ON MEMORY

HERMANN EBBINGHAUS
(1850-1909)

Lecture 6
 Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850–1909)
• Wundt claimed it was impossible to conduct experiments on the higher
mental processes but a German psychologist working alone, isolated from
any academic center of psychology, began to experiment successfully on the
higher mental processes

• Hermann Ebbinghaus became the first psychologist to investigate learning

and memory experimentally

• He not only showed that Wundt was wrong but also changed the way in
which association, or learning, could be studied
 Ebbinghaus’s Life
Born: near Bonn, Germany (1850)

College studies: University of Bonn; Universities in Halle and Berlin

During his academic training his interests shifted from history and literature to
philosophy, in which he received his degree in 1873
seven years of independent study in England and France, interests changed
toward science

Three years before Wundt established his laboratory at Leipzig, Ebbinghaus

bought a copy of Fechner’s great work, Elements of Psychophysics

Fechner’s mathematical approach to psychological phenomena excited

Ebbinghaus, and he resolved to do for psychology what Fechner had done for
psychophysics using rigid and systematic measurement
 Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850–1909)

Goal :

• to apply the experimental method to the higher mental

processes

Influenced by the the British associationists, Ebbinghaus chose

to undertake his research in the area of human learning
 Research on Learning and memory

Background:
The customary way to study learning was to examine associations
that were already formed - British associationists

Investigators were working backward, attempting to determine

how the connections had been established

Ebbinghaus began his study with the initial formation of the

associations
Background: Research in learning
In this way he could control the conditions under which the chains of ideas
were formed and thus make the study of learning more objective

Ebbinghaus’s work on learning and forgetting has been judged one of the
great instances of original genius in experimental psychology

It was the first venture into a truly psychological problem area, one that was
not part of physiology, as was true with so many of Wundt’s research topics

Ebbinghaus’s revolutionary research broadened considerably the scope of

experimental psychology
 Background: Research in learning
Learning and memory had never been studied experimentally
Wilhelm Wundt had said they could not be

Ebbinghaus set out to do so even though he had no academic

appointment, no university setting in which to conduct his work,
no teacher, no students, and no laboratory

Nevertheless, over a period of five years, he carried out alone a

series of carefully controlled and comprehensive studies using
himself as the only subject
 Ebbinghaus’s research on learning
• For the basic measure of learning Ebbinghaus adapted a
technique from the associationists who had proposed frequency
of associations as a condition of recall

• Ebbinghaus reasoned that the difficulty of learning material

could be measured by this frequency; that is, by counting the
number of repetitions needed for one perfect reproduction of
the material

Influence of Fechner - measured sensations indirectly by measuring

the stimulus intensity necessary to produce a jnd in sensation

• Ebbinghaus approached the problem of measuring memory

similarly, by counting the number of trials or repetitions
required to learn the material
 Ebbinghaus’s research on learning

• Material to be learned  Ebbinghaus devised similar, but not

identical, lists of syllables
• Repetition of task to check accuracy

To cancel out variable errors from trial to trial and obtain an

average measure

systematic in experimentation  he regulated his personal

habits as well, keeping them as constant as possible and
following an unvarying routine, always learning the material at
the same time each day
 Research with Nonsense Syllables

For the material to be learned—Ebbinghaus invented nonsense

syllables

Nonsense syllables: Syllables presented in

a meaningless series to study memory
processes

Titchener noted that the use of nonsense syllables marked the first significant
advance in the field since the time of Aristotle
Research on Nonsense syllables
In 1980s - research by a German psychologist who read all
the original footnotes in Ebbinghaus’s publications
showed:

Nonsense syllables as Ebbinghaus suggested:

• were not always limited to three letters, and they were
not necessarily nonsense, some of the syllables were
four, five, or six letters long

• What Ebbinghaus called a “meaningless series of

syllables” as the subject matter of his research was
incorrectly translated into English as a “series of
nonsense syllables.”
To Ebbinghaus, it was not the individual syllables
that were designed to be meaningless (although
many were), but rather that the entire list of
stimulus words would be meaningless—
deliberately constructed to be free of prior
connections or associations
 Ebbinghaus’s research on learning
and memory

Ebbinghaus designed several studies using his

meaningless series of syllables to determine the
influence of various experimental conditions on human
learning and retention
 Ebbinghaus’s research on learning
and memory
Study 1:

To investigate the difference between the speed of memorizing lists of

syllables versus the speed of memorizing meaningful material

To determine the difference, Ebbinghaus memorized stanzas of Byron’s

poem, “Don Juan.” Each stanza has 80 syllables,
required approximately nine readings to memorize one stanza

He then memorized a meaningless series of 80 syllables

Required nearly 80 repetitions

He concluded that meaningless or unassociated material is

approximately nine times harder to learn than meaningful material
Ebbinghaus’s research on learning

Ebbinghaus’ Forgetting curve for nonsense syllables

Schultz and Schultz, 2011

 Ebbinghaus’s research on learning
Study 2:
To study the effect of the length of the material to be learned on the number
of repetitions necessary for a perfect reproduction

Findings: longer material requires more repetitions and more time to learn

Manipulation of IV: Ebbinghaus increased the number of syllables to be

learned

Findings: the average time to memorize a syllable increased

Of course these results are predictable in a general way: The more we have to
learn, the longer it will take us
 Contributions to Learning and Memory
research
• The learning curve
• The Forgetting curve
• Overlearning effect

