This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Little is actually known about the nature and characteristics of the cognitive dissonance state. In this paper, we review the actual knowledge and the main limitations of past studies. Then, we present two studies that investigate the characteristics of the cognitive dissonance state from the perspective the Pleasure Arousal Dominance model of emotion. Study 1 (N = 102) used the hypocrisy paradigm and Study 2 (N = 130) used a counterattitudinal essay. In Study 1, participants in the Dissonance condition reported less Pleasure with each inconsistent behaviour remembered. In Study 2, participants in the Dissonance condition reported less Pleasure than participants in the Control Condition. In both studies, no significant difference was found on the Arousal and Dominance indexes. These results are among the first to link cognitive dissonance to a general model of emotions, an approach that should be pursued further.
Keywords: cognitive dissonance, emotion, Pleasure Arousal Dominance model, affect, hypocrisy, counter-attitudinal
Cognitive Dissonance Theory (Festinger, 1957) proposes that individuals experience psychological discomfort when they are confronted with inconsistent cognitions. This psychological discomfort is more generally considered to be a state of aversive arousal that can be referred as a cognitive dissonance state (CDS). For many scholars, the CDS is the core of the theory and its central process: this psychological discomfort mediates the consequences of the inconsistency exposure (Elliot & Devine, 1994; Devine, Tauer, Barron, Elliot, & Vance, 1999; Festinger, 1957; McGrath, 2017; Vaidis & Bran, 2018). Just as hunger is an aversive state driving animals to find food in order to reduce their discomfort, the CDS is considered to be an aversive state that drives humans to resolve inconsistency in order to reduce the state. However, despite its central role in the theory, the CDS has received limited consideration in the literature. Little is empirically known about its nature and characteristics and, as we will discuss below, the field may be lacking a reliable instrument to assess the CDS (Vaidis & Bran, 2019). In this vein, the current research aims to expand knowledge of the characteristics of the CDS using the framework of the Pleasure Arousal Dominance model (Mehrabian & Russell, 1974).
The CDS has been described as a state of psychological discomfort (Festinger, 1957; Elliot & Devine, 1994), a state of tension (Croyle & Cooper, 1983, Kruglanski & Shteynberg, 2012), an unpleasant feeling (Harmon-Jones, 2000a) or a state of aversive arousal (Proulx, Inzlicht, & Harmon-Jones, 2012). Most of these descriptions integrate two distinct components: arousal and negative valence. In the following sections, we review the empirical evidence linking the CDS to these two components.
The literature provides many clues that cognitive dissonance involves physiological arousal. For instance, writing a counterattitudinal essay is the predominant task used to generate an inconsistency between an attitude and a behaviour, and studies found elevated galvanic skin responses (GSR) during and after the writing of such essays (Croyle & Cooper, 1983; Elkin & Leippe, 1986; Harmon-Jones, Brehm, Greenberg, Simon & Nelson, 1996; Losch & Cacioppo, 1990). The free-choice paradigm and receiving feedback contrary to expectations are two other paradigms that have been associated with elevated heart rate (Etgen & Rosen, 1993; Gerard, 1967; Mann, Janis & Chaplin, 1969). Examinations of neuronal activity have shown a lower level of alpha waves when doing an unpleasant task without enough justification (McMillen & Geiselman, 1974) as well as the involvement of specific brain areas such as the anterior cingulate cortex during cognitive dissonance studies involving counterattitudinal tasks or the free-choice paradigm (for review, see Izuma & Murayama, 2019). Finally, other evidence of cognitive dissonance arousal involves the increased activity of the corrugator supercilii muscles during a counterattitudinal essay setting (Martinie, Olive, Milland, Joule, & Capa, 2013) and pupil dilation when exposed to perceptual inconsistencies (Proulx, Sleegers, & Tritt, 2017; Sleegers, Proulx, & van Beest, 2015).
