The effect of severity of initiation on liking for a group.

“The beauty of the Aronson and Mills (1959) design is that it easily can be adapted for use with animals because one can train an animal that a large effort is required to obtain one reinforcer whereas a small effort is required to obtain a different reinforcer.”

“Similarly, effortful initiation can increase the perceived value of a social group (Aronson & Mills, 1959).”

“In contrast, when an action is evaluated retrospectively, effort tends to inflate the value of a realized reward (Aronson and Mills, 1959; Alessandri et al., 2008; L. Wang et al., 2017).”

“For example, when participants built a storage box (versus simply inspecting one that had already been built), they were not only willing to pay more for it but also liked it more (Norton et al., 2012; see also Aronson & Mills, 1959; Brehm, Wright, Solomon, Silka, & Greenberg, 1983).”

“Individuals are likely to have more positive feelings for objects created through great effort (Aronson & Mills, 1959).”

“…converge to maximize this commitment: we observe our own cooperative behavior and justify the associated effort (Bem, 1972; effort justification; Aronson & Mills, 1959); others also observe our behaviors, making it difficult for us to act incongruently in subsequent situations (consistency,…”

“…confusion and hesitation and heighten uncertainty in beliefs and preferences (Schwarz 2004; Wilson and Schooler 1991), a superfluous choice step that requires a perplexing trade-off might add preference ambiguity (instead of insufflate confidence) and dispel the preference persistence effect.”

“When a similar effect has been found in humans (e.g., Aronson & Mills, 1959), it has been referred to as the justification of effort effect; however, we prefer to interpret this preference as a contrast effect.”

“Similarly, threatening and painful events can motivate increased group identification (e.g., Aronson and Mills 1959), even when the pain and threat find their source within the very group with which one identifies.”

“This finding is in line with Tsfati and Livio’s (2008) argument that journalists have to perceive a positive social influence of the media for reasons of ‘effort justification’ (Aronson and Mills, 1959).”

“and create a more compelling experience by exploiting the effortjustification paradigm [1].”

“The first such experiment was famously conducted by Aronson and Mills (1959).”

“…from dissonance reduction via effort justification (e.g., increased liking of a group after having invested great effort to become a member; Aronson & Mills, 1959) to the IKEA effect (valuation of mundane objects such as standardized IKEA boxes upon having folded them oneself as opposed to…”

“In one study supporting this prediction (Aronson & Mills, 1959), participants learned they could join a group only by passing an initial test in which they were asked to read a series of words aloud from a set of cards.”

“…does not apply to the two other paradigms that were used to study dissonance reduction: the induced compliance paradigm (e.g. Festinger & Carlsmith, 1959; and Linder, Cooper & Jones, 1967) and the effort justification paradigm (e.g. Aronson and Mills, 1959; and Wicklund, Cooper & Linder, 1967).”

“A dramatic illustration of this phenomenon comes from a classic social science study by Eliott Aronson and Judson Mills [1].”

“19 The contrast between the harshness of being hazed and the outcome of being enthusiastically accepted into the group may increase the experience of being rewarded for enduring the hazing.”

“Given effort justification theory (Aronson & Mills, 1959) and cognitive dissonance theory (Festinger, 1962), the more time spent with and knowing someone may facilitate the desire to justify that time and to see the relationship and person as more desirable and satisfying than relationships without…”

“People sometimes recover faster from intensely painful experiences than less distressing ones [15], [16], [17], [18], [19] as intense emotions possibly cause the recruitment of an assortment of defensive psychological processes that try to weaken them [20], [21].”

“It was not the purpose of the present study to examine the more intricate psychological mechanisms underlying the cognitive dissonance explanation of the effects of a severe initiation, as formulated by Aronson and Mills (1959).”

“For example, Aronson and Mills (1959) asked college girls to read a list of obscene words to a male experimenter, intending this exercise to be an embarrassing initiation rite.”

“There are many empirical studies to support the cognitive dissonance theory, with more studies in the past conducted in a laboratory setting (e.g. Aronson and Mills 1959; Brehm 1956; Festinger, Riecken, and Schachter 1956).”

