2. Decision-making happens everywhere in our daily life. Some decisions are quite easy to
make, while others might be rather difficult. The decisions being made not only result from the
cognitive process of decision-making, but also from the cultural background of the decision-
makers and their identities. What is more, after the decision has been made, the dissonance
between the perception of different options and individual’s actual choice might lead the change
of one’s perception of different options. Past studies have explored different cultural dimensions
that influence individuals’ decision making. One area of inquiry has been into how the theory of
cognitive dissonance varies with different cultural backgrounds.
In 1957, Leon Festinger introduced the Cognitive Dissonance Theory, illustrating that
dissonance is a negative drive state which occurs whenever an individual simultaneously holds
two cognitions which are psychologically inconsistent. If the occurrence of the dissonance is
perceived to be unpleasant, the individuals would strive to reduce the unpleasantness by making
them to be more consonant by changing one or both cognitions to make them “fit together”
better. For example, in Festinger’s time-worn experiment, a man was told that cigarette smoking
was bad for his health and might produce cancer, which was inconsistent and dissonant with the
fact of him smoking cigarettes. Therefore, in order to reduce his dissonance, instead of using a
tough method of getting rid of the cigarette smoking, he would change his cognition to fit his
smoking behavior. The man might perceive, “Sam and John are both heavy smokers and they
still live well;” or “I would prefer a shorter life but also a more enjoyable life with cigarette
smoking.” The changing cognition can help to reduce the dissonance between smokers believes
and their choice/decision-making, and allow them to feel more comfortable (Aronson, 1969).
In a study investigating on the cultural guises of cognitive dissonance (Browne, Kitayama,
Spencer, P. Zanna & S.Zanna, 2005), the authors argued that the tendency to justify or
3. rationalize decisions (the Cognitive Dissonance Theory) is part of human nature. However, it
still emerges in culture-specific ways because the culture shapes how and when such
rationalization occurs. When people of different cultures face a less-than-optimal choice, there
should be cross-cultural variability in the processes of cognitive dissonance and self-image
maintenance. The dissonance reduction depends on the particular nature of important self-
concepts espoused in a given culture.
Morling and Evered (2006) explored at the various degrees of social impact upon decision-
making across cultures. The authors argued that there were two kinds of controls. The primary
control refers to people choosing to influence their social and physical environment; while the
secondary control refers to people flexibly adjust themselves to fit in with existing realties.
People who live in a culture that emphasized individualism, independence, and autonomy may
benefit more from primary control and less from secondary control than people who live in
cultures that emphasize interdependence and collectivism. In sum, we can indicate that
individuals under different cultures, individualism and collectivism, might regard the social
opinion of different importance.
Imada and Kitayama (2010) did a series of studies to clarify how the cognitive dissonance
could help people justify their choice based on the cultural background. In the social eyes and
choice justification experiment (Imada & Kitayama, 2010), as for the individuals from Asia, who
tend to espouse interdependent cultural values, justified choices more when they were made in
the perceived presence of social eyes than in the perceived absence of social eyes. The Caucasian
American justified their choices regardless of whether they were in the presence of social eyes or
not. Therefore, individuals from Eastern cultures seem to care more about the societal pressure
4. when they are making personal decisions, while the individuals from the Western cultures
actually care less about the “social eyes”.
In the article Is There Any “Free” Choice? Self Dissonance in Two Cultures (Kitayama et.
al, 2004), the authors argued that personal decision-making was influenced by the dissonance,
but the degree of justification varied across the culture. Japanese participants justified their
choice by increasing liking for chosen items and decreasing liking for rejected items (the
dissonance effect) with the social cues, which means to be asked to think of the opinions of the
average student in their own university before making a choice for themselves; and the cognitive
dissonance didn’t have any effect on their choice under the condition without the social cues.
However, the European Americans justified their choices regardless of the social-cue
manipulations, both supported the Cognitive Dissonance Theory. This discovery indicated that
dissonance effect might influence the decision-maker’s judgment. Additionally, the degree of
influence by the cognitive dissonance varied across cultures.
However, it doesn’t mean that the individuals from Western cultures are insensitive to the
dissonance effect. The research done by Kitayama and Park (2012) suggested that in
individualistic cultures, greater interdependence is negatively related to pursuit of self-centered
rewards. Moreover, the gift-giving study (Kimel, Grossmann & Kitayama, 2012) showed us that
when European-Americans were primed with affiliation, they justified choices made for
themselves less than choices made for their friends, which was analogous with that typically
found among more interdependently-oriented East-Asians. In conclusion, individuals under
Western cultures also justified their choices influenced by the environment; which means that
they could also be affected by the cognitive dissonance effect while justifying their decisions.
5. People under purely one culture could be affected straightly by their own cultures. However,
as the globalization and the easier-approach to immigrate to a different culture, some people
have the experience to live under multiple cultures, and are exposed to and influenced by
multiple cultures. According to the Bicultural Identity Integration (BII) study done by Benet-
Martinez from the University of California at Riverside and Haritatos from the University of
Michigan (2005), they illustrated that BII captures the degree to which bicultural individuals
perceive their mainstream and ethnic cultural identities as compatible and integrated vs.
oppositional and difficult to integrate. The people of high BII had developed compatible
bicultural identities (Padilla, 1994; Phinney & Devich-Nabarro, 1997; Rotheram-Borus, 1993).
They found themselves to be easy to integrate both cultures in their everyday lives. They didn’t
perceive two cultures to be mutually exclusively, oppositional, or conflicting. However, for those
who are low on the BII, they were reported to have more difficulty in incorporating both cultures
into a cohesive sense of identity (Gil, Vega, & Dimas, 1994; Phinney & Devich-Navarro, 1997;
Vivero & Jenkins, 1999). They viewed the incompatibility of the two cultures as a source of
internal conflict. Also, the low BIIs often prefer to choose one culture to be dominant.
According to the study of Hanek (2016), she dived deeper into the investigation of general
identity integration(GII). Identity integration refers to the perceived compatibility between one’s
multiple social identities. People with high identity integration (II) perceive their identities as
compatible and integrated, whereas people with low identity integration (II) perceive their social
identities as conflicting and disparate. In this study, she figured out that individuals with lower
identity integration (II)—or those who perceive their identities as disparate and in conflict—
tended to be more indecisive facing a decision-making task; and vice versa. What should be paid
attention here is that the patterns held across different types of identities, including
6. organizational, cultural, and work-family; and the decisions were identity-relevant decisions
only.
In the Hanek (2016) study, she specifically investigated about the relationship between
identity integration (II) and decision-making. The study found that individuals with lower II
might affect negative decisional experiences independent of the degree of conflict that may be
inherent between different types of identities or between different choice options. What is more,
the study showed that perceptions of one’s identities as incompatible appeared to cause post-
decisional regret for identity-relevant decisions.
Previous researchers have shown us the relationship between the cultures and decision
making. In specific, how the Eastern culture and Western culture influence people’s mindset
while decision-making. However, cultural identity is only one of the individual’s identity. One
still have multiple other identities, such as social, gender, professional, and organizational. Few
studies actually dive into the following questions: (1) whether attitude change occurs more for
difficult than easy choices; (2) relationship between the identity integration and people’s attitude
change after making a choice. These are the questions of the current investigation. We
hypothesize that the attitude change would be greater for difficult choices than for easy choices.
Also, we expect that there will be a positive relationship between the identity integration and
attitude change.
Method
Participants
Thirty-one students enrolled in the University of Michigan, aged from 18 to 30 years’ old,
participated in this study for half an hour and got five dollars as compensation. They were from
various of areas though most of them come from western culture backgrounds. Based on
7. previous research showing a stronger attitude change among Western participants, we hoped to
recruit the participants from Western cultures primarily, though we did not exclude participants
who were not from a Western background.
Measures
General Identity Integration Scale (GII). Participants completed the GII scale as a
measure of how they perceive their different social identities as compatible with one another.
The GII scale contains 10-items that are measured on a 7-point Likert-type scale from 1 (strongly
disagree) to 7 (strongly agree) (Hanek & Lee, 2014; Huff, et al., 2015). Example items include:
“My different selves blend together seamlessly”, “I am best described by a blend of all my
different selves”, “My selves give me an edge in life”, “I feel comfortable having many selves”,
“I am often conflicted between my different selves”, “I am often torn between my different
selves”, and “Having different selves creates tension”.
Procedure
The study consisted of six parts. In the first part, the participants entered the lab and the
experimenter notified the participants that the lab was working closely with the Michigan
bookstore. The sponsor of the bookstore would like to learn more about how the university
students thought about different kinds of gift cards. Also, the experimenter gave the participants
a brief picture of the study as evaluating gift cards from various local and national businesses.
