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Monkeys and Cognitive Dissonance
Hugh Pickens writes "People deal with cognitive dissonance — the clashing of conflicting thoughts — by eliminating one of the thoughts. Psychologists have suggested we hone our skills of rationalization in order to impress others, reaffirm our "moral integrity" and protect our "self-concept" and feeling of "global self-worth." Now experimenters at Yale have demonstrated that other primates employ the same psychological mechanism. In one experiment, a monkey was observed to show an equal preference for three colors of M&M's and was given a choice between two of them. If he chose red over blue, his preference changed and he downgraded blue. When he was subsequently given a choice between blue and green, it was no longer an even contest — he was now much more likely to reject the blue. Rationalization is thought to have an evolutionary utility; once a decision has been made, second-guessing may just interfere with more important business. "We tend to think people have an explicit agenda to rewrite history to make themselves look right, but that's an outsider's perspective. This experiment shows that there isn't always much conscious thought going on," said one researcher."
As a vision scientist, I have to ask if they controlled for trichromacy vs. dichromacy? In other words, like humans, some monkeys do not see the three colors that most humans do...
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It seems like a significant portion of consciousness is creating the delusion that the conscious mind is leading the charge when most time it is the last to know. Even muscle movement can be shown to be marshalled and initiated by lower brain systems slightly before the conscious mind even thinks the thought to move.
"Man is not a rational animal. He's a rationalizing animal."
- Robert A. Heinlein
Kind thoughts do not change the world
I still think there's something to be said for the idea that people, and likely monkeys, become invested in their decisions on a less fundamental level than habit.
That would be the desire to not be wrong.....
if we make a choice, then are presented with the same choice, under the same circumstances (cravings, often based on current nutrient requirements don't count) we are prone to validate, rather than invalidate our previous choice by a very real urge to be "right"
It's called reenforcement. Like Pavlov's dog salivating.
The blue M&M was not preferred. The monkey felt bad about being given what it didn't prefer. This bad feeling became associated with the blue M&M and the monkey therefore preferred any other colour.
Reminds me of what happens when I've bought bad buggy software. After a while even if there are improvements, if you've been disappionted enough you'd rather use any other piece of software that does the same job.
In other words, for some slashdotters, Windows is the blue M&M.
What exactly is new here?
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This site is an excellent example of how people don't deal with cognitive dissonance very well. All you need to do is look at articles that paint popular companies in a slightly bad light. Rather than try to reconcile the fact that something they like did something they don't like, they just try to rationalize it away. There's always someone that leaps to the front with a carefully constructed, big-ass explanation of why this issue is overblown, or it isn't an issue at all. It is almost like they're on the payroll for said companies. In more extreme cases, the apologist may be forced to concede that the act was bad, but they can always backpedal and say, "well, at least they aren't murdering puppies all the time like this other company!" Ah, nothing like capitalizing on the popularity of moral relativism to make weak arguments.
In humans, the color blue tends to suppress the appetite (presumably because very few natural edibles are both blue and not poisonous). I'd bet the same would hold true for the monkeys. Although after eating an M&M of any color the monkey would not equate green with plants and red with blood, the colors might still have an instinctual effect on the desirability of the M&M.
This idea is simply not true. It really bugs me when I read something like this.
First of all, people can hold thoughts in cognitive dissonance for a long time, sometimes an entire lifetime without necessarily eliminating one or the other. I realize I'm opening up myself to a lot of snarky comments by saying it, but it's true nonetheless.
Secondly, cognitive growth, that is, conceptual growth, particularly in math or in other logically structured areas of thought, only comes about through the synthesis of thoughts that are otherwise held in cognitive dissonance. This is Hegel's famous thesis, antithesis, synthesis triad.
In either case, cognitive dissonance is not always resolved by rejecting one thought or the other.
Funny as hell, and it shows the author is an idiot. If you chose the yellow car that had bad gas mileage over the blue "sensible" car, than you probably weren't rating gas mileage as an important consideration. Your were probably considering the options/engine displacement as being higher on your objectives list. Different people have different preferences, which is why someone else would rate high gas mileage as more important. Now, if the cars were the exact same except for color and gas milage, than you could be said to have a sub-optimal intellect. Or neon yellow could be you favorite color and you could find blue dreadfully dull. Again, the example given has nothing to do with the study, or rather shouldn't if the study measures what it claims, which I doubt.
