Misattribution of Dissonance and Behaviour-Consistent Attitude Change

Dissonance theorists have speculated that people who have misattributed dissonance arousal to an external source may come to question the appropriateness of this attribution. Moreover, they may then be motivated to alter their attitudes. The current study tested this latter notion by having an experimenter discredit the plausibility of an external source after misattribution had presumably occurred. Sixty-four female undergraduates were given a pill described as having either unpleasant side effects or no side effects. Subjects (Ss) then were committed to write counter-attitudinal essays under high-choice conditions. Some Ss were then told that a mistake had been made, and that they had actually been given the other form of the pill. As predicted, Ss who had initially been led to believe that the pill had aversive side effects but were later told that it did not, manifested behaviour-consistent attitude change.