Ebbinghaus invented several tests of retention:

• Recall -- attempting to remember each item. Ebbinghaus used two types
of recall task
– Free recall -- attempt to recall the list items; order is not important
– Serial recall -- attempt to recall the list items in the order studied

• Recollection -- given a large list of CVS's try to recognize which of them

had been on the list studied. This technique is more sensitive test of
memory than recall; a person may be able to recognize an item that he or
she could not recall

http://users.ipfw.edu/abbott/120/Ebbinghaus.html
 Contributions to Learning and Memory
research…
• Savings -- rememorize the list (usually used after a long retention interval,
when neither recall nor recognition produce much evidence of prior
learning). Compare the number of repetitions required to learn the list the
first time to the number required the second time. A handy measure
is percent savings. For example, if it required 20 trials to memorize the list,
and only 10 trials to rememorize it, then this represents 50% savings
Savings is the most sensitive test of memory, as it will indicate some residual
effect of previous learning even when recall and recognition do not

• serial position curve -- the relation between the serial position of an item
(its place in the list) and the ability to recall it. Items near the beginning of
the list are easier to recall than those in the middle (the primacy effect).
Those near the end of the list are also earier to recall than those in the
middle (the recency effect.) These two effects together yield a curve that is
roughly U - shaped
http://users.ipfw.edu/abbott/120/Ebbinghaus.html
 Significance of his work

The significance of Ebbinghaus’s work is in his

careful control of the experimental conditions,
his quantitative analysis of the data, and his
conclusion that learning time per syllable as well
as total learning time both increase with longer
lists of syllables
 Ebbinghaus’s study of other variables
influencing learning and memory

• the effects of overlearning (repeating the lists more times

than necessary for one perfect reproduction)

• associations within lists, reviewing material, and the time

elapsed between learning and recall

• His research on the effect of time yielded the famous

Ebbinghaus’s forgetting curve, which shows that material is
forgotten rapidly in the first few hours after learning and more
slowly thereafter
 Ebbinghaus’s publications
• On Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology
(1885)

• Journal of Psychology and Physiology of the Sense

Organs(1890) - Ebbinghaus, with the physicist Arthur König

• The Principles of Psychology (1902) which he dedicated to

Fechner’s memory

• A Summary of Psychology (1908)

 Contributions
• Introduced Learning and Memory studies

• Ebbinghaus’s research is exacting, thorough, and

systematic that it continues to be cited in
psychology textbooks well over a century later

• In the history of psychology no other investigator

working alone subjected himself to such a rigid
regimented experimentation
 Reconstruction of an Automobile
destruction: An example of the
interaction between language and
memory
Lecture 7
 “ The research that I and many other psychological
scientists have done has taught us about the malleability
of human memory. Thousands of experiments conducted
over the last century reveal this truth: despite the value
of human memory for allowing us to manage our lives
effectively, it is not very hard to get people to remember
things that never happened”

E F Loftus
Adapted from Gross, 2015
Background and context
In 1973, the Devlin Committee was set up to look at over 2000 legal cases in
England and Wales that had required identification line-ups

In 45 % of cases  suspects were picked out, 82% were convicted

Of the 347 cases in which prosecution occurred when Eye Witness Testimony
was the only evidence against the defendant, 74 per cent were convicted
(Devlin, 1976)

This indicates the overwhelming weight given to Eye Witness Testimony

(Baddeley, 1999)
The reconstructive nature of memory has led
some researchers to question the accuracy of
Eye Witness Testimony
 Reconstructive memory—The Bartlett
approach

Bartlett (1932) used serial reproduction, in which one person reproduces

some material, a second person has to reproduce the first reproduction, a
third has to reproduce the second reproduction and so on, until six or seven
reproductions have been made

The method is meant to duplicate, to some extent, the process by which

gossip or rumours are spread, or legends passed from generation to
generation
One of the most famous pieces of material Bartlett used was ‘The War of the
Ghosts’, a North American folk tale
The War of Ghosts
One night two young men from Egulac went down to the river to hunt seals and while
they were there it became foggy and calm. Then they heard war-cries and they
thought: ‘Maybe this is a war party’. They escaped to the shore and hid behind a log.
Now canoes came up and they heard the noise of paddles and saw one canoe coming
up to them. There were five men in the canoe and they said: ‘What do you think? We
wish to take you along. We are going up the river to make war on the people’. One of
the young men said ‘I have no arrows’. ‘Arrows are in the canoe’, they said. ‘I will not go
along. I might be killed. My relatives do not know where I have gone. But you’, he said,
turning to the other, ‘may go with them’. So one of the young men went but the other
returned home. And the warriors went on up the river to a town on the other side of
Kalama. The people came down to the water and they began to fight and many were
killed. But, presently, the young man heard one of the warriors say: ‘Quick, let us go
home; that Indian has been hit’. Now he thought: ‘Oh, they are ghosts’. He did not feel
sick but they said he had been shot. So the canoes went back to Egulac and the young
man went ashore to his house and made a fire. And he told everybody and said:
‘Behold, I accompanied the ghosts and we went to fight. Many of our fellows were
killed and many of those who attacked us were killed. They said I was hit and I did not
feel sick’. He told it all and then he became quiet. When the sun rose he fell down.
Something black came out of his mouth. His face became contorted. The people
jumped up and cried. He was dead.
The War of the Ghosts…
• On reproduction, the story became more
 Shorter
 conventional
 Coherent
Bartlett concluded from his findings that interpretation plays a major role in the
remembering of stories and past events

