Forced compliance: Commitment to compliance and commitment to activity

It is argued that the standard manipulation of free choice in a forced compliance situation has fostered confusion between the two different types of choices offered to subjects, namely commitment or non‐commitment to compliance with the experimenter and choice of counter‐attitudinal activity per se...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:European journal of social psychology 1995-01, Vol.25 (1), p.17-26
Main Authors: Beauvois, Jean-Léon, Bungert, Marc, Mariette, Pascale
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Biological and medical sciences
Compliance
Decision making
Decision theory
Forced
France
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Motivation
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Public choice
Social interactions. Communication. Group processes
Social psychology
Subjects
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:It is argued that the standard manipulation of free choice in a forced compliance situation has fostered confusion between the two different types of choices offered to subjects, namely commitment or non‐commitment to compliance with the experimenter and choice of counter‐attitudinal activity per se. From a theoretical viewpoint, the two choices have very different implications. The former is a prerequisite to dissonance arousal; the latter may bring about consonant cognitions which reduce the dissonance ratio. Two experiments which separated these two choices confirmed the above predictions, derived from a radical conception of the dissonance theory (Beauvois and Joule, 1981, 1994). The results are inconsistent with the reinterpretation of dissonance effects in self‐perception terms.
ISSN:0046-2772
1099-0992
DOI:10.1002/ejsp.2420250103