Long-range experimental modification of values, attitudes, and behavior

Abstract

S INCE the summer of 1966, a major portion of the research effort at Michigan State University has been devoted to a systematic investigation of the effects of experimentally induced feelings of self-dissatisfaction on long-range changes in values, attitudes, and behavior. The theoretical approach used differs from other approaches in experimental social psychology in three major respects: 1. Contemporary social psychologists generally agree that a necessary prerequisite to cognitive or attitude change is the presence of a state of imbalance or inconsistency. Two major experimental methods generally employed to create such a psychological state are (a) to induce a person to engage in behavior that is incompatible with his attitudes and values and (b) to expose him to information about the attitudes or values of significant others that are incompatible with his own attitudes and values. In contrast to these two well-known methods, we have employed a third method, namely, to expose a person to information designed to make him consciously aware of states of inconsistency that exist chronically within his own value-attitude system below the level of his conscious awareness. 2. While the main theoretical focus of contemporary social psychology is on the concept of attitude and on theories of attitude change, the present focus is on the concept of value and on a theory of value change. This shift from attitudes to values is made on the assumption that values are more fundamental components within a person's makeup than attitudes and, moreover, that values are de-1 The research reported herein was supported by a grant from (he National Science Foundation. Support of this research is gratefully acknowledged. This paper was presented as part of a symposium, Human Behavior and Its Control, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Chicago, Illinois, December . '(0, 1070. 3 Requests for reprints should be sent to Milton Rokcach, Visiting Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario, London 72, Ontario. terminants of attitudes as well as of behavior. Such a shift in focus becomes scientifically possible only if clear conceptual and operational distinctions can be made between the attitude and value concepts. Relevant discussions concerning this distinction are presented elsewhere (Rokeach, 1968a(Rokeach, , 1968b(Rokeach, , 1968c(Rokeach, , 1968(Rokeach, -69, 1971) and need not be repeated here except to say that an attitude represents an organization of interrelated beliefs that are all focused on a specific object or situation, while a value refers to a desirable end state of existence (terminal value) or a desirable mode of behavior (instrumental value). Terminal and instrumental values arc generalized standards of the means and ends of human existence that transcend attitudes toward specific objects and situations. Thus denned, a person is conceived to have many thousands of attitudes but only several dozens of values. These relatively few values are conceived to determine many or all of man's attitudes as well as his behavior. 3. A third way in which our theoretical approach differs from those of other workers in the field of attitude change is in the conception and measurement of psychological states of dissonance (imbalance, inconsistency, incongruity). To speak of dissonance meaningfully is to identify at least two elements X and Y that are in some "dissonant relation" to one another. In Festinger's theory (and in other balance formulations), X and Y are typically identified as two cognitions (beliefs, attitudes, values, or cognitions about behavior), and X and Y will necessarily vary from one situation to another. In the present formulation, X and Y are not two cognitions that vary from one situation to another, but are invariant across all situations: X ~ self; Y -one's perceived performance or behavior in whatever the situation. X and Y are dissonant with one another if the person's behavior in any given situation leads him to become dissatisfied with himself; X and Y are consonant if his behavior in a given situation leads him to remain satisfied with himself. Such states of dis-45