The cognitive dissonance theory was proposed by leon festinger. It says that we often bring our attitudes into line with our actions. The video i watched not only gave an experiment on cognitive dissonance it also refreshed my memory on a few other psychological terms. They created an experiment where some subjects played a very boring and tedious game. At the end of the experiment they spilt the people up in half and gave one group of the 20 dollars for telling the next patients that the game and experiment was fun and not boring. They gave the other half only one dollar for doing the same thing. The purpose of this was to see if the patient would lie and say the game was fun, not only if they would lie but if they would actually believe their lie and get into it by making up a story and justifying their reason why the game was fun. It is like cognitive dissonance because if we say something that we don't believe then we may actually start believing what we say (bringing our attitudes into line with our actions).
The results of the experiment were the opposite of what i thought. When the people were interviewed later, it said that the people that were paid less believed their lies more. They believed the game was more fun that it actually was to them at the time. They said this is true because people love things more when they have to suffer from them. I thought the people who were paid more would actually start to believe their lie because they had a bigger external motivation.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=korGK0yGIDo
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