Rationalization and Cognitive Dissonance: Do Choices Affect or Reflect Preferences?

Cognitive dissonance is one of the most influential theories in social psychology, and its oldest experiential realization is choice-induced dissonance. Since 1956, dissonance theorists have claimed that people rationalize past choices by devaluing rejected alternatives and upgrading chosen ones, an effect known as the spreading of preferences. Here, I show that every study which has tested this suffers from a fundamental methodological flaw. Specifically, these studies (and the free-choice methodology they employ) implicitly assume that before choices are made, a subject’s preferences can be measured perfectly, i.e. with infinite precision, and under-appreciate that a subject’s choices reflect their preferences. Because of this, existing methods will mistakenly identify cognitive dissonance when there is none. This problem survives all controls present in the literature, including control groups, high and low dissonance conditions, and comparisons of dissonance across cultures or affirmation levels. The bias this problem produces can be fixed, and correctly interpreted several prominent studies actually reject the presence of choice-induced dissonance in their subjects. This suggests that mere choice may not be enough to induce rationalization, a reversal that may significantly change the way we think about cognitive dissonance as a whole. * School of Management and Cowles Foundation, Yale University, New Haven, CT, 06511, USA. I would like to thank Dan Benjamin, Steven Berry, Paul Bloom, Judith Chevalier, Louisa Egan, Matthew Gentzkow, Philip Haile, Emir Kamenica, Edward Kaplan, Ulrike Muench, Emily Oster, Laurie Santos, Ryan Takasugi, Paul Tetlock, seminar participants at Cornell, and especially Daniel Gilbert, Barry Nalebuff, Benjamin Polak, Jane Risen and Jesse Shapiro for invaluable discussions during the writing of this paper. Comments are welcome at [email protected] or at 135 Prospect St., Box 208200, New Haven, CT 06520.