Motivational basis of dissonance: The singular role of behavioral consequences.

This article provides the first empirical test of the idea that discrepancy is not needed in order to arouse cognitive dissonance.Dissonance was aroused when Ss felt responsible for some aversive consequence, regardless of whether their behavior was consistent (writing a proattitudinal essay) or inconsistent (a counterattitudinal essay) with beliefs.The data demonstrate that in both situations, dissonance is aroused.This result, based on the dissonance motivation model of Cooper and Fazio (1984), strongly suggests that the motivational basis for dissonance is the felt responsibility for aversive consequences.The theoretical implications of this outlook are explored, including a discussion of the many ways that it expands the applicability of dissonance theory.One of the most frequently demonstrated phenomena in social psychology is that people who act in a way that is inconsistent with their attitudes experience a motivational state that causes them to alter those attitudes.The primary theoretical explanation for this motivation has been Festinger's (1957) theory of cognitive dissonance.This theory is based on a principle of cognitive consistency and assumes that an aversive, drivelike state is aroused when cognitive inconsistency is perceived.Attitude change follows, then, as a means of restoring consistency and reducing the aversive state.Dissonance theory has been able to account for a host of phenomena, ranging from the proselytizing behavior of religious cultists (Festinger, Riecken, & Schachter, 1956) to the toy preferences of small children (Aronson & Carlsmith, 1963).However, the induced compliance paradigm, in which subjects are induced to argue a position that is counterattitudinal, has most frequently been the tool of choice for experimental research in this area.Consider the following situation: A teacher plays the devil's advocate in a class, advocating, for instructional purposes, a position with which he or she actually disagrees.According to Festinger's (1957) theory, the inconsistency between the teacher's action in the class and his or her true attitude should produce pressure for attitude change in the direction of the teacher's pedagogical arguments.Research since the initial formulation of dissonance theory, however, has identified a number of parametric limitations on the likelihood that the teacher would experience dissonance and change his or her attitude: The inconsistent behavior must be freely chosen (Davis & Jones, 1960;Linder, Cooper, & Jones, 1967;Sherman, 1970b), there must be some commitment to