Reducing fears and increasing assertiveness: The role of dissonance reduction

In the research paradigm known as effort justification, people engage in an effortful activity in order to attain a goal. As a result, the goal becomes more attractive. Two experiments were conducted to test the notion that the effort justification sequence can account for the positive changes that result from psychotherapy. In the first experiment, subjects who were afraid to approach a snake underwent one of two types of effortful therapy. One was a modified form of an anxiety-producing therapy known as “implosive therapy”; the other was merely a set of physical exercises. It was reasoned, on the basis of cognitive dissonance theory, that the expenditure of effort would lead to a positive change in the ability to approach the snake but only under conditions of high decision freedom. Half of the subjects in each of the therapy conditions participated with high choice; the other half with low choice. Subjects' improvement in their approach to snakes was assessed. A main effect for decision freedom was predicted and found independently of the type of effort that subjects expended. A second experiment conceptually replicated the findings of the first experiment. Subjects who wanted to become more assertive participated in an effortful, physical exercise therapy or in a modified form of the standard treatment for fear of assertiveness. The results of the 2 × 2 factorial experiment again showed a main effect for decision freedom such that high choice subjects became more assertive. The findings were discussed in terms of dissonance and attribution theories as well as for implications for future consideration of psychotherapy.     

Prototypicality and personality: Effects on free recall and personality impressions

An experiment was performed to test the hypothesis that it is easier to process information about characters who fit well with and are, therefore, “prototypical” of shared beliefs about various personality types. Character prototypicality was manipulated in a free recall and personality impression paradigm through variations in the consistency of a character's identification with preexisting beliefs about two personality-type categories—extraversion and introversion. Subjects also were given information about each character that varied in degree of abstraction from traits to concrete behavior. As predicted, both the amount and nature of the information correctly recalled were significantly affected by the consistency of the character's identification with extraversion or with introversion. Character consistency also significantly affected the amount of material written in the personality impressions and the tendency to qualify the generality of the impressions. The results support a model in which incoming data about personality are coded, structured, elaborated, and remembered according to the quality of their match with preexisting beliefs about various personality types.     

Constraints on the processing of indirect speech acts: evidence from aphasiology

The ability of anterior aphasics and patients with right-hemisphere damage to comprehend both the literal and nonliteral readings of indirect speech acts was examined. Subjects viewed videotaped episodes in which one actor asked another “Can you X?” and the second actor responded with either an action or a simple “Yes.” Subjects judged whether the response was appropriate given its context. Anterior aphasics could comprehend the nonliteral but not the literal reading, supporting models that posit that people have direct access to nonliteral but conventional readings. Patients with right-hemisphere damage could appreciate the direct reading, but failed to distinguish between appropriate and inappropriate action-responses. This finding suggests that it may be possible to dissociate the pragmatic and syntactic aspects of comprehension of indirect speech acts.     

Constructing other persons: A limit on the effect

Numerous studies have documented the effect that expectancies have on perceivers' perceptions of targets, but in few of these studies have the targets been aware of the perceivers' expectancies. In the present study, some perceivers were led to believe that their future interaction partners had a cold personality while others held no such expectancy. Orthogonal to this manipulation, some targets were told that their partners expected them to be cold while others received no such information. Results indicate that expectancy confirmation occurs only when perceivers with expectancies interact with naive targets. Targets who were told that the perceiver held an expectancy about them were able to overcome this expectancy. The relevance of these findings to the process of expectancy confirmation is discussed, and some predictions are made about the conditions under which expectancy confirmation will and will not occur.     

Cognitive dissonance and psychotherapy: The role of effort justification in inducing weight loss

The role of effort justification in psychotherapy was examined. It was hypothesized that the effort involved in therapy, plus the conscious decision to undergo that effort, leads to positive therapeutic changes through the reduction of cognitive dissonance. An experiment was conducted in which overweight subjects attempted to lose weight through one of two forms of “effort therapy”. These therapies were bogus in that they were based solely on the expenditure of effort on a series of cognitive tasks that were unrelated to any existing techniques or theory addressing weight loss. One of the therapies called for a high degree of effort while the degree of effort in the second therapy was low. A no-treatment control group was also included. It was predicted that greater weight loss would occur for high-effort than low-effort or control subjects, and that this weight loss would be maintained or increased over time. Results supported these predictions. Over an initial 3-week period, high-effort subjects lost slightly more weight than low-effort subjects or controls. A 6-month follow-up revealed that the effects of effort on weight loss had increased and were highly significant. Reliable differences remained even 1 year after the initial experimental sessions. Possible mechanisms mediating the dissonance effect were discussed, as were several alternative explanations.     

