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How We Respond To Imagine you’re at a party and you overhear a colleague praising a new measure, and you’re dumbfounded, as you’ve heard her deriding it in private. Then you see that your colleague is actually addressing the creator of the new scale. You now understand, empathizing with your colleague’s discomforting position. However, research shows that you, having witnessed this behavior, may also change your attitudes toward the measure. Princeton University Professor Joel Cooper, along with Michael Norton of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Benoit Monin of Stanford University and Michael Hogg of University of Queensland, studied how witnessing inconsistent behavior affects a person’s attitudes. Their paper, “Vicarious Dissonance: Attitude Change From the Inconsistency of Others,” was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (2003, Vol 85). The researchers found in three separate studies that vicarious dissonance – a kind of vicarious unease resulting from imagining oneself in the speaker’s position – led to people changing their attitudes to accommodate the inconsistent behavior. Importantly, the studies showed that this was true only when observers were connected to the speaker through joint membership in a group with which they identify. The researchers note the positive side of this behavior. “The tendency to adopt automatically the perspective of members of important groups,” they conclude, “may be a means of staying attuned to changing group norms, and may result in greater consonance within groups.” The study was based on 201 student participants
from Princeton University and University of Queensland, in Brisbane,
Australia. Participants listened to or engaged in various scenarios
involving counterattitudinal behavior among actors, under the guise
that the research had to do with linguistics. Questionnaires recorded
their attitudes after the session.
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