Forced compliance: Commitment to compliance and commitment to activity

✍ Scribed by Jean-Léon Beauvois; Marc Bungert; Pascale Mariette

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1995
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 681 KB
• Volume: 25
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0046-2772
• DOI: 10.1002/ejsp.2420250103

✦ Synopsis

It is argued that the standardmanipulation of free choice in a forcedcompliance situation has fostered confusion between the two different types of choices offered to subjects, namely commitment or non-commitment to compliance with the experimenter and choice of counter-attitudinal activity per se. From a theoretical viewpoint, the two choices have very different implications. The former is a prerequisite to dissonance arousal; the latter may bring about consonant cognitions which reduce the dissonance ratio. Two experiments which separated these two choices confirmed the above predictions, derived from a radical conception of the dissonance theory (Beauvois and Joule, 1981, 1994). The results are inconsistent with the reinterpretation of dissonance effects in self-perception terms.