Given the amount of evidence, it seems indisputable that cognitive dissonance is associated with elevated arousal. However, some deviations across these results should be noted: contrary to the results in the free-choice paradigm, studies involving writing counterattitudinal essays have not found an elevation in heart rate (Croyle & Cooper, 1983); similarly, contrary to the results for the counterattitudinal essay paradigm, studies utilizing unexpected feedback have not found an elevation in GSR (Etgen & Rosen, 1993). These discrepancies are also noticeable in neuronal studies. Although most studies report an activation of the anterior cingulate cortex in dissonance situations, this finding is not ubiquitous, and other discrepancies in activated areas can be seen between studies (for a review, see de Vries, Byrne, & Keho, 2015). Especially, two studies using the free-choice paradigm have not found the same activation pattern, and it is not clear if these differences are due to methodological or theoretical variations (Jarcho et al., 2010; Qin et al., 2011). Moreover, recent general criticisms of neuronal studies questioned the precision of neuronal results and it is likely that many variations between paradigms are currently missed (see Hong, Yoo, Wager, & Woo, 2019). Given these deviations, it is not clear if the elicited arousal is exactly the same or if its nature differs depending on the dissonance paradigms. Unfortunately, there is no study to our knowledge that has compared the nature of the arousal elicited by different cognitive dissonance paradigms.
While most scholars agree on the notion that the CDS is aversive, this assumption has remained untested for a long time (Devine et al., 1999). Early studies on the valence of dissonance arousal mainly used the misattribution paradigm (Zanna & Cooper, 1974). In this paradigm, a plausible explanation is offered to participants to justify their discomfort. For instance, in their seminal paper, Zanna and Cooper’s participants had to ingest a placebo pill that allegedly induced a negative mood. Because of this belief, participants in the dissonance condition were inclined to misattribute their psychological discomfort to the pill instead of the inconsistency, and thus they did not show any use of an inconsistency reduction strategy. Studies using the misattribution paradigm have repeatedly shown that the CDS could be misattributed to other sources of aversive affect such as drugs (Higgins, Rhodewalt & Zanna, 1979; Zanna, Higgins, & Taves, 1976), fear of electric shock (Pittman, 1975), room lighting (Cooper, 1998) or prism goggles (Losch & Cacioppo, 1990), but also to positive sources such as cartoons (Cooper, Fazio & Rhodewalt, 1978), pleasant pictures (Drachman & Worchel, 1976) or comedy routines (Kidd & Berkowitz, 1975). If the CDS is a negative state, it is difficult to understand how individuals can misattribute it to a positive source. Incidentally, this discovery has motivated the conceptualization of the New Look Model (Cooper & Fazio, 1984) which defines cognitive dissonance as a state of neutral physiological arousal that may later be labelled positively or negatively (see also Schachter & Singer, 1962). While some data provided support for this conceptualization (e.g., Martinie et al., 2013), most scholars still consider the dissonance state to be aversive per nature.
Aside from the misattribution paradigm, the most popular method to study the CDS is the use of self-report scales. Studies have repeatedly shown that a negative affect was induced by a variety of cognitive dissonance paradigms, such as the classic counterattitudinal task paradigm (Cancino-Montecinos, Björklund, & Lindholm, 2018; Elliot & Devine, 1994; Harmon-Jones, 2000a; Galinsky, Stone, & Cooper, 2000; Shaffer, 1975), being reminded of self-transgressions concerning advocated behaviours (Pelt & Fointiat, 2018; Priolo et al., 2016; Yousaf & Gobet, 2013), being exposed to information inconsistent with beliefs (Russell & Jones, 1980; Vaidis & Gosling, 2011), being in disagreement with others (Matz & Wood, 2005), and seeing someone performing a counterattitudinal behaviour (i.e., vicarious dissonance; Norton, Monin, Cooper, & Hogg, 2003; Monin, Norton, Cooper, & Hogg, 2004). Most scholars using self-report scales consider that the CDS is not felt as a general negative affect but is rather experienced as a specific psychological discomfort (Elliot & Devine, 1994).
Apart from the misattribution paradigm and self-report scales, further evidence of the aversive nature of the CDS involves the activation of facial areas related to negative emotions while writing a counterattitudinal essay (Martinie et al., 2013). Overall, these results seem to show that cognitive dissonance is associated with negative affect, and most cognitive dissonance scholars conclude so. However, we believe that there are a number of important limitations to these studies.
