Self-presentational analysis of the effects of incentives on attitude change following counterattitudinal behavior.

A self-presentational analysis of the forced compliance setting focuses on the predicament-creating aspects of Counterattitudinal actions and on the types of accounting tactics people use to excuse or justify events that threaten their identities before real or imagined audiences. The social meaning of monetary payments that are offered for the performance of Counterattitudinal actions should affect the nature of the predicament subjects confront. It was hypothe-sized that when payment is introduced in a context that increases subjects' concerns about moral evaluation relevant to bribery, a direct relationship should occur between magnitude of payment and attitude change. If payment is in-troduced in a context that minimizes moral evaluation relevant to bribery, however, an inverse relationship should occur. Three experiments provided sup-port for these hypotheses. In addition, attitude change was enhanced when subjects thought they were presenting their accounts to an audience that had observed their actions. Finally, compared to observers, subjects who had re-ceived large payments attempted to redefine them to make them appear more legitimate. Despite the amount of theory and research devoted to understanding the impact of coun-terattitudinal action on attitudes, one par-ticularly enigmatic problem still exists—un-derstanding the effects of incentives on atti-tude change following Counterattitudinal be-havior. Dissonance theory (Festinger, 1957) originally generated the prediction that atti-tude change should be inversely related to the magnitude of payment offered subjects to per-form a Counterattitudinal action, a relation-The present studies were supported by Research