Then, in the first part of the study, the experimenter gave the participants a list of 20 gift
cards and let them to circle the ten cards that they would most like to own by using the marker to
cross out the ones they would not like to own. Those ten left on the paper were the gift cards they
would like to own. Later, the experimenter went to another room and brought back an envelope
8. with ten gift cards the participants just chose and let the participants to rank them from 1 to 10
according to how much they would personally like to own them.
Later, in the second part of the study, the experimenter required the participants to complete
a market survey, which is actually a filter to get the participants to forget about the previous
ranking they just made. Whether the participants took survey A or survey B were decided
randomly by the experimenter. During the participant doing the survey, the experimenter went to
another room and randomly decided whether to give the participants an easy task (condition 1: to
choose a gift card from ranking 2 and 9) or a difficult task (condition 2: to choose a gift card
from ranking 5 and 6).
After that, in the third part of the study, the experimenter told the participants that the
sponsor of the bookstore would like to thank the participant for helping him to know about the
gift cards by giving them a gift card with values inside. But among all those cards, only two of
them had money inside. The participants needed to choose one card from the two. After the
participant chose one from the two, the experimenter noted down the card on the previous
ranking sheet.
And then, in the fourth part of the study, the participant was asked to do a second survey,
which also served as the filler in this study to get the participants to forget about the choice they
just made. Again, whether the participants took survey A or survey B were decided randomly by
the experimenter at the second part of the study.
Moreover, in the fifth part of the study, the experimenter told the participants that the sponsor
still wanted to know how the students might feel about the gift cards after they left the book
store, when they were no longer exposed to the actual gift cards. As a result, the experimenter
asked the participants to rank the 10 gift cards they chose at the beginning of the experiment
9. once more, according to their own preferences. However, this time, the participants could not see
the gift cards and just made their decisions from the previous list they chose using the marker.
The experimenter could encourage the participants to indicate how they feel right at the very
moment, regardless of their previously reported preferences.
Lastly, in the final part of the study, the experimenter asked the participants to do the third
survey, to help the researcher to measure the participants’ identity integration.
After going through all the six parts above, the participants were thoroughly debriefed and
thanked. They were also asked to donate the gift cards back to the study, because the study was
not actually sponsored by the book store. All participants agreed to do so. In lieu of the gift
cards, the participants received 5 dollars as monetary reward. Also, the experimenter asked the
participants about their thoughts and questions about the study.
Results
There was no significant difference in dissonance reduction, as measured by spreading of
alternatives between easy (M = -2.0, SD = 3.82) and difficult trials (M = -1.13, SD = 2.25), which
doesn’t support our first hypothesis. Additionally, our second hypothesis was not supported
either. Before testing the relationship between spreading of alternatives and general identity
integration, we look at the mean and standard deviation of the scale (M=4.68, SD=0.99). We did
not see a significant relationship between spreading of alternatives and general identity
integration (r = .05, p > .1).
Discussion
In this study, the results are not consistent with previous research using the Cognitive
Dissonance Theory. From the data, we can illustrate that most participants under both the easy
condition and the difficult conditions rank the chosen item lower and the rejected item higher,
10. which is opposite to the conclusions of the Cognitive Dissonance Theory. The reasons could be
due to limitations in the study design.
First, one potential explanation came from discussions with participants. During the study
and the interviews for their thoughts after the experiment, I have figured out that many of the
participants ranked the rejected item higher and the chosen item lower because they had already
owned the chosen ones and they had stronger intention to own the ones they rejected.
Here are two analogous examples that can help to explain this psychological phenomenon,
both the difficult condition and the easy condition. A little boy likes coconut ice-cream and
pineapple almost equally the same, maybe prefer coconut favor a little bit more than the
pineapple favor. His mother gave him two options, a coconut ice-cream and pineapple ice-cream,
and requested him to choose one between the two. He most likely to choose the coconut one over
the pineapple one. Next time, let the little boy to choose again between the two, he might want to
try something new and select the pineapple one. It doesn’t mean that he now prefers pineapple
over coconut, just because he would like to own something new. This example can help to
illustrate the difficult condition. Here comes another example that the little boy prefers orange
juice much more than the apple juice. His mother gave him two options of orange juice and apple
juice and requested him to choose one between the two, and he would much more likely to
choose orange juice over apple juice. And the next time, let the little boy to make the decision
between the two again, he would probably choose the one he hadn’t tried last time. This is a
general psychological phenomenon and also part of the human nature that are more curious and
ambitious about the things they don’t own and kind of ignore the things they already own.