Learning and remembering are both active processes trying to make the past more
logical, coherent and generally ‘sensible’

inferences or deductions are made about what could / should have happened

We reconstruct the past by trying to fit it into our existing understanding of the
World through SCHEMAS
 BACKGROUND AND CONTEXT
Bartlett’s view of memory as reconstructive was adopted by Loftus, who has
investigated it mainly in relation to eyewitness testimony (EWT)

Elizabeth Loftus  a pioneer (and still a leading figure) in the field

of EWT research, which represents an application of cognitive psychology to
real-world, social phenomena

Loftus: The evidence given by witnesses in court cases is highly

unreliable, and this is explained largely by the kind of misleading questions
that witnesses are asked. Lawyers are skilled in asking such questions
deliberately, as are the police when interrogating suspects and witnesses to a
crime or accident
 Eye witness Testimony

Her basic procedure (paradigm) has been to manipulate the questions that
participants are asked about a film or slides of an automobile accident, or a
staged crime, in order to see how these can affect what they remember of
the incident

This procedure is an attempt to simulate real-world situations, in which

witnesses are asked (often very misleading) questions by police and lawyers
 AIM AND NATURE
HYPOTHESIS

The study was conducted to investigate the influence of the wording of the
question used to tap participants’ estimates of speed (how fast two cars
involved in an accident were travelling) on the actual speed estimate

Loftus and Palmer define a leading question that by either its form or content,
suggests to the witness what answer is desired, or leads him/her to the
desired answer

The study actually comprises two separate, but related, experiments

 HYPOTHESIS

Hypothesis 1 (Experiment 1)
It was expected that the verbs used to refer to how the two cars touched
(‘contacted’, ‘hit’, ‘bumped’, ‘collided’ or ‘smashed’) would produce
increasingly higher speed estimates (i.e. ‘contacted’ would produce
the lowest and ‘smashed’ the highest)

Hypothesis 2 (Experiment 2)
Participants asked about the speed of the cars that ‘smashed’ would be more
likely to say they had seen broken glass than participants who were asked
about the cars that ‘hit’
 METHOD/DESIGN

Experiment 1
Sample: 45 students divided into five groups

Experimental condition: watched seven different films of traffic accidents

(the films lasting between 5 and 30 seconds)

Following each film, participants were asked a series of specific questions

about the accident, the critical question being the one about the speed at
which the cars were travelling
 Experiment 1
Methodology: After watching the film Following each film, the subjects
received a questionnaire asking then1 first to, “give an account of the accident
you have just seen,“ and then to answer a series of specific questions about the
accident. The critical question was the one that interrogated the subject about
the speed of the vehicles involved in the collision
Loftus and Palmer, 1974

Loftus and Palmer manipulated the verb used to refer to how the cars touched

Each of the five groups received the same form of the question
‘About how fast were the cars going when they _____?’
but the missing word varied (‘contacted’ / ‘hit’ / ‘bumped’ / ‘collided’ /
‘smashed’)

IV - The specific verb used in the critical question

DV - and the average (mean) speed estimate given in response to this question
Experiment 2
Sample: 150 students - divided into three groups

Experimental condition: watched a film of a car accident (lasting just 4

seconds)

Method: At the end of the film, the subjects received a questionnaire asking
them first to describe the accident in their own words, and then to answer a
series of questions about the accident
Experiment 2
The critical question asked the subject about the speed of the vehicles

“About how fast were “About how fast were not

the cars going when were the cars going interrogated about
they smashed into each when they hit each vehicular speed
other?” other?”
N= 50 N = 50 N= 50

A week later, the participants returned, and without seeing the film again
answered a series of questions about the accident. The critical question here
was, “Did you see any broken glass?” which the subjects answered by
checking “yes” or “no.”
This question was embedded in a list totalling 10 questions, and it appeared
in a random position in the list
There was no broken glass in the accident

Loftus and Palmer, 1974

 RESULTS
SPEED ESTIMATES FOR THE VERBS USED IN EXPERIMENT 1

Verb Mean speed estimate

Smashed 40.5

Collided 39.3

Bumped 38.1

Hit 34.0

Contacted 31.8

Loftus and Palmer, 1974

 RESULTS
Experiment 2
DISTRIBUTION OF “YES” AND “NO” RESPONSES TO THE QUESTION
“DID YOU SEE ANY BROKEN GLASS?’
Response Verb Condition

Smashed Hit Control

Yes 16 7 6

No 34 43 44

Loftus and Palmer, 1974

 RESULTS
Experiment 2

PROBABILITY OF SAYING “YES” TO, “DID YOU SEE ANY BROKEN GLASS?’
CONDITIONALISED ON SPEED ESTIMATES

Verb Speed Estimate

Conditio
n
1-5 6-10 11-15 16-20

Smashed 0.09 0.27 0.41 0.62

Hit 0.06 0.09 0.25 0.50

The probability of saying ‘yes’ to the broken glass question is significantly greater
when the verb ‘smashed’ is used than when ‘hit’ is used
Loftus and Palmer, 1974
 CONCLUSIONS
The results of Experiments 1 and 2 indicate that the form of a question (in
this case, changing a single word) can markedly and systematically affect a
witness’s answer to the question
This could be a result of either response-bias factors (e.g. ‘smashed’
biases the participant’s response towards a higher estimate), or the verb
‘smashed’ changes the participant’s memory representation of the accident
(s/he ‘sees’ the accident as being more serious than it actually was)

