DISSONANCE AROUSAL AND THE COLLECTIVE SELF:



DISSONANCE AROUSAL AND THE COLLECTIVE SELF:

Vicarious Experience of Dissonance Based on Shared Group Membership

Joel Cooper and Michael A. Hogg

The candidate for political office prepares to climb to the podium. You and he have been longstanding members of the same trade union. You, he, and the union have traditionally opposed free trade zones. But today he has been invited to address the Chamber of Commerce to express his views. He begins to speak and you realize that he is extolling the virtues of lowered tariffs and reduced trade restrictions. He is speaking contrary to the position you know he holds privately.

The scenario described above can lead easily to a prediction based on the social psychological principle of cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1957): Because of his counterattitudinal advocacy, the candidate should experience dissonance and change his attitude to become privately more in favor of free trade alliances. A second question is less obvious and more intriguing. Will you, by dint of observing your fellow union member make a dissonance arousing speech, also experience dissonance? We believe that the answer is yes. In this paper, we will develop support for the proposition that people can experience dissonance vicariously from observing a fellow group member behave in a dissonant fashion. Based on social identity and social categorization theory, we believe that the fusing of the individual self with the social group establishes the principle that permits the sharing of social processes among group members.

Dissonance by Association. Investigators have explored the possibility of experiencing cognitive dissonance by association, that is, when someone we are associated with engages in a counterattitudinal act that makes us conjointly responsible (see Cooper & Stone, 2000, for a review). In an early demonstration of dissonance in groups, Festinger, Riecken, and Schachter (1956) demonstrated that seeking social support was an effective means of dissonance reduction after “prophecy failed” and a group’s central attitude was shown to be invalid. Zanna and Sande (1987), using the two classic paradigms of dissonance research, induced compliance and free choice, varied whether participants were acting on their own or in groups of three. Their results suggest that dissonance can be experienced in groups, though some individuals diffuse responsibility in group settings and do not experience dissonance as a result. More relevant to the present investigation, Sakai (1999) showed that students who tacitly agreed to go along with a confederate deceiving a naïve subject into believing that a boring experimental task was interesting (see Festinger & Carlsmith, 1959) rated the task as more interesting than did participants who only observed the interaction. We wish to focus on a situation similar in surface features, but quite distinct in substance. Whereas participants in the above studies were publicly associated and implicitly responsible for the dissonance-inducing behavior, our interest lies in the case where participants are mere witnesses to someone with whom they identify engaging in dissonant behavior.

Actor-observer identification. At the heart of vicarious dissonance is the capacity to empathize with a significant other –- to experience that person’s thoughts and feelings as your own, We hypothesize that such a process is more likely to occur if the other person is a member of a personally important and meaningful social group to which you belong. If your identification with that group is strong enough, merely witnessing a group member engage in behavior that clashes with shared attitudes should be enough to induce discomfort vicariously, leading to attitude change as a means of arousal reduction. The greater the bond you have with the group, the greater the vicarious dissonance.

Shared group membership may create vicarious experience through the operation of social identity and self-categorization processes that assimilate self and fellow group members to the in-group prototype (e.g., Hogg & Abrams, 1988; Tajfel & Turner, 1979; Turner, Hogg, Oakes, Reicher, & Wetherell, 1987). These processes transform discrete individuals into embodiments of the same prototype, and thus change "you and I" (the individual self) into "we" (the collective self). The self-concept, in other words, is extended to incorporate the other (Cadinu & Rothbart, 1996; Simon, 1997; Simon & Hastedt, 1999; Smith & Henry, 1996). In salient group contexts people categorize themselves and fellow in-group members as members of the same category – the category prototype replaces individuality (a process of prototype-based depersonalization) and thus unique individuals become psychologically joined as representatives of the same prototype, leading to vicarious experience.

