The paradigm of induced double submission: a new look at the experience of Festinger and Carlsmith (1959).

Summary The interest of this work is to propose a new reading of the experiment of Festinger and Carlsmith (1959). We have given this experiment, initially conceived as a simple induced submission, a new paradigmatic framework: the double induced submission. In this experiment, the subjects emitted two behaviors. They performed a series of tedious tasks (first behavior) and then had to present it to the next student (second behavior). For these authors, only the performance of the second behavior (presentation of tasks positively) was crucial because it was from this that the rate of dissonance (d d+c) was established. In our opinion, the cognition related to the realization of a series of tasks must be taken into account in the establishment of the dissonance rate. Indeed, the results observed in our experiments 1,2,3 and 4 show that the first behavior is likely to affect the dissonance rate. The four experiments performed are consistent with the radical version of the cognitive dissonance theory (Beauvois & Joule, 1982): - the rate of dissonance is based on a generative cognition related to the subject's behavior and not on the subject's private attitude. - The process of dissonance reduction is not oriented towards cognitive coherence but towards the rationalization of behavior. Its function is to restore the value of the extorted problematic behavior.