Dissonance Theory Redux: Re-uniting Leon and Lewin

In terms of methodological artistry and the generation of non-obvious, even counter-intuitive, findings, the articulation of dissonance theory by Leon Festinger and his students (1) and especially their most famous laboratory experiments (2), represented a high-water mark in the history of social psychology. Clever (and often entertaining) experiments in that tradition are no longer featured in our field’s major journals. Yet the term “cognitive dissonance”, now used very broadly to convey ambivalence or recognition of inconsistency between previous words or deeds and current ones, has, like “ego”, “inferiority complex,” “positive reinforcement”, “groupthink”, and “narcissist.” become a part of everyday lay psychologizing.

The crucial refinements to dissonance theory offered by Elliot Aronson (3) direct our attention to a motive that even the most diehard behaviorists must acknowledge distinguishes us from the rats, pigeons, canines, and other creatures that work to gain rewards and avoid punishments. That motive compels us to see ourselves, and those with whom we share bonds of kinship, affection, or group membership, as virtuous, rational, and coherent and, although perhaps imperfect in terms of values, traits, and priorities, no worse (and, if possible, somewhat better) than the majority of our peers.

Aronson’s refinement, and later work, including Steele’s influential 1988 articulation of self-affirmation theory(4), effectively tied the concept of dissonance reduction to the more familiar concepts of ego-protection and rationalization introduced a half-century earlier by Ernest Jones in 1908, and popularized by Sigmund Freud (5) soon after. As Festinger (1957) had noted, most inconsistencies between present beliefs or current behavior and new information lead to changes in beliefs and/or behavior without particular need for rationalization. John Maynard Keynes, when questioned about his reversal of views regarding a failed policy, famously responded, “when the facts change, I change my mind …what do you do sir?”(6) (If only more political and intellectual leaders were equally willing to yield to inconvenient facts!)

It is often non-problematic to admit one was mistaken or fooled, or even to confess that one was a fool—blinded by love, perhaps, or taken in by a con-man who proposed a deal too good to be true. Other inconsistencies are treated as mere idiosyncrasies and similarly create no need for rationalization. Health food enthusiasts who confess their distaste for beets despite their inarguable membership on the list of healthy foods, or mathematicians who regularly buy lottery tickets despite the expected negative return on investment, can acknowledge such incongruities, feeling little if any need for further justification.

Aronson’s refinement also clarifies when and why hypocritical discrepancies between words and deeds, in the wry words of Rochefoucauld, can be justified simply as a “tribute that vice pays to virtue.” Parents who urge their offspring to lead a healthier or more virtuous life than the one they led at the same age feel little dissonance about the counsel they are offering. Moreover, most of us readily acknowledge that we are neither consistently virtuous nor otherwise perfectly consistent human beings. The need to rationalize, and the effort we are willing to exert to alleviate that threat, in turn, depend on the degree of inconsistency, and the importance of the aspect of self under threat, and hence the degree of dissonance, we are facing.

Festinger’s place in the pantheon of 20th-century psychology is secure, and exploration of the processes by which people boost and protect self-esteem and the good name of their group continues to be one of social psychology’s most fruitful areas of research. It was Festinger’s work that lured me and many in my academic cohort into experimental social psychology. Upon rereading his 1957 text, and recalling some of the most notable studies that followed, I found myself transported back to my student days, again awed by Festinger’s powers of conceptual analysis and synthesis. I also began noting connections to contemporary real-world phenomena and exciting directions for new research, and even musing about possible manipulations,” cover stories”, and outcome measures for such research.

Looking back, I am struck both by Festinger’s choice of phenomena to emphasize in explaining his theory and by the primary focus of the research that he and his followers first conducted. Those choices reflect the tradeoffs the Festingerians made in terms of elegance and non-obviousness of research findings versus degree of relevance to the social and political issues of the day, and to the most difficult and dissonance-producing decisions, many Americans of that era faced. My motive in writing this essay, however, concerns the future of our field as much as its past. In the concluding section of the essay, I suggest that renewed attention to dissonance reduction, and rationalization more generally, is particularly timely. Those processes, I suggest, are all too apparent and dangerous today as the US and much of the rest of the word confront debilitating political divides and dangerous economic, environmental, and social challenges.

Dissonance Phenomena Highlighted by Festinger (1957) and Issues in US Society 1954-1973

Desegregation and Dissonance . During the first decade of dissonance work, when the researchers Festinger inspired were testing and sharpening the abstract propositions of his theory, America was embarking on its own great natural dissonance experiment. It was implementing the Supreme Court’s 1954 order to undertake “with all deliberate speed” the desegregation of public schools throughout the South. In the previous decade, the US armed forces had been integrated. Although racially homogenous communities continued to be the rule rather than the exception, integrated housing projects for low-income citizens were being constructed in many Northern neighborhoods. The great migration from the rural South to the industrial north in the 1930s and the war years that followed had produced factories, trade unions, and communities where many blacks and whites worked and lived side by side.

In the case of white Americans who had long supported and rationalized the disparate treatment of black and white citizens, the prospect of having their children attend the same school as black children was a threat and a source of fear and resentment. For those with more progressive views about race and racial equality, the discrepancy between their beliefs and their failure to actively address that inequality was a source of potential dissonance. For the white students and others who joined black citizens in sit-ins, protest marches, and bus trips in the deep South, the awareness of the dangers to which they were exposing themselves, their actions were congruent with the beliefs but incongruent with their natural desire for self-preservation and safety. Black activists in that struggle similarly were obliged to reduce their dissonance about the even greater risks to which they were exposing themselves, and the understandable doubts they harbored about the prospects of achieving meaningful change through their actions.

Black parents living in the South or the urban ghettos in the North faced a particularly difficult, dissonance-provoking choice when it came to the issue of school desegregation. Should they have their children expose themselves to the ill-treatment they could expect in newly integrated schools? Or should they keep them in the more socially comfortable environment of schools with teachers and peers who shared their race, and forego the superior resources and opportunities that their children might benefit from in a formerly all-white school? Regardless of the option they chose, they would experience dissonance about the costs of their choice. The moderators of dissonance that Festinger and his students were exploring in the laboratory—choice, commitment, responsibility, foreseeability of consequences, degree of irrevocability, extent of costs or sacrifices borne—all were dramatically at play. Yet neither Festinger nor his students directed their research efforts toward this ongoing social and political struggle.

The hope had been expressed that attitude change would follow from behavior change, and that once contact between black and white students became an ordinary everyday experience, opposition to it would diminish. Festinger’s 1957 book included a couple of sentences, citing Myrdal‘s important 1944 book (7) highlighting the contradiction between endorsement of equality and widespread unequal treatment of African-Americans. Festinger also briefly mentioned a 1951 study by Deutsch and Collins (8) on racial attitudes in integrated housing projects, pointing out that while dissonance theory predicted a reduction in white opposition to desegregation in areas where citizens complied with the Supreme Court’s order, it also predicted an increase in opposition in areas where it was successfully resisted. But the examples he chose in introducing his theory, and more importantly, the initial research undertaken did not include dissonance related to the growing struggle for civil rights.

In a 1962 volume, Brehm and Cohen (9) offered a detailed early discussion of the conditions under which dissonance theory would predict positive attitude change in the aftermath of school integration or other types of inter-racial contact. But they could not point to much data, either from laboratory experiments or field studies, that tested those predictions. Festinger’s formulation suggested the special importance of the tipping point between just enough and not quite enough pressure to produce citizen and state compliance, whereby the optimal strategy would be to introduce enough force or incentive to achieve widespread compliance (and ideally establish a new set of norms), but not more than necessary to get the job done.

The incentives could have been financial—perhaps larger than standard pay raises for teachers or increased resources for activities that parents and students found particularly attractive but otherwise difficult to fund. Making use of relatively invisible pressures or what Thayler and Sunstein (10) termed “nudges”—that is, pressures perceived by the targets as sufficiently modest to make compliance dissonant with continuing opposition to desegregation and justification of other Jim Crow policies, would have been an even better means to achieve that objective. A shortlist of recommended tactics might have included boosting perceived consensus, use of pre-commitment, and creation of small specific reference groups removed from the pressures exerted by existing norms and traditions.

Ignorant of dissonance theory and its implications, or disregarding it, most liberals failed to recommend such nuance in implementation. Instead, faced with widespread, politically popular, resistance to integration, they advocated and applauded the use of federal troops, lawsuits, and forced busing to enforce the new law of the land. The result was a hardening of resistance and massive defection by whites from the public schools, accompanied by rationalizations that ranged from red-necked racism to benign paternalism and the claims that segregated schools better served the interests of the students of both races.

Black parents who were ambivalent about sending their children to previously all-white schools had good reason to be ambivalent. Desegregation meant job losses for dedicated black teachers, reduced resources for public schools and colleges with predominantly black enrollments that had long been vehicles of upward mobility, and also an educational experience for many children that were worse than they would have faced in their segregated schools (11). (The racist backlash created by the desegregation that Lyndon Johnson predicted, and the broader civil rights struggle that ensued, continue to be exploited by GOP half a century later.

Despite the flaws in its implementation, and despite the price black communities paid for desegregation, for many it opened doors for professional achievement and provided opportunities for cross-racial friendships. Ultimately, public opposition to integration withered away. Racially based discrimination did not disappear, but even in the Deep South, the most blatant instances were curtailed, integrated schools are the norm, and overtly racist ideology has largely become the province of fringe groups with little political power¹. The blue patches around college towns in the sea of red we witness on Election Day voting tallies are testimony to those changes. So the balance sheet of pluses and minuses is mixed. Still, we are left to wonder if closer attention to the lessons of dissonance theory might have prompted some psychologically wiser desegregation implementation strategies and a less mixed scorecard.

Before concluding my discussion of dissonance theory there is a general problem to be acknowledged regarding attempts to change social attitudes and norms by the wise application of dissonance theory principles. Different people have different “tipping-points”, and what is just enough coercion or incentivizing to produce compliance and attendant shifts in attitudes and norms for some is not quite enough to produce compliance for others. in which case, as Festinger noted, it creates additional motivation to justify non-compliance and is apt to produce a hardening of resistance. The best policymakers can do is to undertake some research to determine the “sweet spot” that produces the most satisfactory result in terms of the level of compliance and strength of resistance on the part of non-compliers.

Dissonance Dilemmas for 1950s Leftists and Liberals . In the late 1960s, when I was a Columbia Ph.D. student, the escalating costs and casualties in the Vietnam War, accompanied by rising doubts about any “light at the end of the tunnel” that would bring the war to a satisfactory conclusion, was increasing dissonance for supporters of the war. At the same time, opposition to the war, especially among students potentially subject to the draft, was leading many to move from political detachment or passive disapproval to participation in anti-war marches and rallies, national political campaigns, and in many cases to later careers involving social advocacy. It led others to seek deferments on dubious medical grounds, to enroll in ROTC programs that put off service, to register as conscientious objectors, or to leave the country. It even led some to commit crimes against fellow citizens. In the case of young Americans who voluntarily enlisted or who served when drafted, they experienced the trauma of the war first-hand and returned to hostile receptions from anti-war peers.

The advent of the birth control pill and the Supreme Court’s Roe v Wade decision legalizing abortion was a potential source of dissonance for women in general and Catholic families in particular. Both opponents and supporters of such reproductive rights were motivated to justify their personal decisions by strengthening beliefs congruent with those decisions. As in the case of the civil rights struggle and the Vietnam War, the ensuing political divisions became a central feature of US politics. Political and social conservatives maintained that they were the patriots and upholders of traditional American values and institutions and that the patriotism and/or morality of their liberal opponents were suspect. Surprisingly, this important chapter in American history, and the obvious question of why it produced dramatic political transformation and behavior change in some, a hardening of views and rationalization in others, and political disengagement in still others, received little if any attention from the dissonance researchers. ²

Dissonance Dilemmas for 1950s Leftists and Liberals . In the decade following World War II, McCarthyism was at its height. Government employees, scientists, writers, and film-makers were asked to sign loyalty oaths, and in some famous cases to name and denounce colleagues who were or had been members of Communist or Socialist organizations, had shown too enthusiastic support for left-wing causes, or otherwise engaged in “ Un-American” activities. Satisfying such demands often required betrayal of friends, colleagues, and deeply help principles, and for many and the prospect of ostracism; but failure to comply could mean the loss of careers and livelihoods, or even imprisonment (12). Either decision would create dissonance; and accounts of those who faced that choice leave little doubt about an issue that later theorists thought it necessary to validate empirically—i.e., that dissonance is an aversive motivational state and an impetus to rationalization. Yet none of the texts I reviewed even mentioned these paradigmatic cases of pre-decisional conflict and post-decisional dissonance reduction.

A somewhat different dilemma involved the responses of loyal communists and left-leaning artists and intellectuals who personally confronted, or heard credible firsthand reports about the realities of life in Stalinist Russia--the brutal crushing of dissent, the show-trials, the failed collectivization experiments, and the ruthlessness of its leaders. Switches in “party line” from opposition to fascism in Spain to a treaty with Nazi Germany, and from opposition to the Allied war effort to joining that effort when Hitler launched its forces against Russia, demanded further rationalization. The liquidation of Trotsky and other once-lionized revolutionaries made a similar demand. Many Party members and fellow travelers defected. Some became outspoken anti-communists conservatives, more became traditional liberals or became apolitical and focused on their careers. But a diehard minority rationalized it all and continued to be Party loyalists.

The public pronouncements of those diehards ( You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs; don’t believe what you read in the Western Press ) were familiar to me long before I was exposed to dissonance theory. They accepted uncritically tales of economic leaps forward and swallowed any reservations and doubts they had about the present realities of life in communist countries, focusing beyond those realities on the glorious, utopian future that Marx had claimed would surely come. For these diehards, no “Kronstadt” moment ⁴ created a tipping point, an event that at last could not be rationalized. Participant in Milgram experiments (13) could not justify (to the experimenter and to themselves) disobeying when it came to administering the Nth shock, given that they had rationalized all of the previous N-1 shocks. By the same token, the justifications and rationalizations offered by the diehards in the face of early challenges to their loyalty, made it too difficult and painful to abandon their self-defining Marxist beliefs—beliefs for which they often willingly had made costly personal sacrifices—in the face of later, even more daunting, challenges.

Novelists, playwrights, and public intellectuals humanities described a dilemma that some true believers endured. Volunteers who went to fight in Spain in 1936, or those who went to prison because of their anti-war activities prior to the Soviet joining of the Allies in June of 1941, made enormous sacrifices in service of the beliefs. A better understanding of when and why some believers change their views in light of unwelcome evidence and when, why, and how others stay the course and rationalize would have been obvious goals for dissonance researchers, and it remains an important task for researchers today. But social psychologists, to my knowledge, contributed little if anything to the discussion of these high dissonance real-world experiences.

This omission is particularly puzzling because Festinger and his colleagues had described the events that led up to and ensued from a failed prophesy and the role that disconfirmation may play in prompting the birth of religious movements (14) discuss in the concluding section of this essay, consideration of rationalization in the context of political disappointment would be particularly timely today as American voters reflect not only on the 2016 Presidential election and its aftermath, but the growing sense that standard progressive nostrums may not be sufficient to treat what currently ails our body politic.

The Particular Research Strategy of the Festingerians

Festinger’s 1957 book introduced the central tenets of cognitive dissonance theory and the determinants of the magnitude of dissonance. It also offered familiar examples of everyday dissonance reduction, including the rationalizations offered by smokers who are aware of the dangers of their habit yet do not or cannot quit ( if I stop smoking I will gain weight; the link between smoking and cancer may be a causal one), or by purchasers of cars and then discover negative features of their expensive purchases. In terms of the formal propositions of dissonance theory, the relevant rationalizations ( it breaks down a lot and gives terrible mileage but it has great acceleration and I love its body design ). All of us have heard such everyday rationalizations offered for investments of time, energy, or dollars that yielded disappointing results or other bad decisions, to say nothing of the justifications that politicians offer for their missteps. We may be unsure about whether the individuals in such cases are trying to convince us, or themselves, but their behavior does not violate our lay theories about human motivation.

The most extreme case of post-decision dissonance reduction that Festinger described in his 1957 volume involved Japanese nationals living in the US who opted for repatriation to their homeland at the conclusion of World War II. According to a newspaper account of that day, those expatriates thought that Japan would win the war, and despite what they read and what they heard on the radio, they refused to accept reports of their country’s defeat and surrender. Only when they returned to Japan and witnessed firsthand their devastated homeland did they accept the painful truth.

In the post-war periods following that war and subsequent ones, Americans also heard individuals who had engage in practices that violated normal moral and ethical standards justifying their actions to the world, and perhaps to themselves as well. Those individuals and other complicit in those misdeeds took comfort in the support of peers who share their views and accepted their rationalizations. Such phenomena were familiar to anyone who followed the trial of Adolph Eichman, described by Hannah Arendt (15), which took place at a time when dissonance researchers were highly active yet that trial, and the justifications Eichmann offered for his leading role in the holocaust is not mentioned in the books and review articles I read. Nor, in my reading did I see any discussion of contemporaneous or after-the-fact rationalizations regarding the wartime internment of Japanese-Americans or the Mai Lei massacre in Vietnam.

Although Festinger and his students presumably recognized how large a role dissonance reduction played in contemporary American life, the research strategy they adopted relied almost exclusively on experimental manipulations involving novel situations. Recognizing that they could not create cases of truly wrenching decisions or wrongdoers motivated to reduce their dissonance about great harm to others in the laboratory, they opted to orchestrate milder dissonance-producing scenarios. In particular, they investigated three separate phenomena—changes in evaluations of options after consumer decisions, dissonance-reducing changes in beliefs or evaluations after “forced” compliance, and seeking-out of information that supports rather than challenges one's actions and beliefs.

Their research strategy went beyond simply capturing these phenomena in controlled laboratory experiments. It involved manipulating the magnitude of dissonance research participants would experiencing as a consequence of their actions or choices and showing corresponding changes in assessments or beliefs when post-behavioral dissonance was present and presumably high enough to motivate such changes vs minimal in magnitude or even absent and no such change would occur. In so doing, the researchers added important nuance to their theorizing, and impressed us with their skill in crafting non-obvious findings, but failed to connect their work to the types of dissonance reduction and rationalization that we witnessed most compellingly in the events of the day.

It is noteworthy that the two real-world events Festinger cited as the original impetus for his theorizing and first research undertakings involved phenomena that seemed puzzling in terms of conventional assumptions about human motivation. One pertained to rumor transmission—the report that immediately after an earthquake in India in 1934, the rumors disseminated by those in areas adjacent to the quakes were anxiety-provoking rather than reassuring. The other, as I noted earlier (16) involved the responses of true believers to failed prophecies—the history of increased rather than decreased devotion and proselytism in the immediate aftermath of the relevant disconfirmation. In both real-world cases, Festinger suggested, the responses that took place reflected dissonance reduction. However, in their subsequent research, the Festingerians focused almost exclusively on laboratory studies in which levels of dissonance evoked would, of necessity, be modest in magnitude.

Advantages and Limitations of High vs Low Dissonance Experiments . Despite these real-world examples of non-obvious behavior, when it came to experimental tests of dissonance theory, the research in the aftermath of Festinger’s 1957 book focused primarily on self-reported changes in beliefs and evaluations rather than consequential actions. More specifically, it investigated changes in such self-reports under “high” versus “low” (perhaps more aptly characterized as “very low” vs “moderate” versus “very low”) dissonance conditions created experimentally. Virtually the only work that focused on behavioral measures in the early days of dissonance research involved the predicted tendency for individuals to seek out information that bolstered rather than challenged their existing beliefs. Ironically, in terms of the present state of political polarization and media influence in America, the researchers were unable to find consistent support for their theory-based predictions.

Creation of dissonance in the laboratory had some obvious advantages. Most importantly, it allowed the investigators to manipulate rather than measure the postulated determinants of dissonance magnitude and then test their predictions regarding responses of participants in high vs low dissonance conditions. In the case of the free-choice paradigm, the predicted moderator of the level of dissonance was the difficulty of the choice (17). In the case of the forced compliance paradigm, which received the lion’s share of the researchers’ attention, the moderators included the magnitude of incentives for compliance, commitment, choice, feelings of agency and responsibility, and magnitude, foreseeability, and irreversibility of negative consequences (18).

A further advantage of the Festingerians’ research strategy was the ease of conducting follow-up studies to rule out alternative explanations. For example, Gerard and Matthewson (19) replicated the effects of a high versus low discomfort “initiation”, substituting strong versus weak electric shock for the two kinds of initiation that had been used by Aronson and Mills and Brehm and Cohen, replicated Brehm’s earlier demonstration of dissonance-reducing changes in the evaluation of chosen versus non-chosen alternatives using the responses of children choosing toys instead of adults choosing small appliances (20).

Last, but by no means least, the tenets of dissonance creation and resolution offered great latitude for creativity in the choice of procedures and measures. To the distaste of some critics (21), they also provided material for good cocktail-party stories and research anecdotes to enliven lectures. Manipulations and dependant variable measures featuring sexually explicit passages from Lady Chatterley’s Lover, instructions to consume grasshoppers, enduring of pain, and willingness to inflict pain on peers, and agreement to go without food or water (22), all added excitement to my cohort’s first ventures as experimental social psychologists. Personally, I remember the contrast between the reception I received from students and non-psychologists when I described the work of the most talented dissonance researchers and the reception and the boredom I created when I lectured about Hullian learning theory, or even when I shared the results of the earlier group dynamics work of Festinger and other Lewinians.

The research strategy followed by the first generation of dissonance researchers had some limitations. Perhaps the most obvious limitation was that the levels of dissonance experienced by the participants in most studies (generally college undergraduates or children) were much lower than the levels experienced by individuals who had faced soul-challenging decisions, endured truly great sacrifices, or were implicated in serious harm-doing. Conducting single-session laboratory studies in which dissonance had to be created also precluded exploration of step-by-step dynamic processes of rationalization of morally dubious actions, such as nepotism and discrimination in hiring and promotion practices, or exploitation of workers, to say nothing of military atrocities committed against civilians or the sexual abuses committed by priests (and the higher-ups who covered up the abuse).

These limitations were compounded by the reliance on self-reports rather than measures of consequential behaviors of the sort Festinger had described in introducing his theory (i.e., rumor transmission and proselytism) made it difficult to assess the importance of dissonance considerations relative to other factors in determining difficult real-world decisions and their continuing consequences. The strategy of blocking obvious and familiar means of dissonance reduction, and showing that a particular non-obvious change in cognition would occur, allowed investigators to test precise predictions. But that strategy offered limited possibilities to explore the variability in the responses that people experiencing great dissonances show in specific contexts, or to explore when and why behavior change rather than rationalization for failure to make such changes takes place. In retrospect, it is also surprising that so little research was done in which the salience of particular dissonance-reducing strategies was manipulated and behavioral consequences, both immediate and long-term, measured.

There were a few cases where researchers ventured beyond the laboratory, including a clever study of racetrack bettors’ increased confidence in the wisdom and value of their bets once they have put their money on the line (23) and increased attachment to gambling strategies after their adoption. But other very obvious targets for relatively easy to conduct real-world field research received little attention. One such research target would have been assessments of the merits of political candidates immediately after versus before voting, or before versus after election results become known, and still later after elected candidates supported policies favored or opposed by the voter. However, such phenomena seem to have been left to political scientists. The more momentous, potentially dissonance-producing choices of the sort I noted earlier— choices regarding military service, or joining specific advocacy groups in times of economic peril—were frequent topics in our late-night bull sessions. But they rarely if ever figured in the dissonance studies reported in our field’s most influential journals.

It is interesting to note that Festinger and company did not try to measure the presumed mediator of the dependent variable measures they studied—i.e., the degree of negative arousal or discomfort in high versus low dissonance conditions. Nor did they measure reductions in the level of dissonance or discomfort participants experienced following dissonance-reduction opportunities. There were sound reasons for these omissions. In some cases he investigators suspected that the outcomes they measured depended on non-awareness, or at least the absence of explicit acknowledgment of their arousal state. The investigators might also have worried that critics could claim that soliciting self-reports regarding internal states creates hypothesis-confirming experimental demands on participants. In any case, a much later, straightforward, study (24), using the counter-attitudinal essay procedure, showed that participants reported more post-compliance discomfort, and a greater reduction in that discomfort after presumably reducing dissonance, under high than low dissonance conditions.

Re-reading Festinger’s 1957 book, I was also struck by how much of the initial theorizing involved examples of confirmation bias in exposure to evidence, but how little of the research evidence reported pertained to that bias. However, when Brehm and Cohen reviewed later experimental research on selective exposure, they characterized that evidence as at best mixed. Some later box-score summaries (25) even excluded this phenomenon from the list of supported dissonance theory implications. This trimming of the canon, as I discuss later in this essay, has proven to be ill-advised in light of our country’s recent political history and t the rise of social media and partisan news networks.

It is also surprising in light of Festinger’s 1957 introduction of dissonance theory how little the phenomenon of biased assimilation of evidence was pursued in the early years of dissonance theory. I did, however, find one study (26) showing that students presented with strong and weak arguments regarding segregation disproportionately recalled the strong arguments consistent with their own views, but the weak arguments consistent with the opposite view. Later investigators demonstrated biased evaluation of the strength of arguments and evidence and showed that it leads to logically indefensible perseverance and strengthening of beliefs (27).

The Art of Producing Counter-intuitive Findings. A particular feature of the most famous dissonance studies was the emphasis on findings that were not only non-obvious but arguably counter-intuitive. That emphasis becomes more explicable in light of Festinger’s account of rumor transmission after a 1934 earthquake in India, the phenomenon that he notes in prompted the first glimmerings of the theory. Why, he mused in the book’s foreword, did the rumors spread and believed by those in the periphery of the area where the major destruction had occurred prove to be mostly negative rather than positive and reassuring. The answer he ventured was that the post-event anxiety, uncertainty, and sense of vulnerability those inhabitants experience were incongruent with their awareness that they (in contrast to those who had been near the earthquake's center) had been spared any truly negative consequences of the tremors. It was the prospect of negative events to come, Festinger suggested, that were congruent with what they were feeling, and the rumors they spread. This finding anticipated Schachter and Singer’s 1962 two-factor theory of emotion, and subsequent demonstrations of the consequence of emotional misattribution and mislabeling(28).

When Festinger launched dissonance theory, both the then ascendant traditions of behaviorism and classic economics emphasized the rational and adaptive pursuit of self-interest, which entails efforts to maximize rewards and to minimize costs and risks. When applied mindlessly, those tenets prompt those hearing an account of the relevant studies to anticipate more positive effects on responses in the case of larger rewards than smaller ones, and more negative effects in the case of more aversive or threatening experiences than less aversive or threatening ones. Had laypeople been asked to venture predictions about individuals’ willingness to engage in particular behaviors, such predictions would, of course, have been warranted and, all things being equal, confirmed. But the dissonance experiments dealt not with effects of the relevant experimental manipulations not on compliance to requests but with evaluations made when the relevant positive or negative contingencies were no longer in effect.

The Festinger and Carlsmith findings (29) do not negate the banal fact that people prefer to be well paid rather than poorly paid for their work. However, the participants in that study were not asked to rate their satisfaction or other feelings about the task for which they were being paid—i.e., deceiving a peer who they believed was the next participant in the study. Rathert, they were rating how interesting they found the tedious task about which they had lied. Similarly, participants in the Aronson and Mills (30) study were not rating the undesirability of the embarrassing versus mild “initiation” they had endured, they were rating the subsequent tedious discussion they heard after that initiation experience.

While there are clearly limits to the appreciation people have regarding some of the subtler features of dissonance theory, the phenomenon that the dissonance researchers bottled in the laboratory regarding “insufficient justification” is familiar enough to most laypeople. Few are particularly surprised or perplexed when poorly rewarded artists, poets, musicians, or educators justify their continuing devotion to their calling by citing its non-material rewards. Similarly, product marketers learned long ago that people value products or outcomes that required some of—the so-called “Ikea effect” (31) whereby consumers show a particular liking for the furniture items they spent a bit of time and energy assembling, or the preference homemakers have for cake mixes that required the preparer to add a fresh egg before putting the mix in the oven.

Equally familiar are cases in which people rationalize risk, effort, discomfort, or even injury by exaggerating to others, and also to themselves, the pleasure of a dangerous activity or the worthiness of the cause for which they have suffered. Aesop’s fable, more than two millennia ago, of the fox who decided that the unreachable grapes were sour, anticipated the phenomenon of dissonance reduction in the face of frustrating failure. Countless poets waxed lyrical about the links between romantic ardor and suffering or risk endured to enjoy it. Parents have long recognized that bribing children to do their homework, or to eat their green vegetables, can have adverse consequences —that, extrinsic reward can undermine intrinsic interest” (32).

In short, laypeople are well aware that our species is prone to after-the-act rationalization. They are also aware that when people feel they are being forced rather than freely choose to act in a particular way, they feel less need to rationalize. Nevertheless, reliance on the simple behaviorist heuristic that more positive or negative reinforcement produces greater motivation and effort led psychology students and even their teachers (in the absence of deeper reflection) to venture the wrong prediction about the effects of the independent variable manipulations in those classic dissonance studies. By creating unfamiliar scenarios, and by making so salient the size of payment for lying in the case of the Festinger and Carlsmith study, the level of embarrassment evoked in the Aronson and Mills study, or the severity of threat for disobedience in the Aronson and Carlsmith study, investigators essentially directed the attention of research participants and those predicting their responses away from the amount of dissonance experienced by the research participants. Hence the “non-obviousness” of findings.

It would be interesting and revealing to have naïve participants make the relevant predictions, but then ask them to think for a while about why those predictions might be wrong, and to revise them accordingly. It would also be interesting to first “prime” participants to think about the human penchant for rationalization and to offer some familiar examples. Such priming, I suspect, would produce a sharp drop in the frequency of erroneous predictions. Claims about the non-obviousness of the relevant findings would also be received more skeptically, and experiences of great surprise would be rarer. In short, we would find that many, and perhaps most, people are competent lay psychologists when it comes to matters of dissonance reduction.

Dissonance Theory and the Fundamental Attribution Error

Evidence that people feel less dissonance when their behavior is a response to strong situational pressures and constraints than weak ones does not contradict everyday understandings of human behavior and motivation. We all recognize that a man who hands his cash to a robber who says “your money or your life” feels less dissonance than one who is persuaded by a glib salesman to overspend for some vanity-serving piece of clothing, bottle of wine, or office accoutrement. .Similarly, the woman who agrees to undergo life-saving surgery feels less dissonance than the woman who opts for painful cosmetic surgery. There is, however, something missing, or at least worthy of greater emphasis in standard accounts of findings yielded by the Festingerian compliance paradigm. A hint about that something is offered by the fact that in the “insufficient reward” condition of the Festinger and Carlsmith study, were the payment offered participants was only $1.00 (the standard amount for a 1959 research participant). only one participant declined that offer.

Clearly, it was something beyond that modest payment that led to such near-universal agreement to lie as the experimenter requested. The virtual total compliance with the experimenter’s request to lie about the task. With the benefit of hindsight (and discussion of the study with my late colleague Merrill Carlsmith) the features of that “something” became apparent. Participants in that study, like those in many other studies of that era, were facing an unfamiliar situation, and as such, were sensitive to clues about the “right” way to behave. Like most people in such situations, they were reluctant to violate expectations and norms—to “make a fuss” or stand-out as odd or inappropriate. Carlsmith, who served as experimenter, had been coached at length by Elliot Aronson about the way to convey the expectation to research participants that although they were free to leave rather than lie to the “next subject,” the experimenter confidently expected that they would agree to his request. The pressure to comply was strong enough to guarantee compliance, but not fully appreciated by the individual succumbing to it.

