Page 207 - The Social Animal

Self-Justification 189

other cigarette for Philip Morris U.S.A. and is brimming over
with satisfaction over its prospects. But how does he square
with his conscience the spending of $10 million in these United
States over the next year to lure people into smoking his new
brand? “It’s not a matter of that,” says Landry, Philip Morris’s
vice president for marketing. “Nearly half the adults in this
country smoke. It’s a basic commodity for them. I’m serving a
need. . . . There are studies by pretty eminent medical and sci-
entific authorities, one on a theory of stress, on how a heck of
a lot of people, if they didn’t have cigarette smoking to relieve
stress, would be one hell of a lot worse off. And there are plenty
of valid studies that indicate cigarette smoking and all those
diseases are not related.” His satisfaction, says Landry, comes
from being very good at his job in a very competitive business,
and he will point out that Philip Morris and its big-selling
Marlboro has just passed American Tobacco as the No. 2 ciga-
rette seller in America (R. J. Reynolds is still No. 1). Why a new
cigarette now? Because it is there to be sold, says Landry. And
therein lies the inspiration of the marketing of a new American
cigarette, which Landry confidently predicts will have a 1 per-
cent share of the American market within 12 months. That 1
percent will equal about five billion cigarettes and a healthy
profit for Philip Morris U.S.A. 9

It is possible that James Morgan and Jack Landry are simply lying.
(Fancy that; executive officers of a tobacco company actually lying!)
But it may be a bit more complicated than that; my guess is that, over
the years, they may have succeeded in deceiving themselves. Near the
close of Chapter 3, I discussed the fact that information campaigns
are relatively ineffective when they attempt to change deep-seated
attitudes. We can now see precisely why. If people are committed to
an attitude, the information the communicator presents arouses dis-
sonance; frequently, the best way to reduce the dissonance is to reject
or distort the evidence. The deeper a person’s commitment to an at-
titude, the greater his or her tendency to reject dissonant evidence.
To mention one chilling example of this process, consider the
Hale-Bopp suicides. In 1997, 39 members of Heaven’s Gate, an ob-
scure religious cult, were found dead at a luxury estate in Rancho
Santa Fe, California—participants in a mass suicide. Several weeks
earlier, a few members of the cult had walked into a specialty store
and purchased an expensive high-powered telescope so that they