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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."
...but frankly, I think these are some pretty heavy conclusions to draw from the discussed studies.
I think we should all take the high road and not take a swing at the underhanded pitch thrown to us here. Bush administration references are just too easy. Save yourself the time and just laugh preemptively.
I got a catholic block.
Heck, one look at drivers, TV, and movies today could've told ya that for a LOT less money.
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
I'm sorry, but Blue M&Ms taste disgusting. Even a monkey knows that.
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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I'm not so sure this is the same thing as what humans experience as cognitive dissonance, or it may only be a subset of the phenomenon. When people are employing cognitive dissonance there is actual work going on - they are not just making the same choice again, but rationalizing why that choice is the correct one and in the process deciding for it again. They are willful and not just sticking to a rut.
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
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?
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
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.
So this is why the other side in the [insert heated political debate] is wrong.
And here I thought that they were just stupid.
"Giving money and power to governments is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys." - P.J. O'Rourke
How can they ethically give M&Ms to an animal? Depraved scientists, inflicting harm just for the fun of it.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Not that I am in any way supporting or rejecting the claims made in the study, but your criticism is probably unfounded**.
.05), and designated the items within each triad as choices A, B, and C (choices were specific to each individual monkey); although there were no significant differences in preferences across the three M&M colors within a triad, we conservatively used each subject's least preferred color of the three (i.e., the one the monkey took longest to obtain during preference testing) as option C.
The M&M (and sticker choices) were different across subjects, so it is unlikely that a systematic bias could result from visual perception of the items. The M&M choices chosen for the subjects were determined by relatively equal preference in a pretraining phase of the experiment. Given the fact that they find an effect, it's unlikely that it's due to an inability to tell the items apart.
Specifically:
We first assessed the monkeys' existing preferences for M&M's of different colors by timing how long they took to retrieve individual M&M's. For each monkey, preferences for at least nine different M&M colors were assessed. As each preference test began, the monkey was inside its home cage, just outside a testing chamber, and was allowed to watch as the experimenter placed one colored M&M on a tray outside the other side of the chamber. The door to the testing chamber was opened, and the monkey was allowed to enter when it wished to retrieve the M&M. We measured how quickly the monkey entered the testing chamber to retrieve the M&M. Preferences for each color were assessed across 20 trials per monkey; trials for each color spanned two experimental sessions.
After preference testing, we performed analyses of variance to determine whether each monkey had statistically significant preferences. We identified triads of equally preferred colors (all ps >
**By the way, I've been reading your slashdot comments for quite some time, and so don't take this as a personal affront or anything. =) I think you're probably one of the better scientist/posters on the site. =)
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.
Maybe you've decided that accepting contradiction is the best course of action because it's a tactic you've chosen before... not because you've discovered it to be the best tactic. ...I'm just sayin' is all...
ZERO
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
Obviously not. The green taste sexier.
Sometimes you do this. But a heck of a lot of decisions (probably way more than you realize - for example whether to cross the street before or after that approaching car) are made at a more subconscious level. The `reasoning' comes later, for the purpose of justifying what you already chose.
It should've ended with: "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 who was using his skills of rationalization in order to impress others.
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.
Initially the monkey did not have a preference. After being forced to decide between two of the three colours, once more allowed free choice, it exhibited biased behaviour. There was evidence. The change was apparently due to the coerced choice between two equipotentials. People would rationalize this later, trying to explain why "blue" wasn't as good. I would guess that a pretty interesting case could be made that the ability to break such ties is an evolutionary advantage. At base, tie breaking could be critical to survival. Imagine. The predator is behind you. Ahead the path forks. You know equally good ways of escaping the predator are available down each path. But if you stop to try and work out which is best, the predator will eat you while you hesitate. Afterward, because you survived the chase going down one path rather than the other, you will prefer that path. There's a lot of reinforcement for that preference, even if none of it is logical.
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
The monkeys had experience eating all of the colors of M&Ms used in the experiment (and, there were more colors than the few you mention). Safety of the choice has little to do with the outcome.
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...
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
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Did the monkey which didn't like blue and therefore chose green, choose no M&Ms if presented a choice between only blue candies?
Here's your sig.
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.