Page 234 - The Social Animal

216 The Social Animal

lying produces greater attitude change when the liar is undercom-
pensated for lying, especially when the lie is likely to evoke a change
in the audience’s belief or behavior.*
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A great deal of subsequent research supports this reasoning and
allows us to state a general principle about dissonance and the self-
concept: Dissonance effects are greatest when (1) people feel person-
ally responsible for their actions, and (2) their actions have serious
consequences. That is, the greater the consequence and the greater
our responsibility for it, the greater the dissonance; the greater the
dissonance, the greater our own attitude change.
My notion that dissonance is aroused whenever the self-concept
is challenged has many interesting ramifications. Let us look at one in
some detail. Suppose you are at home and someone knocks at your
door, asking you to contribute to a worthy charity. If you didn’t want
to contribute, you probably wouldn’t find it too difficult to come up
with reasons for declining—you don’t have much money, your contri-
bution probably wouldn’t help much anyway, and so on. But suppose
that, after delivering a standard plea for a donation, the fundraiser adds
that “even a penny will help.” Refusing to donate after hearing this
statement would undoubtedly stir up some dissonance by challenging
your self-concept. After all, what kind of person is it who is too mean
or stingy to come up with a penny? No longer would your previous ra-
tionalizations apply. Such a scenario was tested experimentally by
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Robert Cialdini and David Schroeder. Students acting as fundraisers
went door to door, sometimes just asking for donations and sometimes
adding that “even a penny will help.” As conjectured, the residents who
were approached with the even-a-penny request gave contributions
more often, donating almost twice as frequently as those getting just
the standard plea. Furthermore, on the average, the even-a-penny con-
tributors were likely to give as much money as the others; that is, the
statement legitimizing the small donation did not reduce the size of
the contributions. Why? Apparently, not only does the lack of exter-
nal justification for refusing to donate encourage people to give money,

*It should be mentioned that, in this as well as in the other experiments dis-
cussed here, each participant was completely debriefed as soon as he or she had fin-
ished participating in the experiment. Every attempt was made to avoid causing a
permanent change in the attitudes of the participants. It is always important to de-
brief participants after an experiment; it is especially important when the experiment
induces a change in an important attitude or has important behavioral consequences.