Cognitive dissonance of Leon Festinger

While at the University of Minnesota, Festinger read about a cult that believed that the end of the world was at hand. A woman, “Mrs. Keech,” reported receiving messages from extraterrestrial aliens that the world would end in a great flood on a specific date. She attracted a group of followers who left jobs, schools, and spouses and who gave away money and possessions to prepare to depart on a flying saucer that, according to Mrs. Keech, would arrive to rescue the true believers. Given the believers’ serious commitment, Festinger wondered how they would react when the prophecy failed. He and his colleagues, posing as believers, infiltrated Mrs. Keech’s group and kept notes on the proceedings surreptitiously.

The believers shunned publicity while they awaited the flying saucer and the flood. But when the prophecy was disconfirmed, almost immediately the previously most-committed group members made calls to newspapers, sought out interviews, and started actively proselytizing.

Festinger was unsurprised by the sudden proselytizing after the prophecy’s disconfirmation; he saw the cult members as enlisting social support for their belief to lessen the pain of its disconfirmation. Their behaviour confirmed predictions from his cognitive dissonance theory, whose premise was that people need to maintain consistency between thoughts, feelings, and behaviours.

Festinger’s theory proposes that inconsistency among beliefs or behaviours causes an uncomfortable psychological tension (i.e., cognitive dissonance), leading people to change one of the inconsistent elements to reduce the dissonance or to add consonant elements to restore consonance. Mrs. Keech’s followers actively enlisted new believers to obtain social support (and thereby add consonant elements) to reduce the dissonance created by the disconfirmation.

In 1955 Festinger left the University of Minnesota for Stanford University, where he and his students launched a series of laboratory experiments testing cognitive dissonance theory and extending it to a wide range of phenomena. One of the best known was the forced-compliance paradigm, in which the subject performed a series of repetitive and boring menial tasks and then was asked to lie to the “next subject” (actually an experimental accomplice) and say that the tasks were interesting and enjoyable. Some subjects were paid $1 for lying, while others were paid $20.

Based on dissonance theory, Festinger correctly predicted that the subjects who were paid $1 for lying later evaluated the tasks as more enjoyable than those who were paid $20. The subjects who were paid $20 should not have experienced dissonance, because they were well rewarded and had ample justification for lying, whereas those paid $1 had little justification for lying and should have experienced cognitive dissonance. To reduce the dissonance, they reevaluated the boring task as interesting and enjoyable.

In 1964, Festinger moved from social psychology to research on visual perception. Although a seemingly radical departure, it was in fact a continuation of a theme. Festinger’s work on visual perception concerned how people reconcile inconsistencies between visual perception and eye movements to see coherent images. His social psychological research concerned how people resolve conflict (group dynamics), ambiguity (social comparison), and inconsistency (cognitive dissonance)—all manifestations of pressures for uniformity.

Psychosocial archeology

In 1968 Festinger was appointed the Else and Hans Staudinger Professor of Psychology at the New School for Social Research in New York City. In the late 1970s he turned to questions about human nature raised by archeological data. His work resulted in a monograph, The Human Legacy, published in 1983. A general theme of that work was that humans often bring about problems unwittingly, as a result of intellectual and creative talents—for example, creating new technologies without being fully able to foresee their long-term consequences. Initially, Festinger’s “archeological” work was perceived as being at the margins of social psychology, but it was later seen as prescient of contemporary developments in evolutionary and cultural psychology.