We are mainly concerned with three limitations that call into question the validity of the studies reviewed above as evidence of the aversive nature of dissonance. First, it is unclear if the emotion captured in these studies is really the theorized CDS or a confound with other negative emotions. This is especially the case when the assessment is only based on measures that cannot assess a specific state, such as facial activity or the “calm-tense” item used by Zanna and Cooper (1974). This is problematic because many cognitive dissonance paradigms are likely to induce negative emotions other than the CDS. For instance, paradigms that potentially highlight inconsistencies with the self, such as the induced hypocrisy paradigm or counter-attitudinal tasks, are likely to induce guilt or shame in the participants (Elliot & Devine, 1994; Kenworthy et al., 2011; Stice, 1992; Yousaf & Gobet, 2013). Consequently, when reviewing the main cognitive dissonance paradigms, Kenworthy et al. (2011) conclude that guilt could be the most important mediator of common cognitive dissonance effects. Depending on the paradigms used, anger and surprise are two other emotions that are likely to be confounded with cognitive dissonance (Geschwender, 1967; Noordewier & Breugelmans, 2013). Some scholars would probably disregard this point by considering that guilt or anger are forms of the CDS (Geschwender, 1967; Stice, 1992); however, most seem to consider the CDS to be a specific state, distinct from these other emotions (Elliot & Devine, 1994; Kenworthy et al., 2011). While this particular debate is beyond the scope of this article, we invite consideration of the question. If the CDS is a specific state, then instruments should allow the CDS to be distinguished from other negative emotions.
A second limitation of previous studies is that there is very little evidence supporting the view that the assessed negative affect is the same across all paradigms. Most studies have focused on a restricted set of cognitive dissonance paradigms, especially on the counterattitudinal paradigm. In comparison, some other paradigms, such as the free-choice or the effort justification paradigms, have very few measures of the level of psychological discomfort they induce. This amounts to many data supporting the idea that writing a counterattitudinal essay evokes negative affect, but scarce evidence that the other paradigms induce the same negative affect. Actually, it seems likely that different inconsistencies would elicit different affective states, for instance depending on whether they involve self-relevant cognitions (Elliot & Devine, 1994) or positive outcomes for the individual (Gawronsky & Branon, 2019; Kruglanski & Shteynberg, 2012). As presented above, studies assessing arousal are unclear regarding whether the different cognitive dissonance paradigms elicit the same sort of arousal. Therefore, it is still to be determined if there exists a common CDS across these paradigms.
The third limitation is that there are few studies using reliable measures of the CDS. As we wrote above, instruments that focus on general feelings or emotions may in fact capture other emotions. As most cognitive dissonance paradigms are likely to induce other emotions, it may be more pertinent to distinctively assess the nature of the psychological discomfort involved in the CDS. In this regard, the Dissonance Thermometer (Devine et al., 1999; Elliot & Devine, 1994) is the most common means to assess CDS. In its original form, it is a 18 item self-report affective scale that computes a specific CDS index on the basis of how much people report feeling uncomfortable, uneasy and bothered. Today, most studies assessing the CDS rely on this instrument. However, despite its popularity, this scale seems to present several flaws. The few studies that have reported its factorial structure have found irregularities (Elliot & Devine, 1994; Gosling, Denizeau, & Oberlé, 2006; Matz & Wood, 2005), although part of this may be due to different choices of factor analysis such as the applied rotation. The scale indexes have presented an insufficient homogeneity several times (Harmon-Jones, 2000a; Priolo et al., 2016), and their inter-correlations fluctuate (Elliot & Devine, 1994; Galinsky et al., 2000; Matz & Wood 2005). Sometimes the cognitive dissonance induction has no significant effect on the identified discomfort index but affects the negative-self index (Gosling et al., 2006). Moreover, the discomfort index may also lack sensitivity, as its scores are usually very close to the lowest possible value, indicating a likely floor effect.
Perhaps due to these psychometric issues, the Dissonance Thermometer is also not used in a standardized way. The discomfort index is often assessed separately from the rest of the scale (Harmon-Jones, 2000b; Galinski, et al., 2000; Monin et al., 2004; Norton et al., 2003; Vaidis & Gosling, 2011), or measured with different instructions and methods of scoring (Harmon-Jones, 2000b; Monin et al., 2004; Norton et al., 2003; Vaidis & Gosling, 2011), and some researchers alter the index by using only some of the original items (Holland, Meertens & Van Vugt, 2002) or by combining it with other items (Jordens & Van Overwalle, 2005; Matz & Wood, 2005; Pelt & Fointiat, 2018; Priolo et al., 2016). This lack of standardization impairs the comparability of the results and limits their interpretation. For instance, could the affect assessed with Elliot and Devine’s three items (1994; uneasy, uncomfortable and bothered) and Matz and Wood’s five items (2005; uneasy, uncomfortable, bothered, tense and concerned) be considered the same? The Dissonance Thermometer has been initially used to support the claim that CDS is experienced as a specific psychological discomfort instead of a general negative affect (Elliot & Devine, 1994). However, all the variations we have seen could actually be interpreted as evidence for a general and unspecified negative affect.
