Page 216 - The Social Animal

198 The Social Animal

dangerous: It is difficult to escape or to pass and go undetected; and if
you are caught trying to flee or disguising your identity, the penalty is
immediate execution. On the other hand, deciding to sit tight could
be a disastrous decision if it turns out that your religious group is being
systematically annihilated. Let us suppose you decide not to take ac-
tion. That is, you commit yourself to sit tight—turning your back on
opportunities to try either to escape or to pass. Such an important de-
cision naturally produces a great deal of dissonance. To reduce disso-
nance, you convince yourself that you made a wise decision—that is,
you convince yourself that, although people of your religious sect are
made to move and are being treated unfairly, they are not being killed
unless they break the law.This position is not difficult to maintain be-
cause there is no unambiguous evidence to the contrary.
Suppose that, months later, a respected man from your town tells
you that while hiding in the forest, he witnessed soldiers butchering
all the men, women, and children who had recently been deported
from the town. I would predict that you would try to dismiss this in-
formation as untrue—that you would attempt to convince yourself
that the reporter was lying or hallucinating. If you had listened to the
man who tried to warn you, you might have escaped. Instead, you
and your family are slaughtered.
Fantastic? Impossible? How could anyone not take the respected
man seriously? The events described above are an accurate account
of what happened in 1944 to the Jews in Sighet, Hungary. 19
The processes of cognitive distortion and selective exposure to in-
formation were important factors in the senseless escalation of the war
in Vietnam. In a thought-provoking analysis of the Pentagon Papers,
Ralph White shows how dissonance blinded our leaders to informa-
tion incompatible with the decisions they had already made. As White
put it,“There was a tendency, when actions were out of line with ideas,
for decision makers to align their ideas with their actions.”To take just
one of many examples, the decision to continue to escalate the bomb-
ing of North Vietnam was made at the price of ignoring crucial evi-
dence from the CIA and other sources that made it clear that bombing
would not break the will of the North Vietnamese people but, quite
the contrary, would only strengthen their resolve.

It is instructive, for instance, to compare [Secretary of Defense
Robert] McNamara’s highly factual evidence-oriented summary