Decision freedom as a determinant of the role of incentive magnitude in attitude change.

Abstract

In the forced-compliance paradigm, attitude change following a counterattitudinal performance has been shown to be both a direct (reinforcement prediction) and an inverse (dissonance prediction) function of the amount of incentive offered. An experiment successfully demonstrated that if S feels free not to comply attitude change will be inversely related to incentive magnitude, but that the positive relationship will hold if this freedom is reduced. It was hypothesized that the procedure of an earlier study by Rosenberg, whose results supported the reinforcement prediction, inadvertently reduced Ss' freedom not to comply. When this procedure was closely replicated in a 2nd experiment, the positive relationship was again found, but when the procedure was modified to make a decision not to comply a viable alternative for S, the inverse relationship resulted. The 2 experiments together show that a low incentive arouses dissonance, leading to attitude change, only when the person remains free to decide against compliance after he has been fully informed about the incentive. If the incentive is announced after the person Is committed to compliance, a reinforcement effect obtains. If a person can be induced to behave publicly in a manner that does not follow from his private attitudes, he will experience cognitive dissonance. The magnitude of dissonance will be greater when there are few reasons for complying than when there are many reasons (Festinger, 19S7). This dissonance may be reduced by an accommodating change in private attitude if other ways of reducing dissonance are not available. Thus a person who has been induced to behave in a counterattitudinal fashion will change his private attitude more the less he has been rewarded for complying. Festinger and Carlsmith (1959) found support for this proposition in a study in which subjects were persuaded (for $1 or $20) to extol the attractiveness of a dull and tedious task for the benefit of the next subject. Also, Cohen (1962) found that Yale students who were induced to write essays in favor of the New Haven police later showed more positive attitudes the smaller the incentive they had been offered to write the essay. Rosenberg (196S) has recently questioned the generality of this proposed relationship and has suggested that subjects in the