Page 209 - The Social Animal

Self-Justification 191

objective and, while watching the film, to take notes of each infrac-
tion of the rules, how it started, and who was responsible. As you
might imagine, there was a huge difference in the way this game was
viewed by the students at each university. There was a strong ten-
dency for the students to see their own fellow students as victims of
illegal infractions rather than as perpetrators of such acts of aggres-
sion. Moreover, this was no minor distortion: It was found that
Princeton students saw fully twice as many violations on the part of
the Dartmouth players as the Dartmouth students saw. Again, peo-
ple are not passive receptacles for the deposition of information. The
manner in which they view and interpret information depends on
how deeply they are committed to a particular belief or course of ac-
tion. Individuals will distort the objective world to reduce their dis-
sonance. The manner in which they will distort and the intensity of
their distortion are highly predictable.
A few years later, Lenny Bruce, a perceptive comedian and social
commentator (who almost certainly never read about cognitive disso-
nance theory), had the following insight into the 1960 presidential
election campaign between Richard Nixon and John Kennedy.

I would be with a bunch of Kennedy fans watching the debate
and their comment would be, “He’s really slaughtering Nixon.”
Then we would all go to another apartment, and the Nixon fans
would say, “How do you like the shellacking he gave Kennedy?”
And then I realized that each group loved their candidate so
that a guy would have to be this blatant—he would have to look
into the camera and say: “I am a thief, a crook, do you hear me?
I am the worst choice you could ever make for the Presidency!”
And even then his following would say, “Now there’s an honest
man for you. It takes a big guy to admit that. There’s the kind
of guy we need for President.” 11

People don’t like to see or hear things that conflict with their deeply
held beliefs or wishes. An ancient response to such bad news was liter-
ally to kill the messenger.A modern-day figurative version of killing the
messenger is to blame the media for the presentation of material that
produces the pain of dissonance.For example,when Ronald Reagan was
running for president in 1980, Time published an analysis of his cam-
paign. Subsequent angry letters to the editor vividly illustrated the
widely divergent responses of his supporters, on the one hand, and his
detractors,on the other.Consider the following two letters: 12