Experiment 2 was designed to test this second interpretation

By testing participants a week after seeing the film of the accident, it was
shown that they ‘remembered’ other details (broken glass) that did not
actually occur, but which are consistent with an accident occurring at higher
speeds
Loftus and Palmer, 1974
 Subsequent research
There are four different kinds of memory distortion studies:
1. Those concerned with the effects of leading questions
Loftus and Zanni, 1975
1. those in which new items are inserted by suggestion into a previously
observed scene Loftus and Hoffman, 1989

2. those which manipulate details of an object that appeared in the previous

scene Belli, 1989

These three types are to do with distorting a memory, or at least the report of
an event which participants actually witnessed

4. that which attempts a much more radical effect: the suggestion of an

entire episode that supposedly happened, but which in fact did not
occur in the participant’s past Garry et al., 1994
 Subsequent research
This amounts to the creation of a completely false memory. One example is
the ‘shopping mall’ study (Garry et al., 1994)
• Fourteen year-old Chris was convinced by his older brother, Jim, that he
had been lost in a shopping mall as a small child. Chris was given
summaries of childhood events (three actual events and the false
shopping mall incident), and asked to write about each one. Jim
repeatedly provided Chris with false details about the shopping mall. Two
weeks later, Chris could ‘remember’ details, such as the appearance of the
elderly man who rescued him. When Chris was debriefed, he expressed
dismay
 Subsequent research

Loftus (1997) refers to a small number of similar studies,

involving larger groups of participants, all showing that it is
possible to ‘implant’ false memories. This is related to false
memory syndrome
 “Communicating what we have learned to the broader public
will go a long way towards minimising the damage that false
memories can cause.
If there is one lesson to be learned from our findings, it is this:
just because a memory is expressed with confidence, just
because it contains detail, just because it is expressed with
emotion, does not mean it really happened.
We cannot yet reliably discriminate true memories from false
ones; we still need independent corroboration.
Advances in neuroimaging and other techniques may one day
aid in this endeavour.
But in the meantime, we as a society would do well to
continually keep in mind that memory – like liberty – is fragile”

E F Loftus
Adapted from Gross, 2015
Emotionality and perceptual
defence
E. McGinnies (1949)

Lecture 8
 BACKGROUND AND CONTEXT
• A commonly held view of perception is that it is an active process,
influenced by motivational, emotional and cognitive processes

• The opposite view is of a passive receipt of sensory information

from and about the external world

• There are six types of motivational-emotional influence on

perception: (Allport, 1955)
a. the value of objects PERCEPTUAL
b. bodily needs DEFENCE
c. reward and punishment
d. individual values
e. personality
f. emotional connotation
 The concept of Perceptual defence

Do we block out some things from our perception because they are
unpleasant to us?

Human beings protect themselves from perceiving stimuli that are hurtful or
offensive

The idea of perceptual defense suggests:

On occasions human beings do not perceive a specific sensory stimulus
(word/image with a vulgar connotation), because we have a filtering
mechanism or "perceptual wall" preventing the sensory data from being
processed
 The concept of Perceptual defence

Perceptual defence
(Postman et al., 1948; McGinnies, 1949)

refers to the findings from laboratory experiments that :

subliminally perceived words

(that is, below the threshold of consciousness)
that evoke unpleasant emotions
take longer to perceive consciously
than neutral words
 The concept of Perceptual defence

• The value of objects refers to the phenomenon of perceptual

accentuation (or sensitization) things that are relevant or
salient for us are perceived as larger/brighter/more
attractive/more valuable, and so on, than those which are not

• Emotional connotation  the accentuation of negative

(anxiety-/frustration producing) stimuli

• Recognition can occur before perception enters conscious

awareness
BACKGROUND AND CONTEXT…

• A commonly used indicator of autonomic activity is the

Galvanic Skin Response (GSR); this measures the skin’s
resistance to electricity, which decreases as anxiety is raised
through increased sweating

• In the subception effect, enough information is transmitted to

the autonomic nervous system (ANS) to determine different
levels of GSR; but insufficient information reaches the brain
centres responsible for correct verbal identification
McGinnies wished to explore the question

How is a
raised or lowered recognition threshold
for harmful stimulus objects achieved
before the observer
discriminates them and becomes aware
of their threatening character?
 Using Galvanic Skin Response Recorder

• Mc Ginnies hypothesized  detecting any one aspect of

autonomic arousal (physiological arousal beyond the
participant’s conscious control) that accompanies perceptual
behaviour should elucidate on the processes involved in
perceptual defence
 Using Galvanic Skin Response Recorder
Taking GSR as a measure of autonomic arousal,
McGinnies predicted that:
1 There will be a significant change in GSR in reaction to visually
presented stimuli (words) with emotive connotations before
the participant is able to report the exact nature of the stimulus
compared with stimuli without such connotations

2 The mean recognition threshold for the words with emotive

connotations will be significantly higher than for words without
emotive connotations (i.e. it will take longer to recognize ‘emotional’
words)

The higher recognition threshold for emotional content represents the concept
of perceptual defence
 METHOD/DESIGN

