Exam 8: Attitudes and Behavior

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Steele and colleagues have demonstrated that people may reduce dissonance by drinking alcohol. These researchers induced students to write an essay favoring a big tuition increase (which was clearly inconsistent with their attitudes) Participants who were given a free choice to write this essay became more supportive of the fee increase, except in one condition. Right after writing the essay, some students participated in a "taste test" in which they drank beer or vodka. These participants showed none of the usual signs of dissonance and failed to change their attitudes. One more constructive way of coping with dissonance is to reaffirm one's positive sense of self-worth and integrity. In another study by Steele and colleagues, college students (some of whom were science majors) were asked to rate 10 popular music recordings, and then to choose to keep either their fifth- or sixth-ranked one. Participants were then asked to prepare for a second experiment, in which half of them would be asked to wear a lab coat. Then, everyone was asked to rate the music again. Most of the students reduced the dissonance created by their earlier difficult choice by evaluating their chosen recording more highly than the one they had not chosen. But, for the science majors who wore lab coats (which was a symbol of their values and training), there was no sign of the usual dissonance-aroused attitude change.

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According to self-perception theory, after we behave in attitude-inconsistent ways our current attitudes change because we are inferring our attitudes from our behavior. If we are unsure of who to vote for, and then find ourselves voting for a particular candidate, we can infer from our behavior that we must have liked that candidate all along. In contrast, according to cognitive dissonance theory, our attitudes change after discrepant behavior because this change in attitude helps us to reduce dissonance. If you just lied and told someone that you love her horrible new dress you can make yourself feel better by convincing yourself that you actually like the dress after all. These theories are both correct, depending on the situation. Research by Fazio and colleagues has shown that when freely chosen actions are relatively trivial (i.e., they do not violate cherished self-images or important attitudes) attitudes are inferred with little or no effort via self-perception processes. In contrast, freely chosen actions that run counter to well established or important attitudes trigger emotional arousal and cause extensive thinking as people work to justify their actions. In these cases, attitudes change in the service of dissonance reduction.