In a classic experiment on cognitive dissonance, students did some boring, repetitive tasks and then had to tell another student, who was waiting to participate in the study, that the work was interesting and fun (Festinger & Carlsmith, 1959)
Half the students were offered $20 for telling this lie and the others only $1. Based on what you have learned about cognitive dissonance reduction, which students do you think decided later that the tasks had been fun after all? Why?
Indicate whether this statement is true or false.
The students who got only $1 were more likely to say that the task had been fun. They were in a state of dissonance because "The task was as dull as dishwater" is dissonant with "I said I enjoyed it—and for a mere dollar, at that." Those who got $20 could rationalize that the large sum (which really was large in the 1950s) justified the lie.
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If blood vessels in the brain rupture, cutting off the supply of oxygen to parts of the brain and thereby killing surrounding brain tissue, the person is said to have suffered a
a. stroke. b. broken ventricle. c. tangle of neurons. d. nervous breakdown.
Your textbook discusses the issue of facilitated communication and its applicability to assisting children with autism
One possibility for the early research results was that the children were communicating through the adults who were assisting them. As the book notes, a simpler explanation for the miraculous findings was that the "facilitators" were simply guiding the hands of the children to communicate things that their parents would want to hear. This simpler explanation is consistent with the concept of A) replicability. B) Occam's Razor. C) falsifiability. D) correlation versus causation.