• Laboratory experiment: A repeated measures design

• Sample size: 16 participants (8 male and 8 female

undergraduates from an elementary psychology class)

• 2 experimental conditions: presented with 18 words (11

neutral, 7 emotionally toned)

• IV – Stimulus words
• DV – mean GSR and mean recognition threshold
Method

The words were presented via a

tachistoscope, which allowed
controlled variation of exposure
time, starting at 0.01 seconds.
Each participant sat in front of the
tachistoscope, with electrodes
strapped to both palms for
measuring GSR. Each participant’s
threshold was first determined for
four trial words, by exposing the
word once at 0.01 seconds, once
at 0.02 seconds, and so on, until it
was correctly identified
 Instructions…

Before the experiment began,

participants were told that they would be shown
words which they might not be able to recognize
at first
They were instructed to report whatever they saw
or thought they saw on each exposure, regardless
of what it was
 RESULTS

Emotionality (hypothesis 1)

Emotionality was significantly greater during pre-recognition exposures of

the critical than of the neutral words

Group averages of galvanic skin response to neutral and critical words during pre-recognition exposures
 RESULTS

Thresholds (hypothesis 2)

The mean recognition thresholds were greater for the critical than for
the neutral words. The difference was statistically significant

Mean thresholds of recognition of the observers to the neutral and emotionally charged words
 CONCLUSIONS
• It seems clear that emotional reactivity, as measured by
GSR, does accompany perceptual defence

• Emotionality was significantly greater during pre-recognition

exposure of the critical (emotionally charged) words than of
the neutral words hypothesis 1

• the mean recognition thresholds were significantly greater for

the critical than for the neutral words (i.e. it took participants
longer to correctly identify the emotionally charged words)
hypothesis 2
 Criticisms
• One criticism of McGinnies’ study is that participants were not
failing to recognize the critical words as quickly as the neutral
words, but rather they may have felt too embarrassed to say
them out loud - the year was 1949!

• Bitterman and Kniffin (1953): there was no perceptual

defence effect if participants were allowed to write down
their answers

• Lacy et al., (1953); Postman et al.,(1953): the perceptual

defence effect could be eliminated if participants were
warned that emotive words would be shown
 Subsequent research

• Similar to Freud’s repression hypothesis

• Dixon (1971) reviewed several studies  verbal stimuli that

are too quick or too dim to be consciously perceived will
nonetheless affect the participant’s associative processes

• Marcel and Patterson (1978) associations following the

subliminal perception of a word were linked to its meaning

• Tyrer et al. (1978)  participants’ self-ratings of anxiety

increased following the subliminal presentations of
unpleasant words, such as ‘cancer’
 Evidence in Brain studies

Whalen et al. (1998) Functional magnetic resonance imaging

(f MRI) shows that unconsciously perceived fearful faces produce
greater activity in the amygdala than happy faces
 Applications and implications…
Evidence for unconscious perception challenges ideas about consciousness
that are popular among those who study consciousness, both neuroscientists
and philosophers
one idea suggests: any stimulus is either ‘in’ or ‘out’ of consciousness

This experiment suggests that sensory information is processed in a wide

variety of ways, with different consequences for different kinds of behaviour

Some of these behaviours are usually taken as:

indicators of consciousness  verbal reports or choices between clearly
perceptible stimuli
Indicators of unconsciousness  fast reflexes, guesses or certain measures of
brain activity
nothing is ever ‘in’ or ‘out’ of consciousness
 …to Subliminal perception in advertising
Jim Vicary (a US market researcher) arranged with the owner of a New Jersey
cinema to install a second special projector which, during the film, flashed on
the screen phrases such as, ‘Hungry? Eat popcorn’, and ‘Drink Coca-Cola’.
These were either flashed so quickly, or printed so faintly, that they could not
be consciously perceived – even after a warning that they were about to
appear

Films treated in this way were alternated with untreated films throughout the
summer of 1956

Later banned in US and England due to protests for manipulation and invasion
of privacy
• The controversy about perceptual defence in
the 1950s led to the understanding of
Perceptual Discrimination as the conservative
criterion (Eriksen, 1960)
Clashing Cognitions: When
actions prompt attitudes
Cognitive Consequences of
forced compliance
Festinger L and Carlsmith J M (1959)

Lecture 9
 What happens to
a person's private opinion
if he is forced to do or say
something
contrary to that opinion?
 CONTEXT
• Cognitive revolution in response to Behaviourism
The dominance of behaviourism in American psychology
was waning, and the cognitive revolution was gaining
momentum

Cognitive Dissonance Theory (CDT) challenged two of

behaviourism’s fundamental tenets:
- ‘Mental life’ has no place in psychology
- Behaviour is shaped by reinforcements

Cognitive Dissonance Theory was regarded as one of the major

innovative theories of the time and it became very influential
within social psychology
 Background
Festinger et al (1956) – The study of the cult

Mrs Marian Keech led a cult that believed that the world would end on Dec
21st 1954
• All dry land would be deluged, and all earthly creatures drowned. On the
eve of the apocalypse, however, the faithful few would be transported by
flying saucer to another planet, where they would take up residence until
the terrestrial flood waters had subsided

• When predictions were disconfirmed – few disillusioned

• Rest of the members  God had spared the wayward world, in
recognition of the piety and fidelity shown by cult members themselves
Their renewed zeal seems motivated by a need for social validation. If
other people agreed with them, then they could obtain reassurance that
their beliefs had been right all along
Festinger (1957)
• proposed that pairs of cognitions (an inclusive term for thoughts and
feelings) can be consonant, dissonant, or irrelevant with respect to one
another

For example, "I helped the old lady across the street“ and "I am a helpful
person" are consonant beliefs

Dissonant cognitions, on the other hand, are those that psychologically imply
the reverse of one other, as do the beliefs "I refrained from helping the old
lady across the street" and "I am a helpful person."

