Topic: Dissonance Theory, Harsh initiations
In 1959, Festinger and Carlsmith published their study on dissonance theory. The theory suggests that we have an inner drive to hold all our attitudes and beliefs in harmony to avoid disharmony1. In their study, they asked participants to perform dull tasks, like turning pegs on a peg board. Following the subjects were paid either $1 or $20 to tell the next participant (who was actually a confederate), that the task was really interesting and fun, and almost all of the subjects complied. Afterwards, subjects were asked to evaluate the experiment overall. Those participants that were paid only $1 rated the task as much more interesting than participants who were paid $20 to lie.
They concluded that participants who were paid $20 had sufficient justification to tell the lie; they were doing it for the money. Participants who were only paid $1 did not have the sufficient justification for their actions of lying about the task, so instead there is an attitude change.
The theory of dissonance relies upon the principle of cognitive consistency, that people strive to have consistent attitudes and behaviors. The cognitive dissonance resulting from conflicting attitudes or beliefs and behaviors, is a feeling of discomfort that leads to a change of attitude, belief or behavior, and such action reduces the discomfort. For participants who were paid $20, the reward for telling the lie led to a condition where dissonance was not present or minimal at most. But participants who were paid only $1, did not have a good reason to lie. Because their actions (the lie) conflicted with their beliefs (that they are good people), they changed, instead, their perception of the task. To relieve the dissonance, the participants came to believe that the task actually was interesting, so they weren’t really telling a lie.
In later years, dissonance has been studies in a variety of social situations including harsh initiations, like hazing or building group cohesion.
One such example of harsh initiation was brought to my attention when I came across the TED talk given by Kakenya Ntaiya in 2012, “A Girl who Demanded School” (full video included at end).
She begins her talk with an image, “There’s a group of people in Kenya. People cross oceans to go see them. These people are tall. They jump high. They wear red. And they kill lions. You might be wondering, who are these people? These are the Maasais. And you know what’s cool? I’m actually one of them.”
The Maasais, they boys are brought up to be warriors. The girls are brought up to be mothers. When I was five years old, I found out that I was engaged to be married as soon as I reached puberty. My mother, my grandmother, my aunties, they constantly reminded me that your husband just passed by. Cool, yeah? And everything I had to do from that moment was to prepare me to be the perfect woman at age 12. My day started at 5 in the morning, milking the cows, sweeping the house, cooking for my siblings, collecting water, firewood. I did everything that I needed to do to become a perfect wife.
I went to school not because the Maasais’ women or girls were going to school. It’s because my mother was denied an education, and she constantly reminded me and my siblings that she never wanted us to live the life she was living…
When I went to school, I had a dream. I wanted to become a teacher. Teachers looked nice. They wear nice dresses, high-heeled shoes. I found out later that they are uncomfortable, but I admired it. But most of all, the teacher was just writing on the board — not hard work, that’s what I thought, compared to what I was doing in the farm. So I wanted to become a teacher.
I worked hard in school, but when I was in eighth grade, it was a determining factor.
In our tradition there is a ceremony that girls have to undergo to become women, and it’s a rite of passage to womanhood.
And then I was just finishing up eighth grade, and that was a transition for me to go to high school. This was the crossroad. Once I go through this tradition, I was going to become a wife. Well, my dream of becoming a teacher will not come to pass. So I talked — I had to come up with a plan to figure these things out. I talked to my father. I did something that most girls have never done. I told my father, “I will only go through this ceremony if you let me go back to school.” The reason why, if I ran away, my father will have a stigma, people will be calling him the father of that girl who didn’t go through the ceremony. It was a shameful thing for him to carry for the rest of his life. So he figured out, “Well,” he said, “Okay, you can go to school after the ceremony.”
I did. The ceremony happened. It’s a whole week long of excitement. It’s a ceremony. People are enjoying it. And the day before the actual ceremony happens, we are dancing, having excitement, and through all the night we did not sleep. The actual day came, and we walked out of the house that we were dancing in. Yes, we danced and danced. We walked into the courtyard, and there were a bunch of people waiting. They were all in a circle. And as we danced and dance, and we approached this circle of women, men, women, children, everybody was there. There was a woman sitting in the middle of it, and this woman was waiting to hold us. I was the first. There were my sisters and a couple of other girls, and as I approached her, she looked at me, and I sat down. And I sat down, and I opened my legs. As I opened my legs, another woman came, and this woman was carrying a knife. And as she carried the knife, she walked toward me and she held the clitoris, and she cut if off.
