Submission, dissonance and rationalization in action.

Summary According to Festinger's (1957) theory of cognitive dissonance, when subjects perform a behavior that goes against their beliefs or motivations, they experience a state of tension called dissonance. To reduce this dissonance, subjects can modify their beliefs to better match their behavior. Based on the radical conception of cognitive dissonance theory (beauvois, and joule, 1981, 1996), joule (1986b) considers a new modality of dissonance reduction: rationalization in action. According to him, a counter-attitudinal behavior can be rationalized, by the realization of a new behavior consistent with the first one. The objective of this thesis is to study the process of rationalization in act and to prove that the acceptance of the second behavior does reduce dissonance. In the first chapter, we present Festinger's (1957) theory of cognitive dissonance and the motivational properties of dissonance. We review the different modes of dissonance reduction, and analyze whether they are used in a complementary or alternative way. The second chapter is devoted to a presentation of the radical conception of cognitive dissonance theory and the rationalization process in action. Our third chapter is experimental. In our experiments, we lead subjects to perform a counter-attitudinal behavior. Immediately afterwards, we propose a second behavior. We measure the rate of acceptance of the second behavior as well as its effect on the level of dissonance (attitude change). Our main hypothesis is that if subjects rationalize in act, they should no longer feel the need to rationalize cognitively (attitude change).