to lose the ostrich

To Lose the OstrichAuthor(s): Joel CooperSource: Psychological Inquiry, Vol. 1, No. 3 (1990), pp. 205-206Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1449751 .

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COMMENTARIES 205

To Lose the Ostrich

Joel Cooper Princeton University

Kruglanski's theory of lay epistemology offers an enticing promise for social psychology. It is the quintessential Oc- cam's razor. By offering a very few postulates, it holds out the possibility of being able to incorporate ideas from a wide variety of other theories. In his article alone (which is only a glimpse of the material presented in Kruglanski, 1989), we are told that the multitude of concepts derived from attribution theory, dissonance theory, social cognition, social judg- ment, and attitude change are no longer necessary. They can all be replaced by the concepts of hypothesis generation, hypothesis validation, and epistemic motivation.

At the risk of oversimplifying, the notion is that people use and process knowledge. They form and test hypotheses, motivated by the need to form or avoid specific and nonspecific closure. With these few principles, most of the concepts derived from various endeavors in social psychology can be understood. And Kruglanski claims his principles of lay epistemology can do more than that. They can make excur- sions into the field of applied social cognition-specifically, cognitive therapy. In that domain, they can make cognitive therapy comprehensible in lay epistemic terms, and suggest therapeutic steps that Ellis (1977), Beck (1976), and others have not yet considered.

These claims are extremely broad. Their usefulness for science depends on the degree to which they accomplish two goals simultaneously. First, the use of lay epistemic concepts must do justice to the meaning of the original concepts they purport to subsume. Second, using lay epistemic language must allow for an appropriate degree of differentiation. That is, using the concepts of lay epistemology, we must be able to make the kind of differential predictions that have been made by the original theories. It is here that Kruglanski's theory falls short.

Before examining a specific case of the failure of lay epistemology to be differentially useful, let us look at the impor- tance of differentiation as an analytic tool. If we wished to understand the peculiar animal that had feathers, laid eggs, enjoyed burying its head in the sand, and did not fly, we would want to know about the properties of the ostrich. It is true that an ostrich is a member of the category, bird. How- ever, we begin to lose some of the essential features of the ostrich by merely using the term, bird, when considering the ostrich. Some of its unique features, differentiating it from other birds, have been lost by using the more general term. Further, we could not argue that the ostrich category is not subsumed in the category, animal. Yet we stray further away from being able to say anything that is differentially interesting and unique about the ostrich. The concept is at too high a level of abstraction to be useful in making many specific predictions about the ostrich.

Such is the problem with Kruglanski's lay epistemology. The high level of abstraction that gives it its broad, encom- passing insights into a variety of areas, at the same time, makes it lose its power in specific instances. Consider the case of cognitive consistency theory. According to Kruglanski, people become aroused or upset when con-

fronted with inconsistency because the inconsistent information undermines a person's confidence in a hypothesis that he or she holds. If a person has a motivation for closure, the inconsistent information can be upsetting.

Let us examine how this might work in a typical situation studied by cognitive dissonance theorists. A person who holds an attitude that cigarette smoking should be allowed in public places is induced to make a speech advocating a smoking ban on airplanes. He or she is offered a small sum of money for making the remarks. The speech is given publicly to a group that is considering a smoking ban on international flights. According to Festinger's (1957) original version of dissonance theory, dissonance is created by the psychological inconsistency created by the discrepancy between the attitude and the behavior. Moreover, the conditions shown to be necessary for dissonance such as commitment (Carlsmith, Collins, & Helmreich, 1966), personal responsibility (Cooper, 1971), and aversive consequences (Collins & Hoyt, 1972; Cooper & Worchel, 1970) have been met. The arousal created by these conditions gives rise to a motivation to change attitudes.

Lay epistemology holds that a person's confidence in his or her original opinion may be undermined by the speech. This will create upset if the person were motivated to form a specific closure about smoking in public places. So far, lay epistemology does an adequate job on the first criterion men- tioned earlier. A certain number of dissonance-related terms have been translated into a new language without too much damage to the original concepts. To say that confidence is undermined, causing one to become upset is similar to Fes- tinger's statement that holding contradictory cognitions cre- ates arousal. Similarly, Kruglanski's reinterpretation of Cooper and Fazio's (1984) position is that bringing about an aversive event is a way of undermining one's self-confidence as a good decision maker. This, too, may be an adequate way of changing the words used by Cooper and Fazio.

