Page 200 - The Social Animal

182 The Social Animal

“But you don’t drink, do you?”
“No, but . . . um . . . um . . . I’m going to do a lot of entertaining
during the next several weeks, and some of my friends do.”
“How come you’re wearing all that rain gear on such a sunny
day?”
“Well . . . actually, the weather is quite changeable this time of
year, and I didn’t want to take any chances.”
“But there isn’t a cloud in the sky.”

“Well, you never can tell.”
“By the way, where did you buy the liquor?”
“Oh, heh, heh. Well, um . . . down at the supermarket.”

“How come you went that far?”
“Well, um . . . um . . . it was such a nice day, I thought it
might be fun to take a long walk.”

People are motivated to justify their own actions, beliefs, and feelings.
When they do something, they will try, if at all possible, to convince
themselves (and others) that it was a logical, reasonable thing to do.
There was a good reason why Sam performed those silly actions—he
was hypnotized. But because Sam didn’t know he had been hypno-
tized, and because it was difficult for him to accept the fact that he
was capable of behaving in a nonsensical manner, he went to great
lengths to convince himself (and his friend) that there was a method
to his madness, that his actions were actually quite sensible.
The experiment by Stanley Schachter and Jerry Singer discussed
in Chapter 2 can also be understood in these terms. Recall that these
investigators injected people with epinephrine. Those who were
forewarned about the symptoms caused by this drug (palpitations of
the heart, sweaty palms, and hand tremors) had a sensible explana-
tion for the symptoms when they appeared. “Oh, yeah, that’s just the
drug affecting me.” Those who were misled about the effects of the
drug, however, had no such handy, logical explanation for their
symptoms. But they couldn’t leave the symptoms unjustified; they
tried to account for them by convincing themselves that they were
either deliriously happy or angry, depending on the social stimuli in
the environment.