Does pupil dilation indicate cognitive dissonance and strength of attitude change? Replicating the spreading of alternatives effect in a blind-choice task.

Authors

  • Alexander Fries University Groningen
  • Sebastiaan Mathôt University Groningen

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25609/sure.v4.2851

Keywords:

Cognitive dissonance, arousal states, spreading of alternatives, attitude change, preferences, pupillometry

Abstract

The aim of the present research was twofold. First, we aimed to replicate a recent study by Sharot et al. (2010), which found evidence for the spreading of alternatives (SOA) effect. Second, we investigated the hypothesis that cognitive dissonance, which may explain an existing SOA effect, is accompanied by significant changes in pupil diameter. Our results provide neither support for this hypothesis nor do they replicate the SOA effect. We conclude that more research is needed to investigate the SOA effect and call for deploying more suitable experimental paradigms to investigate the link between cognitive dissonance states and pupillary changes.

Student Research Conference 2018

Additional Files

Published

2018-11-09

Issue

Vol. 4 (2018): Student Research Conference 2018

Section

Social Sciences & Economics

License

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted under the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike (CC BY-SA) license and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page.