The thoughts I had after reading the article (yes, I did)... The thoughts we have and the decisions we make are not always initialized in the concious mind. They are running at the basic level, underneath our concious "windowing system" of thoughts. We are merely interpretting what the system is doing and displaying it in a fashion that is usable.
From what I understood the monkeys were given three different colors to eat. They had all three to choose from at the start. Surely the monkeys would have eaten from all of the colors. Only when they were forced to choose between two did they discount the value of the blue.
"Once a monkey was observed to show an equal preference for three colors of M&Ms - say, red, blue and green - he was given a choice between two of them. If he chose red over blue, his preference changed and he downgraded blue. When he was subsequently given a choice between blue and green, it was no longer an even contest - he was now much more likely to reject the blue."
I also thought about how marketing fits into this... I don't know that program/OS, therefore it must not be good.
Mike
"There's never enough time to do it right the first time, but there's always time to do it again."
Blue food barely exists in nature. There are two foods which are blue. Blue Berries and nasty French Cheese.
And how many blue berries grow in the jungle, anyway? --Of course, jungles are filled with all kinds of weird and un-cataloged beasties and plants, some of which may indeed be blue, but they could just as likely be toxic and bitter tasting. . . My point here is. . , my point. . .
Well, what I'm saying is that maybe there were other processes at work in the test subject's decision-making process. Heck, I don't even like blue smarties, and I don't have hair on my bum.
And anyway, I thought cognitive dissonance was the psychological result of believing one thing while evidence to the opposite exists right in your face. That's the more entertaining take on it, anyway. Nobody is going to throw a fit over blue M&M's. But reality versus sacred cows. . . Man, you can start wars over stuff like that! Cuz, you know, some things really are true while others really are not. Everything else is opinion. Funny how wrong people with strong opinions are generally the first to start shooting.
Say. . . Did they ever try selling boxes of all red Smarties?
I bet if they did, it flopped. Life, after all, is all about making decisions. When the decisions have all been made, you're better off dead.
-FL
This is something I notice nearly everyone does. We hate to admit we're wrong and if you do admit it, people are more prejudiced against you. If you look at it logically, it makes almost no sense because why should a previous decision or conclusion have any effect on my current conclusion at this time when I have the luxury of gathering more information on the question. Until this was pointed out to me by Nicholas Taleb in "Black Swan" and "Fooled by Randomness", I wasn't very keen to change mind after I made a decision. Taleb claims that George Soros, one of the most successful investors, have been known to change his mind from one day to the next on things that have huge financial impacts. When asked why, he supposedly answers in a very matter of fact tone that he knows more now. If only we were all so logical... Well I guess it's just hardwired into us.
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Have you ever been in a waiting room with the usual set of old magazines. None of them seems particularly interesting. Then someone comes into a room and takes a magazine and starts reading it. Suddenly that magazine becomes very interesting, you might try to read some headlines over their shoulders if you can. I am not the only person who experiences this, frequently after I put down a magazine I took at random a couple of people will reach for it.
It is just as likely that rather than the blue M&M being downgraded the green one becomes upgraded because we all want what we can't have at the moment!
I think they over-interpret their findings. I can see that they have given a reasonably reliable demonstration of the phenomenon 'cognitive dissonance' in monkeys; after all, it only means that once you've made a decision, you are likely to make the same decision again. This makes sense in the real world, of course - we make a decision, find that it works well enough, and in the future we don't need to spend time and effort on making that decision again. Otherwise we waste time that could be used on finding food, having sex and other things that promote the survival of the species.
But talking about 'moral integrity' and 'global self-worth' is far-fetched. For one thing, I can't see that it is necessary to explain it any further than I have outlined above. I think there may be reasons to believe that animals other than humans have something like a sense of morality and self-worth, but this has nothing to do with it. I wish researchers (or perhaps it is the reporter?) would stop this kind of nonsense - it makes people lose respect for the genuine and valuable research that goes on into understanding the other animals on the planet, because they get associations of bunnies in waist-coats drinking tea.