In our opinion, developing an instrument assessing a specific affect, such as the CDS, requires understanding the precise nature and characteristics of this affect. However, the characteristics of the CDS are not well-understood today, aside from a general consensus that it should involve a form of negative arousal. For the purpose of developing a relevant instrument, we believe that there is much to gain from taking a step back and examining the characteristics of the CDS in a more global framework. While cognitive dissonance theory has rarely been linked to psychological models of emotions, these models can be used to better describe the nature of the CDS. Indeed, decades of research have investigated the nature and structure of human emotions, and it seems senseless to ignore this work in the examination of the CDS. In the following studies, we use the framework of the Pleasure Arousal Dominance model of emotion (Bakker, van der Voordt, Vink, & de Boon, 2014; Mehrabian & Russell, 1974) to investigate the characteristics of the CDS across two cognitive dissonance paradigms.
The Pleasure Arousal Dominance (PAD) model was conceptualized by Mehrabian and Russell (1974) to understand the characteristics of internal emotional states, and is often used to measure the impact of stimuli or environmental features on affective states (e.g., Bradley & Lang, 2000; Lang, Bradley, & Cuthbert, 2008). For instance, it has been used to categorize the emotions induced by the pictures from the International Affective Picture System (Lang et al., 2008), as well as in a vast array of research including neuropsychology, computer science, marketing research and environmental psychology (see Bakker et al., 2014).
The PAD model proposes a categorization of emotions on three independent dimensions: pleasure, arousal and dominance. Pleasure refers to the general positive and negative feelings experienced, arousal refers to the level of alertness and physical activity, and dominance refers to the feelings of control, non-restriction and autonomy. This three-dimensional structure allows comparing the characteristics of different emotional states. For instance, anger is reported as an unpleasant, aroused and moderately dominant emotion, while boredom is reported as a slightly unpleasant, unaroused and mostly non-dominant emotion (Mehrabian, 1980). Compared to the dissonance thermometer, using the PAD model may give us additional information about the characteristics of the CDS. The dimensions of pleasure and arousal may adequately capture its supposed “aversive arousal” nature. For its part, the dimension of dominance may be an interesting exploratory measure given that the CDS has similar properties to anger and is linked to an action motivation that may increase feelings of dominance (Harmon-Jones, 2000a, 2004; Harmon-Jones & Harmon-Jones, 2019; Jonas et al., 2014). However, it is also often linked to negative emotions such as guilt or shame (Kenworthy et al., 2011; Stice, 1992) that may reduce feelings of dominance. Therefore the PAD model could help in identifying the characteristics of the CDS and its distinctiveness in comparison to other emotions. In turn, knowing the characteristics of the CDS will facilitate the development of a specific measure instrument for its assessment.
Two main instruments have been developed to assess emotions using the PAD model. The first one is the PAD scale developed by Mehrabian and Russell (1974). With this scale, each of the three dimensions is measured with six bipolar items. Participants rate their affective state using pairs of items such as ‘annoyed-pleased,’ ‘relaxed-stimulated,’ or ‘controlled-controlling.’ The second instrument is the Self-Assessment Manikin scale (SAM, Bradley & Lang, 1994), a non-verbal scale that uses humanoid figures with various expressions to represent the dimensions. When used together, both the PAD scale and the SAM tend to show similar results (Bradley & Lang, 1994). To our knowledge, cognitive dissonance theory has rarely been linked with general models of emotion before, and never with the PAD model. Yet, this model appears to be a relevant framework to examine the characteristics of the CDS.
