COGNITIVE CONSISTENCY THEORIESadequate justification ($20) for doing so. They
could attribute their lying to the incentive, and
they would not feel hypocritical. The $1 partici-
pants experienced significant dissonance because
they did boring tasks, but yet they said they thought
the tasks were fun. As Festinger and Carlsmith
predicted, the $1 was an insufficient justification
for the lie, so the dissonance remained unless the
participants changed their attitudes toward the
task, and convinced themselves (as shown in their
ratings of the tasks) that maybe the tasks were not
boring, and in fact, they rather enjoyed them! The
results were precisely as predicted, and this paved
the way for a flurry of research that tested the
exciting, often dramatic, and counterintuitive pre-
dictions that arose from cognitive dissonance theory.
Alternate Versions of Dissonance Theory.
Very soon after the publication of Festinger’s theo-
ry, research revealed that the theory might need to
be revised somewhat, to account for more of the
data that were being published, which didn’t quite
fit with the theory. In one notable revision, one of
Festinger’s protegés, Aronson (1969) posited that
the theory would be strengthened if it stated that
dissonance would be most clearly aroused when
the self-concept of the person is engaged. In other
words, dissonance is stronger and more clearly
evoked when the way we think about ourselves is at
odds with our cognitions or behavior. This modifi-
cation was supported by much subsequent re-
search (Aronson 1980). Less an alternate version
and more of a theoretical competitor, Bem’s (1967)
self-perception theory was the first major theory
that offered a plausible account of the dissonance
data, and pointed to different causal mechanisms.
Unlike cognitive dissonance theory, Bem’s ap-
proach did not invoke reference to hypothetical
motivational processes, but rather tried to account
for the person’s behavior in terms of the stimuli
present in the individual’s environment and his or
her related behavior. Bem’s theory proposed that
attitudinal change in dissonance experiments hap-
pens not due to an aversive tension (or other
motivation), but due to a person’s perceptions of
his or her own behavior. Specifically, Bem said that
people infer their attitudes from their actions, in
much the same way that observers of our behavior
infer the nature of our attitudes from our behav-
ior. Attitude change occurs when their most re-
cent behavior is different from their previous
attitudes.
This behavioral approach to dissonance phe-
nomena recasts the Festinger and Carlsmith ex-
periment in a very different light. In a replication
of the Festinger and Carlsmith study, Bem asked
participants to listen to a tape describing a person
named Bob, who did some boring motor tasks.
Control condition participants then were asked to
assess Bob’s attitude toward the tasks. Other sub-
jects then learned that Bob was given $1 or $20 to
say to the next participant that the motor tasks
were fun. Participants then listened to a recording
of Bob enthusiastically telling a subsequent wom-
an participant how enjoyable the motor tasks were.
Participants were then asked to evaluate Bob’s
attitude toward the motor tasks. Those who were
told that Bob was given $20 to tell the lie inferred
that the only reason he told the lie was because he
was paid a lot of money. They assumed that he
didn’t really have a positive attitude toward the
motor tasks. Those who were told that Bob re-
ceived $1 didn’t think Bob had a good reason for
lying, so his behavior (lying) told participants that
Bob must really feel positively about the motor
tasks. Control condition participants inferred that
Bob negatively evaluated the motor tasks. As can
be seen, these results are virtually identical to
those obtained in the Festinger and Carlsmith
experiment. Thus, according to self-perception,
the Festinger and Carlsmith participants inferred
their attitudes toward the boring tasks based on
their recent behavior.Subsequent research on self-perception theo-
ry was aimed at testing the self-perception theo-
ry contention that no arousal exists as a result
of the dissonance situation. Zanna and Cooper
(1976) found that arousal did indeed accompany
counterattitudinal advocacy, so it was apparent
that self-perception did not apply to all dissonance
situations. Fazio, Zanna, and Cooper (1977) sug-
gested that dissonance accounted for attitude
change when behavior is truly counterattitudinal,
but that self-perception can account for situations
where behavior is only mildly counterattitudinal.
For most researchers, this seems to have settled
the debate about the situations to which each
theory may be applied (Abelson 1983).A final major revision was proposed by Coop-
er and Fazio (1984). They suggested that disso-
nance does not result from mere cognitive incon-
sistency, but only is evoked when the person feels
personally responsible for causing an aversive event.