The Theory of Cognitive Dissonance

In 1959 two experimenters, L. Festinger and J. Carlsmith did a very interesting experiment that you’ve probably already heard about. They took a group of students and made them do an incredibly tedious, useless and uninteresting task. Then they asked those students to tell other people how the task was so much fun, so that those people would also participate. They offered to pay them a reasonable sum for the lie (20 US) or a paltry sum. Then they asked if the participants enjoyed doing the task. The researchers found that those who were offered a reasonable sum to lie still said they didn’t enjoy the task. Those people who had been offered the paltry amount, however, suddenly said they enjoyed the task a great deal more than other groups.

The reasoning for this shift went as followed: when a person has two conflicting views or positions (they have internal dissonance) they will try to resolve that conflict by moving those views closer to each other. The people that were well paid for their lie didn’t have this dissonance, as they believed they were well rewarded for their deception. For those paid near to nothing, however, no such excuse would hold. They couldn’t tell themselves they had lied for the money and they couldn’t unsay the things that they had said, so instead they had only one option left and that was to move their viewpoint and decide that obviously they weren’t lying and the task was actually enjoyable.

It’s a bit like when you try to get something, can’t get it and then talk yourself into believing you didn’t really want it anyway.

I wonder if I’m now doing the same thing with my solitude? I have always hated being alone and yet lately I’ve been shouting ‘I like being by myself. I like having my own time. I like my time to myself.’ Is this not a classic example of me trying to reduce my internal dissonance? Since I’m having trouble finding people I really want to hang out with, am I not perhaps trying to convince myself that I’m not really interested in hanging out with people? And then, once my internal views have shifted I start to avoid people (believing that that is what I really want – which it is, of course, it’s just not what I used to want) so as to continue my supposed solitude.

I wonder if my studies of social psychology will actually help me gain a better insight into my own behaviour, or will just lead to me second guessing my intuition and ending up with a worse understanding of how I fit together.

There’s research out there that claims that psychologist are no better than other people at figuring out what makes other people tick.

But then there has already been research that counters that research.

Round and round she goes, where she stops nobody knows.