Our hypotheses regarding the impact of identification on attitudes emanate from recent theorizing about attitudes in the field of social identity (see Terry, Hogg, & White, 2000). Our group identifications serve an important adaptive function in allowing us to assess the accuracy and validity of our attitudes, and the process of identification fundamentally occurs to reduce self-conceptual uncertainty (Hogg, 2000). It is therefore not surprising that we tend to assimilate our attitudes to group standards (Turner, 1991), or that our attitudes polarize toward positions expressed by group members (Mackie, 1986; Mackie & Cooper, 1984). In addition, the level to which we identify (or fail to identify) with our groups moderates the impact of our group memberships (Hogg & Hardie, 1991). Behavior of in-group members has its greatest impact on members who are highly identified with the group (Tajfel, 1981; Tajfel & Turner, 1979): Low identifiers, for example, are less influenced by group norms than are high identifiers (Terry & Hogg, 1996). Witnessing a member of a group with which we identify engaged in the process of grappling with inconsistent cognitions undermines one of the central functions of group identification, and we should be particularly motivated to reduce increased subjective uncertainty through dissonance reduction. Shared membership in a personally important group, in sum, is one of the key enabling conditions for the occurrence of vicarious dissonance.

A first study. We designed an empirical test of the notion of vicarious dissonance. Our goal was to establish the conditions that simulate the scenario at the opening of this paper. We set out to have a research participant observe a member of his or her group make a statement on a meaningful issue that the participant knew was counterattitudinal. To accomplish this, we asked volunteer participants to come to an experiment testing the establishment of “linguistic subcultures.” This provided a way for us to highlight the important social groups to which our student-participants belonged. At Princeton University, incoming students are randomly placed in residential colleges. The colleges form the basis of social life for the freshmen, who live in the colleges, take their meals at their college, and have social events there. We told the research participants that we were studying the way in which linguistic differences form between social groups and that we were particularly interested in assessing different linguistic patterns that develop within the different residential colleges.

. We stressed these implied differences between groups in order to make group concerns salient (Turner et al., 1987). This cover story justified listening to and rating audio tapes made by other students. Participants were run in dyads and were always told that the other participant had been randomly assigned to record a speech, while they would be doing the rating, and were further told that they would not have to make a speech themselves. They were told that speakers knew that other students were rating their tapes, and were then informed that their speaker was either from their in-group (same residential college) or out-group (different residential college).

Like the union member in the opening scenario who heard his fellow union member make a counterattitudinal speech, our participants heard another group member give a speech that was counterattitudinal. Unlike the opening scenario, some students knew that the speaker was a member of his or her own residential college or of a different college. In addition, we manipulated the decision freedom that the speaker had to make the speech. Half of the participants heard the speakers choose to make the speech while the other half heard the speaker simply accede to the experimenter’s instructions. Finally, all participants filled out a measure adapted from Hogg, Cooper-Shaw and Holzworth (1993) that assessed the strength of positive identification that members felt for their residential college.

If vicarious dissonance exists, then it should be experienced by students who heard their in-group member deliver a counterattitudinal speech. These students should change their attitudes in the direction of the speech, especially if they felt strongly attracted to their group. And that is just what happened. Students who liked their residential college and who heard a fellow college member behave in a way that was attitude-discrepant changed their own attitude in the direction of the speech. They became more favorable to position that tuition should be increased. No such change occurred for students who heard precisely the same speech given by members of a different residential college (i.e., the out-group.) nor for students who were not attracted to their group.

