Dissonance produced by deviations from life styles: The interaction of Jungian typology and conformity

Hypothesized that individuals would experience dissonance if their behavior were inconsistent with their usual life-styles. Specifically, the experiment examined the roles played by the Jungian personality variable of introversion-extraversion and behavior in a typical conformity situation. 22 introverted and 22 extraverted male undergraduates, chosen on the basis of their scores on the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator Form F, were placed in a conformity predicament, believing that they were responding to a political issue after learning that the unanimous judgment of the rest of the group was contrary to their own. Half of the introverts and half of the extraverts were made to believe they conformed; the other half were led to believe they were independent. An interaction was predicted such that dissonance-produced attitude change would be found only for behaviors that were discrepant from life-styles: conforming introverts and independent extraverts. Results support the prediction and are discussed in terms of the need to consider both personality and situational variables in dissonance arousal. (16 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved).