I. Article
Recently, the world of music was shaken by a sexual scandal targeting a french very popular singer : Patrick Bruel. Despite the turmoil that tainted his reputation as the “perfect son-in-law”, the star’s fans are always present at his concerts. As I read through the comments of the articles about the court case that puts the spotlight on the star, I realized that he was well defended by his fans. Many of them did not hesitate to say that the “supposed victims” of the star only wanted his money. By reading this, I smiled as as I thought back my undergraduate courses. One concept came to mind above all: cognitive dissonance.
Cognitive dissonance is a very popular theory in social psychology. Conceptualized by Leon Festinger in 1957 in his book, his idea has not aged a bit. This university professor has described humans as beings who rationalize their thoughts and beliefs after the fact. In other words, for him, we do not always do things according to what we believe. Sometimes, we even believe in what we do only after we have done it. With this first observation about his own, Festinger stood out from his fellow psychologists, but his idea did not stop there. For him, when an individual agrees to adopt behaviour that goes against his beliefs or his values, the individual feel an uneasiness that the teacher has described as “a dissonant state” (cited by Vaidis & Halimi-Falkowicz, 2007). To understand how only one behaviour can destabilizes us so much, we need to look at the global vision that psychological theorists have of us. For many of them, we are beings who seek coherence because it makes things more predictive and therefore controllable. This sense of control gives us the impression that we understand our environment, which reassures us. Moreover, it is important to put the individual in a situation where he or she would have the choice of doing otherwise than having this counter-attitudinal behaviour to accentuate the state of dissonance induced by the situation according to the scientists.
Thus, to embarrass an individual through experimental psychology, nothing could be easier ! First step, ask two groups of participants to do a long and extremely boring task. Understand this as an unattractive task that many of us would not have the idea of doing even if we were bored ! In their experience, Festinger and Carlsmith (cited by Harmon-Jones & Harmon-Jones, 2007) subsequently paid each of the participants to make those who were to do the task after them (actually accomplices of the researchers) believe that it was really interesting. In one case, participants were paid $1 for this lie, in the other case they were paid $20. At the end of the experiment, the psychologists found that participants who had received the lowest pay tended to say that the task was less boring than those who received more money. They even claimed to perceive the scientific interest of the task! Why this sudden very positive attitude for a tedious and not fun task ? For the authors, this would be due to the fact that $20 seemed sufficient, in the eyes of the participants in the experiment, to justify having spent a long time doing an uninteresting task. $1 being almost nothing, the others convinced themselves that the task was not so bad ! This modification of the initial attitude under the effect of dissonance is called “cognitive rationalization technique”.
Like the fans of the variety star, we can also claim that the values we initially defended (it is obvious that a sane person does not support sexual assault), are no longer so important in the context. We can find excuses (the famous cognitive rationalization) and surrounded ourselves with people who think like us. In short, there are plenty of ways to change your mind when things do not go the way you want !
II. Words I have learned :
the turmoil : l’agitation
to think back : repenser à
to stand out : se démarquer
a uneasiness : un malaise
tedious : ennuyant, pénible
III. Bibliography
Harmon-Jones, E., & Harmon-Jones, C. (2007). Cognitive dissonance theory after 50 years of development. Zeitschrift für Sozialpsychologie, 38(1), 7-16.
Vaidis, D., & Halimi-Falkowicz, S. (2007). La théorie de la dissonance cognitive: une théorie âgée d’un demi-siècle. Revue électronique de Psychologie sociale, 1, 9-18.