Developmental change in early representational intelligence: Evidence from spatial classification strategies and related verbal expressions

The procedures 1- to 3-year-old children use to group simple sets of objects are analyzed in an investigation of cognitive change in early representational intelligence. Forty children spontaneously manipulated two-class arrays and participated in two experimental probes of object grouping. Children 1 to 2 years of age group classes by looking for one kind of thing at a time. Consistent with this, they verbally mark single classes. Children from $\text{2}\text{1}\text{2}$ to 3 years old employ spatial grouping procedures that require simultaneous consideration of two classes, and they refer to relations between classes. Advances made during the second year are consistent with other initial signs of representational-symbolic intelligence. The advances in the third year are unaccounted for by traditional cognitive-developmental theories, but they are congruent with late-emerging patterns in natural representational systems such as language, suggesting the presence of broad changes in mental organization shortly after the onset of representational intelligence.     

Cognitive and linguistic factors affect visual feature integration

Five experiments investigated the influence of cognitive and linguistic factors on the integration of color and letter-shape information. Subjects were briefly presented strings of colored letters that varied in pronounceability and familiarity. Detection and search tasks required subjects to identify the color of predesignated target letters. It was proposed that errors in integrating color and shape would be less likely with items from different perceptual units than from items within the same perceptual unit. If words, at some level of perceptual analysis, are processed as units whereas nonwords are processed by individual letters, then there should be more letter-shape and color feature integration errors with words than with nonwords. The first two experiments tested this prediction by comparing feature integration errors with words and nonwords. The remaining experiments manipulated letter-string pronounceability, familiarity, and the presence of vowels to isolate the factors that may influence feature integration. The results demonstrate that cognitive and linguistic factors, such as familiarity and pronounceability, can influence the combination of colors and shapes in perception.     

“Magic” revisited: Children's responses to apparent violations of conservation

Using a procedure adapted from E. Mermelstein and L. S. Shulman (1967, Child Development, 37, 39–52), kindergarten and third-grade children were exposed to one of two apparent violations of conservation or to a transformation in which conservation was preserved. In the violation conditions, water attained either the same or a higher level in a wider container than it had in a narrower container. The dependent measures were children's (a) predictions of the outcome of the transformation, (b) spontaneous reactions and verbal explanations of the actual outcome, and (c) responses to conventional conservation questions. The findings suggest that children very gradually progress from a stage at which they expect the water level to remain constant and base judgments of quantitative relations on water level alone to a stage at which they view reciprocal compensation and conservation as logically necessary. The findings indicate that, although some third-grade children may have attained the latter stage, many have not.     

Temporal order judgments with amnesia

The hypothesis that patients with anterograde amnesia fail to recognize the temporal relations among recognizable past events was evaluated. Experiment 1 showed that order recognition for words in a list was at chance levels even though event recognition was significantly above chance. The same pattern did not obtain for intact adults. Experiment 2 examined event and order recognition for news events. Amnesics' event recognition for news events was quite accurate and comparable to controls, yet their order recognition was significantly below that of controls, again at chance levels. It is argued that the failure to encode the temporal relations among events has broad consequences for memory performance in general.     

Infants are trichromats.

Two experiments were conducted to demonstrate that human infants 3 months of age perceive color in a normal, trichromatic manner. In the first experiment, the visual attention of 30 infants was monitored in a habituation-dishabituation paradigm that used spectral and white lights with brightness factors eliminated. Infants discriminated white from monochromatic light in a region of the spectrum (490–500 nm) where color-normal adults can but color-deficient adults cannot. In the second experiment which also used a habituation paradigm, eight infants showed good discrimination between hues in a region of the spectrum (560–580 nm) where color-deficient adults typically show no hue discrimination. Results from these studies of the neutral zone and hue discrimination evidence trichromatic vision in infancy and are discussed in the context of their several clinical, social, and intellectual implications.     

Mistreatment of an esteemed other as a consequence affecting dissonance reduction

Recent research has shown that aversive behavioral consequences affect the magnitude of dissonance reduction. The present experiment was conducted to help clarify the meaning of an aversive consequence. In previous research, an aversive event was manipulated by having a subject believe that a counterattitudinal speech he had delivered was successful in convincing one of the subject's colleagues. In the present study, it was argued that convincing a colleague is aversive only to the extent that the colleague is liked. This reasoning was tested in a 2 × 2 factorial experiment in which subjects delivered a counterattitudinal speech to a recipient whom either was or was not liked by the subject and either was or was not convinced by the subject's speech. It was predicted and found that the subject would evidence attitude change only in the condition in which the speech led to the aversive event of successfully convincing an esteemed other. The results were discussed in terms of refining the relationship between attitude discrepant behavior and attitude change.     

