Cognitive dissonance a myth? April 11, 2008
Posted by Niels in : Life, the universe, and everything , trackbackAfter all I’ve written about cognitive dissonance, M. Keith Chen, an economist from Yale, has come along to say that it doesn’t exist. John Tierney summarizes his argument in the New York Times. And I’ll summarize the summary here: a number of past experiments into cognitive dissonance have been plagued by hithertofore unnoticed sample bias and simple ass-backwards statistical mistakes.
I’m not quite ready to write off cognitive dissonance yet. Most psychologists and behavioral economists are saying, “Sure, the experiments were flawed, but that doesn’t mean cognitive dissonance doesn’t exist,” and as silly as it seems, I’m in their camp. For now. I’m interested to see the results of the statistically unflawed cognitive dissonance research that I’m sure will be coming in the near future.
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We talked about this study in our social psych lab meeting today. Even if this problem does plague one of the paradigms that was used to demonstrate cognitive dissonance (which is not necessarily the case), it doesn’t say anything about the others (e.g., that we like a boring event better if paid $1 vs. $20 to lie about it). Therefore, I wouldn’t say cognitive dissonance has been debunked at all.