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their thinking so that the dissonance is reduced. That may very well be why children insist that the alienated parent is all bad, and is very unwilling to consider even the slightest good in the parent.
People Don’t Have to Be Bribed to Make Major Attitude Changes:
Remarkably, it takes very little by way of incentive to arrive at a given attitudinal state. This is contrary to what people assume happens in alienation cases. The common assumption is that the alienating parent pressures the child with threats or actively rewards hateful behaviors.
It can happen that way but it certainly doesn't have to. Such extreme forms of programming may be utilized by some parents but may be entirely unnecessary. As a matter of fact outright bribery or threats would probably not work as well as more subtle forms of influence, whether they occur wittingly or unwittingly.
Festinger and one of his students, J. Merill Carlsmith (1979) performed a series of experiments where they encouraged experimental subjects to lie about whether their participation in an experiment was interesting or boring. They paid some of the students $1 to tell the lie that the experiment was interesting (when it was really boring) and others they paid $20. They made the bold prediction that in the group that was paid $1, the subjects actually came to believe the lie they told. As it turns out, they were correct. The answer they gave for the change in attitude was that the group that was paid $20 knew that $20 was enough incentive for them to maintain the belief that the experiment was boring. The group that was paid only $1 had insufficient justification for telling a lie. That
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