Page 232 - The Social Animal

214 The Social Animal

that it wasn’t completely a lie and the task wasn’t quite as dull as it
seemed at first; as a matter of fact, when looked at in a certain way, it
was actually quite interesting.
It would be fruitful to compare these results with Judson Mills’s
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data on the effects of cheating among 6th-graders. Recall that, in
Mills’s experiment, the decision about whether to cheat was almost
certainly a difficult one for most of the children. This is why they ex-
perienced dissonance, regardless of whether they cheated or resisted
temptation. One could speculate about what would happen if the re-
wards to be gained by cheating were very large. For one thing, it
would be more tempting to cheat; therefore, more children would ac-
tually cheat. But, more important, if the gains for cheating were as-
tronomical, those who cheated would undergo very little attitude
change. Much like the college students who lied in Festinger and
Carlsmith’s $20 condition, those children who cheated for a great re-
ward would have less need to reduce dissonance, having been pro-
vided with an abundance of external justification for their behavior. In
fact, Mills did include this refinement in his experiment, and his re-
sults are consistent with this reasoning: Those who cheated to obtain
a small reward tended to soften their attitude about cheating more
than those who cheated to obtain a large reward. Moreover, those who
refrained from cheating in spite of the temptation of a large reward—
a choice that would create a great deal of dissonance—hardened their
attitude about cheating to a greater extent than those who refrained
in the face of a small reward—just as one might expect.

Dissonance and the Self-Concept The analysis of the disso-
nance phenomenon presented in this section requires a departure
from Festinger’s original theory. In the experiment by Festinger and
Carlsmith, for example, the original statement of dissonance went
like this: The cognition “I believe the task is dull” is dissonant with
the cognition “I said the task was interesting.” Several years ago, I re-
formulated the theory in a way that focuses more attention on the
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way people conceive of themselves. Basically, this reformulation
suggests that dissonance is most powerful in situations in which the
self-concept is threatened.Thus, for me, the important aspect of dis-
sonance in the situation described above is not that the cognition “I
said ‘X’” is dissonant with the cognition “I believe ‘not X.’” Rather,
the crucial fact is that I have misled people: The cognition “I have