This study contributes to our understanding of how individuals cope with or resolve cognitive dissonance and proposes narrative engagement as a potential means in which individuals can fulfill dissonance reduction. Previous work has established dissonance can result in psychological discomfort and the role of narrative engagement in mitigating discomfort resulting from everyday threats to the self. Thus, narrative engagement was evaluated to determine if there was a resulting decrease in attitudinal change that would traditionally be seen in dissonance reduction to establish an alternative strategy. A 2 x 2 between-subjects design using undergraduate student participants from a Midwestern university were grouped randomly into conditions for this study. Participants first reported their attitudes toward tuition by placing their ratings on a semantic differential scale. The participants in cognitive dissonance conditions engaged in the induced-compliance paradigm task of writing counter-attitudinal essays on raising tuition at the university by 12%. Individuals were then given a narrative short story or asked to complete basic arithmetic problems to establish a contrast in narrative and non-narrative cognitive tasks. Individuals in the narrative condition then reported their narrative engagement on multiple scales, while non-narrative participants continued with the math problems for an equal time duration. Participants again reported their attitudes toward tuition for comparison to before the manipulation to evaluate the degree of attitudinal change experienced. The study found that narrative engagement could not be evaluated as a dissonance reduction mechanism due to difficulties replicating dissonance induction with participants. This issue may potentially stem from using a topic, such as tuition increases, that has changed significantly since previous research. Consequently, further evaluation of dissonance induction tasks is necessary to properly induce dissonance using the induced-compliance paradigm in future work.
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