Application of this theory has yielded many surprising and nonintuitive
predictions. For example, conventional wisdom suggests that behavior follows from
attitudes; dissonance theory, however, identifies conditions under which just the
opposite occurs. An early and often replicated experiment illustrates the power and
counterintuitiveness of the theory. In what is now known as the induced compliance
effect, Festinger and Carlsmith (1959) asked individuals to perform 30 minutes of a
mind- numbingly tedious activity, and then to persuade a waiting participant that the
activity was in fact quite interesting. This situation created cognitive dissonance in
most individuals––they believed that the task was boring, yet inexplicably found
themselves arguing quite the opposite.
The theory of cognitive dissonance (Festinger 1957) states that inconsistency
between beliefs or behaviors creates an aversive motivational state akin to hunger or
thirst. This tension is typically reduced by changing one of the dissonant elements, or
adding new ones, until mental consonance is achieved. There have been three major
revisions relevant to modern interpretation of dissonance phenomena. Aronson's selfconsistency
model ( 1968) proposed that dissonance resulted from behaviors that were
discrepant with one's conception of oneself as a decent and sensible person. Steele's
self-affirmation theory ( 1988) proposed that dissonance emerged from threats to the
overarching self- system, and that dissonance reduction relied on re-establishing the
integrity of the global self-concept. Cooper and Fazio's `New Look' model ( 1984)
proposed that dissonance resulted from creating unwanted aversive consequences and
did not require cognitive inconsistency. A recent synthesis discussed by Cooper (
1999) and Stone ( 1999) suggests that dissonance is caused by a discrepancy between
the outcome of a behavioral act and the standard to which it is compared. According to
this self-standards model, contextual variables determine the comparison standard, and
it is this standard that determines which dissonance process is most likely to be
operative.