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Insufficient justification (insufficient punishment) is a phenomenon under the realm of social psychology. It synthesizes theories of cognitive dissonance and internal vs. external justification. Essentially, insufficient justification is when an individual utilizes internal motivation to justify a behavior. It is most commonly seen in insufficient punishment, which is the dissonance experienced when individuals lack sufficient external justification for having resisted a desired activity or object, usually resulting in individuals’ devaluing the forbidden activity or object.〔Aronson, Elliot, Timothy D. Wilson, and Robin M. Akert. Social Psychology. 7th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2010. 163-65. Print.〕 That is, when an individual can’t come up with an external reason as to why they resisted doing something they wanted to, he or she decides to derogate the activity. Mild punishment will cause a more lasting behavioral change than severe punishment because internal justification is stronger than external justification. ==Background== In 1963, Elliot Aronson and J. Merrill Carlsmith conducted an experiment with pre-school-age children. The researchers started by analyzing how people respond to punishment for doing something they enjoy; humans comply with a very severe punishment, but it doesn’t stop them from enjoying the activity and wanting to do it again. Since they will probably try do the desirable activity again, someone trying to prevent them from doing so must work harder to enact social control Thus, Aronson and Carlsmith thought that if they could convince the subjects that they did not in fact like this activity that they previously enjoyed, they would be more likely to obey. In other words, they would change their cognition in order to reduce dissonance, or the uncomfortable feeling when our actions are not in line with our cognitions. (In this case, we want to be doing something desirable and we are not). Aronson and Carlsmith then examine the idea of cognitive rearrangement in terms of doing an unpleasant activity. When we do something we don’t want to do, we give ourselves a positive reason for why we do it. For example, if a person is forced to eat a food they don’t like, they might internally justify eating it by telling themselves that it is healthy, a positive attribute. The researchers hypothesized that the opposite effect would occur for punishment. That is, if you don’t give someone an external reason for not doing a desirable activity, they will construct an internal reason for why they didn’t really even like it in the first place. For example, if one is threatened with mild punishment for eating enjoyable food, you’ll tell yourself that it’s not really that good anyway. Thus, the researchers conducted their experiments with the preschooler children, intending on threatening them with either mild or severe punishment if they played with a desirable toy. Then, they would ask the children how desirable the toy was after they were not allowed to play with it. The researchers devised a method to have the children rank the toys from least desirable to most desirable. Then they told the children they would be back but before they left, they told the children to not play with the most desirable toy. They threatened half the children with mild punishment and the other half with severe punishment. Afterward, the experimenters returned to the children and asked them to re-rank the toys. On average, the most favored toy decreased in favorability to the children threatened mildly and the most favored toy increased in favorability to the children threatened severely. Thus, the children experienced cognitive dissonance as to why they were not playing with the favorable toy, so they justified their non-action by convincing themselves that the toy must have been unfavorable in the first place. The researchers concluded that this insufficient punishment is an effective means of inducing the formation of values in children.〔Aronson, E., & Carlsmith, J.M. (1963). Effect Of The Severity Of Threat On The Devaluation Of Forbidden Behavior. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 66, 584-588.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Insufficient justification」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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