A replication study in the context of cognitive dissonance theory

The purpose of the current study is to replicate the study named "Cognitive Consequences of Forced Compliance", conducted by Festinger and Carlsmith (1959). The reason for replicating one of the most important studies of the cognitive dissonance theory (CDT) is to see whether similar results would be similar to that of the original work. In the original study, the money prize given to the participants was determined as 1 dollar and 20 dollars (Festinger and Carlsmith, 1959). While in the current study, the money prize was instead 1 TL for 1 dollar and 50 TL for 20 dollars. The study was conducted with 43 undergraduate students (23 of which were female and 20 of which were male) from Başkent University, Department of International Business. The participants were given 4 extra course points for participating in the experiment. The experiment was announced as "performance measurement". Participants were given two materials, the first one was 12 cylinders which could be taken in or out from a tray. Then, the second material, which consisted of 48 cubes which could be turned by hand were shown. This process lasted for half an hour. Both materials were prepared as per their counterparts in the original study. The experiment was conducted one by one with the participants in the experiment room. The participants were expected to tell the other participant (which was a confederate) waiting outside that the experiment was fun. After accepting to help, the participants was given 1 TL or 50 TL. In the last stage, the helper who was posing as a psychology student aware of the experiment asked the participants how much fun was the experiment. The original study had found that 1 dollar participants had fun, and the wanted attitude change had been generally reached. In this regard, the participants that took 1 dollar was exposed to cognitive dissonance (Festinger & Carlsmith, 1959). However, both 1 TL and 50 TL participants were found to have fun in the current study. The control group has stated that they hadn't have fun both in the current and the original study. However, there were conditional and methodological differences from that of the original study. Possible research ideas and what the future researchers must be careful about was explained in detail in the discussion section. Keywords: Cognitive dissonance theory, replication, attitude change, psychology