Irrelevant cognitions – are those that carry no psychological implications for

one another, as with "I helped the old lady across the street" and "I am good
at math”

Abelson et al., 2004

Cognitive Dissonance Theory
Other research…
Two studies reported by Janis and King (1954; 1956):
• the private opinion changes so as to bring it into closer correspondence
with the overt behavior the person was forced to perform
• Specifically, they showed that if a person is forced to improvise a speech
supporting a point of view with which he disagrees, his private opinion
moves toward the position advocated in the speech
• The observed opinion change is greater in people who perform mental
rehearsal and think up new arguments than for persons who only hear the
speech or for persons who read a prepared speech with emphasis solely
on execution and manner of delivery
• In this way, they propose, the person who is forced to improvise a speech
convinces himself.
 AIM AND NATURE

The aim of the study was to test Cognitive Dissonance Theory –

specifically the following hypothesis:

The larger the pressure on participants to elicit particular overt

behaviour (beyond the minimum needed to elicit it),
the weaker will be the tendency to change their opinions so as
to bring them in line with that behaviour
 METHOD/DESIGN
The reward in question was either $1 or $20 for telling another participant
(actually a stooge of the experimenter) that the task they were waiting to
perform was really Interesting

Task for ‘Measure of Performance’ - The real participants had just performed
this task themselves. (The task involved putting 12 spools onto a tray,
emptying the tray, refilling it with spools, emptying it again, and so on. After
doing this for 30 minutes, the participant was given a board containing 48
square pegs; the task was to turn the pegs a quarter-turn clockwise, then
another quarter turn, and so on. This also took 30 minutes.)
The hour spent on these repetitive, monotonous tasks was meant to provide
participants with an experience that they would have a rather negative
opinion about
 METHOD/DESIGN
Sample: 71 male student volunteers in the introductory psychology course at
Stanford University - informed that they had to perform a ‘two-hour experiment’
dealing with “Measures of Performance”

After completing the tasks:

• Controls: were not asked to do anything else, except that they were going to
be interviewed as part of the departmental study

• Experimental Condition I and II: asked if they would be willing to stand in for
the student volunteer whose role was to tell waiting participants about the
tasks; they were shown the ‘script’ he used, in which he says, ‘It was very
enjoyable’. ‘I had a lot of fun’. ‘I enjoyed myself’. ‘It was very interesting’. ‘It
was intriguing’. ‘It was exciting

• Once participants had agreed to this request, they were paid either $1 or $20;
this was the amount they had been told they would receive when they were
first asked

Participants had been randomly allocated to the three conditions

• After signing a receipt for the money, the participant was taken by the
experimenter into the secretary’s office (where he had previously waited),
where a female stooge was waiting

• The participant then made some positive remarks about the experiment, to
which the stooge responded by saying she was surprised because a friend of
hers had done it the week before and found it really boring. Most participants
responded by saying something like, ‘Oh no, it’s really very interesting. I’m
sure you’ll enjoy it.’

• Like control participants, those in the Experimental Group I ($1) and

Experimental Group II ($20) were taken to another office, where an
interviewer was asked if he wanted to interview them as part of the
departmental study
• In all cases, of course, he did
The interviewer was unaware of which condition the participant was in
 The interview…
The interview consisted of four questions; participants were encouraged to
talk about them first, before rating their opinion on an 11-point scale:

1. Were the tasks interesting and enjoyable?

2. Did the experiment give you an opportunity to learn about your own
ability to perform these tasks?

3. From what you know about the experiment and the tasks involved in it,
would you say that the experiment was measuring anything important?
That is, do you think the results may have scientific value?

4. Would you have any desire to participate in another similar experiment?

 RESULTS
Average ratings on interview questions for each condition

For the two experimental

groups, the dissonance
produced by
telling someone how
interesting and enjoyable the
tasks were could be reduced
most directly by persuading
themselves that they really
were interesting and
enjoyable

Data for 11 of the 71 participants had to be discarded leaving 60 participants for the study

Control ~ E1 = significant difference

EI ~ EII = significant difference

$1 group experiences the greater dissonance: How can they justify lying about the
boring task for a mere $1? The solution is to see the tasks as actually being interesting
and enjoyable
Cognitive Dissonance Theory and the Festinger & Carlsmith (1959) experiment
 CONCLUSIONS

• When participants were induced, by offer of reward, to say

something contrary to their private opinions, this private
opinion tended to change so as to correspond more closely
with what they had said
The greater the reward offered (beyond what was necessary to
elicit the behaviour), the smaller the effect

• Since this is what CDT predicts will happen, Festinger and

Carlsmith have found support for the theory
 EVALUATION
One of the strengths of CDT is that the predictions it makes are counter-
intuitive (that is, contrary to what ‘common sense’ would predict)

The common-sense prediction of the $1–$20 experiment is, surely, that the
participants offered the $20 should be more likely to change their opinion
about the task than the $1 group. The results, of course, go in the opposite
direction

