Page 208 - The Social Animal

190 The Social Animal

might get a clearer view of the Hale-Bopp comet and the spaceship
they fervently believed was traveling behind it. Their belief was that,
when the comet got close to Earth, it was time to rid themselves of
their “Earthly containers” (their bodies) by killing themselves so that
their essence could be picked up by the spaceship. A few days after
buying the telescope, they came back to the store, returned the tele-
scope, and politely asked for their money back. When the store man-
ager asked them if they had had problems with the scope, they
indicated that it was defective: “We found the comet all right, but we
can’t find the spaceship that is following it.” Needless to say, there
was no spaceship. But, if you are so convinced of the existence of a
spaceship to die for a ride on it, and your telescope doesn’t reveal it,
then, obviously, there must be something wrong with your telescope!
Juicy anecdotes are suggestive. But they do not constitute scien-
tific evidence and, therefore, are not convincing in themselves. Again,
taking the cigarette example, it is always possible that Mr. Morgan and
Mr.Landry know that cigarettes are harmful and are simply being cyn-
ical. Likewise, it is possible that Landry always believed cigarettes were
good for people even before he began to peddle them. Obviously, if ei-
ther of these possibilities were true, his excitement about the benefits
of cigarette smoking could hardly be attributed to dissonance. Much
more convincing would be a demonstration of a clear case of attitudi-
nal distortion in a unique event. Such a demonstration was provided
back in the 1950s by (of all things) a football game in the Ivy League.
An important game between Princeton and Dartmouth, the contest
was billed as a grudge match, and this soon became evident on the
field: The game is remembered as the roughest and dirtiest in the his-
tory of either school. Princeton’s star player was an All-American run-
ning back named Dick Kazmaier; as the game progressed, it became
increasingly clear that the Dartmouth players were out to get him.
Whenever he carried the ball, he was gang-tackled, piled on, and
mauled. He was finally forced to leave the game with a broken nose.
Meanwhile, the Princeton team was not exactly inactive: Soon after
Kazmaier’s injury, a Dartmouth player was carried off the field with a
broken leg. Several fistfights broke out on the field in the course of the
game, and many injuries were suffered on both sides.
Sometime after the game, a couple of psychologists—Albert
10
Hastorf of Dartmouth and Hadley Cantril of Princeton —visited
both campuses and showed films of the game to a number of stu-
dents on each campus.The students were instructed to be completely