The existence of choice was, in a sense, illusory. The size of the payment, in fact, served to divert the participants’ consideration away from the actual determinants of their compliance. (Had they fully recognized those determinants, they would have felt relatively little dissonance and relatively little need to rationalize that compliance.) ⁴ This need, however, was attenuated in the $20 condition in part because, as theorized by the investigators, the payment was large enough not only to temp participants to offer the (essentially harmless) lie, and also to justify doing so. Anyone, they could rightly have assumed, would have done likewise. My point in such post-hoc theorizing is not that participants in these and other famous dissonance studies would not have experienced a need to reduce dissonance if they had fully recognized the pressures and constraints that had governed their behavior. Rather, it is that the magnitude of the dissonance they felt and sought to reduce was heightened by that lack of recognition.

Subtle compliance pressures that are not fully appreciated, either by the research participants who succumb to them or by those who are surprised by the relevant findings are, of course, a feature of many of the classic experiments we teach students about. Students learning reading about participants who “surprisingly” went along with their peers (actually experimental confederates) in offering obviously wrong judgments about the length of lines in the Solomon Asch’s famous conformity studies deem those participants to be weak. Those who obeyed the experimenter’s instruction to deliver a painful shock in the Milgram studies are seen both as weak and morally culpable. Those who agree to have an unsightly billboard on their lawn in the Freedman and Fraser classic foot-in-the-door study as seen as lacking the gumption to say no to an unreasonable request. As I have discussed at length elsewhere (33), people, particularly those in our highly individualistic society, generally fail to appreciate the power of social and situational pressures and constraints. As a result, they are inclined to make unwarranted dispositional attributions about those who succumb, and to make erroneous predictions about how those actors would behave when those pressures and constraints changed.

Potential Expansions in Research Concerns.

Individual versus Collective Rationalization. Perhaps the most important shortcoming of the dissonance theory tradition was its almost exclusive focus on individual rather than collective processes. When individuals rationalize personal decisions that turned out badly, or help each other reduce dissonance about missed opportunities or failures to meet high personal standards, the resulting improvement in mood and protection of self-regard may be benign. But the kinds of collective rationalization that accompany, indeed may be necessary pre-conditions for, the worst ills that groups visit on each other, have malignant consequences, including perpetuation and escalation of such wrong-doing and failures to learn from history. Neglect of this phenomenon is surprising not only because of its obvious relevance to dark chapters in human, but because Festinger’s immediately preceding work had explored group dynamics and social comparison (34). Moreover, in their famous account of what happens “when prophesy fails” Festinger and his colleagues (35) had explicitly noted that proselytism in the aftermath of that failure took place only among the followers who dealt with their dissonance collectively. Those who confronted disconfirmation alone showed no such response. They accepted the fact that the prophesy was wrong, drifted away from the group, and got on with their lives.

Had the Festingerians focused on contemporary events and recent history, they surely would have noted the importance of collective rationalization. Defense and justification of segregation, and steps taken by individuals and communities to keep their white children out of integrated classrooms, were fueled by organized groups and leaders with political agendas. The orchestration of rallies and protests and attempts to frame opposition to integration as an issue of State’s Rights, dedication of monuments and renaming of streets, schools, parks, buildings, and organizations to honor confederate politicians and generals, depended upon such organized, collective activity. So, of course, did the efforts almost a century earlier to frame the formation of the Confederacy and the Civil War as a noble struggle to preserve States Rights rather than an ignoble effort to preserve a profitable but immoral institution. Those of us old enough to remember the Vietnam War who were personally immersed in the dissonance research will recall not just our individual ruminations at the time but late-night discussions rationalizing both the things we did and the things we were unwilling to do in opposition to that war

The phenomenon of collective rationalization has been a prominent and perhaps necessary component of virtually all the most consequential cases of egregiously immoral actions and institutions. The Nazi holocaust, the dimensions of which became increasingly clear in the decade before Festinger’s account of dissonance theory, is perhaps the most obvious case in point. Other examples, including the bombing of civilian population centers, and the earlier subjugation, displacement, and decimation of indigenous populations in America, Australia, and Africa. In each case, rationalizing justifications were offered to the masses by political leaders and reinforced in everyday conversations whereby ordinary men and women absolved each other of responsibility, sometimes by agreeing about the necessity for the evils being perpetrated, sometimes by agreeing about the futility of active opposition, and the high personal costs or risks that such opposition would demand. The Festingerians were aware of these events, but that awareness again prompted little if any research to clarify the dimensions of such collective rationalization or explore when, why, or how particular individuals or groups resisted it

The most ubiquitous and enduring impetus for collective rationalization is the phenomenon of ingroup favoritism, that is, the tendency to treat members of one’s “ingroup” more generously when it comes to sharing of resources and opportunities than “outgroup” members. (36). Rather than digressing to discuss the literature, I will note that although the practice of “ingroup favoritism” is found throughout the animal kingdom, where it has a clear evolutionary basis, two features of ingroup favoritism are uniquely human.

The first is that humans alone form and favor ingroup members based on features other than kinship or shared territory. These features include not only shared ethnicity but also shared religious affiliation, political allegiance, occupation, or social club membership. Notions of “us” and “them”, and often us versus them, are central features of social cooperation and completion, and the “us” are afforded some of the preferential treatment we offer to family members. Those individuals have a status that makes them something akin to “fictive kin.” The second unique feature of human ingroup favoritism involves something more directly concerned with the topic of my essay. Robert Sapolsky, in his magisterial 2017 opus Behave (37) points out that most ape species, and many other members of the animal kingdom, are inclined to share some of their food with fellow troop members without extending such generosity to members of other troops. What makes humans unique, he notes, is the need they feel to justify more favorable treatment of ingroup than outgroup members.

The human capacity for collective rationalization is strikingly apparent when it comes to justifying hierarchies of wealth, privilege, and opportunity. The Protestant Ethic and conceptions of meritocracy that ignore initial advantages and disadvantages in the opportunity to acquire and display skills and credentials are maintained by powerful institutions, and echoed in everyday conversations among those at the top of the privilege pyramid. So effective are these hierarchy and inequality-justifying institutions that they succeed in inducing many at the bottom of the privilege pyramid to accept those ideological memes rather than challenge the status quo (38).

Rationalization via Counterfactuals An important tenet of dissonance theory, and a key to the Festingerian research strategy, was the postulate that when obvious and easy means to reduce dissonance are not available to the actor, less obvious dissonance reducing strategies will be employed. The man who in the 1970s wished to remove the ugly backyard bomb shelter he had paid to have built in the hysteria of the 1950s, only to find that removing it would be impossible without prohibitive cost, creatively decides that it would make an excellent wine cellar. If the grapes been within reach or if he had been able to devise some stratagem to reach them. Aesop’s fox would have eaten them rather than remain hungry and reduce dissonance about his failure to devour them by deciding that they are sour. The woman whose job is ill-paid, or whose marriage is a source of abuse and regret, would leave if she could do so without dire consequences. Lacking that option, however, she reduces her dissonance by exaggerating the direness of those consequences or by identifying and even exaggerating positive aspects of her job or marriage.

The same woman might utilize another means of dissonance reduction—the postulation of worst consequences of doing otherwise ( “I might never have found a new job and gone heavily in debt”: “ I might have married someone who not only treated me badly, but drank to excess, used illegal drugs, or failed to pull his weight financially ”). The dissatisfied purchaser of a new car with a host of small defects may reduce her dissonance with the counterfactual that if she had bought a different car, it “probably would have had even worse problems”, or if she had kept his old car, it might well have “ broken down on a dangerously busy highway.” The smoker who fails to overcome her nicotine addiction may insist that if she quit smoking, she “would have gained a huge amount of weight” and “ put herself at even greater medical risk”.

The use of such “counterfactual” rationalizations figures heavily in the defense of dubious political policies. In the 1950s and 1960s, they provided the rationale for the disastrous Viet Nam war inactions (“ if we don’t send troops to Vietnam, the fall of that “domino” will embolden our enemies to escalate their efforts to control that whole region of the world” ). In South Africa, counterfactual rationalizations bolstered repugnant apartheid policies (“ if we allow ‘them’ full rights of citizenship, including the right to vote, they take over and make our lives unbearable”). In Israel, counterfactuals help to justify disproportionate responses to crude rocket attacks ( if the US were facing such attacks from Mexico, its responses would be more extreme than the one we made, and the historically resonant claim that if they ever have the ability we now have to inflict casualties the death toll will be not in the hundreds but the hundreds of thousands,)

Some counterfactual suppositions are outlandish; others may be reasonable. But in both cases their validity is generally indeterminable and thus irrefutable. Dissonance researchers offered examples of their potential relevance in studies employing the free-choice paradigm. More recent investigators have investigated the role of dissonance reduction in maintaining feelings of personal virtue (39) and good fortune versus regret (40). However, the potential importance of counterfactuals in the rationalization of individual or collective evil-doing has been little explored. In my literature search, I found no study showing that hearing dissonance-reducing counterfactuals increases wrongdoing, although I did find one impressive Mturk study (41) showing that contemplating counterfactuals (e.g. Trump could have won the popular vote if that had been his goal) led Trump supporters to rate the relevant falsehood (Trump won the popular vote) less harshly. Counterfactuals about negative consequences that would have followed had controversial policies regarding the treatment of asylum seekers and desperate immigrants at our borders not been pursued likely play a role in allowing supporters of those policies and the leader who instituted them to reduce their dissonance about morally offensive results of those policies.

Contemporary Phenomena and Research Possibilities: Re-uniting Leon and Lewin.

Kurt Lewin’s discussion of tension systems and ways to resolve disequilibrium in such systems (42) had set the stage both for Festinger’s earlier work on group dynamics and the birth of dissonance theory. Lewin focused on the application of basic psychological principles to the social concerns of his day, and he inspired many of his students to follow in his footsteps. Dissonance theory provided a solid foundation for such application. In elaborating on the role of choice, commitment, sacrifices endured, and especially personal relevance and sense of responsibility, the dissonance researchers provided important insights about when, why, and how individuals and communities resist changing their practices and priorities. They also provided potentially useful insights for policy-implementers who wanted to win acceptance for such changes, and ideally to influence people’s hearts and minds as well as their actions. Yet, as I noted, for many decades after Festinger’s 1957 book, most of those researchers seemed to have pointedly avoided socially relevant applied issues, including most notably in cases where dynamic group processes, political persuasion, and organized advocacy played a role.

Elaborate experiments of the sort conducted by the Festingerians, studies labor requiring imaginative cover stories, deception, experimental confederates, and other theatrics are now a rarity. Today, the specific conceptual and definitional issues that the dissonance theories worked so hard to clarify rarely are debated or pursued empirically. In fact, dissonance theory itself has largely been subsumed within a general acknowledgment of the human motive to respond defensively both to threats to self-regard and to efforts to impugn or denigrate one’s group.

Despite the reservations I have expressed about the scope of the dissonance work done by Festinger and his most prominent followers, and despite the fact that it is no longer is a hot topic for researchers in our field, that work continues to inspire me,. it should alsoinspire other social psychologists who seek to follow the Lewinian tradition in applying “practical theories”) to pressing real-world concerns. That tradition has been undergoing a welcome revival, particularly among researchers seeking to help students from stigmatized minority groups achieve their full academic potential. Elliot Aronson’s work on the “Jigsaw Classroom” (43) set an inspiring example for the new generation of researchers. Much of the new intervention work, whether the specific interventions involve changing mindsets or sense of personal efficacy or increasing confidence about belonging, soliciting self-affirmations and combating stereotype threat, hinges on making students’ cognitions about themselves and their abilities and their belief and expectations about academic success more congruent. (44). A notable virtue in this later work is the attention the investigators give to longer-term effects, and to demonstrations that intervention benefits initially shown in laboratory experiments or single classrooms can be “scaled up” and achieved with larger populations and cost-effective procedures.

The list of contemporary issues appropriate for Lewinian attention is topped by the current COVID 19 pandemic, which forces difficult decisions and tradeoffs regarding public health, personal freedom and convenience, and economic consequences—all of which create dissonance and prompt rationalization (45). The same issues, of course, are raised less immediately but arguably much more crucially by the threat of impending climate change, and its potential social and economic consequences (46). Proposed individual and societal changes regarding life-style that experts deem necessary to reduce our carbon footprint, including increases in regulation, fees, and taxes to defray costs of developing and introducing greener technologies, inevitably prompt dissonance-reducing denial regarding the certainty, imminence, and human role in climate change. The threat of rising tides and increasing frequency of adverse weather events, and related threats to the world’s food supply and diversity of plant and animal species is something that people understandably would prefer not to think about and deal with. The human proclivity to rationalize present indulgence or inaction rather than endure the sacrifices or pay the costs required to confront this challenge is an important topic for the next generation of social psychologists following in Lewin’s footsteps.

Unfortunately, powerful interest groups encourage such denial and organize opposition to the necessary changes in policy and practice. They strive to turn attention elsewhere, or to focus public attention on the costs and inconvenience of those changes, and away from potential economic and lifestyle gains those changes could provide. As the impact of changes in climate already taking place become less deniable, I expect to see a pivot to the claim that such change is not only real but unavoidable. The new objection will be that any greener policies will prove futile—too little and too late to do any good, and therefore not worth the sacrifices they would entail. The need to recognize the special psychological, political, and economic dimensions of the challenge we face in dealing with issues of climate change mitigation is obvious. Current research on tactics to reduce energy consumption and promote greater use of renewable energy sources, and the tradeoffs between mandatory and voluntary measures, between nudges that coax and mandatory laws and taxes, merit more attention than they are receiving.

Another issue regarding impending climate change that has both pragmatic and psychological dimensions is the tradeoff between emphasis on minimizing such changes and adapting to those that we surely face. On the one hand, promoting policies to mitigate negative consequences (building dams and seawalls, reinforcing shoreline buildings, developing crops better suited for warmer temperatures, etc.) can divert attention away from the need to mitigate the change itself. On the other hand, acceptance of the need for, and advantages of, planful adaptation would make climate change denial, whether by individual or interest groups, less tenable. It could also bring to the fore interest groups that support and would benefit economically from such adaptation efforts.

Still another great social issue we confront today is the increasing political divide in US society (47). That divide has been characterized as the gap between the coastal elites who have benefited from globalization and increased ethnic and cultural diversity and those in the heartland who feel, with some justification, that their lives have gotten worse. It has also been characterized as a divide between rural and small-town Americans with deep roots in their communities and those whom they see rootless and uncaring cosmopolitans. Those “left behind” are experiencing the loss not only of good-paying jobs and economic security but also of opportunity, dignity, community, and optimism about the future. Polling data suggests vast low- density “red” areas, where voters with relatively less education and jobs skills no longer in demand live, and smaller but much higher density blue areas, where voters with high levels of education and with skills in ever-increasing demand live. Again, opportunistic leaders and interest groups stoke resentment, heighten feeling (in blue and red areas alike) of “us” and “them”. The result is a rise in xenophobic nationalism among supporters of our current president and distrust and hostility toward those who not only denigrate him ⁷ but offer condescending portraits and caricatures of his supporters.

As positions harden, and political commitment escalates in debates not only about climate change and immigration policies, but also about policing and, most of all, the persistence of structural racism, the lessons of dissonance theory research seem to be forgotten, even among my liberal academic colleagues. Too often, they simply insist that those the other side of the issue are ignorant of facts, displaying bad faith, and abandoning cherished American values, and in so doing they ignore the implications of dissonance theory about the reasons why attitudes are hard to change, and how best to change them. While some people can be convinced by data or expert opinions, and/or what they see for themselves, many more are apt to dig in their heels, seek out and derive comfort from like-minded peers, and attend ever more exclusively to media that supports their views. Indeed, what we see Trump supporters doing today is less a case of justifying his objectionable actions than justifying their own past and continuing support of him.