Second, the data collected are not as clean as we had hoped. According to the article Is There
Any ‘‘Free’’ Choice? (2004), the Asian, or say people from Eastern culture, justified their
11. choices by spreading alternatives only when self-relevant social others were salient. Their
options could not reflect the law of the Cognitive Dissonance Theory when they made the
decision in private. In contrast, European Americans, or say people from Western culture,
justified their choices in all conditions, regardless of the social-cue manipulations, which were
asked to think of the opinions of the average student in their own university before making a
choice for themselves in Kitayama and Snibbe’s study. In this study, we would like to look for
how people psychologically and cognitively rank the chosen item higher and the rejected item
lower. However, the randomly recruited participants in our sample included some Asians,
students from India, Malaysia and also American born Chinese. Their decisions might also have
been affected by the “social eyes” as the experiments were taken place in the lab and the
participants need to make the decisions in front of the experimenter. This could be counted as a
reason why the data haven’t reflected the Cognitive Dissonance Theory. We were supposed to
separate the data collected from the Easterners and Westerners, and analyze the data to test how
the cognitive dissonance affected the participants from different cultural backgrounds. However,
our sample is not big enough to make this come true.
There is slight difference between the difficult condition and the easy condition. The variance
between the original choice and the second choice is larger in the easy condition than the
difficult condition, which is opposite with our previous hypothesis. This might result from that
the participants under the easy conditions have more space to vary their options, compared to the
participants under the difficult conditions. Also, choosing between ranking 5 and 6 is more
closely to the condition in the experiment of cognitive dissonance theory, compared to choosing
one option between ranking 2 and 9. In our study, the results from the easy condition group are
in the opposite direction far more away then the results from the difficult condition, which means
12. the results from the difficult group reflected the cognitive dissonance theory better than the
results from the easy group.
Limitations and Further Study
In general, the study was created to test the relationship between cognitive dissonance and
identity integration. Unfortunately, our study design did not successfully demonstrate the
cognitive dissonance effect and because of this we could not measure the relationship between
dissonance and identity integration. Some reasons are described below.
First, there is a significant problem on the wording of the second ranking sheet. In the second
ranking sheet, the researcher asked the participants to rank those ten gift cards again according to
their preferences of owning the gift cards, which was the same wording as the first ranking sheet.
However, we actually wanted to ask the participants how they like those gift cards after they
owned one of them. For example, a participant may have thought the Jimmy John’s gift card is
more preferable than the Starbucks’ gift card at his first ranking. Then, the researcher asked him
to choose one from Jimmy John’s and Starbucks. He chose Jimmy John’s over Starbucks when
doing the decision-making. Later, if we ask him to rank how much he would like to own, he
might want to own something new, such as the Starbucks. Alternatively, if we ask him to rank
how much he likes those cards, he might view the one he already got as a more favorable item.
The wording of the questions in the study could be misleading and we will change the wording
in future research.
Second, the sample may not be large enough to observe the cognitive dissonance effect. Our
study started in October of this semester and ended in early December. The researcher needed to
do the literature review and recruit participants before actually running the participants. Thus,
participants were recruited at the very busy part of the semester (around Thanksgiving and close
13. to the finals). Moreover, due to the study’s priming that we would give the participants gift cards
with money inside as compensation (we told the truth at the end of the study and compensated
them the coupon instead), we could not recruit the participants through Subject pool, which
added more difficulty to the participant recruitment. This is only a pilot of the study and the lab
will recruit more participants to continue the study next semester.
Lastly, the data is as clean as we had initially hoped. As mentioned before, people from
Eastern cultures and Western cultures might have responded differently to the choice. This study
was meant to be based on the people from Western culture. We recruited the participants
randomly in different ways and thought the majority of the students on campus are from the
Western culture. The recruitment result ends up with several participants from India, China and
West Africa. With more participants, we could compare across cultures, but as it stands those
data may have affected the results of this study.
In the future study, we would expand the sample of the study and hope to collect the data
from up to 80 participants. What is more, we would strictly select the participants by asking not
only their age and U of M enrollment status, but also their race to guarantee we recruit the
students from the Western culture. If we have enough time, we would like to collect the data
from the very beginning of the semester and change the wording of the second sheet.
14. References
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16. Appendix
Figure 1. The spreading of alternatives between easy and difficult trials
Figure 2. The relationship between spreading of alternatives and general identity integration
