Thinking and Deciding

DETERMINANTS AND RELATED PHENOMENA 217
believe that they had written the essay for a good reason. Because they did not do it
for the money, they apparently convinced themselves that they had done it because
they really agreed with the position more than they initially thought.
In another classic study, Festinger and Carlsmith (1959) induced subjects to participate
in a psychology experiment that they deliberately made boring and tedious.
After the experiment, each subject was asked to convince the next subject (actually
a confederate) that the experiment was interesting and fun. Half of the subjects were
paid $1 for their participation in the experiment; the other half were paid $20. After
this, the subjects were interviewed about their true opinion of the experiment. The
group paid $1 had a more favorable opinion of the experiment.
Festinger (1962) explains these results as a process of “reduction in cognitive
dissonance.” When the choice is difficult, the reasons for one decision are “dissonant”
with the reasons for the other, and the dissonance can be reduced by playing
down the reasons for the choice not made or inventing reasons for the choice made
(for example, that the dull experiment was really interesting).
Surely we try to eliminate conflict among our beliefs. Most of our attempts to do
this, however, are completely rational. When we find evidence against a belief that
we favor, for example, we often reduce the strength of the belief, so as to “reduce the
dissonance.” These experiments, however, seem to show some sort of irrationality.
What is irrational here? The idea of “dissonance reduction” does not by itself seem
to capture it.
The reason for this sort of postdecisional change could be that people like to
believe that they are “good” decision makers — both morally good and intelligent.
They change their beliefs about their reasons for having made a decision so that their
beliefs fit their desire that they be good in these ways. When they write an essay
opposing their real view for only a small amount of pay, it is easiest to justify that
decision (a bad financial deal) by thinking that they truly have some sympathy for
that position. Likewise, they may justify doing a boring task for a small amount of
pay by thinking that they actually liked the task. Similarly, when they make a difficult
decision between two choices, they may later have doubts about whether they made
the best decision unless, in retrospect, they see the decision as not so difficult at all;
they therefore play down the value of the rejected choice. These experiments seem
to illustrate a form of wishful thinking, where the “wish” is the desire to have been
a good decision maker, and the beliefs that are affected are those about reasons for
having made a decision.
A number of experiments support this view. Cooper (1971), for example, found
that the effect of past decisions on beliefs was larger when the outcome of the decision
could be foreseen than when it could not. The decision in question involved
agreeing to work with another subject (a confederate) in a task in which the amount
of payment depended on the performance of both subjects. In order to receive high
payment, both subjects had to solve aptitude test problems and, after doing each
problem, indicate accurately whether they had answered it correctly or not. The subject
was told that her partner was either “too timid to publicly state that she had [the
problem] correct” or else was “a little too sure of herself.” In fact, the partner did