ABSTRACT
One day, instead of counting stations and plotting strategy, I looked up to find that my train was racing toward Columbus Circle, about 3 miles south of my station. For the first time, I found myself so engrossed in what I was reading that I felt no sense of time or place. The train rocked on its track, the doors opened and closed at 125th street, and I was reading my homework assignment for my social psychology class. I had just finished the procedure section of Aronson and Carlsmith’s (1963) study in which children were forbidden to play with an attractive toy and convinced themselves that they did not like the toy very much if the threat had been mild rather than severe. It was a finding artfully derived from a theory called cognitive dissonance. And it was the seminal moment that would drive my own career as a social psychologist.