Traditional liberals, especially those with high-paying jobs, good housing, health insurance, and retirement savings, have progressive attitudes about climate change, immigration policy, gay rights, affirmative action, etc. However, they are inclined to reduce their dissonance about growing inequality. Some blame heartless companies, abetted by opportunistic right-wing politicians and their wealthy campaign backers. But others blame countrymen who are bearing the cost of new social and economic realities for their dire circumstances ( “they should have gotten more education”, “they should go back to school or get retrained”, “they should move to places where there are jobs”) The sense of shoulder-to-shoulder solidarity between social liberals, working-class Americans, and people who simply care about the welfare of fellow citizens seeking better pay and working conditions, greater security, and rights to unionize, has been lost.

This essay is not the place to propose specific strategies to achieve the types of political coalitions and life-style changes required to meet the difficult challenges posed by global warming, growing economic inequality, or divisive populism. However, one Lewinian lesson is worth bearing in mind. When change is being resisted despite the net benefits it would offer, the well-schooled Lewinian asks not what can be done to increase pressures to changes but what can be done to identify, and decrease, the factors and forces that now stand in the way of such change. When we consider again the targets for intervention discussed in this essay, that question becomes how can we make it less dissonant for those we want to persuade to step across the divide and change their behavior in ways that would better serve our society. More specifically, what can we do to make such change congruent with the concerns on the other side of the political divide and these issues, to see themselves as rational, coherent, principled, worthy of self-esteem and the good opinion of their peers, motivation no less strong than those on our own side.

To state the obvious, it is not by calling them stupid, or decrying the motivational biases and dubious appeals to which they are succumbing. At the same time, it would be wise to pause to consider the ways in which our own rationalizations and responses to dissonance-arousing threats may be creating barriers to the formation of needed political partnerships. The most important lesson from the dissonance researchers, combined with the lessons we have learned about the situational control of behavior, suggests that gently nudging gradual changes in behavior can initiate virtuous cycles whereby easy steps forward lead to acceptance of new norms, which in turn make further steps easier, ultimately leading to new ways of seeing the world, and the duties of a good citizen that come to seem natural and obvious.

Demonstrating the effectiveness of such a step-by-step strategy, testing ways to discourage rationalization where it is a barrier to change, and making behavior that is incompatible with the better angels of our nature and the requirements of a more sustainable future more dissonant, are appropriate goals for my younger colleagues who take up the Lewinian challenge. True experimental designs whereby the impact of wise interventions can be assessed through comparison with appropriate control or “current best practices” conditions will always be the goal standard for researchers. Aronson’s experiments using “hypocrisy” manipulations to induce water and energy conservation and to promote safe sex practices (show that experimentalists of the Festinger era, old dogs that we may be, can learn, and teach some new tricks (48).

Notwithstanding the advantage of true experiments whereby variables are systematically manipulated, analyzing the results of “natural experiments” in which different policies and practices are being employed in different communities or countries can be enlightening. Of special interest in this regard would be policies and practices that differ in terms of the magnitude of sacrifice called for, ease and incentivizing of compliance, perceived choice, and other demonstrated moderators of dissonance magnitude. Careful attention, guided by theory, to the history of individuals who have resisted the temptation to make difficult but constructive changes, and that of individuals who proved unwilling to join peers in rationalizing socially harmful practices could also be fruitful. I envy the newcomers to our field who have the opportunity to write this next exciting chapter in the development and application of useful theory, and ultimately the history of social psychology.

Some Final Personal Reflections and Acknowledgments: Looking Backward and Forward

When I undertook this essay, the audience I had in mind consisted of Stanford graduate students in psychology and friends and colleagues with whom I have long discussed both the history and current state of our field, of American politics, and the connection between them. The immediate impetus for writing was my own longstanding dissonance about Festinger—a truly brilliant psychologist and a decisive influence on experimental social psychology during the most formative years in my career, but a man whose own career puzzled me. Although the most prominent student of Kurt Lewin, he did not emphasize Lewin’s tension-system theorizing as a primary influence in his introduction of dissonance theory. Even more notable was his unmistakable distaste for applied research in the Lewinian tradition, and his lack of attention to collective processes or “group dynamics” in the research he and his students undertook.

Very early in my career, I had become good friends with Solomon Asch during his stay at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences on the hill overlooking the Stanford campus. Al Hastorf had been the match-maker, suggesting to Asch that I was a young man who could bring him up to date on our field. I was delighted to take on that task. Asch was a penetrating critic, and when I described the recent but already famous experiments of Festinger and his students, he waved his hand and said, “the work is very clever, of course, but it lacks any moral dimension. Leon looks down on the people in his experiments as if they are insects”.

At the time, I dismissed his critique as humanistic prattle, but over the years I have increasingly noted places where social concern could have deepened the dissonance tradition. I have ruminated not only about opportunities to apply dissonance theory in dealing with real-world problems, but also opportunities to get a better sense of how powerful the phenomenon is relative to other factors that play a role in the commission of evil deeds and creation of barriers to necessary changes in American society. Becoming friends with Elliot Aronson, and discussing Festinger’s career and mentoring with him, was a further impetus for my essay. My own Ph.D. advisor, Stanley Schachter, had been one of Festinger’s most prominent students and his lifelong friend. Stan’s mentoring launched my career and helped win a position at Stanford, but he, although in kinder tones, also had a low opinion of applied social psychology and intervention studies. It was not until I met Aronson (who not coincidentally had been an undergraduate devotee of the leading humanist psychologist Abraham Maslow) that I saw how Festinger’s artfulness could be captured in service of wise intervention work.

I would be remiss if I failed to mention Phil Zimbardo’s role, both in my own career and as an impetus for this essay. Phil served as a visiting professor and as my adviser during my third year at Columbia while Stan was on sabbatical. I suspect he was instrumental in my hiring at Stanford and his brilliant 1966 monograph, The Cognitive Control of Motivation showed me that dissonance processes could have profound behavioral consequences. I would be even more remiss if I failed to acknowledge Mark Lepper. During the four decades in which we taught our graduate course in social psychology to successive cohorts of Ph.D. students, His lectures on dissonance theory, which synthesized the work and offered deep insights about the larger themes underlying the individual experiments and later developments in social psychology, have been foundational to my continuing ruminations about the history and status of dissonance theory.

As I turn my gaze from the past to the future, it seems obvious that rationalization and motivated reasoning more generally, even without due acknowledgment of the dissonance tradition or its finer points, will be a target of researchers. It certainly should be for those who address the twin issues of the political divide in America and the related threats of climate change, resource depletion, and loss of biological diversity. Given the increasingly sophisticated brain-imaging technologies, there will be ever more research on the neural changes that precede and follow rationalization. Perhaps we may even discover the “signature” of an open or closed mind, and a mind that is rationalizing intransigence versus a mind that is rationalizing change.

I hope that work will also be forthcoming that is more ideographic in nature, work that explores the kinds of personal experiences or revelations that are most likely to produce the acknowledgment of painful truths and past errors. A phenomenon that Festinger and company did not pursue, but one that has created inner conflict and dissonance for people of conscience over the centuries, is that of remaining silent in the face of profound wrongdoing. The Oxford dictionary, in defining the term “construal,” notably gives the example of “construing silence as assent”. I fear that remaining silent in the face of wrongdoing by political leaders promotes dissonance reduction of a sort that is all too familiar in our history. The more the leader violates norms, the more inclined his supporters are to justify their silence and their earlier support. Accordingly, they minimize and rationalize his misdeeds by increasing their support for those of his goals and policies with which they agree, and by exaggerating the extent to which he has succeeded in enacting those policies and making progress toward those goals. I also hope that we will see work done that illuminates the operation of rationalization processes not only in such vicious cycles of rationalization but also in virtuous cycles that take place over longer time periods than we can study in the laboratory. Two examples provide a basis for optimism.

The first case is that of smoking, the behavior that Festinger devoted so much attention to in explaining dissonance reduction. At the time, it was widely acknowledged (especially after the Surgeon General’s 1964 report) to be a health threat. However, in the 1960s, smoking was congruent not with folly but with conceptions of maturity, sophistication, and adherence to social norms. The rationalizations offered by smokers ( If I quit, I’ll gain weight, I need to smoke to relax when I am stressed, and various versions of the link between smoking and cancer are merely correlational and may not be causal ). Now more than half a century later, smoking—at least in my Bay Area neck of the woods—is seen as deviant, anti-social, uncouth, stupid, reckless, a sign of personal weakness, and anything but sophisticated. Most young people, at least most educated, middle-class young people, do not smoke. The relevant norm is enforced by all kinds of restrictions and taxes. The smoker’s dissonance reduction task is far more difficult than it was in Festinger’s day (he was a heavy smoker). In fact, the responses of those witnessing the deviate smoker and hearing the reactions of most onlookers, especially if that smoker tries offering rationalizations for his nicotine habit, reinforces the anti-smoking norm.

The second case is that of recycling. The story, in this case, is a bit different because it involves not the gradual stigmatization of a once-acceptable individual choice, but the institutionalization, facilitation, and community acceptance of a particular obligation of good citizenship. When I first came to Stanford, recycling involved separating different types of glass, separating glass from paper and paper from cardboard, and driving to a recycling center where volunteers maintained the piles of the material to be recycled and arranged for their transport. Only a minority of Palo Altan’s participated in this labor-intensive (and inefficient) activity, and driving to the recycling center probably created more pollution with greenhouse gases than was saved.

Today Palo Altan put out recyclable materials, grass clippings, leaves, garden debris, and kitchen scraps in colored cans provided by the city (for which they pay a small monthly fee). The old voluntary system likely strengthened beliefs in the need for and value of recycling and presumably other “green” values as well, more than the current system does. That current system no longer depends on congruent values; it is merely the standard, normative way we put out our trash, and therebyfulfill the duties of a normal community member. That includes the paying of the relevant fees and taxes (just as we do for maintaining our roads, parks, military, and government itself). The same trade-offs between maximizing compliance and internalization of values will apply to virtually any programs that are implemented to combat climate change, unless opposition is organized and funded by those who benefit from the absence of such programs. The formula—step-by-step removal of barriers to compliance, increasingly widespread participation and compliance, establishment and entrenchment of new norms, and stigmatization of non-compliers—comes directly from the playbooks of Lewin and Leon.

Reference Notes (1) Festinger, 1957; Aronson, 1969; Brehm & Cohen, 1962), (2) eg., Festinger & Carlsmith, 1959; Aronson & Mills, 1959; Brehm, 1956; Aronson & Carlsmith, 1963.

(3) Aronson 1968,1969; also Cooper & Fazio, 1984; Greenwald & Ronis, 1978; Steele,1988; Steele & Liu,1983, many chapters in Abelson, Aronson, McGuire, Newcombe, Rosenberg, & Tannenbaum, 1968.

(4) Steele 1997

(5) Freud 1911

(6) It appears that this remark actually was made in 1970 by fellow economist Paul Samuelson, who claimed he was echoing the words of Keynes, However there is no documentation that Keynes offered this specific and pithy rejoinder to the charge of inconsistency.

(7) Myrdal, 1941

(8) Deutsch & Collins, 1951

(9) Brehm & Cohen

(10) Thayler & Sunstein, 2008

(11) Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History podcast of July 12, 2017 presents a compelling account of the costs borne in the aftermath Brown vs Board of Education.

(12) See Navansky, 1980; Schrecker, 1998.

(13) Milgrim, 1963,1974

(14) Festinger, Riecken & Schachter

(15) Arendt, 1983

(16) Festinger, Riecken & Schachter

(17) Ehrlich 1957; Brehm 1956

(18) Brehm & Cohen, 1957; Fazio & Cooper, 1984; Cooper, 2007.

(19) Gerard & Matthewson, 1966; Aronson & Mills 1959

(20) Brehm and Cohen, 1959; Brehm, 1956.

(21) See Ring, 1967; and response by McGuire, 1967

(22) Aronson & Mills 1959; Smith, 1961; Zimbardo, 1968; Brock & Buss, 1964; Brehm, 1962.

(23) Knox & Inkster, 1968.

(24) Elliot and Devine, 1994.

(25) Greenwald & Ronis, 1978.

(26) Jones and Kohler, 1958.

(27) See Lord, Ross, & Lepper, 1979. Ross & Lepper, 1980, Kunda, 1990; Nickerson, 1998.

(28) Schachter & Singer, 1962.

(29) Festinger & Carlsmith 1963. (30) Aronson & Mills, 1959 (31) Arielyi, 2016. (32) Lepper, Greene, & Nisbett, 1973; Deci, 1971.

(33) Ross, 1977; Ross & Nisbett.

(34) Festinger, 1950, 1953 Festinger 1954

(35) Festinger, Reicken & Schachter, 1956 (36) see Fiske, 2002; Dasgupta, 2004). (37) Sapolsky, 2017

(38) See Jost & Banaji, 1994; Jost, Banaji, & Nosek, 2004

(39) Effron, Miller & Monin, 2012

(40) Mandel & Dhami, 2005; Roese & Olson, 2014: also Gilovich & Medvec, 1995; Kahneman & Miller, 1986). (41) Efffron, 2018 (42) Lewin, 1940.1943

(43) Aronson 1978; Aronson & Bridgeman, 1979.

44) See Dweck, 2006; Walton & Cohen, 2011; Steele 1997; Aronson, Fried & Good, 2002; Good, Aronson, & Inzlicht, 2003; Cohen, Garcia, Apfel & Masters, 2006; See review by Cohen & Sherman, 2015; also Yeager & Walton, 2011.

(45) Aronson and Tavris

(46) Gilovich & Ross, 2015; Ross et al, 2016.

(47) Gilovich & Ross, 2015; Gelman, 2008:Kendzior, 2018;Klein, 2020;Kornacki, 2019; West, 2019.

(48) Dickerson. Thibodeau, Aronson, & Miller, 1992; Stone, Aronson, Crain, Winslow, & Fried, 1994.

Notes

¹ A colleague who grew up on a farm in Georgia mentioned a source of support for integration at the college and even high-school level that involved intercollegiate athletics. Teams lacking African American athletes were at a disadvantage to integrated teams. While racism by no means was magically erased by the presence of African-American athletes (often in starring roles) the alumni and other fans who cheered their efforts and sought to recruit the most gifted of them were motivated to reduce rather than maintain their opposition to integration of their schools.

² One execption is a highly relevant, although lightly cited, dissonance study (Staw, 1974) of the sort one might have expected to see featured in contemporary texts and reviews. The finding was that ROTC members whose draft numbers were high, and who therefore would have avoided military service even without their ROTC experience, rated that experience less positively than those whose number was low and would otherwise have been drafted.

³ In the case of more harmful acts, the offer of a larger payment might well evoke anticipation of greater guilt and perhaps might even produce less compliance, and more rather than less need to justify such compliance, than a more modest incentive (Interestingly, whereas only one participant refused to lie in the $1 condtion, two participants refused to do so in the $20 condition).

⁴ It is worth noting that William Shakespeare, a great lay psychologist as well as the greatest of our dramatist made it clear that even his villains apparently felt the need, and showed the capacity, to rationalize their villainy. This perhaps is clearest in Shylock’s insistence that he was a man more sinned against than sinning, but even a cursory examination of the soliloquys of his other villians will leave no doubt that Shakespeare recognized the role that rationalization play in the darkest of human deeds.

⁵ The role of this error is even more central, although not really acknowledged, in Bem’s (1965, 1967, 1972) alternative, “self-perception theory” account of many classic dissonance theory findings. Bem’s account essentially held that the research participants in these studies were making the same attributions about their own beliefs and preferences that observers or others learning about their responses would make, and in fact did make in Bem’s interpersonal simulations. But what Bem did not acknowledge was that this account only “works” if the observers in question were not giving due consideration to the various situational pressures and constraint faced by the actor. In other words, the attributions to features of the actor were wrong, just as the actor’s attributions about his or her own actions were wrong.

