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Back to the Future: Retrospective Review of Leon Festinger's A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance
By Leon Festinger. Evanston, IL: Row Peterson, 1957. 291 pp. Cloth, $3.95. In 1956, during my first year as a graduate student at Stanford, I was shopping around for an elective course. At that time, the last thing in my mind would have been to take a course in social psychology. I thought the whole area was boring and simplistic because, in those days, almost all the research findings in social psychology could be explained by a rather simple (and simplistic) version of reinforcement theory. This version struck me as being little more than "bubba psychology" (i.e., things my grandmother could have told me). For example, in the mid-fifties some of the hottest social psychological research dealt with communication and persuasion demonstrating that, if you concoct a message asserting the feasibility of nuclear submarines, people are more likely to believe it if you attribute it to a respected physicist like J. Robert Oppenheimer than if you attribute it to an unreliable source like Pravda. To a firstyear graduate student, the hypothesis seemed so patently obvious that it hardly seemed necessary to perform an elaborate experiment to substantiate it.
Even classic experiments that weren't specifically inspired by reinforcement theory (e.g., Lewin's work on democratic and autocratic leadership and the Asch experiment on conformity) could easily be recast and explained in terms of that simple and ubiquitous concept. While there were other theories around, the problem was that there weren't other theories around that could make predictions that couldn't somehow be subsumed under the dominant and apparently more parsimonious wings of reinforcement theory. For example, in the Asch experiment, because it was dealing with something as trivial as the size of a line, a reinforcement theorist might suggest that it is simply more rewarding to go along with the unanimous judgment of four other people than to defy that opinion and brave their scorn and ridicule.
But, in spite of my total lack of interest in social psychology, I was desperate for a course to take, and I had heard good things about a new professor who had just arrived from Minnesota (some guy named Leon Festinger), who...