Forced-Compliance Experiment

Festinger and Carlsmith's one-dollar versus twenty-dollar study: the smaller payment changed attitudes more.

Specifications & Metrics

After an hour of boring peg-and-spool turning, participants were paid one or twenty dollars to praise the task to a waiting woman.
The one-dollar group later rated the task markedly more enjoyable, resolving dissonance by upgrading the task itself.
The counterintuitive smaller-incentive pattern became dissonance theory's signature prediction.