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In terms of methodological artistry and the generation of non-obvious, even counter-intuitive, findings, the articulation of dissonance theory by Leon Festinger and his students (1) and especially their most famous laboratory experiments (2), represented a high-water mark in the history of social psychology. Clever (and often entertaining) experiments in that tradition are no longer featured in our field’s major journals. Yet the term “cognitive dissonance”, now used now very broadly to convey ambivalence or recognition of inconsistency between previous words or deeds and current ones, has, like “ego”, “inferiority complex,” “positive reinforcement”, “groupthink”, and “narcissist.” become a part of everyday lay psychologizing.

The crucial refinements to dissonance theory offered by Elliot Aronson (3) directs our attention to a motive that even the most diehard behaviorists must acknowledge distinguishes us from the rats, pigeons, canines, and other creatures that work to gain rewards and avoid punishments. That motive compels us to see ourselves, and those with whom we share bonds of kinship, affection, or group membership, as virtuous, rational, and coherent and, although perhaps imperfect in terms of values, traits, and priorities, no worse (and, if possible, somewhat better) than the majority of our peers.   

Aronson’s refinement, and later work including Steele’s influential 1988 articulation of self-affirmation theory(4), effectively tied the concept of dissonance reduction to the more familiar concepts of ego-protection and rationalization introduced a half century earlier by Ernest Jones in  1908, and popularized by Sigmund Freud (5) soon after. As Festinger (1957) had noted, most inconsistencies between present beliefs or current behavior and new information lead to changes in beliefs and/or behavior without particular need for rationalization. John Maynard Kaynes, when questioned about his reversal of views regarding a failed policy, famously responded, “ when the facts change I change my mind …what do you do sir?”(6)   (If only more political and intellectual leaders were equally willing to yield to inconvenient facts!

It is often non-problematic to admit one was mistaken or fooled, or even to confess that one was a fool—blinded by love, perhaps, or taken in by a con-man who proposed a deal too good to be true. Other inconsistencies are treated as mere ideosyncrisies and similarly create no need for rationalization. Health food enthusiastics who confess their distaste for beets despite their inarguable membership on the list of healthy foods, or mathematicians who regularly buy  lottery tickets despite the expected negative return on investment, can acknowledge such incongruities, feeling little if any need for further justification.

Aronson’s refinement also clarifies when and why hypocritical discrepancies between words and deeds, in the wry words of Rochefoucauld, can be justified simply as a “tribute that vice pays to virtue.” Parents who urge their offspring to lead a healthier or more virtuous life than the one they led at the same age feel little dissonance about the counsel they are offering. Moreover, most of us readily acknowledging that we are neither consistently virtuous, nor otherwise perfectly consistent human beings. The need to rationalize, and the effort we are willing to exert to alleviate that threat, in turn, depend on the degree of inconsistency, and the importance of the aspect of self under threat, and hence the degree of dissonance, we are facing.

Festinger’s place in the pantheon of 20th century psychology is secure, and exploration of the processes by which people boost and protect self-esteem and the good name of their group continues to be one of social psychology’s most fruitful areas of research. It was Festinger’s work that lured me and many in my academic cohort into experimental social psychology. Upon rereading his 1957 text, and recalling some of the most notable studies that followed, I found myself transported back to my student days, again awed by Festinger’s powers of conceptual analysis and synthesis. I also began noting connections to contemporary real-world phenomena and exciting directions for new research, and even musing about possible manipulations,”cover stories”, and outcome measures for such research.

Looking back, I am struck both by Festinger’s choice of phenomena to emphasize in explaining his theory and by the primary focus of the research that he and his followers first conducted.Those choices reflect the tradeoffs the Festingerians made in terms of elegance and non-obviousness of research findings versus degree of relevance to the social and political issues of the day, and to the most difficult, and dissonance-producing decisions many Americans of that era faced.  My motive in writing this essay,  however, concerns the future of our field as much as its past. In the concluding section of the essay I suggest that renewed attention to dissonance reduction, and rationalization more generally, is particularly timely. Those processes, I suggest are all too apparent and dangerous today as the US and much of the rest of the word confronts debilitating political divides and dangerous economic, environmental, and social challenges.

Dissonance Phenomena Highlighted by Festinger (1957) and Issues in US Society 1954-1973

Desegregation and Dissonance. During the first decade of dissonance work, when the researchers Festinger inspired were testing and sharpening the abstract propositions of his theory, America was embarking on its own great natural dissonance experiment. It was  implementing the Supreme Court’s 1954 order to undertake “with all deliberate speed” the desegregration of public schools throughout the South. In the previous decade the US armed forces had been integrated. Although racially homogenous communities continued to be the rule rather than the exception, integregated housing projects for low-income citizens were being constructed in many Northern neighborhoods. The great migration from the rural South to the industrial north in the 1930s and the war years that followed had produced factories, trade unions, and communities where many blacks and whites worked and lived side by side.

In the case of white Americans who had long supported and rationalized the disparate treatment of black and white citizens, the prospect of having their children attend the same school as black children was a threat and a source of fear and resentment. For those with more progressive views about race and racial equality, the discrepancy between their beliefs and their failure to actively address that inequality was a source of potential dissonance. For the white students and others who joined black citizens in sit-ins, protest marches, and bus trips in the deep South, the awareness of the dangers to which they were exposing themselves, their actions were congruent with the beliefs, but incongruent with their natural desire for self-preservation and safety. Black activists in that stuggle similarly were obliged to reduce their dissonance about the even greater risks to which they were exposing themselves, and the understandable doubts they harbored about the prospects of achieving meaningful change through their actions.

Black parents living in the South or in the urban ghettos in the North faced a particularly difficult, dissonance-provoking choice when it came to the issue of school desegregation.  Should they have their children expose themselves to the ill-treatment they could expect in newly integrated schools? Or should they keep them in the more socially comfortable environment of schools with teachers and peer who shared their race, and forego the superior resources and opportunities that their children might benefit from in a formerly all white school. Regardless of the option they chose, they would experience dissonance about the costs of their choice. The moderators of dissonance that Festinger and his students were exploring in the laboratory—choice, commitment, responsibility, foreseeability of consequences, degree of irrevocability, extent of costs or sacrifices borne—all were dramatically at play. Yet neither Festinger nor his students directed their research efforts toward this ongoing social and political struggle.

The hope had been expressed that attitude change would follow from behavior change, and that once contact between black and white students became an ordinary everyday experience, opposition to it would diminish. Festinger’s 1957 book included a couple of sentences, citing Myrdal‘s important 1944 book (7) highlighting the contradiction between endorsement of equality and widespread unequal treatment of African-Americans. Festinger also briefly mentioned a 1951 study by Deutsch and Collins (8) on racial attitudes in integrated housing projects, pointing out that while dissonance theory predicted a reduction in white opposition to desegregation in areas where citizens complied with the Supreme Court’s order, it also predicted a increase in opposition in areas where it was successfully resisted. But the examples he chose in introducing his theory, and more importantly the initial research undertaken did not include dissonance related to the growing struggle for civil rights.

In a 1962 volume Brehm and Cohen (9) offered a detailed early discussion of the conditions under which dissonance theory would predict positive attitude change in the aftermath of school integration or other types of inter-racial contact. But they could not point to much data, either from laboratory experiments or field studies, that tested those predictions. Festinger’s formulation suggested the special importance of the tipping point between just enough and not quite enough pressure to produce citizen and state compliance, where by the optimal strategy would be to introduce enough force or incentive to achieve widespread compliance (and ideally establish a new set of norms), but not more than necessary to get the job done.

The incentives could have been financial—perhaps larger than standard pay raises for teachers, or increased resources for activities that parents and students found particularly attractive but otherwise difficult to fund. Making use of relatively invisible pressures or what Thayler and Sunstein (10) termed “nudges”—that is, pressures perceived by the targets as sufficiently modest to make compliance dissonant with continuing opposition to desegregation and justification of other Jim Crow policies, would have been an even better means to achieve that objective. A short list of recommended tactics might have included boosting of perceived consensus, use of pre-commitment, and creation of small specific reference groups removed from the pressures exerted by then existing norms and traditions.

Ignorant of dissonance theory and its implications, or disregarding it, most liberals failed to recommend such nuance in implementation. Instead, faced with widespread, politically popular, resistence to integration, they advocated and applauded the use of federal troops, lawsuits, and forced busing to enforce the new law of the land. The result was hardening of resistance and massive defection by whites from the public schools, accompanied by rationalizations that ranged from red-necked racism to benign paternalism and the claims that segregated schools better served the interests of the students of both races.

Black parents who were ambivalent about sending their children to previously all white schools had good reason to be ambivalent. Desegregation meant job losses for dedicated black teachers, reduced resources for public school and colleges with predominantly black enrollments that had long been vehicles of upward mobility, and also an educational experience for many children that was worse than they would have faced in their segregated schools (11). (The racist backlash created by the desegregation that Lyndon Johnson predicted, and the broader civil rights struggle that ensued ,continue to be exploited by GOP half a century later.

Despite the flaws in its implementation, and despite the price black communities paid for desegration, for many it opened doors for professional achievementand provided opportunities for cross-racial friendships. Ultimately, public opposition to integration withered away. Racially based discrimination did not disappear, but even in the Deep South the most blatant instances were curtailed, integrated schools are the norm. and overtly racist ideology has largely become the province of fringe groups with little political power1 . The blue patches around college towns in the sea of red we witness on election day voting tallies are testimony to those changes. So the balance sheet of pluses and minuses is mixed. Still, we are left to wonder if closer attention to the lessons of dissonance theory might have prompted some psychologically wiser desegregation implementation strategies and a less mixed scorecard.

Before concluding my discussion of dissonance theory there is general problem to be acknowledged regarding attempts to change social attitudes and norms by the wise application of dissonance theory principles. Different people have different “tipping-points”, and what is just enough coercion or incentivizing to produce compliance and attendant shifts in attitudes and norms for some is not quite enough to produce compliance for others. in which case, as Festinger noted, it creates additional motivation to justify non-compliance and is apt to produce a hardening of resistance. The best policy makers can do is to undertake some research to determine the “sweet-spot” that produces the most satisfactory result in terms of level of compliance and strength of resistance on the part of non-compliers.

Dissonance Dilemmas for 1950s Leftists and Liberals. In the late 1960s, when I was a Columbia PhD student, the escalating costs and casualties in the Vietnam War, accompanied by rising doubts about any “light at the end of the tunnel” that would bring the war to a satisfactory conclusion, was increasing dissonance for supporters of the war. At the same time, opposition to the war, especially among students potentially subject to the draft, was leading many to move from political detachment or passive disapproval to participation in anti-war marches and rallies, national political campaigns, and in many cases to later careers involving social advocacy. It led others to seek deferments on dubious medical grounds, to enroll in ROTC programs that put off service, to register as conscientious objectors, or to leave the country. It even led some to commit of crimes against fellow citizens. In the case of young Americans who voluntarily enlisted or who served when drafted, they experienced the trauma of the war first-hand and returned to hostile receptions from anti-war peers.

The advent of the birth control pill and the Supreme Court’s Roe v Wade decision legalizing abortion were a potential source of dissonance for women in general and Catholic families in particular. Both opponents and supporters of such reproductive rights were motivated to justify their personal decisions by strengthening beliefs congruent with those decisions. As in the case of the civil rights struggle and the Vietnam War the ensuing political divisions became a central feature of US politics. Political and social conservatives maintainted that they were the patriots and upholders of traditional American values and institutions and that the patriotism and/or morality of their liberal opponents were suspect. Surprisingly, this important chapter in American history, and the obvious question of why it produced dramatic political transformation and behavior change in some, a hardening of views and rationalization in others, and political disengagement in still others, received little if any attention from the dissonance researchers. 2

Dissonance Dilemmas for 1950s Leftists and Liberals. In the decade following World War II, McCarthyism was at its height. Government employees, scientists, writers, and film-makers were asked to sign loyalty oaths, and in some famous cases to name and denounce colleagues who were or had been members of Communist or Socialist organizations, had shown too enthusiastic support for left-wing causes, or otherwise engaged in “ Unamerican” activities. Satisfying such demands often required betrayal of friends,  colleagues, and deeply help principles, and for many and the prospect of ostracism; but failure to comply could mean the loss of careers and livelihoods, or even imprisonment (12). Either decision would create dissonance; and accounts of those who faced that choice leave little doubt about an issue that later theorists considered to be in need of empirical validation—i.e., that dissonance is an aversive motivational state, and an impetus to rationalization. Yet none of the texts I reviewed even mentioned these paradigmatic cases of pre-decisional conflict and post-decisional dissonance reduction.

A somewhat different dilemma involved the responses of loyal communists and left-leaning artists and intellectuals who personally confronted, or heard credible firsthand reports about the realities of life in Stalinist Russia--the brutal crushing of dissent, the the show-trials, the failed collectivation experiments, and the ruthlessness of its leaders. Switches in “party line” from opposition to fascism in Spain to a treaty with Nazi Germany, and from opposition to the Allied war effort, to joining that effort when Hitler lauched its forces against Russia, demanded further rationalization.  The liquidation of Trotsky and other once-lionized revolutionaries made a similar demand. Many Party members and fellow travelers defected. Some became outspoken anti-communists conservatives, more became traditional liberls or became apolitical and focused  on their careers. But a diehard minority rationalized it all and continued to be Party loyalists.

The public pronouncements of those diehards (You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs; don’t believe what you read in the Western Press) were familiar to me long before I was exposed to dissonance theory. They accepted uncritically tales of economic leaps forward and swallowed any reservations and doubts they had about the present realities of life in communist countries, focusing beyond those realities on the glorious, utopian future that Marx had claimed would surely come. For these diehards, no “Kronstadt” moment 4 created a tipping-point, an event that at last could not be rationalized. Participant in Milgram experiments (13) could not justify (to the experimenter and to themselves) disobeying when it came to administering the Nth shock, given that they had rationalized all of the previous N-1 shocks. By the same token, the justifications and rationalizations offered by the diehards in the face of early challenges to their loyalty, made it too difficult and painful to abandon their self-defining Marxist beliefs—beliefs for which they often willingly had made costly personal sacrifices—in the face of later, even more daunting, challenges.

Novelists, playwrights, and public intellectuals humanities described dilemma that some true believers endured. Volunteers who went to fight in Spain in 1936, or those who went to prison because of their anti-war activities prior to the Soviet joining of the Allies in June of 1941, made enormous sacrifices in service of the beliefs. A better understanding of when and why some believers change their views in light unwelcome evidence and when, why, and how others stay the course and rationalize would have been an obvious goals for dissonance researchers and it remains and important task for researchers today. But social psychologists, to my knowledge, contributed little if anything to the discussion of these high dissonance real-world experiences.  

This omission is particularly puzzling because Festinger and his colleagues had described the events that led up to and ensued from a failed prophesy and the  role that disconfirmation may play in prompting the birth of religious movements (14) discuss in the concluding section of this essay, consideration of rationalization in the context of political disappointment would be particularly timely today as American voters reflect not only on the 2016 Presidential election and its aftermath, but the growing sense that standard progressive nostrums may not be sufficient to treat what currently ails our body politic. 

The Particular Research Strategy of the Festingerians

Festinger’s 1957 book introduced the central tenets of cognitive dissonance theory and the determinants of the magnitude of dissonance. It also offered familiar examples of everyday dissonance reduction, including the rationalizations offered by smokers who are aware of the dangers of their habit yet do not or cannot quit (if I stop smoking I will gain weight weight; the link between smoking and cancer may be a causal one), or by purchasers of cars and then discover negative features of their expensive purchases. In terms of the formal propositions of dissonance theory, the relevant rationalizations (it breaks down a lot and gives terrible milage but it has great acceleration and I love its body design). All of us have heard such everyday rationalizations offered for investments of time, energy or dollars that yielded disappointing results or other bad decisions, to say nothing of the justifications that politicians offer for their missteps. We may be unsure about whether the individuals in such cases are trying to convince us, or themselves, but their behavior does not violate our lay theories about human motivation.