On reflection, however, we can see the degree of power that is lost because the lay epistemological approach fails to make any further differentiations. Why is it important that the counterattitudinal speech be made for just a small, rather than a large, financial incentive? Why is it important for the audience to be convinced, or potentially convinced, of the counterattitudinal position? Why is it important for the speech to be made in public? All these factors are (and were) derived from dissonance theory. They make sense, given the motivational properties of dissonance as Festinger and others elaborated them. They seem to have no place in Kruglanski's model. Confidence in a hypothesis is equally undermined by a speech given in private, by a speech given for a high incentive, or by a speech that is given without free choice or responsibility.

It is also not clear why the actor, in our hypothetical speech example, would have the proper epistemic motivation for closure. It is only against the backdrop provided by this motivation that the theory of lay epistemology can predict any arousal or opinion change in the wake of counterat-



206 COMMENTARIES

titudinal advocacy. Dissonance theory posits a motivation for consistency. Lay epistemology posits that any of four motivational orientations can exist. There is nothing salient in the situation that would orient a person toward a motivation for closure, rendering a prediction under the lay epistemological view ambiguous. Yet we can demonstrate time after time in the laboratory that the hypothetical situation we have de- picted will lead to attitude change as predicted by the original theory of cognitive dissonance or its successors.

A similar set of objections can be raised about the other sections of Kruglanski's article. Consider the section on attribution. It is certainly true that one's confidence in a particular causal hypothesis can be undermined by a tenable, alter- native hypothesis. Kelley (1967) called this "discounting," and Kruglanski can view it as an undermining of confidence in a particular hypothesis. What power do we add with the new language? There are no new predictions here. Kruglanski's statement that discounting will occur only if the new hypothesis is "truly in competition" with a certain causal hypothesis, is not new and is perfectly consistent with Kelley's position. The unfortunate aspect of using the language of lay epistemology is that it does not seem well suited to handling the crux of Kelley's causal attribution model. It does not adequately address a person's use of consensus, consistency, and time/modality in making causal attributions. Further, it does not appear capable of addressing the way in which people make dispositional trait attributions as Jones and Davis's (1965) attributional model has shown us. It does not show us how or why attributions are exaggerated under conditions of personalism and hedonic relevance. (In this regard, it should be pointed out that Kruglanski misin- terprets Jones and Davis's notion of hedonic relevance. Hedonic relevance does not lead to ego protection; it leads to more extreme and more confidently held attributions.)

With all this said, Kruglanski's article is still of enormous interest. Higher level concepts are important. What Kruglanski has shown us is that there is a way of processing information that combines knowledge with motivation. That theory makes predictions that are interesting in their own right. That theory leads to specific, testable hypotheses on which Kruglanski and his associates have been conducting interesting research. It is important for Kruglanski to point out, as he does in this article, that several areas of research are not inconsistent with lay epistemological thought. When

Kruglanski's current formulation goes further to suggest that the other areas (attribution, attitude change, consistency, etc.) are nothing but instances of lay epistemology, then it ceases to be productive.

Social psychology needs the kind of thought-provoking ideas that Kruglanski has put forth. In this particular case, we lost the ostrich-that is, categories at a level of abstraction that allow us to make rich and unique predictions about the phenomena being studied.

Note

Joel Cooper, Department of Psychology, Princeton Uni- versity, Princeton, NJ 08544-1010.

References

Beck, A. T. (1976). Cognitive therapy and the emotional disorders. Madison, CT: International Universities Press.

Carlsmith, J. M., Collins, B. E., & Helmreich, R. L. (1966). Studies in forced compliance: I. The effect of pressure for compliance on attitude change produced by face-to-face role playing and anonymous essay writing. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 4, 1-13.

Collins, B. E., & Hoyt, M. G. (1972). Personal responsibility for consequences: An integration and extension of the "forced compliance" effect. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 8, 558-593.

Cooper, J. (1971). Personal responsibility and dissonance: The role of foreseen consequences. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 18, 354-363.

Cooper, J., & Fazio, R. H. (1984). A new look at dissonance theory. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental socialpsychology (Vol. 17, pp. 229-266). New York: Academic.

Cooper, J., & Worchel, S. (1970). Role of undesired consequences in arousing cognitive dissonance. Journal of Personality and Social Psy- chology, 16, 199-206.

Ellis, A. (1977). The basic clinical theory of rational emotive therapy. In A. Ellis & R. Greiger (Eds.), Handbook of rational emotive therapy (pp. 3-34). New York: Springer.

Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Jones, E. E., & Davis, K. E. (1965). From acts to dispositions: The attribution process in person perception. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 2, pp. 220-266). New York: Academic.

Kelley, H. H. (1967). Attribution theory in social psychology. In D. Levine (Ed.), Nebraska Symposium on Motivation (pp. 192-238). Omaha: University of Nebraska Press.

Kruglanski, A. (1989). Lay epistemics and human knowledge: Cognitive and motivational bases. New York: Plenum.



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