“Cognitive Dissonance and the Perception of Natural Environments,” Emily Balcetis and David Dunning, Psychological Science, vol. 18, no. 10, October 2007, pp. 917–21
(http://dx.doi.org/
10.1111/
j.1467-9280.
2007.02000.x).
(Thanks to Keith Niall for bringing this to our attention.) The authors are at Ohio University and at Cornell University. Dunning shared the 2000 Ig Nobel Psychology Prize for unrelated work. Here the authors report:“Two studies demonstrated that the motivation to resolve cognitive dissonance affects the visual perception of physical environments. In Study 1, subjects crossed a campus quadrangle wearing a costume reminiscent of Carmen Miranda. In Study 2, subjects pushed themselves up a hill while kneeling on a skateboard. Subjects performed either task under a high-choice, low-choice, or control condition. Subjects in the high-choice conditions, presumably to resolve dissonance, perceived the environment to be less aversive than did subjects in the low-choice and control conditions, seeing a shorter distance to travel (Study 1) and a shallower slope to climb (Study 2). These studies suggest that the impact of motivational states extends from social judgment down into perceptual processes.”
(That’s an except from the article “Soft Is Hard,” Published in AIR 15:3.)