Page 224 - The Social Animal

206 The Social Animal

The data from Mills’s experiment are provocative indeed. One
thing they suggest is that the most zealous opponents of a given po-
sition are not those who have always been distant from that position.
For example, one might hazard a guess that the people who are most
angry at the apparent sexual freedom associated with the current
generation of young people may not be those who have never been
tempted to engage in casual sexual activity themselves. Indeed,
Mills’s data suggest the possibility that the people who have the
strongest need to crack down hard on this sort of behavior are those
who have been sorely tempted, who came dangerously close to giv-
ing in to this temptation, but who finally resisted. People who almost
decide to live in glass houses are frequently the ones who are most
prone to throw stones.
By the same token, it would follow that those individuals who
fear that they may be sexually attracted to members of their own sex
might be among those most prone to develop antigay attitudes. In an
30
interesting experiment, Henry Adams and his colleagues showed a
group of men a series of sexually explicit erotic videotapes consisting
of heterosexual, male homosexual, and lesbian encounters while
measuring their sexual arousal (actual changes in their penile circum-
ference). Although almost all of the men showed increases in sexual
arousal while watching the heterosexual and lesbian videos, it was the
men with the most negative attitudes toward male homosexuals who
were the most aroused by the videos depicting male homosexual
lovemaking.
Early in this chapter, I mentioned that the desire for self-justifi-
cation is an important reason why people who are strongly commit-
ted to an attitude on an issue tend to resist any direct attempts to
change that attitude. In effect, such people are invulnerable to the
propaganda or education in question. We can now see that the same
mechanism that enables a person to cling to an attitude can induce
that individual to change an attitude. It depends on which course of
action will serve most to reduce dissonance under the circumstances.
A person who understands the theory can set up the proper condi-
tions to induce attitude change in other people by making them vul-
nerable to certain kinds of beliefs. For example, if a modern
Machiavelli were advising a contemporary ruler, he might suggest
the following strategies based on the theory and data on the conse-
quences of decisions: