“Mind full or mindful” – can mere cognitive busyness lead to compliance similar to an emotional seesaw?

ABSTRACT

The emotional seesaw phenomenon (ESP) is a social-influence technique in which a person experiences a certain emotion, where the external stimulus that evoked the emotion suddenly disappears. Large effects on compliance and impaired cognitive functioning were reported after ESPs. The present research (total N = 163) tests a generalization of this phenomenon: whether mere cognitive busyness leads to similar effects by provoking an inner focus. Two experiments closely modeled after previous ESP experiments supported this reasoning: a simple expectancy violation (Experiment 1) and cognitive load (Experiment 2) caused a comparable pattern of results as the ESP. Experiment 3 demonstrated that also the ESP fostered an inner focus and consequently compliant behavior. We discuss mechanisms underlying social-influence techniques.

KEYWORDS:

• Mindlessness
• social influence
• cognitive load
• emotional seesaw phenomenon
• expectancy violation

Acknowlegment

We thank Joanna Sweklej and Natalie Trent for valuable comments on a previous version of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by adoctroral grant from the Max-Planck-Society to Magdalena C. Kaczmarek