Subjects delivered a counterattitudinal speech supporting an unwanted policy. Two groups were given information about the consequences of making the speech before agreeing to make it. One was explicitly informed of the possibility of an unwanted consequence occurring. The second group was given a general description of the consequences that was designed to make the specific unwanted consequence retrospectively foreseeable if made known later. In addition, there was a third group that was told nothing about the consequences of making the speech at the time of the decision to make it. After the speech was delivered, half of the subjects in each group were informed of a specific unwanted consequence of their act and half were given no further information. As predicted, self-justificatory attitude change was found only in the two conditions in which subjects were informed prior to making the speech of the specific unwanted consequence and in the condition in which subjects were given a general description of the consequences beforehand and specific information about the unwanted consequence after the speech. The results are discussed in terms of the relation of personal responsibility to cognitive dissonance arousal.A series of recent experiments has made it relatively clear that unwanted behavioral consequences that become known to actors only after they have performed a behavior can lead to dissonance-produced self-justificatory attitude change (Cooper & Worchel, 1970; Cooper, Xanna, & Goethals, 1974;Goethals & Cooper, 1972). There is also considerable evidence leading to the conclusion that such consequences produce dissonance only when their occurrence is foreseen at the time of the decision to engage in the behavior (Cooper, 1971).The latter point, that unwanted consequences must be foreseen if they are to pro-The authors wish to thank Marie-Claire Kiimin and Mark P. Xanna for their help with this research.
Excessive yielding to normal biases was examined by administering a word meaning test to groups of schizophrenics, manics, and controls. It was hypothesized that in sentences calling for the nonpreferred or nondominant meaning of words, schizophrenics would err more in the direction of choosing the preferred meaning. Manics and controls were not expected to make such errors. It was found that both manics and schizophrenics yielded excessively to normal biases. The findings of this study question the specificity of the phenomenon to schizophrenics.
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