Page 223 - The Social Animal

Self-Justification 205

Suppose that, after a difficult struggle, you decide to cheat. How
do you reduce the dissonance? Before you read on, think about it for
a moment. One way to reduce dissonance is to minimize the nega-
tive aspects of the action you have chosen (and to maximize the pos-
itive aspects)—much the same way the women did after choosing an
appliance in Jack Brehm’s experiment. In this instance, an efficacious
path of dissonance reduction would entail a change in your attitude
about cheating. In short, you will adopt a more lenient attitude. Your
reasoning might go something like this: “Cheating isn’t so bad under
some circumstances. As long as nobody gets hurt, it’s really not very
immoral. Anybody would do it. Therefore, it’s a part of human na-
ture—so how could it be bad? Since it is only human, those who get
caught cheating should not be severely punished but should be
treated with understanding.”
Suppose that, after a difficult struggle, you decide not to cheat.
How would you reduce dissonance? Once again, you could change
your attitude about the morality of the act—but in the opposite direc-
tion.That is,to justify giving up a good grade,you must convince your-
self that cheating is a heinous sin, one of the lowest things a person
can do, and that cheaters should be found out and severely punished.
The interesting and important thing to remember here is that
two people acting in the two different ways described above could
have started out with almost identical attitudes. Their decisions
might have been a hairbreadth apart: One came within an ace of re-
sisting but decided to cheat, while the other came within an ace of
cheating but decided to resist. Once they have made their decisions,
however, their attitudes toward cheating will diverge sharply as a
consequence of their decisions.
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These speculations were put to the test by Judson Mills in an ex-
periment with 6th-graders. Mills first measured their attitudes toward
cheating. He then had them participate in a competitive exam with
prizes being offered to the winners.The situation was arranged so that
it was almost impossible to win without cheating; also, it was easy for
the children to cheat, thinking they would not be detected. As one
might expect, some of the students cheated and others did not. The
next day, the 6th-graders were again asked to indicate how they felt
about cheating. In general, those children who had cheated became
more lenient toward cheating, and those who resisted the temptation
to cheat adopted a harsher attitude toward cheating.