THE ORIGINS OF
COGNITIVE
DISSONANCE:
EVIDENCE FROM CHILDREN
AND MONKEYS
EMILY SLEZAK
MORGAN WILBANKS
INTRODUCTION
• Cognitive Dissonance:
• “a psychological state in which an individual’s
cognitions – beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors – are
at odds”
• Interpreted as a negative feeling
• Motivated to resolve the contradiction
• Still up for debate: developmental or
evolutionary basis?
PAST STUDIES
• Aronson & Carlsmith (1963) - Children
• Lewis (1964) - Rats
• Friedrich & Zentall (2004) - Birds
BASIC METHODS
• Combined Comparative-Developmental
Approach
• Free-Choice Paradigm
• Re-rating vs. Two Phase
• Hypothesis:
• If dissonance is experienced in phase one, then
attitude towards unchosen item will change in
phase two
CHILD STUDY METHODS
• Subjects:
• Thirty 4-year-olds
• Tested in pre-schools or in the laboratory
• Procedure
• Assessed child’s preference for stickers with the
smiley-face rating scale
• Children competency for scale tested (See any
issues with this scale?)
CHILD STUDY METHODS
• Procedure continued
• Experimenter identified at least two triads of
stickers the child liked equally
• Each sticker within a triad was labeled A, B, or C
• Phase one: choice between A & B
• Phase two: choice between unchosen option in
phase one and C
• Choice vs. No choice conditions
• Using at least two triads per child, the data was
averaged across trials
CAPUCHIN STUDY METHODS
• Subjects:
• Six Capuchin Monkeys
• Four adults and two adolescents (one subject
group vs. two?)
• Procedure
• Experimenter determined differential preference
for M&Ms based on retrieval time
• Tested 20 times in two experimental sessions
CAPUCHIN STUDY METHODS
• Procedure continued
• Equally preferred triads of M&M colors were
identified
• Choice and no choice conditions
RESULTS
• Children Study
• “Children in the choice condition were more likely to
prefer option C (63.0%) than were children in the nochoice condition (47.2%)”
• evidence of resolving cognitive dissonance
• Capuchin Study
• “The monkeys chose option C more in the choice
condition (60.0%) than in the no-choice condition
(38.3%)”
• The monkeys chose the unreceived option over the
novel option more often in the no-choice condition
DISCUSSION
• Evidence for Cognitive Dissonance in human
adults and children as well as non-human
primates
• Current study isolates reason for attitude
change to be attributed to cognitive
dissonance
• The only difference being an intentional choice
• Evidence for innate over developmental
• Since 4-year-olds have some experience with
cognitive dissonance, further studies with infants
would be preferred
DISCUSSION
• Core-knowledge mechanism
• Possibly core aspects of cognition give rise to
cognitive dissonance
• Automatic response
• Either mechanistically simpler than thought or
assume less cognitively sophisticated individuals
(children and monkeys) are more complex
EGAN, BLOOM, SANTOS (2010)
• Follow-up Study
• Introduction of blind choice to eliminate prior
preferences too fine-grained for measurement
• Results
• Both children and monkeys chose the third
object, consistent with the original study
• Indicating that they devalued the rejected
object
• Pattern did not occur when the subjects did not
have a choice
• Study gives evidence that there was not a prior
preference, but that the choice itself induced
preference