Was it Really Vicarious Dissonance? The finding that attitude change occurred for people who heard in-group members give a counterattitudinal speech is consistent with our notion of vicarious dissonance. But not quite. Half of our participants heard the speech maker given choice about whether to make the pro-tuition speech and the other half heard the experimenter merely tell the speaker to make the speech. There are myriad dissonance experiments that show that the personal experience of dissonance depends upon the perception of choice (e.g, Linder, Cooper & Jones, 1967). Yet, choice did not have that effect on the observation of counterattitudinal behavior. Without differences between choice and no-choice conditions, the possibility exists that participants were merely persuaded more by the words of a speech that were given by in-group members rather than out-group members. It is possible that people’s biases to perceive arguments presented by in-group members as superior (e.g., Wilder, 1990) may have led to greater attitude change. The analysis of speech ratings from Study 1, however, does not support this interpretation, as participants did not find speeches made by in-group members to be of higher quality than speeches made by out-group members. Nonetheless, the differential quality bias cannot completely be ruled out.

A number of additional factors not assessed in Study 1 can also lead to increased message processing and result in greater persuasion. For example, messages from in-group members are more deeply processed (Mackie, Worth & Asuncion, 1990; van Knippenberg & Wilke, 1992), as are unexpected or anticipated messages (Allyn & Festinger, 1961; Eagly, Wood, & Chaiken, 1978; Smith & Petty, 1996). Perhaps hearing a speech by an in-group member favoring a tuition increase was so unexpected that it caused greater attention to, and deeper processing of, the pro-tuition arguments.

In Pursuit of Vicarious Dissonance. It became apparent that, in order to rule out interpretations based on differential persuasion, we needed to remove the actual speech from our procedure, and play only the taped interaction between the student and the experimenter during which the student agreed to make the speech. As we view it, attitude change that stems from vicarious dissonance is independent of processing effects. It occurs when we witness someone with whom we identify engage in dissonant behavior. Just as the aversiveness of agreeing to perform counterattitudinal behavior, and not the performance itself, induces dissonance on an individual level (Linder, Cooper, & Wicklund, 1968), so too should witnessing agreement induce vicarious dissonance in an observer: Speech content itself is irrelevant.

A second experiment sought to accomplish two things. The first was to eliminate the speech from procedure, so the participant only processed the cognition that the speaker had agreed to make a counterattitudinal speech. The second was to target the importance of the speech-maker’s being in the throes of cognitive dissonance him or herself. If dissonance is experienced vicariously, then it is crucial that the speaker be perceived as experiencing this unpleasant tension state. Although a speech may be counterattitudinal for the majority of a group, it is not necessarily counterattitudinal for every member. We systematically varied whether the topic of the speech was counterattitudinal for the particular member whom the participant observed.

Our results supported the main finding of our first study. People who heard an in-group member agree to make a counterattitudinal speech changed their own attitudes to become more consistent with the position that the group member was to advocate. The actual words of the speech were not important, as attested to by the fact that participants did not hear the actual speeches. And, as in the first experiment, only people who were highly attracted to their group showed the vicarious dissonance effect. Interestingly, too, participants only experienced vicarious dissonance if the position was discrepant from the speech maker’s stated attitude. If the speaker personally believed in the argument he or she agreed to make, then it caused no attitude change in the observer, even though the speech was contrary to the group’s attitude and the participant’s attitude. Only if the speaker was behaving in a way that was likely to cause dissonance for him or herself did the observer feel the motivation to engage in attitude change.

The Experience of Vicarious Dissonance. In the second study that we described, we ran an additional set of conditions. We gave half of the participants a standard misattribution stimulus (e.g., Fazio, Zanna and Cooper, 1978). We told them that the lighting in the room often makes people feel tense and uncomfortable. This information, which has been shown on a number of occasions to eliminate personal dissonance, had no impact whatsoever on vicarious dissonance. Participants continued to show attitude change despite the presence of an external stimulus that could account for their unpleasant feelings.

The failure of misattribution to eliminate the dissonance effect opens a window to the possible experience of vicarious dissonance. The typical misattribution approach that has been used with personal dissonance may not work with vicarious dissonance because the two related phenomena are experienced differently. We suggest that the experience of vicarious dissonance is based on an empathic understanding of the actor’s dilemma. Rather than making the observer feel precisely the way the actor feels, it is based on a mental representation of the actor’s likely experience.

