Cognitive Dissonance Theory: An Experiment

Although Festinger’s (1957) concept of cognitive dissonance is well-known in both sociology and psychology, one of his original experiments to demonstrate the phenomenon, carried-out and filmed at Stanford University, is a rather neat way of showing how the concept works, in a couple of ways.

Firstly, it shows how cognitive dissonance involves a psychological tension or discomfort when someone holds two or more conflicting beliefs (or when, in this instance, actions contradict beliefs).

Secondly, in this particular section of the film (there may be more, but I haven’t found them…) Festinger himself explains why the subjects who accepted a $20 fee to lie (approximately $250 in today’s money) found it easier to rationalise their (self) deception as “just lying for the money” than those participants who were paid only $1 (and who had, therefore, to rationalise their behaviour by convincing themselves that a fundamentally boring experiment was actually enjoyable…).

If you want to know more about the experiment, this overview of Festinger and Carlsmith’s study should fill-in any gaps.

In case you’re interested, Festinger extended his ideas in When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction of the World. The focus of the book was a small Chicago doomsday cult called The Seekers that, to cut a long story short, predicted the end of the world [Spoiler Alert: It didn’t end] and then had to deal with the resulting cognitive dissonance when things didn’t turn out the way they exepcted.

Which, to be fair, was a bit of a biggie as far as cognitive dissonace goes on a scale of “Oh Really?” to “WTF!”.

I’m actually not sure if it could be any bigger.

If you want to read the whole thing you can download the book but seeing as you’re probably way-too-busy to do any such thing you could do worse than this very short film that tells you all you need to know…