foreword by Elliot Aronson
Imagine, for a moment, that a group of people are convinced that in a few months a cataclysmic flood will destroy the North American continent. They also believe that, minutes before the catastrophe, a vehicle will arrive from outer space, swoop up this small band of believers, and carry them to safety on a distant planet. Suppose that these people are not wild-eyed kooks wearing white robes and carrying signs saying “REPENT!” but are intelligent, sensible people with nice homes, loving families, and good jobs. In accordance with their belief, they have quit their jobs and given away their money and possessions (who needs money and possessions on a far-off planet?). Now they are eagerly awaiting the arrival of the spaceship and the beginning of their adventure, which will take place precisely at midnight on December 21. How will these people feel and what will they do on December 22, assuming of course that North America still exists and the spaceship did not arrive?
This question would be interesting to just about anyone. In 1954, though, it was particularly interesting to Leon Festinger, a brilliant young experimental social psychologist who was in the process of inventing a new theory of human behavior – the theory of cognitive dissonance – which was soon to emerge as the most exciting theory in social psychology. Essentially, the theory defined dissonance as the mental turmoil that is produced when a person holds two ideas that are incompatible: for example, the cognition “I know smoking can kill me” and the cognition “I’m smoking two packs a day.” Because dissonance is uncomfortable, people will try to reduce it by changing one or both cognitions to make them more consonant with each other. In this case, smokers could either give up cigarettes or justify smoking on some other grounds (“smoking reduces my anxiety”; “it keeps me from overeating”). The more important the issue and the greater the degree of a person’s commitment to it, the greater the dissonance – and the greater the need to reduce it.
When Festinger learned of this doomsday group, by reading an account of “Mrs. Keech” and her predictions in a local newspaper, he saw a made-to-order way of putting his theory to the test. The members of her group had put themselves in a classic dissonance condition: They had made a specific prediction; they had publicly committed themselves to it; and they had taken actions in support of that belief that were virtually irrevocable. As one member of the group, a physician, put it: “I’ve given up just about everything. I’ve cut every tie: I’ve burned every bridge. I’ve turned my back on the world. I can’t afford to doubt. I have to believe.”
So Festinger decided to study this group both before and after their prophecy failed. He enlisted two of his colleagues, Henry Riecken and Stanley Schachter, and together they joined the group as participant observers. The rest is history – a history that you are holding in your hands.
It was an audacious way to test dissonance theory. Festinger at that time was already famous as an innovative laboratory experimenter, and those who didn’t know him personally were astonished by the fact that his initial test of his theory was such an imprecise one; that is, that it was outside the friendly, sterile confines of the laboratory, in the helter-skelter of the real world. But anyone who has ever worked with Festinger would not have been the least bit surprised, for intellectual audacity was one of his defining qualities.
I first met Leon in 1956, when I arrived at Stanford as a first-year graduate student and immediately began working with him. When Prophecy Fails had just been published but had not created much of a stir; it was generally dismissed as an interesting but deeply flawed study. (One reviewer trivialized it, mocking both its methods and conclusions.) Yet, with hindsight, it is now obvious that it was an important piece of research and that this book was the first shot of a revolution that changed the way social scientists would come to understand and explain complex human behavior and motivation. In the following years, Leon and his students designed and conducted a series of elegant laboratory experiments testing hypotheses generated by the theory. These experiments were so tightly controlled and produced such striking results that the theory could no longer be ignored.
To a generation of psychologists raised on behaviorism or psychoanalytic theory, the two dominant theories of the mid-twentieth century, the results of these experiments were startling and unsettling. For example, reinforcement theory would predict that anything associated with a pleasant experience would be liked, whereas anything associated with an unpleasant experience would be disliked. But the theory of cognitive dissonance led us to the prediction that people who voluntarily undergo an unpleasant initiation to become a member of a group would actually like that group better than those who got into the same group more easily. Their cognition “I went through hell and high water to become a member” would be dissonant with any aspects of the group that were dull and boring. They would reduce dissonance by minimizing, in their own minds, any negative aspects of the group and maximizing its benefits. And that is exactly what they did.
Likewise, classical Freudian theory predicted that the ventilation of aggressive energy, in verbal or physical abuse, would be “cathartic,” leading to a reduction in hostility. But dissonance theory predicted that those who ventilate aggression against an individual will be in a state of dissonance: “I am a good, kind person” and “I just did a pretty mean thing to that guy.” Few people want to reduce dissonance by deciding they aren’t so good or kind after all; much easier to reduce it by justifying the harm they cause: “He deserved everything he got.” And if he deserved it, further aggression is warranted. This is why dissonance theory predicted that acts of abuse and aggression do not reduce violence, but often insure its escalation. And that is exactly what they do.
In the last fifty years, the theory of cognitive dissonance breached the walls of academic psychology and entered the vernacular; “cognitive dissonance” is today commonly used by political analysts, TV characters, bloggers, columnists, and comedians. On a personal level, I am gratified to have contributed not only to the early experiments that supported the core premises of dissonance theory, but also to its application to such diverse social problems as the cognitive biases of political partisans, the way people in the legal system can blind themselves to evidence that they have the wrong suspect, the “convenient” distortions of memory, and to the self-justifying rationalizations that fuel family rifts and international wars.
The theory, in short, has come a long way since the initial publication of When Prophecy Fails. But reading this book continues to be both illuminating and great fun. One thing that becomes immediately clear is the difficulty of being a participant observer, because the researcher must tread the fine line between participating and influencing; part of the charm of this book is watching the researchers trying so hard to avoid crossing that line. One example will suffice: Several years after the study, one of the authors, my friend Hank Riecken, told me that on one occasion the leader of the group, Mrs. Keech, insisted that he lead the evening session. Hank told me that he tried to squirm out of it but Mrs. Keech adamantly refused to budge. Hank didn’t know what to do. He was in a bind. If he led the group he might say something that would influence their behavior and thus contaminate the findings. On the other hand, if he persisted in defying Mrs. Keech’s orders, his very resistance might raise suspicion or otherwise influence the group. So Hank agreed. With the group’s devoted gazes upon him, he said, “Let us meditate.” (Now, that’s leadership!)
This book is full of such nuggets – touching, humanizing stories of the participants, as well as descriptions of the authors’ creative solutions to problems that emerged in the course of the study. But the book is much more than a set of stories; it is also of great historical importance as the first test of a powerful theory. Reconnecting with this book after fifty years has given me a renewed appreciation for the genius and audacity of Leon Festinger and his colleagues. I prophesy that it will do the same for you.
Elliot Aronson
February 2008
www.psychspace.com心理学空间网
