elieve that the experiment was enjoyable, as opposed to those who were paid twenty dollars. Incredible? Simple. The subjects who were paid twenty dollars have all the justification in the world for their actions, but the subjects who were only paid one dollar have reacted to the dissonance created by telling the lie for such a small price, and have actually led themselves to believe that the task was enjoyable to improve their self-esteem in regards to the lie.Festinger concluded that over time dissonance would change attitudes. For example, cigarette smokers know that it is unhealthy to smoke, but they created an attitude to justify why they continue to smoke. If I quit smoking now, I will gain weight. I only smoke when I am drinking. I only smoke after a meal. But the dissonance theory is applicable to much bigger social opinions than smoking, for example: Aronson and Mills (1959) conducted an experiment in which some subjects were put through a harsh period of hazing during initiation into a group while other subjects had to endure only mild hazing. The end result was that the people who went through the sever initiation ended up liking that group a lot better than those who went through mild hazing. Going against the reinforcement theory (Aronson, 1997), the psychologists showed that the subjects came to favor things that they had to suffer to achieve. In other words, to go through a harsh initiation creates dissonance with the bad things about the group, and therefore the subjects reinvent their feelings about the group to be more positive, and make the whole process seem worthwhile. The subjects who only went through the mild initiation had no strong feelings for the group one way or another. Dissonance theorists were able to apply their knowledge to a major social change when desegregation was being introduced into the schools in the 1950s. The majority of psychologists involved felt strongly that desegregation sh...
