Cognitive consequences of forced compliance.

Abstract

HAT happens to a person's private opinion if he is forced to do or say something contrary to that opinion? Only recently has there been, any experimental work related to this question. Two studies reported by Janis and King (1954;1956) clearly showed that, at least under some conditions, the private opinion changes so as to bring it into closer correspondence with the overt behavior the person was forced to perform. Specifically, they showed that if a person is forced to improvise a speech supporting a point of view with which he disagrees, his private opinion moves toward the position advocated in the speech. The observed opinion change is greater than for persons who only hear the speech or for persons who read a prepared speech with emphasis solely on elocution and manner of delivery. The authors of these two studies explain their results mainly in terms of mental rehearsal and thinking up new arguments. Inthisway, they propose, theperson who is forced to improvise a speech convinces himself. They present some evidence, which is not altogether conclusive, in support of this explanation. We will have more to say concerning this explanation in discussing the results of our experiment. Kelrnan (1953) tried to pursue the matter further. He reasoned that if the person is induced to make an overt statement contrary to his private opinion by the offer of some reward, then the greater the reward offered, the greater should be the subsequent opinion change. His data, however, did not support this idea. He found, rather, that a large reward produced less subsequent opinion change than did a smaller reward. Actually, this finding by Kelman is consistent with the theory we will outline below but, for a number of reasons, is 1 The experiment reported here was done as part of a program of research supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation to the senior author. We wish to thank Leonard Hommel, Judson Mills, and Robert Tenvilliger for their help in designing and carrying out the experiment. We would also like to acknowledge the help of Ruth Smith and Marilyn M. Miller.

Racial Discrimination and Racial Identity as Risk or Protective Factors for Violent Behaviors in African American Young Adults

“…Perhaps those with more favorable, idealistic views about race relations were less prepared to encounter racial discrimination and found it unexpected, confusing, and devaluing. The inconsistency between positive public regard beliefs and discriminatory experiences is consistent with the idea of cognitive dissonance (Festinger & Carlsmith, 1959), which suggests that incongruence between youths' worldview/societal beliefs (in this case, that society likes my group) and their actual experiences with racial discrimination may lead to intrapsychic conflict. It is this intrapsychic conflict that can lead to stress, frustration, and perceptual distortions that could manifest itself through aggression or violence.…”

Impact of disguise on identification decisions and confidence with simultaneous and sequential lineups.

“…Prior research examining confidence of correct rejections from simultaneous and sequential lineups has either found no difference (Lindsay & Wells, 1985) or higher confidence for simultaneous lineups (Gronlund, Carlson, Dailey, & Goodsell, 2009). Cognitive dissonance may explain these unexpected findings for confidence (Festinger & Carlsmith, 1959).…”

Predicting and explaining behavioral intention and hand sanitizer use among US Army soldiers

“…This study may be affected by commonly perceived social psychology bias, like Marlowe-Crowne's Social Desirability Bias (Crowne & Marlowe, 1960), Availability Heuristic Bias (Carroll, 1978), and inconsistency bias within Cognitive Consequences of Forced Compliance (Festinger & Carlsmith, 1959). This research will not explore the relationship between behavioral intention and behavior.…”

“…It is not to say that behavior is always freely selected (Runkel & Macgrath, 1972). Frequently, individuals perform acts without quite knowing why, and conversely they perform actions because they knew they were not free to do otherwise (Festinger & Carlsmith, 1959). However, most of the time people are free to engage in a variety of different behaviors and can select among these as they please.…”

“…Consequences of Forced Compliance (Festinger & Carlsmith, 1959) still pose threats towards the assessment accuracy of the survey instrument compared to an actual observation study.…”