You know, this is oddly similar to a strange error in modal reasoning I've been noticing a lot in my philosophical work.
Take a mathematical function "f". It's obvious to all of us that -f(x) does not mean the same thing as f(-x). With modal logical operators such as the "necessity" or "obligation" operators, this holds as well: "it is necessary that not-x" means "it is impossible that x", but "it is not necessary that x" means "it is possible that not-x"; and "it is obligatory that not-x" means "it is prohibited that x", but "it is not obligatory that x" means "it is permissible that x".
However, when it comes to assertions of straightforward truth and goodness, as opposed to the stronger notions of necessity and obligation, people suddenly lose the ability to think in such modal categories, if they ever had it at all. With necessity and obligation, we have four categories each: f(x), -f(x), f(-x), and -f(-x); those translating to necessity/contingency/impossibility/possibility and obligation/supererogatoriety/prohibition/permission, respectively. But when we speak of truth and goodness, these categories collapse: it -f(x), i.e. it's not true that x , we say f(-x), i.e. it's true that not x; and likewise with not-good being taken to mean good-not.
But that doesn't follow. While in the proper modal logics f(-x) does entail -f(x), the other way around is not so. It seems to me that we should use the same logic when speaking of straightforward truth and goodness too; just being non-true does not make something false (it could be nonsense or otherwise carry no truth value), even though being false makes something non-true; and just being non-good does not make something bad (it could be morally irrelevant), even though being bad makes something non-good. But most people don't seem to think in those terms; everything is either true or false, good or bad, no middle ground. (And before someone screams "principle of bivalence", note that using modal notation like this, you can express such concepts while keeping bivalent functionality in your logic).
Which brings us back on topic. The monkeys in this experiment were given the choice of red and blue and, choosing red but not-choosing blue (i.e. judging good(red) and not-good(blue)), in the same act chose not-blue (taking not-good(blue) to entail good(not-blue)), when they didn't logically have to to so. So later, presented with blue and green, they remained consistant with their earlier opinion that good(not-blue), when if they had been logical earlier they would have just seen a color they had not-chosen and another color they had not-chosen, rather than a color they had not-chosen and a color they had chosen-not.
I guess this kind of flaw runs pretty deep in the psyche, which explains why it pops up in human reasoning so often...
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If you try sucking the coatings off, you may find they don't taste exactly the same (the coatings, that is. If you just chew the m&m, the (all different, but all unpleasant) flavour of the coating will just be flooded out).
Did the monkey which didn't like blue and therefore chose green, choose no M&Ms if presented a choice between only blue candies?
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If my boss makes me choose a color of mm, then I'm sure as heck going to develop a preference real quick, without any need for rationalizing my decision. Boss says I like blue better now? Okay, I like blue better now, just don't stop the paycheck.
Really, Leon Festinger didn't prove cognitive dissonance to me, all he showed is that experience teaches people to appreciate what they are most familiar with. Cognitive dissonance on the other hand, is about having reason to believe that something you already believe is untrue and still trying to find a way to hold to the questionable belief. Certainly I don't think the monkeys were ever given any reason to believe their choice was inferior, so I don't see this or Leon Festinger's experiments as having proved CD, although Leon at least could question his subjects about their beliefs and try to isolate CD.
B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
In the experiment, the monkeys did know that all of the choices were equal (they showed no preference between the three colors early in the experiment.) That's what makes this so interesting. It was only when provided with an either-or choice that they started degrading options.
What's really interesting here is the implications on other aspects of life. Republican vs. Democrat? Creationism vs. Evolution? To war or not to war? Sports team mentality (choosing a side for no particularly good reason, but sticking with it come hell or high water.)
Are we sure that the monkeys aren't colorblind? Because the tests were done on Capuchin monkeys, which are a group of New World monkeys. I don't know specifically about Capuchins, but the males of many other New World species are commonly colorblind. If you're color blind, red == green.