• These findings have been replicated by several studies in which children

are given either a mild or a severe threat not to play with an attractive toy
(e.g. Aronson and Carlsmith, 1963)

• If children obey a mild threat they will experience greater dissonance,

because it is more difficult for them to justify their behaviour compared
with children receiving a severe threat
 Applications and implications
• Totman (1976) gave patients the illusion of choice over the medication
they received. This seemed to have beneficial effects: the medicine is
more effective because the individual is more committed to it

• Although going beyond CDT, this interesting demonstration of ‘mind over

matter’ is consistent with the prediction that individuals committed by
their own choice will manifest their beliefs in the medication to a greater
extent than those who are less committed (Stephenson, 1996)

• Stockholm syndrome
 REVELATION
If you wish to change somebody's opinion,
subtly induce them to act at odds with it while
letting them think they did so of their
own free will
This tactic works because people readily
rationalize objectionable actions for which they
feel responsible by adjusting their attitudes to
match them
Just Following orders: A shocking
demonstration of obedience to
authority

Lecture 10
Behavioural study on Obedience

Milgram S (1963)

Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67

 Background

I961 – 2 major events:

1. At Jerusalem District Court

2. Psychology Laboratory at Yale University

Although very different from each other, over time researchers

understandings of the two events were fused into a unified
model of evil that dominated popular and scientific thinking for
half a century
 Hannah Arendt on Adolf Eichmann
Adolf Eichmann – Head of Reich Main Security Office Sub Department during
World War II

He dealt with ‘evacuation’ - Responsible for deportation of Jews to the Nazi

death camps
He was the chief bureaucrat of the Holocaust

After the war Eichmann fled to Argentina and lived under the name of
Ricardo Klement
1959 – Mossad kidnapped and smuggled him to Israel where he was indicted
on 15 charges, notably crimes against humanity, crimes against the Jewish
people, and war crimes

On 11 April 1961, the trial began and Adolf Eichmann was seen by the public
for the first time
 Eichmann appearance…
Instead of a strutting arrogant Nazi officer – different from normal folks
Eichmann was a balding nondescript hunched insignificant man

Hannah Arendt – a German Jewish Historian present in court  reported

about it in her book “Eichmann in Jerusalem” and introduced the phrase
“banality of evil”

Arendt (1963 /1994): Eichmann and his ilk were moved less by great hatreds
than by petty desire to do a task well and to please their
superiors. Indeed they concentrated so much on these tasks
that they forgot about their consequences. Eichmann had
no motives at all. He merely never realized what he was
doing
This idea that ordinary people can commit extra ordinary acts of evil through
sheer inattention – was shocking and controversial
But it gained credibility through support from a different form of evidence
 Stanley Milgram on Obedience
14th August 1961 - Eichmann trial clsoed
7th August 1961 – Stanley Milgram began his obedience experiments at Yale
University

MILGRAM’S BACKGROUND
Born – 1933 to Jewish parents - the year Hitler came to power
He closely followed the events of war

Background impacted research  initial research on Conformity

- Whether nations, especially Germany differed in the degree of
Conformity
 Context of the study
Milgram was originally attempting to test the ‘Germans are different’
hypothesis (GADH), used by historians to explain the systematic destruction
of millions of Jews, Poles and others in the 1930s and 1940s

This maintains that:

• Hitler could not have put his evil plans into effect without the cooperation of
thousands of others

• the Germans have a basic character defect, namely a readiness to obey

without question, regardless of the acts demanded by the authority figure,
and it is this readiness to obey which provided Hitler with the cooperation he
needed

He had originally planned to take the experiment to Germany; the 1963 study,
conducted at Yale University (in New Haven, Connecticut), was really intended as
a pilot study (a dummy run)
The results clearly made the trip to Germany unnecessary: the GADH was clearly
false
 AIM AND NATURE

HYPOTHESIS:
On the assumption that Milgram expected to collect data in Germany that
would support the GADH, the 1963 study, by implication, predicted that:
• There would be very low levels of obedience when American
participants were instructed to deliver increasingly intense
electric shocks (the highest shock level being life-threatening)
to a fellow participant

• This first study came to be called the ‘remote victim’ experiment; the next
one (‘voice-feedback’) became the baseline for all subsequent
experiments

• the GADH implies that American participants would show very low levels
of obedience (a finding which does not need explaining, unlike very high
obedience)
• Milgram had asked 14 psychology students to predict what
would happen for 100 participants in the remote-victim
experiment
• They thought that very few would continue up to the highest
shock level
• 40 psychiatrists predicted that less than 1 per cent would
administer the highest voltage
 METHOD/DESIGN
• The study is a controlled observation than an experiment
• Observation was used as a technique for collecting data within the overall
experimental design

• Tape recorders, photographs and (sometimes) observers behind a one-

way mirror were used to record participants’ unusual behaviour. Later
studies also made film records of the proceedings

• This, together with post-experimental interviews with every participant,

generated a great deal of qualitative data (such as their emotional
responses to the situation and things they said about what they were
being asked to do); these complemented the quantitative data (the
number of participants continuing to shock up to different shock levels)
 METHOD/DESIGN
Sample: 40 males aged between 20 – 50 years, different educational and
occupational backgrounds

• They answered advertisements which were sent by post or appeared in

local newspapers, asking for volunteers for a study of memory and
learning, to be conducted at Yale University. It would take about an hour,
and volunteers would be paid $4.50

