Cognitive Constraints: Consistency Motives

Nisbett and Wilson, in their 1977 article, explore the discrepancy between the explanations that psychologists give for participant behavior and the explanations that participants themselves give.  For example, in a standard cognitive dissonance experiment participants adjust their attitudes in line with their recent behaviors but tend to be unaware that they have done so.  I don’t know to what degree this effect would vary depending on attitude strength.   In any case, the standard psychological explanation, based on a program of research involving multiple researchers and myriad experiments, is that participants, faced with behavior that is discordant with their previous attitudes, change their attitudes.  By changing their attitudes participants resolve this discord.  If participants can attribute their behavior to an experimental manipulation—i.e. the experimenter makes them do it—they will tend not to experience attitude change.  Attitude change, in other words, seems to arise as a self-focused process, a way of squaring the sense of self with the actions of that self. 

Unfortunately, as Nisbett and Wilson illustrate using Goethals and Reckman’s conceptually-related 1973 experiment on attitudes towards bussing in pursuit of school integration, participants rarely report being aware of this change.  Reviewing the original article, the pro- and anti-bussing participants were, on average, equally confident in their attitudes.  Both groups of participants changed their attitudes in the direction of the opposite position and, when asked, both groups of participants tended to underestimate the extremity of their previous support or opposition.  All of the participants were high school students and the article supplies no data on the personal relevancy of this issue to these students.  Whatever the initial strength of these attitudes, this experiment, among many others, is interesting because the recall of past attitudes is biased by present attitudes. What could explain this bias?

It is likely that these attitude-behavior consistency and, perhaps, self-concept consistency motives operate implicitly.  The existence of implicit goals is well-established.  They can be primed (Bargh & Chartrand, 2000) and they can shield a participant from undesirable conscious experiences, such as being or acting prejudiced (Moskowitz & Li, 2011).  It is also likely that these implicit processes could operate independently of lay theories of the self and motivation, unless a conscious effort is made to act in accordance with these theories.   Given that teasing apart these implicit processes has taken thousands of man-hours of controlled-laboratory experiments on the part of psychologists, it is not surprising that lay theories do not always incorporate specific analogs to what we, as psychologists, believe is really going on. 

Beyond this distinction, however, as Cohen discussed in his 2003 article, citing among others Pronin, Lin, and Ross’s research on bias blindspots, people are more consistent and more objective when judging others than when judging themselves.   Even if psychologists were to introduce implicit processes into lay epistemology, as has, of course, occurred to a certain degree, those very processes may disrupt the accurate application of the epistemology when a person is judging himself.   

However, it is still, to my knowledge, an open empirical question as to whether these implicit motives could be manipulated in the laboratory, through self-regulation, or through larger, natural-experiment-type patterns of cultural regulation.