In the two studies presented below, we aimed to investigate the characteristics of the CDS by using the PAD model of emotion. We used two of the most popular paradigms in the field: the hypocrisy paradigm (Study 1) and the counterattitudinal essay paradigm (Study 2). Our main hypotheses were that in cognitive dissonance conditions, participants would report lower scores on the Pleasure index and higher scores on the Arousal index compared to the control conditions. We did not have specific expectancies for the Dominance index. Both studies were pre-registered following recommendations from van’t Veer and Giner-Sorolla’s (2016) with exact procedure, specific predictions and analysis plan. Pre-registrations, materials and data are available on Open Science Framework (Study 1: https://osf.io/q45r6; Study 2: https://osf.io/hu25f).
Because, to our knowledge, no previous study has ever assessed the CDS using the PAD scale, we chose to use the sample size recommended for achieving a .80 power to detect a medium effect size (d = 0.5) with a one-tailed t-test, that is, a sample size of 102 participants. We recruited 102 students in a French university in exchange for course credit. All participants were welcomed individually into a lab room by a male experimenter for a study presented as a combination of several psychology studies. Participants were randomly assigned to one of the two conditions of a between-participant experimental design (Hypocrisy vs. Control).
The hypocrisy paradigm consists of inducing participants to support a norm and then remembering instances of their behaviours that violated the norm (Aronson, 1992; Priolo et al., 2019). In our study, participants were first presented with a list of seven anonymous quotations aiming to increase public concern about the protection of the environment and allegedly coming from public personalities. This procedure was intended to increase the salience of the environmental protection norm (Stone & Fernandez, 2008). Participants were then instructed to write a short essay in favour of the protection of the environment. It was mentioned that their essay could be as long as they wished and that they could inspire themselves with the provided list of quotations if needed. Participants had no time limit to write their essay and it was emphasized that the content of their essay was the main focus of the research.
Once they finished their essay, participants had to complete a recall task in 2 steps. In the Hypocrisy condition, participants were first asked to take some time to privately remember all their behaviours of the last month that may have been harmful (vs. beneficial in the Control condition) to the environment. In a second step, they were shown a list of seven specific harmful behaviours concerning the environment and had to mark the ones they personally did in the last month (e.g., “Using a car for a short trip”). In the Control condition, the first step was to remember behaviour that had a positive impact on the environment and the recall task consisted of listing positive behaviours (e.g., “Not using a car for a short trip despite having the opportunity”). To ensure that participants remembered specific occurrences, we asked them to precisely state the spatial and temporal context in which each behaviour occurred. The combination of environmental protection norm salience and the recall of environmentally harmful behaviours should induce cognitive dissonance (Priolo et al., 2016).
Right after the recall phase, participants completed the French validated version of the PAD scale (Detandt, Leys, & Bazan, 2017). This self-report scale is composed of 18 items that assess three main dimensions: Pleasure, Arousal and Dominance. Participants are asked to report how they feel at that moment on a 9-point bipolar scale from –4 (e.g., pleased) to +4 (e.g., annoyed). After the affect measures, participants completed two exploratory tasks, were debriefed and thanked.
It was hypothesized that participants in the Hypocrisy condition would experience less Pleasure and more Arousal than participants in the Control condition. No hypothesis was made for the Dominance index.
The PAD scale presented adequate internal consistency on the Pleasure (α = .81), Arousal (α = .74) and Dominance (α = .76) indexes.
A one-way MANOVA showed a marginally significant main effect of the experimental conditions on the PAD scale: F(3, 99) = 2.58, p = .06, Wilk’s Λ = 0.93, partial η 2 = .07, d = 0.56; with notably less positive affect and more arousal. Sensitivity analyses show that we achieved a .64 power to detect such effect size. Univariate analyses did not confirm significant differences for the three components: Pleasure (F(1, 100) = 0.89; p = .35), Arousal (F(1, 100) = 1.61; p = .21) and Dominance (F(1, 100) = 1.56; p = .22) (see Table Table1 1 ).
Means Comparisons Across Dependent Variables of Study 1.
| Variable | Hypocrisy | Control | 95% CI of difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pleasure | 1.98 (0.99) | 2.19 (1.22) | [–0.65; 0.23] |
| Arousal | 1.31 (1.21) | 1.02 (1.13) | [–0.16; 0.75] |
| Dominance | 1.19 (1.16) | 1.45 (0.95) | [–0.68; 0.16] |