Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [269]
At last Mrs. Keech received the long-awaited message. Spaceships would come to a certain place at a specific time to rescue the believers and take them to safety. But the spaceships failed to arrive either then or at several later promised times, and December 21 came and went without any flood.
At that point, Mrs. Keech received word that, thanks to the goodness and light created by the believers, God had decided to call off the disaster and spare the world. Some of the members, particularly those who had been doubtful or unsure, could not reconcile the failure of the prophecies with their beliefs and dropped out, but the members who had been most deeply committed—some had even quit their jobs and sold their possessions—behaved just as the researchers had hypothesized. They came away more strongly convinced than ever of the truth of Mrs. Keech’s revelations, thereby eliminating the conflict between what they believed and the disappointing reality.
Festinger went on to develop and publish his theory of cognitive dissonance in 1957. It immediately became the central problem of social psychology and remained the principal topic of experimental research for over fifteen years. In 1959 he and a colleague, J. Merrill Carlsmith, conducted what is usually cited as the classic cognitive dissonance experiment. They artfully deceived their volunteer subjects about the purpose of the study, since the subjects, had they known the researchers wanted to see whether they would change their minds about some issue to minimize cognitive dissonance, might well have felt embarrassed to do so.
Festinger and Carlsmith had their undergraduate male subjects perform an extremely tedious task: they had to put a dozen spools into a tray, remove them, put them back, and repeat the process for half an hour. Then they had to turn each of forty-eight pegs in a board a quarter turn clockwise, then another quarter turn, and so on, again for half an hour. After each subject had finished, one of the researchers told him that the purpose of the experiment was to find out whether people’s expectation of how interesting a task is would affect how well they performed it, and that he had been in the “no-expectation group” but others would be told that the task was enjoyable. Unfortunately, the researcher went on, the assistant who was supposed to tell that to the next subject had just called in to say he couldn’t make it. The researcher said he needed someone to take the assistant’s place and asked the subject to help out. Some subjects were offered $1 to do so, others $20.
Nearly all of them agreed to tell what was obviously a lie to the next subject (who, in reality, was a confederate). After they had done so, the subjects were asked how enjoyable they themselves had found the task. Since it had unquestionably been boring, lying about it to someone else created a condition of cognitive dissonance (“I lied to someone else. But I’m not that kind of person”). The crucial question was whether the size of the payment they had received led them to reduce dissonance by deciding that the task had really been enjoyable.
Intuitively, one might expect that those who got $20—a substantial sum in 1959—would be more likely to change their opinion of the task than those who got a dollar. But Festinger and Carlsmith predicted the opposite. The subjects who got $20 would have a solid reward to justify their lying, but those who got a dollar would have so little justification for lying that they would still feel dissonance, and would relieve it by convincing themselves that the task had been interesting and they had not really lied. Which is exactly what the results showed.*23
Festinger and Carlsmith were exhilarated;