26 Sep 2014Working Paper Summaries

Dangerous Expectations: Breaking Rules to Resolve Cognitive Dissonance

by Celia Moore, S. Wiley Wakeman and Francesca Gino

Before completing a task, we form expectations about its difficulty and of how well we will perform on it. It is psychologically uncomfortable to perform worse than we expected. This paper proposes that individuals are more likely to break rules if they have been led to expect that achieving high levels of performance will be easy rather than difficult. The authors argue that this phenomenon occurs because of the heightened cognitive dissonance people experience when their performance expectations go unmet. Consistent with these arguments, across three studies people were more likely to break rules when have been led to believe that performing well will be easy rather than hard. The authors also show that differences in rule breaking are not due to differences in legitimate performance as a function of how easy people expect the task to be or whether their expectations are set explicitly (by referring to others' performance, Study 1) or implicitly (as implied by their own prior performance, Study 2). In Study 3, the authors also show that cognitive dissonance triggered by unmet expectations drives these effects. These results have important implications for the ways in which colleges are setting students' expectations, as well as broader implications for how we set expectations in professional environments. Key concepts include:

Academic and professional environments need to realistically manage how well their students and employees, respectively, should expect to perform.
When people experience a disconnect between their expectations and reality, they are more likely to engage in dysfunctional behaviors in the form of rule breaking, even when breaking rules means crossing ethical boundaries.

Author Abstract

When entering task performance contexts we generally have expectations about both the task and how well we will perform on it. When those expectations go unmet, we experience psychological discomfort (cognitive dissonance), which we are then motivated to resolve. Prior research on expectancy disconfirmation in task performance contexts has focused on the dysfunctional consequences of disconfirming low performance expectations (i.e., stereotype threat). In this paper we focus on the dysfunctional consequences of disconfirming high performance expectations. In three studies, we find that individuals are more likely to break rules if they have been led to expect that achieving high levels of performance will be easy rather than difficult, even if breaking rules means behaving unethically. We show that this willingness to break rules is not due to differences in legitimate performance as a function of how easy people expect the task to be, or whether their expectations are set explicitly (by referring to others' performance) or implicitly (as implied by their own prior performance). Instead, using a misattribution paradigm, we show that cognitive dissonance triggered by unmet expectations drives our effects.