• When participants arrived at Yale University psychology department, they

were met by a Jack Williams, the experimenter.
• Also present was Mr Wallace, introduced as another participant

Mr Wallace was a stooge, trained for the role - whom most observers found
mild-mannered and likeable
Method…
• The participant and Mr Wallace were told that the experiment was
concerned with the effects of punishment on learning. One of them was to
be the teacher, and the other the learner. Their roles were determined by
each drawing a piece of paper from a hat: it was rigged so that the
participant was always the teacher (both slips of paper had ‘teacher’
written on them)

• They all went into an adjoining room, where Mr Wallace was strapped into
an ‘electric chair’ apparatus. The experimenter explained that the straps
were to prevent excessive movement while the learner was being
shocked. An electrode was attached to the learner’s wrist and electrode
paste applied ‘to avoid blisters and burns’. The electrode was attached to
the shock generator situated next door
• The teacher and experimenter then moved into the room with the
generator. The teacher was given a 45-volt shock to convince him that it
was real, as he was to be operating it during the experiment. However,
this was the only real shock that would be delivered at any point in the
experiment which followed
the learner did not receive a single actual shock
Gross, 2007
Method…
The generator (which looked very authentic) had a number of switches, each
clearly marked with voltage levels and verbal descriptions, starting at 15 volts
and going up to 450 in intervals of 15:
– 15–60 Slight shock
– 75–120 Moderate shock
– 135–180 Strong shock
– 195–240 Very strong shock
– 255–300 Intense shock
– 315–360 Intense to extreme shock
– 375–420 Danger: severe shock
– 435–450 XXX
Method…
• The teacher had to read out a series of word pairs (e.g. ‘blue-girl’, ‘nice-
day’, ‘fat neck’)
• then the first of one pair (the stimulus word) followed by five words, one
of which was the original paired response
• The learner had to choose the correct response to the stimulus word by
pressing one of four switches, which turned on a light on a panel in the
generator room
• Each time he made a mistake, the teacher had to deliver a shock, and each
successive mistake was punished by a shock 15 volts higher than the
previous one
• Before delivering each shock, the teacher had to announce the voltage
level
Mr Wallace would pound loudly on the wall at 300 volts and,
after 315 volts would stop pounding and give no further answers
• If the learner failed to respond, the teacher was to take this as an
error; this ensured that shocks could still be given up to 450 volts
Method…
The experimenter had specially prepared ‘prods’ for whenever the teacher
refused to continue or showed any resistance or reluctance to do so:

Prod 1 ‘Please continue’ or ‘Please go on’

Prod 2 ‘The experiment requires that you continue’

Prod 3 ‘It is absolutely essential that you continue’

Prod 4 ‘You have no other choice, you must go on’

The prods were always made in that order and delivered in a firm, but not impolite,
tone of voice
There were also ‘special prods’ to reassure participants that ‘Although the shocks
may be painful, there is no permanent tissue damage, so please go on’
What was expected?
Results

Gross, 2007
 Beyond shock…
• Every participant shocked up to at least 300 volts
• five refused to go beyond 300
• four more gave one further shock before refusing
• two broke off at 330 volts
• and one each at 345, 360 and 375.
• This makes a total of 14 defiant participants (35 per cent)

• 26 participants (65 per cent) were obedient participants -- they went all the way
up to 450 volts

Many did so under extreme stress, some expressed reluctance to shock beyond
300 volts, showing many of the fears that the defiant participants displayed

• At the end of the experiment, many heaved sighs of relief, mopped their brows,
some shook their heads in regret. Some had remained calm throughout

Gross, 2007
 CONCLUSIONS
• The sheer strength of the tendency to obey - Despite having learned
from childhood that it is morally wrong to hurt other people against their
will, 65 per cent of this cross section of an ordinary American town
abandoned this principle in following the instructions of an authority
figure who had no special powers to enforce his commands – they would
not have been punished or suffered any material loss had they disobeyed

• the extraordinary tension and emotional strain caused by the procedure

– in both the defiant and the obedient participants
 Subsequent research
Cheating and stealing food is common. Why?

• Moghaddam (1998) cites Turnbull’s (1972) study of the Ik, a traditional hunter gatherer
people now living in Uganda, near the Kenya border. Social life involves extreme selfishness
and total concern with personal survival, to such an extent that parents deprive their children
of food, and children even refuse water to aged parents

The explanation seems to lie in the terrible conditions in which they live. Formerly hunter-
gatherers roaming freely in search of game, they were forced by modernization and national
boundaries to live in a confined territory with very limited natural resources. Life became a fierce
struggle for survival to the extent that they seemed to have completely abandoned the value we
associate with human social life

Such extreme conditions, similar to those in Nazi concentration camps where many of the values
we normally associate with ‘human nature’ disappeared, underline the power of the situation to
shape behaviour

‘our behaviour, it seems, is much more dependent on the social context than the dominant
Western model of “self-contained individualism” assumes’ (Moghaddam, 1998)
 Subsequent research

Milgram’s research may have left the impression that situational

pressures completely outweigh personality factors in
determining obedience: ‘I was only following orders’ was, of
course, the main defence made by Nazi war criminals at the
Nuremberg trials

The plea of not guilty on grounds of ‘obedience’ was duly

rejected, which suggests that there is more to obedience than
the agentic state
Cognitive and social psychology

Lecture 6-10