My Unedited Hypothesis for Making Hard Choices and then Doing Them

When I started graduate school at TC in 1960 I expected to become a learning theorist.  I assumed that all or most learning experiences were about connecting behavioral patterns through some form of conditioning, reinforcement, extinction, contiguity, punishment.and so on. It appeared to be a gradual process and sometimes boring. Then I ran into some cognitive dissonance research that motivated me to pay more attention to thought processes and the attitude changes that resulted.  In one of those experiments they asked students to write speeches endorsing a plan to raise tuition at the college where the students were attending.  Half of the students were told to write a “raise tuition” speech.  The other half of the students also wrote a tuition-increase speech if they agreed to do it willingly. It was assumed that that both groups would be opposed to the increase before the experiment began so both of them would be endorsing an idea that they were personally opposed to.  After the speeches were completed, they asked the subjects how much they personally agreed or disagreed with the increase.  The “pressured” subject’s reported a negative attitude, as expected, but the “willing” subject’s exhibited a favorable attitude towards the increase which means that their attitudes changed from negative to positive during the course of the experiment.    

I read the above study years ago and I have never stopped thinking about it. The “willing” subjects promoted a raise-tuition view that was not in their best interests to promote.  It took 30 minutes or less to produce the attitude change and even if the change was temporary, it was a remarkable outcome. The world is full of people who are trying to change and be something different..  Was there something about this simple experiment that disposed subjects to make unexpected attitude changes when the only condition unique to these subjects was their willingness to do something that was counter intuitive.  

The willing subjects changed their view about tuition cost from negative to positive.   Can the same experimental conditions change a person’s views about moral choices, that really matter, such as, a change from bad to good or from unproductive to productive and so on?  I think the answer is a qualified yes.

There are some plausible explanations that can account for the changes that occurred in the “willing” subjects but not in the “pressured” subjects. The most common explanation is based on the human dislike of internal conflict.  The experiment began with subjects who were opposed to a tuition increase but when the “willing” subjects, wrote a pro increase speech, they created an internal conflict between their “before” beliefs and  their “after” speeches.  In order to get rid of the dissonance, they had to change something, so they changed their views about the “increase” by deciding that it was a good idea after all.

The pressured subjects, on the other hand, were instructed to write speeches endorsing the same raise in tuition.  There was a conflict  between the view that was imposed on them by an outside source and their personal opposition to the increase but it was not an internal conflict and, therefore, felt no need to change either view.

I borrowed another explanation from an article by Shankar Vedantum on Apple News entitled, Your brain is hardwired to resist change. Here’s how to retrain it.  His first step toward overcoming resistance to change was to embrace ambivalence.  Living with ambivalence is not comfortable and because of our dislike of uncertainty we are susceptible to premature choices that can be either short term or wrong. Vedantum suggested that we develop the patience to live with contradictions and if we endure them long enough, new insights and ideas will emerge.  The two groups of students in the tuition experiment were endorsing the same idea but the “willing” subjects were performing a contradictory task, not present in the “pressured” subjects, and in order remove those contradictions, they had to invest more thinking and energy in defending a point of view that they were originally opposed to. Having said that I suspect that their attitude changes dissipated as soon as they left the experimental environment .  Thirty minutes is not enough time to decide what one is going to believe in  for the next ten years.

The only things that the experimenters manipulated was the freedom of choice, or lack of it but significant differences occurred only in the willing subjects which forced them to resolve contradictions in their thinking but is this enough information to create a model that will lead to productive changes in the real world? 

In an another essay, I stated that humans have to have a reason for everything they do, including trivial ones, but that only happens when someone else isn’t making the decisions for them and external decision making is going to occur frequently, especially in childhood.  Even after childhood there are so many pressures from the outside world that humans probably have less autonomy than they think they have.  Yielding to some form of power or authority is part of daily life.  Even “fitting in” and keeping up with the Joneses are forms of coercion. 

Given all those constraints, how do we create an environment in which individuals feel more like “willing” decisions makers than “pressured” decisions makers?  There are times when the feeling of willingness occurs naturally, such as when we become young adults and are ready to leave home and become independent, during which time he or she has to choose from whatever is available at the time or pause long enough to deal with the uncertainties that go with a long term plan. Is there a way to create the  feeling of “willingness’ during the growing up years, when parents make most of the decisions.

I know of only one child-rearing practice that deals with freedom of choice and ambivalence and I never used it because I discovered it after my children were grown. The strategy is to offer the smallest possible reward or punishment to get a child to do something.  It is an attempt to make the pressures of reward and punishment so mild that when the child does the task, he feels more like a “willing“child than a “pressured” child.  In the process of creating that “willing” feeling, the reward or punishment may be ignored and/or the child may do nothing.  That’s probably okay.  The child is probably stalling rather than ignoring and if the stalling continues, he or she is going experience guilt which is a form internal dissonance. Eventually the child can remove the dissonance by completing the task and if he completes the task on his own terms he is more likely to become a “”decisions maker” than a “decision obeyer.”  The smallest reward or punishment sounds like a good child rearing technique but there is probably no way to know whether it actually contributes to the state of being a willing decision maker as he grows older.

Since I never used this strategy,.one of the reasons I entitled this essay as My Unedited Hypothesis for making hard Choices and then doing them was to get feedback from readers who can try it out.. And you, the readers are the editors.  If there are other ways of obtaining  the same results, i am eager to hear them.

Duane Harmon, January 11, 2024