Cognitive dissonance in a natural setting : A social psychological investigation of the attitudes of graduate students in pre-doctoral and post-doctoral training programs

The study of graduate research training programs affords the opportunity to study and test dissonance theory away from the experimental situation and in the natural setting. It was felt that the attitudes that graduate research trainees have toward their particular research training programs are amenable to interpretation by the dissonance model since these attitudes are partly a function of the decisions which the trainees had to make prior to entering the program. More specifically, the present study was concerned with the following questions: 1. Are responses to motivational, evaluational.and interest questionnaire items influenced by the trainees' attitudes toward research? It was hypothesized that trainees who do not particularly have positive attitudes toward research experience dissonance once they have committed themselves to do research. In order to reduce dissonance, when these trainees are asked to state how interested they are in their training program and the research they are doing, they may respond overly favorably to these items. 2. Are responses to motivational, evaluational, and interest items influenced by the NIDR trainee's attitude toward dentistry? It was hypothesized that MIDR dental trainees experience less dissonance than NIDR non-dental trainees, since the latter group's major field of interest is not dentistry, but yet these trainees are ostensibly committed to doing dental research. 3. Is there a relationship between the number of other programs which were available and which therefore served as alternatives to entering the program, and responses to motivational, evaluational, and interest items? It was hypothesized that the trainees who had applied to and been accepted by other programs would react more positively to the subjective items. 4. Is there a relationship between perceived choice in entering the program and/or selecting one's research problem, and responses to the subjective items? According to dissonance theory the greater the perceived choice in either of these decisions, the greater is the commitment. Two national samples were used, a sample comprised of 104 trainees supported by the National Institute of Dental Research and a sample comprised of 69 trainees supported by other National Institutes of Health. The interviewing was conducted by the National Opinion Research Center. The results of the study indicated that responses to some of the motivational, evaluational, and interest items were related to (1) the trainee's attitude toward research, (2) in the case of the NIDR trainee, his attitude toward dentistry, (3) the number of programs to which the trainee had applied, and (4) perceived choice in the selection of research problem; These results, however, only partly support the dissonance model, since many of the item comparisons made yielded insignificant differences or, in many comparisons, significant differences in the direction opposite to the one predicted by dissonance theory.Psychology, Department o