Testing the Induced-Compliance Paradigm of Cognitive Dissonance
When people behave in ways contrary to their beliefs, this creates an uncomfortable feeling known as cognitive dissonance. In such situations, individuals may shift their beliefs to be less contradictory with their own past behaviour. However, when people feel they had little choice but to behave in the way they did, they may experience less dissonance and therefore show less change in their beliefs.
Dr. Inzlicht and myself joined a team of 39 labs across 19 countries to test if having people ‘act’ against their beliefs would lead to internal conflict and nudge them to change their minds. Nearly 5,000 participants were asked to write essays either against their own views or about neutral topics, with some being told this stage was separate and optional, and others simply being informed it was the next stage of the experiment. After writing these essays, we measured attitudes towards raising tuition, and compared them to attitude assessments taken weeks before. Participants who wrote essays against their own beliefs showed more change in attitude and felt more conflicted compared to those who wrote about neutral topics. However, we couldn’t find strong evidence that giving people a salient choice made any difference in how much they shifted their beliefs. This failure to find an effect of ‘induced compliance’ challenges the idea that this method, at least in the way it was implemented here, is a robust and reliable way to produce and observe cognitive dissonance in the lab.
Effect size of condition comparisons across labs, with average effect sizes at the bottom. HC = High Choice, LC = Low Choice; CE = Contradictory Essay, NE = Neutral Essay. Overall, the effect of the comparison between high and low choice was not significant. However, the comparison between contradictory and neutral essays was significant.
Cognitive Effort for the Self, a Stranger, and a Charity
Helping others is associated with increased well-being for the helper. In the lab, when effort is required, people often display prosocial apathy: forgoing rewards for others to avoid effort themselves. On the other hand, in daily life people often help others for no obvious benefit to themselves. How do people decide who and what is worthy of their efforts?
In work with Dr Inzlicht and Dr Hause Lin I have shown that cognitive effort, like physical effort, discounts the subjective value of potential rewards. Individuals discount rewards by the cognitive effort required to obtain them in a linear fashion, and this discounting is steeper when the rewards will be received by an intragroup stranger, or a personally meaningful charity, compared to the self. In other words, when a reward requires mental effort to obtain, it is seen as less valuable. When the reward is going to a stranger or charity, this ‘effort discounting’ shows a stronger effect. Generally, people would rather think (to earn rewards) for themselves.
However, some participants did not show this prosocial apathy, and were more willing to invest prosocial effort than others. We used machine learning classifiers to build representations of self and others, and found that individuals whose self representation overlapped strongly with their representation of another target were more willing to invest effort for that target. Basically, we trained classifiers on a bunch of behavioural data of individual people making a bunch of decisions to invest effort for self and others. We then asked the classifier to guess in new data whether the behavioural data belonged to a decision made for the self, or a decision made for others. Where classifiers struggled to decode (low accuracy) we concluded there was high overlap of representations for self and other. Put simply, individuals were more willing to invest effort for targets with which they had a lot of self-other overlap.
Empathy and Prosociality Across the Day and Lifespan
Do people vary in how empathetic and prosocial they are throughout the day? What about more broadly, across the lifespan of an adult? I’ve addressed these questions with collaborators in several studies. Myself, Dr Michael Inzlicht, and Dr Zoë Francis, addressed how empathy and prosociality varies across the day, and whether this depends on an individuals chronotype; that is, on whether they are more of a morning-type ‘early bird’ or an evening-type ‘night owl’. This work, led primarily by Dr. Francis, turned up a number of interesting results. We found that empathy opportunities and prosocial behaviours were higher in the morning, but only for early morning-type individuals. Evening-types had consistent, and lower, rates of empathy and prosociality. This effect is likely due to having fewer social opportunities. We also found a strong effect of ‘chronotype’ on well-being, in that evening-types reported lower happiness overall relative to morning-types.
Taking a look at a broader timescale, I’ve examined how empathy, prosociality, and subjective well-being vary across the adult lifespan. Dr. Inzlicht and myself were happy to be part of a team on this paper led by Lena Pollerhoff, including Dr. Julia Stietz, Dr. Phillip Kanske, Dr. Shu-Chen Li, and Dr. Andrea Reiter. We found linear and quadratic effects for empathy, in that it increased from 18-55, then showed a slight decrease in the oldest age grouping of 55 and older. On the other hand, prosociality and subjective well-being showed no age-related changes across the adult lifespan.
