What is the forbidden toy study?
Emmalee Willms
2025-06-16 06:24:55
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Aronson and Carlsmith (1963) threatened children with either mild or severe punishment if they played with favored toys. None of them played with toys, even when left alone with them. Afterwards the children who had only been mildly threatened favored the toys less. Lacking a strong external justification, they had made internal attributions that they actually did not like the toys so much. This is the dissonance felt when a person lack sufficient external justification for having resisted a desired activity or object. This often results in the person devaluing the forbidden thing.
Rudy Thiel
2025-06-04 00:44:17
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: 16
An experiment by Aronson and Carlsmith in 1963 examined self-justification in children. In this experiment, children were left in a room with a variety of toys, including a highly desirable toy steam-shovel (or other toy). Upon leaving the room, the experimenter told half the children that there would be a severe punishment if they played with that particular toy and told the other half that there would be a mild punishment. All of the children in the study refrained from playing with the toy. Later, when the children were told that they could freely play with whatever toy they wanted, the ones in the mild punishment condition were less likely to play with the toy, even though the threat had been removed. This is another example of insufficient justification. The children who were only mildly threatened had to justify to themselves why they did not play with the toy.