Page 260 - The Social Animal

242 The Social Animal

Physiological and Motivational Effects
of Dissonance

How far can the effects of dissonance extend? In the past several
years, researchers have shown that they can go beyond attitudes; they
can modify the way we experience basic physiological drives. Under
certain well-specified conditions, dissonance reduction can lead hun-
gry people to experience less hunger, thirsty people to experience less
thirst, and people undergoing intensive electric shock to experience
less pain. Here’s how it works: Imagine that Vic Volunteer is induced
to commit himself to a situation in which he will be deprived of food
or water for a long time or in which he will experience electric shock.
If Vic has low external justification for doing this, he will experience
dissonance. His cognitions concerning his hunger pangs, his parched
throat, or the pain of electric shock are each dissonant with his cog-
nition that he volunteered to go through these experiences and is not
getting very much in return.To reduce this dissonance, Vic convinces
himself that the hunger isn’t so intense, or the thirst isn’t so bad, or
the pain isn’t so great. This should not be astonishing. Although
hunger, thirst, and pain all have physiological bases, they also have a
strong psychological component. For example, through suggestion,
meditation, hypnosis, placebo pills, the bedside manner of a skillful
physician, or some combination of these, perceived pain can be re-
duced. Experimental social psychologists have shown that, under con-
ditions of high dissonance arousal, ordinary people, with no special
skills in hypnosis or meditation, can accomplish the same things for
themselves.
Thus, Philip Zimbardo subjected many people to intense elec-
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tric shocks. Half of these people were in a high-dissonance condi-
tion—that is, they were induced to commit themselves to volunteer
for the experience and were given very little external justification—
and the other half were in a low-dissonance condition—that is, they
had no choice in the matter and had a great deal of external justifi-
cation. The results showed that the people in the high-dissonance
condition reported experiencing less pain than those in the low-dis-
sonance condition. Moreover, this phenomenon extended beyond
their subjective reports. There is clear evidence that the physiologi-
cal response to pain (as measured by the galvanic skin response) was
somewhat less intense in the high-dissonance condition. In addition,