Everyday Empathy
Empathy–the capacity to understand, share, and care about the emotions of others–is a critical aspect of human psychology. It is foundational for friendships, romantic relationships, and group-living. Despite it’s importance, we are yet to answer basic descriptive questions about empathy and how it is experienced in daily life. I addressed this in work with Dr Michael Inzlicht and Dr Zoë Francis. In a sample of U.S. adults representative of the population on key demographics, I used experience sampling methods to move the study of empathy ‘outside the lab’ and describe empathy experiences in everyday life. Results shed light on key questions in the empathy literature. For example, while researchers typically examine empathy for the pain of strangers, in daily life people often empathize with the positive emotions of close others.
As well, though technically dissociable–different aspects of empathy like perspective taking, emotion sharing, and compassion–tend to co-occur in daily life.
Effects of Recreational Cannabis Use in Regular Users
For chronic users in their everyday lives, how does cannabis effect mood, willingness to invest effort to earn rewards, motivation, and self-control? We performed an experience sampling study among regular cannabis users, prompting them to respond to surveys in daily life when they were and were not high, to find out. Using multilevel models, we examined both within (differences within a person) and between (differences across people) level effects.
When chronic users are high (vs not) they have higher positive emotions 
and less fear/stress 
than they normally experience. Interestingly, the largest effect was on feelings of awe. However, heavier users (those who report being high in ~90% of surveys) had more negative emotions 
than their peers who were somewhat lighter, though still regular, users (high in ~30% of surveys). In other words, people felt more positive emotions than usual when high, but people who were high more often than other regular users had greater negative emotions as a between-subject effect.
Contrasting stereotypes of the ‘stoned slacker’, cannabis use in daily life had no effect on most aspects of motivation, and did not impact willingness to invest mental effort to earn rewards. That said, it did appear to reduce self-regulation. When high (see A), participants report being more impulsive (lower self-control), less organized and neat (orderliness), more willing to lie to get their way (lower virtue), and less willing to follow societal rules (traditionalism). Across participants (see B), those who get high multiple times per day report being lower in self-control, virtue, orderliness, and willpower than those who get high daily.
Wise Empathy and Compassion
Are some strategies of engaging with the emotions of other people ‘wiser’ than others in the sense of leading to better outcomes for both the empathizer and the target of empathy? While it is clear that dissociable constructs like emotion sharing, perspective taking, and compassion correlate strongly in daily life, it is also possible that mindfully focusing on one aspect of the experience may prove adaptive in certain circumstances.
For example, in many professional roles individuals must contend with negative emotions at a high rate that places them at risk for burnout, which has negative mental and physical health implications. In work Dr. Micheal Inzlicht, Dr Jason Beck as well as CEO Rasmus Hougaard and Dr Nick Hobson at Potential Project, I developed the Compassion-Empathy Leadership Freference (CELF) task, which indexes a leaders’ tendency to focus on sharing or caring about negative follower emotions in the workplace.
We have found that leaders who report focusing on compassion rather than emotion sharing when team-members experience distress tend to have higher subjective well-being, reduced burnout, and lower intention to quit. In addition, their team-members report higher leader-member exchange, organizational commitment and job engagement. Preprint: https://psyarxiv.com/md2g8/
Empathy Opportunities
In daily life, empathy opportunities–especially for positive emotions–are correlated with boosts to subjective well-being and high rates of prosocial behaviour. Nonetheless, people miss about 1/3 of the opportunities to empathize present in daily life. What differentiates empathy cues that are noticed from those that are missed? In work with Dr. Rachel Ruttan, I am addressing this question with a multi-method approach.
We collected recollections of attempts to elicit empathy (empathy cues) that were either met with empathy or not. We have used both human coding and Natural Language Processing to better understand what strategies and features differentiate failed and successful empathy cues. We found many commonalities but also key differences across failed and successful cues. For example, ‘work’ and ‘didnt’ were more central in failed cues (left) while ‘friend’ and ‘time’ were more prominent in successful cues (right).
You can find links to my papers on my Google Scholar page (https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=1FZFK5oAAAAJ&hl=en). At my Open Science Foundation profile (https://osf.io/g42yt/) you can find copies of conference posters and talks, as well as data, code, and other materials associated with the research I have done.