The Neural Basis of Rationalization
People rationalize the choices they make when confronted with difficult decisions by claiming they never wanted the option they did not choose. Behavioral studies on cognitive dissonance provide evidence for decision-induced attitude change, but these studies cannot fully uncover the mechanisms driving the attitude change because only pre- and post-decision attitudes are measured, rather than the process of change itself. In the first fMRI study to examine the decision phase in a decision-based cognitive dissonance paradigm, we observed that increased activity in right-inferior frontal gyrus, medial fronto-parietal regions and ventral striatum, and decreased activit in anterior insula were associated with subsequent decision-related attitude change. These findings suggest the characteristic rationalization processes that are associated with decision-making may be engaged very quickly at the moment of the decision, without extended deliberation and may involve reappraisal-like emotion regulation processes.
Here are Stevan's initial remarks on this article. I'm adding them here because it is sometimes hard to keep track of emails.
RépondreEffacerIt uses fMRI to locate the areas that whose activity changes when there is attitude change in cognitive dissonance (CD).
The method fits with the ERP method we use to study changes in perception in category learning and categorical perception (CP): using brain activity change to track the time course of a process that is not revealed by just looking at behavior. As with CP, the interest is in the process of change, from before to after.
Of course knowing where brain activity changes does not explain what is going on in those areas, but in the case of cognitive dissonance (CD) we are not primarily interested in explaining it functionally, nor with modelling it (all possible in principle, but not as relevant to our much more practical motivation in our planned studies -- although it is not ruled out that modelling could be informative too). We are interested in changing behavior.
The important point is that CD is a state, a conflict between two desires, and studies are focused on the attitude toward those desires -- hence in this case, on on attitude change. What the authors in this article refer to as “behavior” is really just the behavior of expressing or verbalizing those attitudes. Hence they are studying changes in attitude, not changes in behavior, which in our case means changes in what people actually do, rather than just in what they say (or perhaps even feel) that they will do.
So the methodology is again relevant to us, as in the other neural study, which actually used ERPs rather than fMRI, for measuring effects of CD and CD resolution on attitude expression. But we need to think of ways to add a second (and more important) phase of the change process that we are interested in, namely, whether the change in attitude actually changes behavior (i.e., eating meat).
A very trivial and simplistic framework for what we could measure is this:
1. Create a state (either with visual or factual information) that produces or reveals cognitive dissonance (CD) between what people feel like eating (meat, M) and how people feel about causing animal suffering (A).
2. Test potential ways to change that CD in favor of lowering M and raising A (e.g., information or images or narratives or evidence about the suffering (A); information or images or narratives of evidence about the health benefits, or sports benefits, of lowering or eliminating M, etc.).
3. Measure attitude change verbally as well as with ERPs (before vs. after, if possible).
4. Design a behavioral measure (e.g., meal diary) that can be used to test whether (and which) verbal attitude changes actually change behavior in the short and long term after 1-3.
We will need to start with simple measures to see whether the paradigm -- (1) generate CD, (2) measure CD, (3) test ways to resolve the CD in favor of A, (4) measure change in CD (words and ERP), (5) measure whether the verbal attitude also changes subsequent behavior (e.g. verbal diaries).
For our meeting next week, see if you can think of some concrete ideas for starting to design experiments along these lines (or other lines you think of!)?
Caution: social psychology is famous for doing trivial, artificial tests of the obvious, with a lot of theorizing, and no actual concrete effects in the real world. We have to make sure our experimental paradigm generates effects that actually influence behavior in the world. I know that for each of us this is not just a project for generating data, statistical and “theoretical” significance, and publications...
Cheers,
S/É