“At around the same time as the Festinger and Carlsmith study, another important study on the effect of cognitive dissonance was conducted by Aronson and Mills (1959),6 who showed that the appreciation of a boring discussion group was affected by the severity of the initiation procedure that preceded it. In their study…”

“…of members’ position and status in the group—for instance, homeowners who invest time and energy will experience more intense emotional involvement; and intimacy is a kind of investment (Aronson and Mills 1959; Peterson and Martens 1972); and (5) spiritual bond is common in each community.”

“In traditional human research, preferences such as those reported here would typically be attributed to cognitive factors, such as cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1957) or more specifically to a form of cognitive dissonance called justification of effort (Aronson & Mills, 1959).”

“, 1984) and liking (Aronson and Mills, 1959).”

“Study 2 実験２では IKEA 効果が努力の正当化に起因するかどうかを評価する(Aronson and Mills, 1959, Benozio and Diesendruck, 2015, Festinger, 1957) 努力の正当化とは、努力した仕事を完了したことに対する報酬として与えられた報酬を過大評 価するバイアスである（Aronson＆Mills、1959） 努力の正当化が IKEA 効果のメカニズムである場合、タスクに費やす努力の量(モンスター全体を作 成するか、一部を作成するか)によって IKEA 効果の大きさが異なることになる …”

“Second, our results relied on a stringent alpha level (.02) and our statistical power was high (beta = .90), including over 60 participants.”

“From this view, perceived growth may be seen as a form of motivated cognition in response to a need to provide a convincing explanation for their personality or lack of depreciation in the wake of adversity (Aronson & Mills, 1959; Seery & Kondrak, 2014).”

“Since Aronson and Mills’ (1959) seminal experiment, there have been only six laboratory studies on the topic (Finer et al.”

“Having successfully endured the rigors of the initiation, the new initiates tend to value the group and their membership in it more than if the initiation had not inflicted physical or mental suffering (Aronson & Mills, 1959; Gerard & Mathewson, 1966).”

“Findings are Interpretable in Non-dissonance F~anzeworks In commenting upon :he results of the Aronson and Mills (1959) study of severity of initiation, Chapanis and Chapanis (1964, pp. 4-5) pose four alternative explanacions of the finding that girls who passed a severe initiation to join a group,…”

“Essentially, the experiment was a replication and extension cf some earlier work by Aronson and Mills (1959) which had indicated that persons who undergo an unpleasant initiation in order to join a group like the group more than people who are spared such an initiation.”

“Mills (Aronson & Mills, 1959), who conducted the first effort-justification experiment, explained quite precisely why effort should evoke dissonance.”

“Moreover, because synchronised walking in public is contra-normative compared to walking normally in a group, the activity may have generated unintended negative affect, which is known to enhance cohesion (Aronson & Mills, 1959).”

“…to cause cognitive dissonance that might result in increased group af fi nity following a rite of passage — that is, a higher sense of group belonging through rewards and higher conformity among new group members (Aronson & Mills, 1959; Festinger, 1961; Kamau, 2013; Keating et al., 2005) may occur.”

“…the purpose of strengthening the individuals commitment to the group, as was highlighted in an experimental study performed by Aronson and Mills in the 1950s, which revealed that an initiate who endures severe hazing is likely to find membership in that group more appealing (Aronson & Mills, 1959).”

“For example, Aronson and Mills (1959) manipulated task difficult and reported that participants who were required to read some embarrassing sexual descriptions in order to join a discussion group placed greater value on the group as the severity of the required task increased.”

“Aronson and Mills (1959) and Gerard and Mathewson (1966) analyzed the responses of two groups of students to joining discussion groups after enduring embarrassing, effortful, or painful initiation tasks.”

“…identity tends to override personal identity in certain contexts where belonging and fitting in is important, and with cognitive dissonance theory (Aronson & Mills, 1959; Keating et al., 2005), in terms of which people tend to attribute a greater value to something they had to put a lot of effort…”

“According to other psychological perspectives, such as cognitive dissonance theory (e.g., Aronson & Mills, 1959; Festinger, 1957), reactance theory (e.g., Brehm, 1966; Brehm & Brehm, 1981; Wicklund, 1974), or motivational intensity theory (e.g., Brehm & Self, 1989; Brehm et al., 1983), adversity…”