Age differences in organization and recall: The effects of training in categorization

An alternating sort/recall task was employed to train fourth graders and college students in organizational strategies. Free-sorting Ss, at both age levels, sorted a group of words into two to seven categories. Analyses of final sorting patterns indicated reliable differences between the children and adults. The organizational schemes thus developed by the free-sorting Ss were taught, by means of a yoking procedure, to other Ss. Results indicated that the recall of fourth graders was improved when they were forced to learn the sorting patterns developed by the older Ss. Similarly, impairment in the recall of college students was observed when they were required to sort according to the organization employed by the fourth graders. These findings imply that changes in organization can result in changes in recall performance.     

A genetic and environmental analysis of sensation seeking

The genetic and environmental contributions to the trait of sensation seeking were analyzed using the responses of 422 pairs of twins to the Sensation Seeking Scale (Form IV). The biometrical method of Jinks and Fulker was applied to the data. The data fit the model indicating the likelihood of a predominantly additive gene action controlling the general trait. The heritability figure of 58% (69% of the reliable variance) was quite high for a personality trait. Data from other studies suggest that the heritability of the personality trait rests upon specific inherited biological traits, such as the biochemicals of the brain and gonadal hormones which affect arousability of the central nervous system and relevant traits, such as mood, impulsivity, risk taking, and sociability.     

Selective self-disclosure with and without correspondent performance

If people are motivated to elicit attributions from others, are they capable of using attribution theory as a means to this end? To explore this question, subjects were asked to select information to disclose to hypothetical target persons in order to have those target persons make specific attributions about the subjects' traits and abilities. The disclosures conformed well to a model sensitive to the principles of augmentation and discounting. The model considers the causal relevance and value of personal information and whether the self-presenter is given the opportunity to engage in behavior that accomplishes some specific self-presentational objective. The results, in line with the model, showed that subjects having the opportunity to engage in such “correspondent” behavior, are subsequently eager to disclose impediments that highlight the likely presence of highly valued behavioral causes. Subjects without such an opportunity seek to disclose facilitating causal factors that would make an effective performance appear to be more likely should the opportunity later arise.     

The causal structure of situations: The generation of plausible causal attributions as a function of type of event situation

The causal structures for each of four types of situations—interpersonal failure, noninterpersonal failure, interpersonal success, and noninterpersonal success—were explored and compared. A first group of subjects generated plausible causes for five specific situations in each of the four general types of situations. A second group of subjects provided similarity data on these causes, which were used in a cluster analysis of the causes. A third group of subjects rated the generated causes on each of six dimensions reported in the attribution literature: changeability, locus, stability, intentionality, globality, and controllability. Analyses of the clusters of causes and the ratings revealed (a) different types of causes were generated for different types of situations, (b) different types of situations led people to generate causes that differ in dimensional location, (c) the various causal dimensions were highly intercorrelated. These findings were applied to A. W. Kruglanski's (Psychological Review, 1980, 87) model of attribution processes. In addition, implications for the study of interpersonal situations and for the cognition-motivation debate over “self-serving” bias in attribution were discussed. Finally, several methodological issues were examined.     

On the relationship of data to theory: A reply to Ronis and Greenwald

Ronis and Greenwald (Dissonance theory revised again: Comment on the paper by Fazio, Zanna, and Cooper. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 15, 1979, 62–69) question our integrative formulation of dissonance and self-perception processes. We argue that our formulation provides an explanation of both the full range of results in the literature and our own experimental data, while neither dissonance nor self-perception theory can singly explain the existing data.     

A mathematical model for social influences on perceptual judgments

A mathematical model based upon signal detection theory is developed that characterizes social influences upon judgments of a stimulus. A social influence cue and the physical aspects of the stimulus were assumed to have independent effects upon performance. A visual movement discrimination task was employed in which subjects could make their judgment either before or after a cue that they had been led to believe was the response of another subject. The accuracy of this “response” was varied. The model provided a good account of the data. A model-based estimate of the magnitude of the influence effect indicated that this effect was greater when the “other” was highly accurate. The model provided an interpretation of social influences on perceptual judgments in which influence pressures have their effects only when subjects' sensory impressions are ambiguous.