Page 205 - The Social Animal

Self-Justification 187

easy to accept the notion that smoking causes lung cancer. This
would also be true for a smoker who encounters the evidence link-
ing cigarette smoking to lung cancer and does succeed in giving up
cigarettes. Occasionally, however, the need to reduce dissonance (the
need to convince oneself that one is right or good) leads to behavior
that is maladaptive and therefore irrational. For example, many peo-
ple have tried to quit smoking and failed. What do these people do?
It would be erroneous to assume that they simply swallow hard and
prepare to die. They don’t. Instead, they try to reduce their disso-
nance in a different way: namely, by convincing themselves that
smoking isn’t as bad as they thought. Thus, Rick Gibbons and his
6
colleagues recently found that heavy smokers who attended a smok-
ing cessation clinic, quit smoking for a while and then relapsed into
heavy smoking again, subsequently succeeded in lowering their per-
ception of the dangers of smoking.
Why might this change of heart occur? If a person makes a se-
rious commitment to a course of action, such as quitting smoking,
and then fails to keep that commitment, his or her self-concept as
a strong, self-controlled individual is threatened. This, of course,
arouses dissonance. One way to reduce this dissonance and regain
a healthy sense of self—if not a healthy set of lungs—is to trivial-
ize the commitment by perceiving smoking as less dangerous. A
more general study that tracked the progress of 135 students who
7
made New Year’s resolutions supports this observation. Individu-
als who broke their resolutions—such as to quit smoking, lose
weight, or exercise more—initially felt bad about themselves for
failing but, after a short time, succeeded in downplaying the im-
portance of the resolution. Ironically, making light of a commit-
ment they failed to keep serves to restore their self-esteem but it
also makes self-defeat a near certainty in the future. In the short
run, they are able to feel better about themselves; in the long run,
however, they have drastically reduced the chances that they’ll ever
succeed in achieving their goals.
Is this the only way to reduce the dissonance associated with fail-
ing to achieve a goal? No. An alternative response—and perhaps a less
maladaptive one—would be to lower one’s expectations for success.
For example, a person who has been unable to give up smoking com-
pletely, but who has cut down on the number of cigarettes smoked
daily, could interpret this outcome as a partial success rather than as