Leon Festinger

Introduction

Leon Festinger (8 May 1919 – 11 February 1989) proposed that inconsistency between what a person believes and what a person does is not merely untidy but uncomfortable — a drive-like aversive state that the person is motivated to reduce, in the way a hungry person is motivated to eat. He called it cognitive dissonance, and the claim transformed social psychology because it reversed the direction of the arrow everyone had assumed.

The assumption before Festinger was that attitudes cause behaviour: you believe something, and so you act. Festinger's argument was that the arrow runs both ways, and that when behaviour and belief come apart, what changes is usually the belief. A person who does something they do not quite believe in, with no good external reason for having done it, comes to believe in it — because changing the belief is the cheapest way out of the discomfort.

That is a strange claim, and Festinger's genius was that he made it produce counter-intuitive predictions that could be tested. The most famous is that paying people less to do something they dislike produces more attitude change than paying them more. It does, and it has been replicated for sixty years.

He founded two theories — cognitive dissonance (1957) and social comparison (1954) — and then, in his forties, walked away from social psychology entirely to work on visual perception and eventually on archaeology. He is one of the few major figures in the field whose obituary could reasonably describe him as having left it.

Early Life and Education

Festinger was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Russian Jewish immigrant parents — his father an embroidery manufacturer. He took his bachelor's degree at the City College of New York in 1939, and then went to the University of Iowa for graduate work in psychology.

Iowa at that point was the centre of American social psychology because Kurt Lewin was there. Festinger took his MA in 1940 and his doctorate in 1942 under Lewin's supervision. From Lewin he took three things that stayed: the conviction that behaviour is a function of the person and the environment together; the insistence that a psychological theory must generate testable predictions rather than classify; and the practice of doing research in real settings rather than only in the laboratory.

After his doctorate he worked as a statistician, first for the Committee on Selection and Training of Aircraft Pilots and then for the Office of Scientific Research and Development, before joining the University of Rochester in 1945 as an assistant professor.

Academic and Professional Career

Rochester: proximity, rumour, and groups

At Rochester, Festinger ran a large field study of a housing project for returning veterans, examining how friendships form. With Stanley Schachter and Kurt Back he established that physical proximity and functional distance — who you are likely to bump into — predict friendship better than shared attitudes do, which was an early and durable result in the study of interpersonal attraction.

This period also produced the rumour work: with Dorwin Cartwright and others, and in his 1950 paper "Informal Social Communication", he argued that rumour is not mere distortion but a collective attempt to make sense of an ambiguous situation, and that it spreads most when the situation is important and ambiguous.

Minnesota and Michigan: the theory years

Festinger moved to the University of Minnesota in 1948 and then to the University of Michigan in 1951, where the Research Center for Group Dynamics had relocated after Lewin's death in 1947.

These are the years in which both theories were built. The social comparison paper appeared in 1954. The dissonance work began at Minnesota in 1951, was interrupted by the doomsday-cult study, and produced A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance in 1957.

When Prophecy Fails (1956), written with Henry Riecken and Stanley Schachter, was the strangest project of his career and the most revealing. Festinger read a newspaper story about a woman, Dorothy Martin of Lake City, Minnesota, who claimed to be receiving messages from superior beings predicting that a flood would destroy the continent on 21 December 1954. He and his collaborators put paid observers inside the group to record what happened when the prophecy failed. What they observed was that the most committed members did not abandon the belief — they intensified their proselytising. The book argues that disconfirmed belief can increase conviction, but only under specific conditions: the belief must be held with conviction, the holder must have acted on it irreversibly, the disconfirmation must be undeniable, and the believer must have social support for the new interpretation.

Stanford, and the exit

Festinger went to Stanford in 1955 and stayed until 1968, and this is where the dissonance programme was completed. The famous forced-compliance experiment, with his graduate student James Carlsmith, was published in 1959: participants performed a genuinely tedious task of turning pegs, then were paid either $1 or $20 to tell the next participant that the task had been interesting. Asked afterward how much they had actually enjoyed it, the participants paid $1 rated the task as more enjoyable than those paid $20.

The logic is the point. Someone paid $20 has an obvious external justification for having lied, so there is no dissonance and no need to change their mind. Someone paid $1 has almost no justification for having lied, so the dissonance must be reduced by concluding that the task really was somewhat interesting. Less incentive produces more attitude change, because the discomfort has to come from somewhere.

In 1968 Festinger left California and Stanford and returned to New York, taking a position at the New School for Social Research. He had become convinced that social psychology could not be made experimental in the way the natural sciences are, and he abandoned the field. He moved first to the study of visual perception and eye movements, and then, in his last decade, to archaeology and the question of how human institutions developed — the subject of The Human Legacy (1983). He died of cancer in New York City on 11 February 1989.

Major Contributions to Psychology

Cognitive dissonance theory

The theory's formal claim is that two cognitions are dissonant when one follows from the opposite of the other, and that the magnitude of the dissonance depends on the proportion of relevant cognitions that are dissonant, weighted by their importance. The state is aversive, it arouses the person, and it motivates reduction by one of three routes: change one of the cognitions, add new consonant cognitions, or reduce the importance of the conflict.

