Compare methods

	Induced Compliance Paradigm	Free-Choice Dissonance Paradigm
Field	Social Psychology	Social Psychology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1959	1956
Originator	Leon Festinger & James Carlsmith	Jack Brehm
Type	Experimental paradigm for cognitive dissonance	Experimental paradigm for post-decisional dissonance
Seminal source	Festinger, L., & Carlsmith, J. M. (1959). Cognitive consequences of forced compliance. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 58(2), 203-210.	Brehm, J. W. (1956). Postdecision changes in the desirability of alternatives. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 52(3), 384-389.
Aliases	Forced Compliance Paradigm, Counter-attitudinal Advocacy Paradigm, Festinger-Carlsmith Paradigm	Free-Choice Paradigm, Post-Decisional Dissonance Paradigm, Spreading of Alternatives Paradigm
Related	3	3
Summary	The induced (forced) compliance paradigm, introduced by Festinger and Carlsmith in 1959, is the classic experimental test of cognitive dissonance theory. Participants are led to perform a counter-attitudinal act -- typically telling another person that a boring task was enjoyable -- under either low or high justification (in the original, paid one dollar versus twenty dollars). Dissonance theory predicts the counterintuitive result that those paid less change their private attitudes more, coming to actually believe the task was enjoyable, because a small incentive provides insufficient external justification for the lie, leaving them to reduce the resulting discomfort by aligning their attitude with their behavior. Festinger and Carlsmith found exactly this inverse relationship between incentive and attitude change, providing striking support for dissonance theory and overturning reinforcement-based predictions that larger rewards produce more attitude change.	The free-choice paradigm, introduced by Jack Brehm in 1956, measures post-decisional dissonance through the phenomenon of spreading of alternatives. Participants first rate the desirability of a set of items, then choose between two options that they had rated as roughly equally attractive, and finally re-rate all the items. Because the chosen option has some unattractive features and the rejected option has some attractive ones, a difficult choice between similar alternatives creates dissonance; participants reduce it by enhancing their evaluation of the chosen option and devaluing the rejected one. This 'spreading' of the two alternatives' desirability after the decision is the paradigm's signature measure and a key demonstration that choices not only reflect preferences but also shape them. The paradigm became a standard tool for studying decision-induced attitude change, alongside the induced compliance procedure.