There are, however, a number of limitations to the Yale approach. Although there are a large number of studies which appear to show that different factors can increase or decrease the likelihood of persuasion, this attitude change has been found to be weak, and not very long lasting. For example, when participants in the experiment carried out by Hovland and Weiss (1951) were re-tested a month later, a ‘sleeper effect’ was found, with the difference in attitude change between participants in the high and low credibility conditions no longer being evident, indicating that the findings may have been fairly superficial.
One of the main problems with the Yale approach as an explanation of attitude change is that it makes two mistaken assumptions. Firstly, it assumes that each variable can only have one effect. However, this is clearly not the case, with research showing that the same variable can even have opposite effects. For instance, Hovland, Janis and Kelly (1953) reported that distracting participants from the content of the message led to a decrease in persuasion, yet Festinger and Maccoby (1964) found that when they carried out a similar study, those participants who were distracted actually showed a higher incidence of agreement to the counter-attitudinal message. Secondly, the Yale approach is also based on a single process assumption which presumes that the mechanisms by which the effect works is the same each time, but each effect may be the result of multiple, rather than single processes. It would appear therefore, that in this respect, the Yale approach presents a far too simplistic view of how different source, message, audience, and context variables influence attitude change. Also, though the Yale approach may, add to our understanding of how attitude change can be produced, and when it is most likely to take place, it does not offer any explanations as to why the various different variables cause people to change their attitudes.
A differing view of attitude change is Festinger’s (1957) theory of cognitive dissonance. Festinger claimed that people are motivated by a need to be consistent, and that we will feel dissonance when we experience two cognitions that are inconsistent. As dissonance is uncomfortable, we aim to reduce it, and because we cannot change our behaviour we instead change our attitudes. Festinger and Carlsmith (1959) carried out an experiment to test this theory. In their study, participants were required to perform two very boring, repetitive tasks. Once they had finished, they were told by the experimenter that the aim of this study was to see whether people’s preconceptions about the tasks would affect their performance, and asked whether they would mind telling the next participant that they had just taken the test and found it to be very interesting. The participants were either paid $1 or $20 for doing this. When the participants were later asked to give their opinion about the experiment, those who were only paid $1 reported that they enjoyed it more than those who were paid $20, who reported finding it boring. Festinger and Carlsmith (1959) concluded that this was because whereas in the $20 condition, participants could justify lying by saying that they did it for the money, those in the $1 condition experienced dissonance because they could not find a way to justify their actions as their reward was so small. Therefore, the only way to reduce their cognitive dissonance was to change their attitude. These findings are also supported by Freedman (1965) who studied the effect of threatening children with either mild or severe punishment if they played with a highly desirable toy. As predicted, children given mild threats later reported liking the toy less than those given severe threats. This change in attitude may have been due to the fact that the mild threat was not sufficient justification for not playing with so the toy, and so to resolve the dissonance they then felt, they changed their opinion about the toy.
The cognitive dissonance theory does have a number of positive attributes. For instance, though the effects of persuasion found by the Yale approach research has been found to be short-term, cognitive dissonance studies have generally shown attitude change to be far more long lasting (Aronson, 1997). For example, in Freedman’s (1965) study a re-test nine weeks later produced the same findings. Also, it could be argued that though most of the research has been carried out in the artificial setting of a laboratory, the nature of dissonance experiments means that they are more like real life and so may be more ecologically valid that those experiments carried out by researchers favouring the Yale approach to attitude change.
Nevertheless, Festinger’s theory is not without its limitations. It may be that the role of cognitive dissonance in changing attitudes is only applicable to certain situations, such as when we feel that we acted of our own accord. If the participants in Festinger and Carlsmith’s (1959) study had been forced to lie to participants rather than being asked to help in return for a cash reward, it is unlikely that the participants would show a change in attitude because they would not experience any dissonance as they could justify their actions due to the fact that they had no choice but to lie. A study by Linder, Cooper and Jones (1967) has in fact demonstrated this. They asked students to write a counter-attitudinal essay. In one condition the students were given no choice but to write the essay, and in another condition they were given the choice of not writing the essay. In both conditions half the participants were paid $0.50 and half $2.50. When the participants could choose whether or not they wrote they essay it was found that, in line with the predictions of cognitive dissonance theory, those paid only $0.50 showed more attitude change. But, when they had been forced to write the essay, participants paid $0.05 showed less attitude change than those paid $2.50, indicating that dissonance induced attitude change depends on the amount of choice the individual is given.
It may also be the case that the findings reported by dissonance experiments can be explained in a different way. Bem (1967) argues that the findings are better explained by his self-perception theory, which proposes that we infer our attitudes from our behaviour and the context in which the behaviour occurs. For example, the participants paid $20 in Festinger and Carlsmith’s (1959) study might reason that they lied because they were being paid, but did not really find the task interesting, whereas those paid $1 may conclude that they said the task was interesting, and because $1 is not a sufficient amount of money to warrant lying, assume that they must have enjoyed the task. Therefore, self-perception theory and dissonance theory make the same predictions, but for very different reasons.
In conclusion, it would appear that neither the Yale approach, nor Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance present a completely adequate explanation of attitude change. While the Yale approach has clearly been useful in demonstrating the extent to which numerous variables can effect persuasion, its narrow view of their being only a single effect and single process means that it is fairly limited. This approach clearly needs to be extended to accommodate for the multiple effects and processes that are involved in bringing about attitude change. Also, though the broad nature of dissonance theory means that it is widely applicable, Festinger’s theory needs to be modified in order to account for the other instances in which attitude change occurs, not just when an individual voluntarily behaves in a counter-attitudinal manner.
