Can Dissonance Theory Do It All

I share the enthusiasm with which Aronson welcomes the reemergence of the concept of motivation and the renewed efforts to combine motivation and cognition in social psychological theory and research. I also share Aronson's desire for a unified theory that will account for the plethora of classic and novel motivational phenomena under a single theoretical umbrella. But I am not convinced that dissonance theory as articulated by Festinger (1957) or as reformulated by Aronson (1968) is capable of providing this umbrella. It is true that, with enough ingenuity, any case in which motives have been shown to affect reasoning may be reformulated as resulting from an inconsistency between two cognitions, as argued recently by Berkowitz and Devine (1989). But the value of such reformulations is questionable. This is because it has been demonstrated and argued by several theorists, including Aronson, that the mere inconsistency between two beliefs does not suffice to produce the motivational state termed dissonance and its resulting attitude change. Rather, dissonance motivation appears to be aroused by the implications of such inconsistency for the self. For example, under the induced-compliance paradigm, people are led to engage in counterattitudinal behaviors that they would normally avoid and subsequently shift their attitudes toward greater consistency with these behaviors. In this case, the implications to the self that people are concerned about are that they will appear to be fools for having performed the counterattitudinal behaviors. Consistent with this view, Cooper and Fazio (1984) showed that in the induced-compliance paradigm, counterattitudinal behaviors are followed by attitude change only when conditions that could lead to the attribution of the behavior to one's foolishness are present-that is, when the subjects believe they have chosen freely to engage in behaviors with foreseeable negative consequences. In research described in the target article, Aronson argues that Cooper and Fazio's (1984) conditions for the arousal of dissonance motivation are overly restrictive. It is not required that the counterattitudinal behavior will have negative consequences because dissonance motivation does not result only from inconsistency with the belief "I am not a fool," a belief that is brought into play in the induced-compliance paradigm only if negative consequences are expected. Dissonance motivation may also result from inconsistency with the belief "I am not a hypocrite," which is likely to be triggered under different kinds of circumstances. In keeping with dissonance tradition, Aronson argues that the inconsistency between the beliefs "I am not a fool (or a hypocrite)" and "I have done something foolish (or hypocritical)" is the driving force behind the subsequent attitude change. Steele (1988), however showed that attitude change in the induced-compliance paradigm is driven by the motivation to avoid being a fool triggered by this inconsistency rather than by the inconsistency per se. This is because when subjects are provided with other avenues for convincing themselves that they are not fools-for example, when they are reminded of other valued aspects of their selves-they do not engage in attitude change despite the ongoing persistence of that inconsistency. It seems, therefore, that we will advance our understanding of motivational phenomena more by searching for the goals aroused in various situations than by searching for inconsistencies among beliefs. Aronson does recognize the importance of goals in producing dissonance effects. Indeed, he argues that all such effects may be viewed as resulting from having performed behaviors that challenge one of three goals: the desires to be stable, competent, and good. Although this view of the range of dissonance theory is broader than the highly restrictive one put forth by Cooper and Fazio (1984), it remains much too restrictive to account for the full range of motivational effects on reasoning that have been documented to date. It is overly restrictive in two senses. First, many other goals may affect reasoning as well. These include broad goals, such as the goals of being happy, being healthy, having free choice, or having control, as well as goals specific to given situations, such as minimizing effort at a given task, viewing a future blind date positively, or viewing a future competitor negatively. Second, Aronson's view is overly restrictive in that it assumes that dissonance-provoking goals capable of affecting reasoning are triggered only by the performance of behaviors that challenge them. But goals may be aroused through other avenues as well. For example, the desire to see a competitor fail, which can affect evaluations of the competitor, may be aroused by the mere existence of the competitor, and the desire to possess health-related genes, which can affect evaluations of relevant research, may be aroused upon hearing of their existence. In a recent article (Kunda, 1990), I reviewed evidence showing that reasoning may be affected by a wide range of goals, and I proposed mechanisms that could account for all such effects. Goals, or motives, were conceptualized very broadly to include any wish, desire, or preference for the outcome of a reasoning task, regardless of how these were aroused. I suggested that people motivated to arrive at particular conclusions attempt to construct seemingly objective justifications for these conclusions that would persuade a dispassionate observer. They arrive at their desired conclusions only if they succeed in justifying them. But the process of justification construction is biased by people's goalsthey selectively access those memories, beliefs, and inferential rules capable of justifying their desired conclusions and creatively combine accessed knowledge to construct new beliefs that lend support to their desired conclusions. These notions of goal-directed memory search and belief construction are capable of accounting for all the research carried out in the dissonance tradition, as well as for research conducted within other paradigms that seem excluded from Aronson's reformulated dissonance theory. An example of a paradigm involving motivated reasoning that seems excluded from Aronson's theory is provided by research on the effects of outcome dependency. Research in this paradigm has shown that when people believe that their own future outcomes depend on the behavior of others, they