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insufficient justification created dissonance and to resolve the dissonance the students actually convinced themselves that the experiment was more interesting than it actually was, even though they were lying about it!
In one of my reconciliation counseling cases, the notion of providing little or no incentive to induce a child to hate a parent was seen in the example of the six-year old girl who complained of visiting her father because all they did was “go on his boat,” and “swim in his swimming pool.” When I asked what kinds of things she did at her mother’s house she said that she did “special things that Daddy would never do with her.” When asked what those special things were she said, “At Mommy’s we sit on the couch and watch TV, and that’s special.” When I asked her where her mother was during this “special time,” she replied, “upstairs talking on the phone to her friends.” Evidently, the very act of her mother identifying all of the things that she does with her daughter as “special time,” was enough to convince her that anything she did with her father was less than special, dull or annoying.
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