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Rationalization and cognitive dissonance. Do choices affect or reflect preferences? (cowles foundation discussion paper no. 1669 (2008).
| Content Provider | CiteSeerX |
|---|---|
| Author | Chen, M. Keith |
| Abstract | A methodological flaw may have led one of the central literatures in social psychology to spuriously conclude that people rationalize past choices, by failing to appreciate that those choices reflect people’s preferences. Cognitive dissonance is one of the most influential theories in social psychology, and its oldest experiential realization is choice-induced dissonance. Since 1956, dissonance theorists have claimed that people rationalize past choices by devaluing rejected alternatives and upgrading chosen ones, an effect known as the spreading of preferences. Here, I show that every study which has tested this suffers from a fundamental methodological flaw. Specifically, these studies (and the free-choice methodology they employ) implicitly assume that before choices are made, a subject’s preferences can be measured perfectly, i.e. with infinite precision, and under-appreciate that a subject’s choices reflect their preferences. Because of this, existing methods will mistakenly identify cognitive dissonance when there is none. This problem survives all controls present in the literature, including control groups, high and low dissonance conditions, |
| File Format | |
| Publisher Date | 2008-01-01 |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