We found evidence for the notion that vicarious dissonance is related to empathic reactions in a new study. We again created the conditions for vicarious dissonance by using the “linguistic sub-cultures” paradigm that we have previously described. This time, we created new measures designed to assess the participants’ own positive and negative affect, the participants’ attributions of the affect that the actor was experiencing and the affect that they believed they would feel if they were doing what the actor was asked to do. We found that attitude change in the vicarious dissonance paradigm was related to the experience that participants believed they would feel if they were in the actor’s place. Participants who were highly attracted to their group and who observed an in-group member behave counterattitudinally, felt that they would feel considerable negative emotion if they were in their group member’s shoes. And, the degree of such affect was significantly related to the magnitude of attitude change.

Vicarious negative affect was also related to individual differences in empathy as measured by Davis’ Interpersonal Reactivity Index (Davis, 1983;1994). In particular, our measure of vicarious affect was related to the Empathic Concern scale of the IRI that assesses the tendency “to experience feelings of sympathy and compassion for unfortunate others.” Thus, individual who were predisposed to connect empathically with others in distress reported higher levels of negative vicarious affect, and this vicarious negative affect was then related to attitude change.

Identification with the Actor. In the studies presented here, group identification was an important moderator of vicarious dissonance-driven attitude change. Is there something specific about group identification that enables vicarious dissonance, or would any type of bond between two individuals lead to the same result?

We believe that there is something unique about group identification. Variables such as liking, similarity and nominal group status do not seem to be related to vicarious dissonance. Recent conceptions of social identity theory (Deaux, 1993) predict just this: Only when others are part of our self-defined social identity do they have an impact on our attitudes, and only then do we look to them for reduction of attitudinal uncertainty (Hogg, 2000). Although liking, familiarity, or merely common group membership are often seen as sufficient markers that two individuals share a social identity and thus see each other as relevant in-group members, only when people identify with their group can the self-other overlap typical of social identity processes occur.

This distinction between relationships that involve a social identity and those that tap into other factors such as group status helps to clarify a debate on the role of empathy and “oneness” (Aron, Aron, Tudor, & Nelson, 1991) in altruistic behavior. Batson, Sager, Garst, Kang, Rubchinsky and Dawson (1997), using nominal groups to instantiate inclusiveness, found no evidence that oneness predicted helping behavior, whereas Cialdini, Brown, Lewis, Luce, and Neuberg (1997), using groups like friends and family, found that oneness superseded empathy in explaining helping behavior. Our results may contribute to resolving this apparent contradiction by suggesting that one essential factor in processes of empathic concern is active identification. True “oneness” with another can only come from shared social identity, which requires group identification. The nominal group labels used by Batson et al. (1997) may not have impacted altruism because they did not lead to strong identification, while Cialdini et al.’s (1997) use of friends and close family members might be experienced as strong instantiations of active identification, perhaps explaining their effect on altruistic behavior.

Shifting Social Identities to Avoid Vicarious Dissonance. Since vicarious dissonance is driven by feelings of active identification with a member of an important group, distancing oneself from the speaker by removing oneself from the group could serve as an avenue to reduce vicarious dissonance. We found no evidence of people using such a strategy in any of our studies, perhaps due to the difficulty of foregoing an important social identity. It might be easier, however, for people to focus selectively on one identity while downplaying another as a means of dissonance reduction, just as they do to avoid unflattering social comparison (Mussweiler, Gabriel, & Bodenhausen, 2000). For example, if female participants who cared both about their status as women and their status as college students observed a male student engaged in dissonant behavior, they might simply stress their female identity and de-emphasize their student identity to reduce vicarious dissonance. Future research should test this hypothesis by making this alternative route available to participants. While reduction of vicarious dissonance is psychologically necessary, we may have some flexibility in coping with the powerful impact of attitudinal discrepancy in relevant others.

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