Studies and Experiments

Festinger and Carlsmith's $1/$20 Experiment

Citation Formats

General Reference

Psychology Atlas. "Festinger and Carlsmith's $1/$20 Experiment." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://dev-psychology.interactiveatlas.org/studies/festinger-and-carlsmith-experiment.

APA Style

Psychology Atlas. (n.d.). Festinger and Carlsmith's $1/$20 Experiment. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://dev-psychology.interactiveatlas.org/studies/festinger-and-carlsmith-experiment

BibTeX

@misc{psychologyatlas-festinger-and-carlsmith-s-1-20-experimen,
  author = {Psychology Atlas},
  title = {Festinger and Carlsmith's $1/$20 Experiment},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://dev-psychology.interactiveatlas.org/studies/festinger-and-carlsmith-experiment},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

In 1959, Leon Festinger and James Carlsmith had 71 male Stanford students perform a tedious hour-long task of turning pegs a quarter-turn at fixed intervals, then paid them either one dollar or twenty dollars to tell a waiting participant, actually a confederate, that the task had been interesting. A third group performed the task without being asked to lie to anyone. Participants paid only one dollar rated the boring task as significantly more enjoyable afterward than those paid twenty dollars.

Facts

Key Finding

Participants paid only one dollar to tell a confederate the boring task was interesting rated the task significantly more positively afterward than participants paid twenty dollars, illustrating that insufficient external justification for a counter-attitudinal act produces internal attitude change to reduce the resulting dissonance. 1

Study Year

1959 1

Cross-Tradition Connections