The most extreme case of post-decision dissonance reduction that Festinger described in his 1957 volme, involved Japanese nationals living in the US who opted for repatriation to their homeland at the conclusion of World War II. According to a newspaper account of that day, those expatriates thought that Japan would win the war, and despite what they read and what they heard on the radio, they refused to accept reports of their country’s defeat and surrender. Only when they returned to Japan and witnessed firsthand their devastated homeland did they accept the painful truth.

In the post-war periods following that war and subsequent ones Americans also heard individuals who had engage in practices that violated normal moral and ethical standards justifying their actions to the world, and perhaps to themselves as well. Those individuals and other complicit in those misdeeds took comfort in the support of peers who share their views and accepted their rationalizations. Such phenomena were familiar to anyone who followed the trial of Adolph Eichman, described by Hannah Arendt (15), which took place at a time when dissonance researchers were highly active yet that trial, and the justifications Eichmann offered for his leading role in the holocaust is not mentioned in the books and review articles I read. Nor, in my reading did I see any discussion of contemporaneous or after-the-fact rationalizations regarding the  wartime internment of Japanese-Americans or the Mai Lei massacre in Vietnam.

Although Festinger and his students presumably recognized how large a role dissonance reduction played in contemporary American life, the research strategy they adopted relied almost exclusively on experimental manipulations involving novel situations. Recognizing that they could not create cases of truly wrenching decisions or wrongdoers motivated to reduce their dissonance about great harm to others in the laboratory they opted to orchestrate milder dissonance-producing scenarios. In particular, they investigated three separate phenomena—changes in evaluations of options after consumer decisions, dissonance-reducing changes in beliefs or evaluations after “forced” compliance, and seeking-out of information that supports rather than challenges ones actions and beliefs.

Their research strategy went beyond simply capturing these phenomena in controlled laboratory experiments. It involved manipulating the magnitude of dissonance research participants would experiencing as a consequence of their actions or choices and showing corresponding changes in assessments or beliefs when post-behavioral dissonance was present and presumably high enough to motivate such changes vs minimal in magnitude or even absent and no such change would occur. In so doing, the researchers added important nuance to their theorizing, and impressed us with their skill in crafting non-obvious findings, but failed to connect their work to the types of dissonance reduction and rationalization that we witnessed most compellingly in the events of the day.

It is noteworthy that the two real-world events Festinger cited as the original impetus for his theorizing and first research undertakings involved phenomena that seemed puzzling in terms of conventional assumptions about human motivation. One pertained to rumor transmission—the report that immediately after an earthquake in India in 1934 the rumors disseminated by those in areas adjacent to the quakes were anxiety-provoking rather than reassuring. The other, as I noted earlier (16) involved the responses of true believers to failed prophesies—the history of increased rather than decreased devotion and proselytism in the immediate aftermath of the relevant disconfirmation. In both real-word cases, Festinger suggested, the responses that took place reflected dissonance reduction. However in their subsequent research the Festingerians focused almost exclusively on laboratory studies  in which levels of dissonance evoked would, of necessity, be modest in magnitude.

Advantages and Limitations of High vs Low Dissonance Experiments. Despite these real-world examples of non-obvious behavior, when it came to experimental tests of dissonance theory, the research in the aftermath of Festinger’s 1957 book focused primarily on self-reported changes in beliefs and evaluations rather than consequential actions. More specifically, it investigated changes in such self-reports under “high” versus “low” (perhaps more aptly characterized as “very low” vs “moderate” versus “very low”) dissonance conditions created experimentally . Virtually the only work that focused on behavioral measures in the early days of dissonance research involved the predicted  tendency for individuals to seek out information that bolstered rather than challenged their existing beliefs. Ironically, in terms of the present state of political polarization and media influence in America, the researchers were unable to find consistent support for their theory-based predictions.

Creation of dissonance in the laboratory had some obvious advantages. Most importantly, it allowed the investigators to manipulate rather than measure the postulated determinants of dissonance magnitude and then test their predictions regarding responses of participants in high vs low dissonance conditions. In the case of the free-choice paradigm, the predicted moderator of level of dissonance was the difficulty of the choice (17). In the case of the forced compliance paradigm, which received the lion’s share of the researchers’ attention, the moderators included  magnitude of incentives for compliance, commitment, choice, feelings of agency and responsibility, and magnitude, foreseeability, and irreversibility of negative consequences (18).

A further advantage of the Festingerians’ research strategy was the ease of conducting follow-up studies to rule out alternative explanations.. For example, Gerard and Matthewson (19)  replicated the effects of a high versus low discomfort “initiation”, substituting strong versus weak electric shock for the two kinds of initiation that had been used by Aronson and Mills  and Brehm and Cohen, replicated Brehm’s earlier  demonstration of dissonance-reducing changes in evaluation of chosen versus non-chosen alternatives using the responses of children choosing toys instead of  adults choosing small appliances (20). 

Last, but by no means least, the tenets of dissonance creation and resolution offered great latitude for creativity in the choice of procedures and measures. To the distaste of some critics (21) they also provided material for good cocktail-party stories and research anecdotes to enliven lectures. Manipulations and dependant variable measures featuring sexually explicit passages from Lady Chatterley’s Lover, instructions to consume grasshoppers, enduring of pain, and willingness to inflict pain on peers, and agreement to go without food or without water (22), all added excitement to my cohort’s first ventures as experimental social psychologists. Personally, I remember the contrast between the reception I received from students and non-psychologists when I described the work of the most talented dissonance researchers and the reception amd the boredom I created when I lectured about Hullian learning theory, or even when I shared the results of the earlier group dynamics work of Festinger and other Lewinians.

The research strategy followed by the first generation of dissonance researcher had some limitations. Perhaps the most obvious limitation was that the levels of dissonance experienced by the participants in most studies (generally college undergraduates or children) were much lower than the levels experienced by individuals who had faced soul-challenging decisions, endured truly great sacrifices, or were implicated in serious harm-doing. Conducting single-session laboratory studies in which dissonance had to be created also precluded exploration of step-by-step dynamic processes of rationalization of morally dubious actions, such as nepotism and discrimination in hiring and promotion practices, or exploitation of workers, to say nothing of military atrocities commited against civilians or the sexual abuses committed by priests (and the higher-ups who covered up the abuse).

These limitation were compounded by reliance on self-reports rather than measures of consequential behaviors of the sort Festinger had described in introducing his theory (i.e., rumor transmission and proselytism) made it difficult to assess the importance of dissonance considerations relative to other factors in determining difficult real-world decisions and their continuing consequences. The strategy of blocking obvious and familiar means of dissonance reduction, and showing that a particular non-obvious change in cognition would occur, allowed investigators to test precise predictions. But that strategy offered limited possibilities to explore the variability in the responses that people experiencing great dissonances show in specific contexts, or to explore when and why behavior change rather than rationalization for failure to make such changes takes place. In retrospect, it is also surprising that so little research was done in which the salience of particular dissonance-reducing strategies was manipulated and behavioral consequences, both immediate and long-term, measured.

There were a few cases where researchers ventured beyond the laboratory, including a clever study of race-track bettors’s increased confidence in the wisdom and value of their bets once they have put their money on the line (23) and increased attachment to gambling strategies after their adoption. But other very obvious targets for relatively easy to conduct real-world field research received little attention. One such research target would have been assessments of the merits of political candidates immediately after versus before voting, or before versus after election results become known, and still later after elected candidates supported policies favored or opposed by the voter. However such phenomena seem to have been left to political scientists. The more momentous, potentially dissonance-producing choices of the sort I noted earlier— choices regarding military service, or joining specific advocacy groups in times of economic peril—were frequent topics in our late night bull sessions. But they rarely if ever figured in the dissonance studies reported in our field’s most influential journals.

It is interesting to note that Festinger and company did not try to measure the presumed mediator of the dependant variable measures they studied—i.e., the  degree of negative arousal or discomfort in high versus low dissonance conditions. Nor did they measure reductions in the level of dissonance or discomfort participants experienced following dissonance-reduction opportunities There were sound reasons for these omissions. In some cases he investigators suspected that the outcomes they measured depended on non-awareness, or at least the absence of explicit acknowledgment of their arousal state. The investigators might also have worried that critics could claim that soliciting self-reports regarding internal states creates hypothesis-confirming experimental demands on participants. In any case, a much later, straightforward, study (24),  using the counter-attitudinal essay procedure, showed that participants reported more post-compliance discomfortant, and  a greater reduction in that discomfort after presumably reducing dissonance, under high than low dissonance conditions.

Re-reading Festinger’s 1957 book, I was also struck by how much of the initial theorizing involved examples of confirmation bias in exposure to evidence, but how little of the research evidence reported pertained to that bias. However when Brehm and Cohen reviewed later experimental research on selective exposure, they characterized that evidence as at best mixed. Some later box-score summaries (25) even excluded this phenomenon from the list of supported dissonance theory implications This trimming of the canon, as I discuss later in this essay, has proven to be ill-advised in light of our country’s recent political history and t the rise of social media and partisan news networks.

It is also surprising in light of Festinger’s 1957 introduction of dissonance theory how little the phenomenon of biased assimilation of evidence was pursued in the early years of dissonance theory. I did, however, find one study, (26) showing that students presented with stong and weak arguments regarding segregation disproportionatly recalled the strong arguments consistent with their own views, but the weak arguments consistent with the opposite view. Later investigators demonstated biased evaluation of the strength of arguments and evidence and showed that it leads to logically indefensible perseverance and strengthening of beliefs (27).

The Art of Producing Counter-intuitive Findings. A particular feature of the most famous dissonance studies was the emphasis on findings that were not only non-obvious, but arguably counter-intuitive. That emphasis becomes more explicable in light of Festinger’s account of rumor transmission after a 1934 earthquake in India, the phenomenon that he notes in  prompted the first glimmerings of the theory. Why, he mused in the book’s foreward, did the rumors spread and believed by those in the periphery of the area where the major destruction had occurred prove to be mostly negative rather than positive and reassuring. The answer he ventured was that the post-event anxiety, uncertainty, and sense of vulnerability those inhabitants experience were incongruent with their awareness that they (in constrast to their countrymen who had been near the earthquakes center) had been spared any truly negative consequences of the tremors. It was the prospect of negative events to come, Festinger suggested, that were congruent with what they were feeling, and the rumors they spread. This finding anticipated Schachter and Singer’s, 1962, two-factor theory of emotion, and subsequent demonstrations of the consequence of emotional misattriburtion and mislabeling(28).

When Festinger launched dissonance theory, both the then ascendant traditions of behaviorism and classic economics emphasized the rational and adaptive pursuit of self-interest, which entails efforts to maximize rewards and to minimize costs and risks. When applied mindlessly, those tenets prompt those hearing an account of the relevant studies to anticipate more positive effects on responses in the case of larger rewards than smaller ones, and more negative effects in the case of more aversive or threatening experiences than less aversive or threatening ones. Had laypeople been asked to venture predictions about individuals’ willingness to engage in particular behaviors, such predictions would, of course, have been warranted and, all things being equal, confirmed. But the dissonance experiments dealt not with effects of the relevant experimental manipulations not on compliance to requests but with evaluations made when the relevant positive or negative contingencies were no longer in effect.

The Festinger and Carlsmith findings (29) do not negate the banal fact that people prefer to be well paid rather than poorly paid for their work. However, the participants in that study were not asked to rate their satisfaction or other feelings about the task for which they were being paid—i.e., deceiving a peer who they believed was the next participant in the study—they were rating how interesting they found the previous tedious task about which they had lied. Similarly, participants in the Aronson and Mills (30) study weren’t rating the undesirability of the embarrassing versus mild “initiation” they had endured, they were rating the subsequent tedious discussion they heard after that initiation experience.

While there are clearly limits to the appreciation people have regarding some of the subtler features of dissonance theory, the phenomenon that the dissonance researchers bottled in the laboratory regarding “insufficient justification” is familiar enough to most laypeople. Few are particularly surprised or perplexed when poorly rewarded artists, poets, musicians, or educators justify their continuing devotion to their calling by citing its non-material rewards. Similarly, product marketers learned long ago that people value products or outcomes that required some of—the so-called “Ikea effect” (31) whereby consumers show particular liking for the furniture items they spent a bit or time and energy assembling, or the preference  homemakers have for cake mixes that required the preparer to add a fresh egg before putting the mix in the oven. 

Equally familiar are cases in which people rationalize risk, effort, discomfort, or even injury by exaggerating to others, and also to themselves, the pleasure of a dangerous activity or the worthiness of the cause for which they have suffered. Aesop’s fable, more than two millennia ago, of the fox who decided that the unreachable grapes were sour, anticipated the phenomenon of dissonance reduction in the face of frustrating failure. Countless poets waxed lyrical about the links between romantic ardor and suffering or risk endured to enjoy it. Parents have long recognized that bribing children to do their homework, or to eat their green vegetables, can have adverse consequences —that, extrinsic reward can undermine intrinsic interest” (32).

In short, laypeople are well aware that our species is prone to after-the-act rationalization. They are also aware that when people feel they are being forced rather than freely choose to act in a particular way they feel less need to rationalize. Nevertheless, reliance on the simple behaviorist heuristic that more positive or negative reinforcement produces greater motivation and effort, led psychology students and even their teachers (in the absence of deeper reflection) to venture the wrong prediction about the effects of the independent variable manipulations in those classic dissonance studies. By creating unfamiliar scenarios, and by making the size of payment for lying in the case of the Festinger and Carlsmith study, the level of embarrassment evoked in the Aronson and Mills study, or the severity of threat for disobedience in the Aronson and Carlsmith study, so salient investigators essentially directed attention of research participants and those predicting their responses away from the amount of dissonance experienced by the research participants. Hence the “non-obviousness” of findings.

It would be interesting and revealing to have naïve participants make the relevant predictions, but then ask to them to think for a while about why those predictions might be wrong, and to revise them accordingly.  It would also be interesting to first “prime” participants to think about the human penchant for rationalization and to offer some familiar examples. Such priming, I suspect would produce a sharp drop in the frequency of erroneous predictions, and surprise claims about the non-obviousness of the relevant findings would drop sharply and experiences of great surprise would be rarer. In short we would find that many and perhaps most people are competent lay psychologists when it comes to matters of dissonance reduction.

Dissonance Theory and the Fundamental Attribution Error

Evidence that people feel less dissonance when their behavior is a response to strong situational pressures and constaints than weak ones does not contradict everyday understandings of human behavior and motivation. We all appreciate the fact that man who hands his cash to a robber who says “your money or your life” feels less dissonance than man who succumbs to glib salesman who leads him to overspend for some vanity-serving piece of clothing, bottle of wine, or office accoutrement, or the woman who agrees to undergo live-saving surgery than one who opts for painful cosmetic surgery. There is, however, something missing, and in need of further consideration, about the Festingerian compliance paradigm. A hint about that missing something is offered by the fact that only a single participant declined to tell the lie in the “insufficient reward” condition of the Festinger and Carlsmith study where the payment just “$1 (the standard one for a 1959 research participant).

Clearly, it was something beyond that modest payment that led to such near-universal agreement to tell the relevant lie.participants to agree to the experimenter’s request. The virtual total compliance with the experimenters request to lie about the task. With benefit of hindsight (and discussion of the study with my late colleague Merrill Carlsmith) the features of that “something” became apparent. Participants in that study, like those in many other studies of that era, were facing an unfamiliar situation, and as such were sensitive to clues about the “right” way to behave. Like most people in such situations, they were reluctant to violate expectations and norms—to “make a fuss” or stand-out as odd or inappropriate. Carlsmith, who served as experimenter, had been coached at length by Elliot Aronson about the way to convey the expectation to research participants that although they were free to leave rather than lie to the “next subject,” the experimenter confidently expected that they would agree to his request. The pressure to comply was strong enough to guarantee compliance, but not fully appreciated by the individual succumbing to it.

The existence of choice was, in a sense, illusory. The size of the payment, in fact, served to divert the participants’ consideration away from the actual determinants of their compliance. (Had they fully recognized those determinants they would have felt relatively little dissonance and relatively little need to rationalize that compliance.)4 This need, however, was attenuated in the $20 condition in part because, as theorized by the investigators, the payment was large enough not only to temp participants to offer the (essentially harmless) lie, and also to justify doing so. Anyone, they could rightly have assumed, would have done likewise.  My point in such post-hoc theorizing is not that participants in these and other famous dissonance studies would not have experienced a need to reduce dissonance if they had fully recognized the pressures and constraints that had governed their behavior. Rather, it is that the magnitude of the dissonance they felt and sought to reduce was heightened by that lack of recognition.

Subtle compliance pressures that are not fully appreciated, either by the research participants who succumb to them or by those who are surprised by the relevant findings5 are of course, a feature of many of the classic experiments we teach students about. Students learning reading about participants who “surprisingly” went along with their peers (actually experimental confedates) in offering obviously wrong judgments about the length of lines in the Solomon Asch’s famous conformity studies deem those participants to be weak.  Those who obeyed  the experimenter’s instruction to deliver painful shock in the Milgram studies are seen both as weak and morally culpable. Those who agree to have an unsightly billboard on their lawn in the Freedman and Fraser classic foot-in-the-door study as seen as lacking the gumption to say no to an unreasonable request. As I have discussed at length elsewhere (33) people, particularly those in our highly individualistic society, generally fail to appreciate the power of social and situational pressures and constraints. As a result, they are inclined to make unwarranted dispositional attributions about those who succumb, and to make erroneous predictions about how those actors would behave when those pressures and constraints changed.

Potential Expansions in Research Concerns.

Individual versus Collective Rationalization. Perhaps the most important shortcoming of the dissonance theory tradition was its almost exclusive focus on individual rather than collective processes. When individuals rationalize personal decisions that turned out badly, or help each other reduce dissonance about missed opportunities or failures to meet high personal standards, the resulting improvement in mood and protection of self regard may be benign. But the kinds of collective rationalization that accompany, indeed may be necessary pre-conditions for, the worst ills that groups visit on each other, have malignant consequences, including perpetuation and escalation of such wrong-doing and failures to learn from history. Neglect of this phenomenon is surprising not only because of its obvious relevance to dark chapters in human, but because Festinger’s immediately preceding work had explored group dynamics and social comparison (34). Moreover, in their famous account of what happens “when prophesy fails” Festinger and his colleagues (35) had explicitly noted that proselytism in the aftermath of that failure took place only among the followers who dealt with their dissonance collectively. Those who confronted disconfirmation alone showed no such response. They accepted the fact that the prophesy was wrong, drifted away from group, and got on with their lives.

Had the Festingerians focused on contemporary events and recent history they surely would have noted the importance of collective rationalization. Defense and justification of segregation, and steps taken by individuals and communities to keep their white children out of integrated classrooms, were fueled by organized groups and leaders with political agendas. The orchestration of rallies and protests and attempts to frame opposition to integration as an issue of State’s Rights, dedication of monuments and renaming of streets, schools, parks, buildings, and organizations to honor confederate politicians and generals, depended upon such organized, collective activity. So, of course, did the efforts almost a century earlier to frame the formation of the Confederacy and the the Civil War as a noble struggle to preserve States Rights rather than an ignoble effort to preserve a profitable but immoral institution. Those of us old enough to remember the Vietnam War who were personally immersed in the dissonance research will recall not just our individual rumination at the time but late night discussions rationalizing both the things we did and the things we were unwilling to do in opposition to that war

The phenomenon of collective rationalization has been a prominent and perhaps necessary component of virtually all the most consequential cases of egregiously immoral actions and institutions. The Nazi holocaust, the dimensions of which became increasingly clear in the decade before Festinger’s account of dissonance theory, is perhaps the most obvious case in point. Other examples, including the bombing of civilian population centers, and the earlier subjugation, displacement, and decimation of indigenous populations in America, Australia, and Africa. In each case, rationalizing justifications were offered to the masses by political leaders and reinforced in everyday conversations whereby ordinary men and women absolved each other of responsibility, sometimes by agreeing about the necessity for the evils being perpetrated, sometimes by agreeing about the futility of active opposition, and the high personal costs or risks that such opposition would demand. The Festingerians were aware of these events, but that awareness again prompted little if any research to clarify the dimensions of such collective rationalization or explore when, why, or how particular individuals or groups resisted it

The most ubiquitous and enduring impetus for collective rationalization is the phenomenon of ingroup favoritism, that is, the tendency to treat members of one’s “ingroup” more generously when it comes to sharing of resources and opportunities than “outgroup” members. (36).  Rather than digressing to discuss the literature I will note that although the practice of “ingroup favoritism” is found throughout the animal kingdom, where it has a clear evolutionary basis, two features of ingroup favoritism are uniquely human.

The first is that humans alone form and favor favor ingroup members based on features other than kinship or shared territory. These features include not only shared ethnicity but also shared religious affiliation, political allegiance, occupation, or social club membership. Notions of “us” and “them”, and often us versus them, are central feature of social cooperation and completion, and the “us” are afforded some of the preferential treatment we offer to family members. Those individuals have a status that makes them something akin to “fictive kin.”The second unique feature of human ingroup favoritism  involves something more directly concerned with the topic of my essay. Robert Sapolsky, in his magisterial 2017 opus Behave (37) points out that most ape species, and many other members of the animal kingdom are inclined to share some of their food with fellow troop members without extending such generosity to members of other troops. What makes humans unique, he notes, is the need they feel to justify more favorable treatment of ingroup than outgroup members.

The human capacity for collective rationalization is strikingly apparent when it comes to justifying hierarchies of wealth, privilege, and opportunity. The Protestant Ethic and conceptions of meritocracy that ignore initial advantages and disadvantages in opportunity to acquire and display skills and credentials are maintained by powerful institutions, and echoed in everyday conversations among those at the top of the privilege pyramid.  So effective are these hierarchy and inequality-justifying institutions that they succeed in inducing many at the bottom of the privilege pyramid to accept those ideological memes rather than challenge the status quo (38). 

Rationalization via Counterfactuals An important tenet of dissonance theory, and a key to the Festingerian research strategy, was the postulate that when obvious and easy means to reduce dissonance are not available to the actor, less obvious dissonance reducing strategies will be employed. The man who in the 1970’s wished to remove the ugly backyard bomb shelter he had paid to have built in the hysteria of the 1950s, only to find that removing it would be impossible without prohibitive cost, creatively decides that it would make an excellent wine cellar. If the grapes been within reach or if he had been able to devise some stratagem to reach them. Aesop’s fox would have eaten them rather than remain hungry and reduce dissonance about his failure to devour them by deciding that they are sour, The woman whose job is ill-paid, or whose marriage is a source of abuse and regret, would leave if she could  do so without dire consequences. Lacking that option, however, she reduces her dissonance by exaggerating the direness of those consequences or by identifying and even exaggerating positive aspects of her job or marriage.

 The same woman might utilize another means of dissonance reduction.—the postulation of worst consequences of doing otherwise (“I might never have found a new job and gone heavily in debt”: “ I might have married someone who not only treated me badly, but drank to excess, used illegal drugs,or failed to pull his weight financially”).The dissatisfied purchaser of a new car with a host of small defects may reduce her dissonance with the counterfactual that if she had bought a different car it “probably would have had even worse problems”, or if she had kept his old car it might well have “broken down on a dangerously busy highway.” The smoker who fails to overcome her nicotine addiction may insist that if she quit smoking she “would have gained a huge amount of weight” and “put herself at even greater medical risk”.

The use of such “counterfactual”rationalizations figure heavily in the defense of dubious political policies. In the 1950’s and 1960’s, they provided the rationale for the disastrous Viet Nam war inactions (“if we don’t send troops to Vietnam, the fall of that “domino” will embolden our enemies to escalate their efforts to control that whole region of the world”). In South Africa counterfactual rationalizations bolstered repugnant apartheid policies (“if we allow ‘them’ full rights of citizenship, including the right to vote, they take over and make our lives unbearable”). In Israel counterfactuals help to justify disproportionate responses to crude rocket attacks (if the US were facing such attacks from Mexico, its responses would be more extreme that tne one we made, and the historically resonant claim that if they ever have the ability we now have to inflict casualties the death toll will be not in the hundreds but the hundreds of thousands,)

 Some counterfactual suppositions are outlandish; others may be reasonable. But in both cases their validity is generally indeterminable and thus irrefutuable.  Dissonance researchers offered examples of their potential relevance in studies employing the free-choice paradigm. More recent investigators have investigated role in maintaining feelings of personal virtue (39) and good fortune versus regret (40). However, the potential importance of counterfactuals in the rationalization of individual or collective evil-doing has been little explored. In my literature search I found no study showing that hearing dissonance-reducing counterfactuals increases wrongdoing, although I did find one impressive Mturk study (41) showing that contemplating counterfactuals (eg. Trump could have won the popular vote if that had been his goal) led Trump supporters to rate the relevant falsehood (Trump won the popular vote) less harshly. Counterfactuals about negative consequences that would have followed had controversial policies regarding treatment of asylum seekers and desparate immigrants at our borders not been pursued likely play a role in allowing supporters of those policies and the leader who instituted them to reduce their dissonance about morally offensive results of those policies.

Contemporary Phenomena and Research Possibilities: Re-uniting Leon and Lewin.   

Kurt Lewin’s discussion of tension systems and ways to resolve disequilibrium in such systems  (42) had set the stage both for Festinger’s earlier work on group dynamics and the birth of dissonance theory. Lewin focused on the application of basic psychological principles to the social concerns of his day, and inspired many of his students to follow in his footsteps. Dissonance theory provided a solid foundation for such application. In elaborating the role of choice, commitment, sacrifices endured, and especially personal relevance and sense of responsibility, the dissonance researchers provided important insights about when, why, and  how individuals and communities resist changing their practices and priorities. They also provided potentially useful insights for policy-implementers who wanted to win acceptance for such changes, and ideally to influence people’s hearts and minds as well as their actions.Yet, as I noted, for many decades after Festinger’s 1957 book most of those researchers seemed to have pointedly avoided socially relevant applied issues, including most notably in cases where dynamic group processes, political persuasion, and organized advocacy played a role.

Elaborate experiments of the sort conducted by the Festingerians, studies labor requiring imaginative cover stories, deception, experimental confederates, and other theatrics are now a rarity. Today, the specific conceptual and definitional issues that the dissonance theories worked so hard to clarify rarely are debated or pursued empirically.  In fact dissonance theory itself has largely been subsumed within a general acknowledgment of the human motive to respond defensively both to threats to self regard and to efforts to impugn or degregate one’s group.

   Despite the reservations I have expressed about the scope of the dissonance work done by Festinger and his most prominent followers, and despite the fact that it is no longer is a hot topic for researchers in our field, that work continues to inspire me, and could inspire other social psychologists who seek to follow the Lewinian tradition in applying “practical theories”) to pressing real-world concerns. That tradition has been undergoing a welcome revival, particularly among researchers seeking to help students from stigmatized minority groups achieve their full academic potential. Elliot Aronson’s work on the “Jigsaw Classroom” (43) set an inspiring example for the new generation of researchers. Much of the new intervention work, whether the specific interventions involve changing mindsets or sense of personal efficacy or increasing confidence about belonging soliciting self-affirmations and combating stereotype threat, hinges on making students’ cognitions about the themselves and their abilities and their belief and expectations about academic success more congruent. (44). A notable virtue in this later work is the attention the investigators giveto longer-term effects, and to demonstrations that intervention benefits initially shown in laboratory experiments or single classrooms can be “scaled up” and achieved with larger populations and cost-effective  procedures.

The list of contemporary issues appropriate for Lewinian attention is topped by the current Covid 19 pandemic, which forces difficult decisions and tradeoffs regarding public health, personal freedom and convenience, and economic consequences—all of which create dissonance and prompt rationalization (45) The same issues, of course, are raised less immediately but arguably much more crucially by the threat of impending climate change, and its potential social and economic consequences (46). Proposed individual and societal changes regarding life-style that experts deem necessary to reduce our carbon footprint, including increases in regulation, fees, and taxes to defray costs of developing and introducing greener technologies, inevitably prompt dissonance-reducing denial regarding the certainty, imminence, and human role in climate change. The threat of rising tides and increasing frequency of adverse weather events, and related threats to the world’s food supply and diversity of plant and animal species is something that people understandably would prefer not to think about and deal with. The  human proclivity to rationalize present indulgence or inaction rather than endure the sacrifices or pay the costs required to confront this challenge is an important topic for the next generation of social psychologists following in Lewin’s footsteps.

Unfortunately, powerful interest groups encourage such denial and organize opposition to the necessary changes in policy and practice. They strive to turn attention elsewhere, or to focus public attention on the costs and inconvenience of those changes, and away from potential economic and lifestyle gains those changes could provide. As the impact of changes in climate already taking place become less deniable, I expect to see a pivot to the claim that such change is not only real but unavoidable. The new objection will be that any greener policies will prove futile—too little and too late to do any good, and therefore not worth the sacrifices they would entail. The need to recognize the special psychological, political, and economic dimensions of the challenge we face in dealing with issues of climate change mitigation is obvious. Current research on tactics to reduce energy consumption and promote greater use of renewable energy sources, and the tradeoffs between mandatory and voluntary measures, between nudges that coax and mandatory laws and taxes, merit more attention than they are receiving.

Another issue regarding impending climate change that has both pragmatic and psychological dimensions is the tradeoff between emphasis on minimizing such changes and adapting to those that we surely face. On the one hand, promoting polices to mitigate negative consequences (building dams and seawalls, reinforcing shoreline buildings, developing crops better suited for warmer temperatures, etc.) can divert attention away from the need to mitigate the change itself. On the other hand, acceptance of the need for, and advantages of, planful adaptation would make climate change denial, whether by individual or interest groups,less tenable.  It could also bring to the fore interest groups that support and would benefit economically from such adaptation efforts.  

Still another great social issue we confront today is the increasing political divide in US society. (47). That divide has been characterized as the gap between the coastal elites who have benefited from globalization and increased ethnic and cultural diversity and those in the heartland who feel, with some justification, that their lives have gotten worse. It has also been characterized as a divide between rural and small-town Americans with deep roots in their communities and those whom they see rootless and uncaring cosmopolitans. Those “left behind”  are experiencing the loss not only of good paying jobs and economic security but also of opportunity, dignity, community, and optimism about the future. Polling data suggests vast low density “red” areas, where voters with relatively less education and jobs skills no longer in demand live, and smaller but much higher density blue areas, where voters with high levels of education and with skills in ever-increasing demand live. Again, opportunistic leaders and interest groups stoke resentment, heighten feeling (in blue and red areas alike) of “us” and “them”. The result is a rise in xenophobic nationalism among supporters of our current president and distrust and hostility toward those who not only denigrate him 7 but offer condescending portraits and caricatures of his supporters.

As positions harden, and political commitment escalates in debates not only about climate change and immigration policies, but also about policing and, most of all, the persistence of structural racism, the lessons of dissonance theory research seem to be forgotten, even among my liberal academic colleagues. Too often they simply insist that those the other side of the issue are ignorant of facts, displaying bad faith, and abandoning cherished American values, and in so doing they ignore the implications of dissonance theory about the reasons why attitudes are hard to change, and how best to change them. While some people can be convinced by data or expert opinions, and/or what they see for themselves, many more are apt to dig in their heels, seek out and derive comfort from like-minded peers, and attend ever more exclusively to media that supports their views. Indeed, what we see Trump supporters doing today is less a case of justifying his objectionable actions than justifying their own past and continuing support of him.

Traditional liberals, especially those with high-paying jobs, good housing,  health insurance, and retirement savings, have progressive attitudes about climate change, immigration policy, gay rights, affirmative action, etc. However they are inclined to reduce their dissonance about growing inequality. Some blame, heartless companies, opportunistic right-wing politicians and their wealthly campaign backers. But others blame countrywho are bearing the cost of new social and economic realities for their dire circumstances (“they should have gotten more education”, “they should go back to school or  get retrained”, “they should move to places where there are jobs”) The sense of shoulder-to-shoulder solidarity between social liberals, working-class Americans, and people who simply care about the welfare of fellow citizens seeking better pay and working conditions, greater security, and rights to unionize, has been lost.

This essay is not the place to propose specific strategies to achieve the types of political coalitions and life-style changes required to meet the difficult challenges posed by global warming, growing economic inequality, or divisive populism. However one Lewinian lesson is worth bearing in mind. When change is being resisted despite the net benefits it would offer, the well-schooled Lewinian asks not what can be done to increase pressures to changes but what can be done to identify, and decrease the factors and forces that now stand in the way of such change. With regard to the targets for intervention discussed in this essay, that question becomes how can we make it less dissonant for those we want to persuade to step across the divide and change their behavior in ways that would better serve our society. More specifically, what can we do to make such change congruent with the concerns on the other side of the political divide and these issues, to see themselves as rational, coherent, principled, worthy of self-esteem and the good opinion of their peers, motivation no less strong than those on our own side.

To state the obvious, it is not by calling them stupid,or decrying the motivational biases and dubious appeals to which they are succumbing. At the same time, it would be wise to pause to consider the ways in which our own rationalizations and responses to dissonance-arousing threats may be creating barriers to the formation of needed political partnerships. The most important lesson from the dissonance researchers, combined with the lessons we have learned about the situational control of behavior, suggests that gently nudging gradual changes in behavior can initiate virtuous cycles whereby easy steps forward lead to acceptance of new norms, which in turn make further steps easier, ultimately leading to new ways of seeing the world, and the duties of good citizen that come to seem natural and obvious.

Demonstrating the effectiveness of such a step-by-step strategy, testing ways to discourage rationalization where it is barrier to change, and making behavior that is incompatible with the better angels of our nature and the requirements of a more sustainable future more dissonant, are appropriate goals for my younger colleagues who take up the Lewinian challenge. True experimental designs whereby the impact of wise interventions can be assessed through comparison with appropriate control or “current best practices” conditions will always be the goal standard for researchers. Aronson’s experments using  “hypocrisy” manipulations to induce water and energy conservation and to promote safe sex practices (show that experimantalists of the Festinger era, old dogs that we may be, can learn, and teach some new tricks (48).

Notwithstanding the advantage of true experiments whereby variables are systematically manipulated, analyzing the results of “natural experiments” in which different policies and practices are being employed in different communities or countries can be enlightening. Of special interest in this regard would be policies and practices that differ in terms of magnitude of sacrifice called for, ease and incentiving of compliance, perceived choice, and other demonstrated moderators of dissonance magnitude. Careful attention, guided by theory, to the history of individuals who have resisted the temptation to make difficult but constructive changes, and that of individuals whose proved unwilling to join peers in rationalizing socially harmful practices could also be fruitful. I envy the newcomers to our field who have the opportunity to write this next exciting chapter in the development and application of useful theory, and ultimately the history of social psychology.

Some Final Personal Reflections and Acknowledgments: Looking Backward and Forward

When I undertook this essay, the audience I had in mind consisted of Stanford graduate students in psychology and friends and colleagues with whom I have long discussed both the history and current state of our field, of American politics, and connection between them. The immediate impetus for writing was my own longstanding dissonance about Festinger—a truly brilliant psychologist and a decisive influence on experimental social psychology during the most formative years in my career, but a man whose own career puzzled me. Although the most prominent student of Kurt Lewin, he did not emphasize Lewin’s tension-system theorizing as a primary influence in his introduction of dissonance theory. Even more notable was his unmistakable distaste for applied research in the Lewinian tradition, and his lack of attention to collective processes or “group dynamics” in the research he and his students undertook.

Very early in my career I had become good friends with Solomon Asch during his time stay at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences on the hill overlooking the Stanford campus. Al Hastorf had been the match-maker, suggesting to Asch that I was a young man who could bring him up to date on our field. I was delighted to take on that task. Asch was a penetrating critic, and when I described the recent but already famous experiments of Festinger and his students, he waved his hand and said, “the work is very clever, of course, but it lacks any moral dimension. Leon looks down on the people in his experiments as if they are insects”.

At the time, I dismissed his critique as humanistic prattle, but over the years I have increasingly noted places where social concern could have deepened the dissonance tradition. I have ruminated not only about opportunities to apply dissonance theory in dealing with real-world problems, but also opportunities to get a better sense of how powerful the phenomenon is  relative to other factors that play a role in the commission of evil deeds and creation of barriers to necessary changes in American society. Becoming friends with Elliot Aronson, and discussing Festinger’s career and mentoring with him, was a further impetus for my essay. My own PhD advisor, Stanley Schachter had been one of Festinger’s most prominent students and his lifelong friend. Stan’s mentoring launched my career and helped win a position at Stanford, but he, although in kinder tones, also had a low opinion of applied social psychology and intervention studies. It was not until I met Aronson (who not coincidentally had been an undergraduate devotee of the leading humanist psychologist Abraham Maslow) that I saw how Festinger’s artfulness could be captured in service of wise intervention work.     

 I would be remiss if I failed to mention Phil Zimbardo’s role, both in my own career and as an impetus for this essay. Phil served as a visiting professor and as my adviser during my third year at Columbia while Stan was on sabbatical. I suspect he was instrumental in my hiring at Stanford and his brilliant 1966 monograph, The Cognitive Control of Motivation showed me that dissonance processes could have profound behavioral consequences. I would be even more remiss if I failed to acknowledge Mark Lepper. During the four decades in which we taught our graduate course in social psychology to successive cohorts of PhD students, His lectures on dissonance theory, which synthesized the work and offered deep insights about the larger themes  underlying the individual experiments and later developments in social psychology, have been foundational to my continuing ruminations about the history and status of dissonance theory.

As I turn my gaze from the past to the future, it seems obvious that rationalization and motivated reasoning more generally, even without due acknowledgment of the dissonance tradition or its finer points, will be a target of researchers. It certainly should be for those who address the twin issues of the political divide in America and the related threats of climate change, resource depletions and loss of biological diversity. Given the increasingly sophisticated brain-imaging technologies, there will be ever more research on the neural changes that precede and follow rationalization. Perhaps we may even discover the “signature” of an open or closed mind, and a mind that is rationalizing intransigence versus a mind that is rationalizing change.

I hope that work will also be forthcoming that is more ideographic in nature, work that explores the kinds of personal experiences or revelations that are most likely to produce the acknowledgment of painful truths and past errors. A phenomenon that Festinger and company did not pursue, but one that has created inner conflict and dissonance for people of conscience over the centuries is that of remaining silent in the face of profound wrongdoing. The Oxford dictionary, in defining the term “construal,” notably gives the example of “construing silence as assent”. I fear that remaining silent in the face of wrongdoing by political leaders promotes dissonance reduction of a sort that is all too familiar in our history. The more the leader violates norms, the more inclined his supporters are to justify their silence and their earlier support. Accordingly, they minimize and rationalize his misdeeds, by increasing their support for those of his goals and policies with which they agree, and by exaggerating the extent to which he has succeeded in enacting those policies and making progress toward those goals.  I also hope that we will see work done that illuminates the operation of rationalization processes not only in such vicious cycles of rationalization but also in virtuous cycles that take place over longer periods of time than we can study in the laboratory. Two examples provide a basis for optimism.

The first case is that of smoking, the behavior that Festinger devoted so much attention to in explaining dissonance reduction. At the time it was was widely acknowledged (especially after the Surgeon General’s 1964 report) to be a health threat. However, in the 1960s, smoking was congruent not with folly but with conceptions of maturity, sophistication, and adherence to social norms. The rationalizations offered by smokers (If I quit I’ll gain weight, I need to smoke to relax when I am stressed, and various versions of the link between smoking and cancer are merely correlational and may not be causal).  Now more than half a century later, smoking—at least in my Bay Area neck of the woods—is seen as deviant, anti-social, uncouth, stupid, reckless, a sign of personal weakness, and anything but sophisticated. Most young people, at least most educated, middle-class young people, do not smoke. The relevant norm is enforced by all kinds of restrictions and taxes. The smoker’s dissonance reduction task is far more difficult than it was in Festinger’s day (he was a heavy smoker). In fact, the responses of those witnessing the deviate smoker and hearing the reactions of most onlookers, especially if that smoker tries offers rationalizations for his nicotine habit, reinforces the anti-smoking norm.

The second case is that of recycling,  The story in this case is a bit different because it involve not the gradual stigmatization of a once-acceptable individual choice, but the institutionalization, facilitation, and community acceptance of a particular obligation of good citizenship. When I first came to Stanford, recycling involved separating different types of glass, separating glass from paper from cardboard and driving to a recycling center where volunteers maintained the piles of the material to be recycled and arranged for their transport. Only a minority of Palo Altan’s participated in this labor intensive (and inefficient) activity, and driving to the recycling center probably created more pollution with greenhouse gases than was saved.

Today Palo Altan put out recyclable materials, grass-clippings, leaves, garden debris, and kitchen scraps in colored cans provided by the city (for which they pay a small monthly fee). The old voluntary system likely strengthened beliefs in the need for and value of recycling and presumably other “green” values as well, more than the current system does. That current system no longer depends on congruent values; it is merely the standard, normative way we put out our trash, and exercise the duties of a normal community member. That includes the paying of the relevant fees and taxes (just as we do for maintaining our roads, parks, military and government itself). The same trade-offs between maximizing compliance and internalization of values will apply to virtually any programs that are implemented to combat climate change, unless opposition is organized and funded by those who benefit from the absence of such programs. The formula—step-by-step removal of barriers to compliance, increasingly widespread participation and compliance, establishment and entrenchment of new norms, and stigmatization of non-compliers—comes directly from the playbooks of Lewin and Leon. 

Reference Notes

(1) Festinger, 1957; Aronson, 1969; Brehm & Cohen, 1962),

(2) eg., Festinger & Carlsmith, 1959; Aronson & Mills, 1959; Brehm, 1956; Aronson & Carlsmith, 1963.

(3) Aronson 1968,1969; also Cooper & Fazio, 1984; Greenwald & Ronis, 1978; Steele,1988; Steele & Liu,1983, many chapters in Abelson, Aronson, McGuire, Newcombe, Rosenberg, & Tannenbaum, 1968.

(4) Steele 1997

(5) Freud 1911

(6) It appears that this remark actually was made in 1970 by fellow economist Paul Samuelson, who claimed he was echoing the words of Keynes, However there is no documentation that Keynes offered this specific and pithy rejoinder to the charge of inconsistency.

(7) Myrdal, 1941

(8) Deutsch & Collins, 1951

(9) Brehm & Cohen

(10) Thayler & Sunstein, 2008

(11) Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History podcast of July 12, 2017 presents a compelling account of the costs borne in the aftermath Brown vs Board of Education.

(12) See Navansky, 1980; Schrecker, 1998.

(13) Milgrim, 1963,1974

(14) Festinger, Riecken & Schachter

(15) Arendt, 1983

(16) Festinger, Riecken & Schachter

(17) Ehrlich 1957; Brehm 1956

(18) Brehm & Cohen, 1957; Fazio & Cooper, 1984; Cooper, 2007.

(19) Gerard & Matthewson, 1966; Aronson & Mills 1959

(20) Brehm and Cohen, 1959; Brehm, 1956.

(21) See Ring, 1967; and response by McGuire, 1967

(22) Aronson & Mills 1959; Smith, 1961; Zimbardo, 1968; Brock & Buss, 1964; Brehm, 1962.

(23) Knox & Inkster, 1968.

(24) Elliot and Devine, 1994.

(25) Greenwald & Ronis, 1978.

(26) Jones and Kohler, 1958.

(27) See Lord, Ross, & Lepper, 1979. Ross & Lepper, 1980, Kunda, 1990; Nickerson, 1998.

(28) Schachter & Singer, 1962; other refs TBA.

(29) Festinger & Carlsmith 1963.

(30) Aronson & Mills, 1959

(31) Arielyi, 2016.

 (32) Lepper, Greene, & Nisbett, 1973; Deci, 1971.

(33) Ross, 1977; Ross & Nisbett.

(34) Festinger, 1950, 1953 Festinger 1954

(35) Festinger, Reicken & Schachter, 1956

(36) see Fiske, 2002; Dasgupta, 2004).

(37) Sapolsky, 2017

(38) See Jost & Banaji, 1994; Jost, Banaji, & Nosek, 2004

(39) Effron, Miller & Monin, 2012

(40) Mandel & Dhami, 2005; Roese & Olson, 2014: also Gilovich & Medvec, 1995; Kahneman & Miller, 1986).

(41) Efffron, 018

(42) Lewin, 1940.1943

(43) Aronson 1978; Aronson & Bridgeman, 1979.

(44) See Dweck, 2006; Walton & Cohen, 2011; Steele 1997; Aronson, Fried & Good, 2002; Good, Aronson, & Inzlicht, 2003; Cohen, Garcia, Apfel & Masters, 2006    See review by Cohen & Sherman, 2015; also Yeager & Walton, 2011.

(45) Aronson and Tavris

(46) Gilovich & Ross, 2015; Ross et al, 2016.

(47) Gilovich & Ross, 2015; Gelman. Kendzior Klein Kornacki, West

(48) Dickerson. Thibodeau, Aronson, & Miller, 1992; Stone, Aronson, Crain, Winslow, & Fried, 1994.

Notes                                                                                                                                                  

1 A colleague who grew up on a farm in Georgia mentioned a source of support for integration at the college and even high-school level that involved intercollegiate athletics. Teams lacking African American athletes were at a disadvantage to integrated teams. While racism by no means was magically erased by the presence of African-American athletes (often in starring roles) the alumni and other fans who cheered their efforts and sought to recruit  the most gifted of them were motivated to reduce rather than maintain their opposition to integration of their schools.

2 One execption is a highly relevant, although lightly cited, dissonance study (Staw, 1974) of the sort one might have expected to see featured in contemporary texts and reviews. The finding was that ROTC members whose draft numbers were high, and who therefore would have avoided military service even without their ROTC experience,  rated that experience less positively than those whose number was low and would otherwise have been drafted.

3 In the case of more harmful acts, the offer of a larger payment might well evoke anticipation of greater guilt and perhaps might even produce less compliance, and more rather than less need to justify such compliance, than a more modest incentive (Interestingly, whereas only one participant refused to lie in the $1 condtion, two participants refused to do so in the $20 condition). 

4 It is worth noting that William Shakespeare, a great lay psychologist as well as the greatest of our dramatist made it clear that even his villains apparently felt the need, and showed the capacity, to rationalize their villainy. This perhaps is clearest in Shylock’s insistence that he was a man more sinned against than sinning, but even a cursory examination of the soliloquys of his other villians will leave no  doubt that Shakespeare recognized the role that rationalization play in the darkest of human deeds.

5 The role of this error is even more central, although not really acknowledged, in Bem’s (1965, 1967, 1972) alternative, “self-perception theory” account of many classic dissonance theory findings. Bem’s account essentially held that the research participants in these studies were making the same attributions about their own beliefs and preferences that observers or others learning about their responses would make, and in fact did make in Bem’s interpersonal simulations. But what Bem did not acknowledge was that this account only “works” if the observers in question were not giving due consideration to the various situational pressures and constraint faced by the actor. In other words, the attributions to features of the actor were wrong, just as the actor’s attributions about his or her own actions were wrong.

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