The phenomena it was built to explain, and which it does explain well:

Forced compliance — the $1/$20 result; doing something counter-attitudinal with minimal justification changes the attitude
Post-decision dissonance — after a difficult choice, people rate the chosen option higher and the rejected option lower; the gap spreads. This is the "sour grapes" case and it has been demonstrated in consumer choice, voting and medical decisions
Effort justification — undergoing something aversive to join a group makes the group more attractive afterwards; the classic Aronson and Mills study of initiation severity
Insufficient punishment — mild threats against a desired activity produce less subsequent interest in it than severe threats do, because the mild threat leaves no external reason for not having done it
Selective exposure — the prediction that people avoid information that would increase dissonance, which is the least reliably supported of the classic predictions

The theory's influence extends past social psychology into attitudes and persuasion, health behaviour — dissonance-based interventions are among the more effective approaches to smoking cessation and disordered eating — and into the design of commitment devices generally.

Published in 1954, this is the second of his two theories and it is often confused with social identity theory, which is a different and later body of work by Tajfel and Turner. Festinger's theory makes a narrow and specific claim:

Human beings have a drive to evaluate their own opinions and abilities
Where objective standards are unavailable, they evaluate them by comparison with other people
They preferentially compare with people similar to themselves
For abilities, there is a unidirectional drive upward — people want to be better, and comparison is with those slightly better

The theory's reach has grown rather than shrunk. It is the framework used for research on social comparison in organisations, on the effects of social media on self-evaluation, on upward and downward comparison in chronic illness, and on the psychology of relative income. See Self-Concept.

Method: the counter-intuitive prediction

Festinger's methodological legacy matters more than any single finding. Social psychology before him was largely correlational and descriptive. He insisted that a theory must generate predictions that no one would believe in advance — that a theory which only predicts what everyone already expects is worthless. The $1/$20 result is the model: no one would have guessed it, the experiment confirmed it, and that structure made the theory hard to dismiss. That standard became the norm in the field.

Major Publications

"Informal Social Communication" (1950) — rumour as collective sense-making
"A Theory of Social Comparison Processes" (1954, Human Relations) — the comparison theory
When Prophecy Fails (1956, with Henry Riecken and Stanley Schachter) — the doomsday cult study
A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (1957) — the systematic statement
"Cognitive Consequences of Forced Compliance" (1959, with James Carlsmith) — the $1/$20 experiment
Conflict, Decision, and Dissonance (1964, edited) — the extensions
The Human Legacy (1983) — his late work on human origins and institutions

Impact and Legacy

Cognitive dissonance is one of the two or three most productive ideas in the history of social psychology — along with Milgram's obedience and Asch's conformity — and unlike those two it has a substantial and generally successful replication record. The induced-compliance paradigm, post-decision spreading, and effort justification have all held up.

Festinger's larger effect was on what social psychology thought it was doing. He and his students — Stanley Schachter, Elliot Aronson, Leon Festinger's generation at Minnesota, Michigan and Stanford — established the experiment as the field's instrument and the counter-intuitive prediction as its standard. Aronson, who is generally reckoned Festinger's most important student, has said that the appeal was that the theory made you feel you had been made a fool of by your own mind and could prove it.

His departure from the field in 1968 remains the most puzzling fact about him. He gave no published explanation, wrote to colleagues that he thought social psychology could not be made rigorous, and spent the rest of his career elsewhere.

Criticism

Self-perception theory is the serious competitor. Daryl Bem argued in 1967 that no aversive drive is needed: people infer their attitudes from observing their own behaviour, much as an outside observer would, particularly when internal cues are weak. Bem could account for the $1/$20 result without dissonance. The debate was largely resolved by Fazio, Zanna and Cooper (1977), who showed that the two accounts apply in different ranges — self-perception handles behaviour that is only mildly counter-attitudinal, dissonance handles behaviour that is clearly so and produces genuine physiological arousal. Both are partly right, and the resolution left dissonance intact as an account of the strong cases.

The theory is hard to falsify as stated. "Cognition" is defined loosely; the magnitude of dissonance is difficult to measure independently of the attitude change it is supposed to predict, which makes circularity hard to rule out; and because almost any outcome can be accommodated by positing additional consonant cognitions, critics from the 1960s onward argued that the theory was better at explaining results after the fact than at predicting them in advance. Later revisions — Aronson's self-consistency version, in which dissonance arises from inconsistency with the self-concept rather than between any two cognitions, and Cooper and Fazio's "new look" requirement that the person must feel responsible for an aversive consequence — were responses to exactly this looseness, and they narrowed the theory in order to save it.

Steele's self-affirmation theory reframes the mechanism. Claude Steele argued that what drives the effects is not inconsistency but threat to self-integrity, and that the effects disappear if people are given an opportunity to affirm the self in some unrelated domain. That is difficult to reconcile with a purely consistency-based account.

When Prophecy Fails is a case study, not a test. Three observers infiltrated a small group, the sample was tiny, there was no control, and the observers were not blind to the hypothesis. It is a classic of observational social psychology and it is not evidence for the theory in the way the laboratory experiments are.

And the consistency motive may not be universal. Cross-cultural work, notably by Steven Heine and Shinobu Kitayama, found that East Asian samples sometimes show reduced or reversed dissonance effects — for example, showing more dissonance reduction when the choice is framed in terms of someone else's preference. The finding suggests that the drive for internal consistency is stronger in cultural contexts that emphasise the independent self, and that dissonance theory describes a motivation that is at least partly culturally produced rather than a universal drive.

Associated Figures

Kurt Lewin — his doctoral supervisor and the dominant intellectual influence on him
Stanley Schachter — his collaborator on the housing study and When Prophecy Fails, and later the originator of the two-factor theory of emotion
James Carlsmith — his graduate student and co-author of the forced-compliance experiment
Elliot Aronson — his most influential student, who reframed dissonance as inconsistency with the self-concept rather than between any two cognitions
Daryl Bem — whose self-perception theory is the main competing account
Fritz Heider — whose balance theory was the predecessor that dissonance displaced