Learning through narratives of experience: Exploring Mount Everest climbers' cognitive dissonance from an ethnomethodological perspective
Creators: name: Burke, Shaunna
Publisher: name: Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa
Year: 2007
Subjects: subject: Education, Guidance and Counseling.
subject: Psychology, Cognitive.
subject: Recreation.

description: The purpose of the present study was to explore how Mount Everest climbers experienced cognitive dissonance in their natural setting. This study also set out to explore the role of self-concept and feelings in Mount Everest climbers' experiences with the phenomenon. Guided by the ethnomethodological (Garfinkel, 1967) school of thought, Aronson's (1968, 1992) self-consistency revision of Festinger's (1957) original cognitive dissonance theory and the Resonance Performance Model (Newburg, Kimiecik, Durand-Bush, &amp; Doell, 2002) were used as conceptual guides. The research methodology included a narrative (Sparkes, 2002) multicase study (Stake, 1995) approach involving multiple in-depth interviews captured on video and participant observation captured by field notes. Six climbers attempting to scale Mount Everest comprised the case studies; five men and one woman. Data were collected over an entire climbing season and one month after the participants returned home from the mountain. Guided by Gergen and Gergen's (1983) strategy for analyzing the structure and content of narratives, data analysis occurred on three levels. First, for each participant the researcher developed a background profile. Second, a narrative case study analysis was performed to explore how the participants experienced cognitive dissonance. The third level of data analysis entailed a cross-case study analysis to explore the patterns of similarity and difference between narratives or themes expressed. Cognitive dissonance was routinely experienced by all six of the participants to socially organize behavior and produce a sense of order from within the Mount Everest culture. That is, whenever the participants interpreted a discrepancy between their behavior and their own standards for competence and morality, which derive from the conventional morals and prevailing values of the society to which they belonged, they experienced feelings of psychological discomfort which lead them to try and reduce or eliminate it through a process of self-justification. Specifically, this process of reducing cognitive dissonance involved the climbers reconstructing the past in such a way that restored their pre-formed notion of self. Through language and reasoning, which were part and parcel with the situated activities of climbing the mountain, the climbers arrived at an interpretation of their day-to-day activities that not only appeared normal, natural, and real, but also felt good to them. The climbers' experiences with cognitive dissonance, which were defined by an ongoing reconstruction of meaning, allowed them to make sense of self-discrepant acts as they strived to achieve not only a sense of cognitive and affective self-consistency but also shared knowledge. The findings in the present study provide support for Aronson's (1968, 1992) self-consistency perspective of cognitive dissonance. More importantly, the study's most notable contribution to the existing body of work on cognitive dissonance is not the empirically based confirmation that Mount Everest climbers do indeed experience dissonance when their self-concept is involved, but an explanation of how the processes underlying the phenomenon are experienced in the minds of these climbers when under extreme physical and psychological duress. Using an ethnomethodological narrative case study approach, this study afforded a unique way of understanding how cognitive dissonance is internalized in the subjective consciousness of climbers.