Dissonance reduction and causal explanation in a forced compliance situation

In a free choice forced compliance situation, subjects had to perform a tedious task. Then, just before having to evaluate the task's interest, certain subjects were provided an arbitrary positive feedback regarding their performance, others a negative feedback and others no information at all concerning their performance. Afterwards, all subjects were administered a questionnaire concerning their theories of causal explanations, which enabled us to compute an externalization score. Evaluation of the task was affected by the feedback's nature: Subjects who received the negative feedback found the task more interesting. Causal theories, however, were only affected by actual performance: the most efficient subjects were those who presented the more external orientation of causal theories. These results are in agreement with the radical conception of dissonance theory.