As you can imagine, I bled. I bled. And after bleeding for a while, I fainted thereafter. It’s something that so many girls — I’m lucky, I never died — but many die. It’s practiced, it’s no anesthesia, it’s a rusty old knife, and it was difficult. I was lucky because one, also, my mom did something that most women don’t do. Three days later, after everybody has left the home, my mom went and brought a nurse. We were taken care of. Three weeks later, I was healed, and I was back in high school. I was so determined to be a teacher now so that I could make a difference in my family.
Well, while I was in high school, something happened. I met a young gentleman from our village who had been to the University of Oregon… I told him, “Well, I want to go to where you are.”
And he told me, “Well, what do you mean, you want to go? Don’t you have a husband waiting for you?”
And I told him, “Don’t worry about that part. Just tell me how to get there.”
This gentleman, he helped me. While I was in high school also, my dad was sick. He got a stroke, and he was really, really sick, so he really couldn’t tell me what to do next. But the next problem is, my father is not the only father I have. Everybody who is my dad’s age, male in the community, is my father by default — my uncles, all of them — and they dictate what my future is.
So the news came, I applied to school and I was accepted to Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Lynchburg, Virginia, and I couldn’t come without the support of the village, because I needed to raise money to buy the air ticket. I got a scholarship but I needed to get myself here. But I needed the support of the village, and here again, when the men heard, and the people heard that a woman had gotten an opportunity to go to school, they said,
“What a lost opportunity. This should have been given to a boy. We can’t do this.”
So I went back and I had to go back to the tradition. There’s a belief among our people that morning brings good news. So I had to come up with something to do with the morning because there’s good news in the morning. And in the village, also, there is one chief, an elder, who if he says yes, everybody will follow him. So I went to him very early in the morning, as the sun rose. The first thing he sees when he opens his door is, it’s me.
“My child, what are you doing here?”
“Well, Dad, I need help. Can you support me to go to America? I promised him that I would be the best girl, I will come back, anything they wanted after that, I will do it for them.
He said, “well, but I can’t do it alone.” He gave ma list of another 15 men that I went — 16 more men — every single morning I went and visited them. They all came together. The village, the women, the men, everybody came together to support me to come to get an education.
I arrived in America. As you can imagine, what did I find? I found snow! I found Wal-Marts, vacuum cleaners, and lots of food in the cafeteria. I was in a land of plenty.
I enjoyed myself, but during that moment while I was here, I discovered a lot of things. I learned that that ceremony that I went through when I was 13 years old, it was called female genital mutilation I learned that it was against the law in Kenya. I learned that I did not have to trade part of my body to get an education. I had a right. And as we speak now, three million girls in Africa are at risk of going through this mutilation. I learned that my mom had a right to own property. I learned that she did not have to be abused because she is a woman.
Those things made me angry. I wanted to do something.
As I went back, every time I went, I found that my neighbors’ girls were getting married. They were getting mutilated and here, after I graduated from here, I worked at the U.N., I went back to school to get my graduate work, the constant cry of these girls was on my face. I had to do something.
As I went back… I spoke to the women, they told me, “You know what we need? We really need a school for girls.” Because there had not been any school for girls. And the reason they wanted the school for girls is because when a girl is raped when she’s walking to school, the mother is blamed for that. If she got pregnant before she got married, the mother is blamed for that, and she’s punished. She’s beaten. They said, “We wanted to put our girls in a safe place.”
As we moved, and I went to talk to the fathers, the fathers, of course, you can imagine what they said: “We want a school for boys.”
And I said, “Well, there are a couple of men from my village who have been out and they have gotten an education. Why can’t they build a school for boys, and I’ll build a school for girls?” That made sense. And they agreed. And I told them, I wanted them to show me as sign of commitment. And they did. They donated land where we built the girls’ school. We have.
…as a new dawn is happening in my school, a new beginning is happening. As we speak right now, 125 girls will never be mutilated. One hundred twenty-five girls will not be married when they’re 12 years old. One hundred twenty-five girls are creating and achieving their dreams. This is the thing that we are doing, giving them opportunities where they can rise. As we speak right now, women are not being beaten because of the revolutions we’ve started in our community.”
Ntaiya’s undergoes a very rough initiation, a rite of passage to become a woman, according to her culture. This ceremony was harmful to herself as well as the other girls who were told, and perhaps even forced to do so. She bargains the ceremony for continuing her education, and by doing so, her father also saves face. She does, on the other hand, feel a strong commitment to her community, and is determined to make positive change for other girls, so that they do not have to undergo that rite of passage.
1 Cognitive Dissonance – Simply Psychology. (2008). Simply Psychology. Retrieved March 26, 2013, from http://www.simplypsychology.org/cognitive-dissonance.html#sthash.mIzj3uz8.3XBdCh09.dpbs
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