Paid Too Little to Lie

In 1959 Leon Festinger and James Carlsmith made people do an extremely boring task (turning pegs a quarter turn, for an hour) and then asked them to tell the next participant it had been interesting and enjoyable.

Some were paid twenty dollars for this, a substantial sum at the time. Some were paid one dollar.

Afterwards, everyone was asked privately how much they had actually enjoyed the task. A simple reward account predicts that the people paid more should report liking it more, having been better rewarded for the association.

The one-dollar group rated it as significantly more enjoyable.

Festinger's explanation is the theory of cognitive dissonance. Holding two inconsistent cognitions is uncomfortable, and the discomfort motivates change in whichever one is easiest to move. The twenty-dollar group had an obvious external justification for lying (twenty dollars) so there was nothing to explain. The one-dollar group had told a stranger a falsehood for almost nothing, which is genuinely hard to square with being a reasonable and honest person.

The behaviour cannot be undone. The payment cannot be revised. What is adjustable is the attitude, so the attitude moves: the task was not that bad, so it was not really a lie.

The conditions under which this happens are specific and they are the interesting part. Dissonance produces attitude change when the behaviour was freely chosen, when it was publicly committed, and when external justification is insufficient. Remove any of those and the effect weakens or disappears.

Which means, counterintuitively, that coercion changes attitudes least. If you were ordered to do it, or paid well, or nobody knows you did it, there is no inconsistency requiring repair. The way to change what someone believes is to get them to act voluntarily, visibly, and for reasons too small to explain the action.

Every organisation that wants commitment has found this by trial and error. Elliot Aronson and Judson Mills ran the clean version: women underwent either a mild or an embarrassingly severe procedure in order to join a discussion group, and then listened to a deliberately tedious discussion about the sexual behaviour of animals. Those who had endured the severe initiation rated the discussion as more interesting.

Effort justification. Having paid a high price for something dull is dissonant, and the adjustable term is the value of what you got. Which is why groups seeking commitment make joining expensive rather than easy, and why the expense is so often pointless by design. A costly, useless ordeal is a purer manipulation than a costly, useful one.

Festinger's most striking application came before the laboratory work. In 1954 he and two colleagues joined a small group that believed the world would end on a specific date, and that they would be rescued by flying saucers. Members had given up jobs, homes and possessions.

The date passed. Nothing happened.

Dissonance theory predicted, in advance, that the group would not quietly disband. The members with the most invested had the most dissonance and the least capacity to write off the cost, and the cheapest resolution was a reinterpretation: the world had been spared because of the group's faith. They then began proselytising far more energetically than before, having previously avoided publicity.

Disconfirming evidence can strengthen a belief, when the belief has already been paid for. This is not irrationality so much as a very expensive sunk cost meeting a mind that would rather reinterpret than write off.

There is a competing account worth knowing, because it is less dramatic and probably also true.

Daryl Bem proposed self-perception theory: when internal cues are weak or ambiguous, people work out what they think by observing what they did, exactly as an outside observer would. "I told him it was interesting, for a dollar, and nobody made me, so I suppose I found it somewhat interesting." No discomfort required, no drive, just inference.

The two accounts make similar predictions in most experiments, which made them very difficult to separate. The current view is that both operate in different territory: self-perception where an attitude is weak or has never been formed, dissonance where an important belief about oneself is genuinely threatened, which is where measurable physiological arousal shows up.

The practical residue of all this is the foot in the door. Freedman and Fraser asked homeowners to display a large, ugly sign about safe driving; almost nobody agreed. Another group had been asked two weeks earlier to display a tiny sign in a window, which almost everyone did. Of those, more than three times as many agreed to the billboard.

The small act was freely chosen and had no external justification, so it got explained internally: I did that because I care about this. And a person who cares about this has every reason to agree to the next request. The mechanism only works while the first step is small enough to feel entirely voluntary, which is why fundraisers, salespeople and recruiters are so careful about how they open.