Page 228 - The Social Animal

210 The Social Animal

greater the reward, the less likely any attitude change will occur. If all
I want you to do is recite a speech favoring Fidel Castro, the Marx
brothers, socialized medicine, or anything else, the most efficient
thing for me to do would be to give you the largest possible reward.
This would increase the probability of your complying by making that
speech. But suppose I have a more ambitious goal: Suppose I want to
effect a lasting change in your attitudes and beliefs. In that case, just
the reverse is true. The smaller the external reward I give to induce
you to recite the speech, the more likely it is that you will be forced
to seek additional justification for delivering it by convincing yourself
that the things you said were actually true.This would result in an ac-
tual change in attitude rather than mere compliance. The importance
of this technique cannot be overstated. If we change our attitudes be-
cause we have made a public statement for minimal external justifi-
cation, our attitude change will be relatively permanent; we are not
changing our attitudes because of a reward (compliance) or because
of the influence of an attractive person (identification).We are chang-
ing our attitudes because we have succeeded in convincing ourselves
that our previous attitudes were incorrect. This is a very powerful
form of attitude change.
Thus far, we have been dealing with highly speculative material.
These speculations have been investigated scientifically in several ex-
periments. Among these is a classic study by Leon Festinger and J.
31
Merrill Carlsmith. These investigators asked college students to
perform a very boring and repetitive series of tasks—packing spools
in a tray, dumping them out, and then refilling the tray over and over,
or turning rows and rows of screws a quarter turn and then going
back and turning them another quarter turn. The students engaged
in these activities for a full hour. The experimenter then induced
them to lie about the task; specifically, he employed them to tell a
young woman (who was waiting to participate in the experiment)
that the task she would be performing was interesting and enjoyable.
Some of the students were offered $20 for telling the lie; others were
offered only $1 for telling the lie. After the experiment was over, an
interviewer asked the liars how much they enjoyed the tasks they had
performed earlier in the experiment. The results were clear-cut:
Those students who had been paid $20 for lying—that is, for saying
the spool packing and screw turning had been enjoyable—rated the
activity as dull. This is not surprising—it was dull. But what about