Page 226 - The Social Animal

208 The Social Animal

people are talking with horror about the fact that the United States
seems to be drastically escalating its friendly overtures toward Castro’s
regime in Cuba. Joe’s belief is a complicated one; he has mixed feel-
ings about the topic, but generally he is opposed to our forming an
alliance with the Cuban dictatorship because he feels it is an evil
regime and we should not compromise with evil. Partly because Joe’s
companions are sounding so pious and partly as a lark, he gradually
finds himself taking a much more liberal-radical position than the one
he really holds. As a matter of fact, Joe even goes so far as to assert
that Fidel Castro is an extraordinarily gifted leader and that the
Cuban people are better off with communism than they’ve been in
hundreds of years. Somebody counters Joe’s argument by talking
about the thousands of people that Castro is alleged to have murdered
or imprisoned to achieve a unified government. In the heat of the ar-
gument, Joe replies that those figures are grossly exaggerated. Quite a
performance for a man who does, in fact, believe that Castro killed
thousands of innocent people during his rise to power.
When Joe awakens the next morning and thinks back on the
previous evening’s events, he gasps in horror. “Oh, my God, what
have I done?” he says. He is intensely uncomfortable. Put another
way, he is experiencing a great deal of dissonance. His cognition “I
misled a bunch of people; I told them a lot of things about Cuba that
I don’t really believe” is dissonant with his cognition “I am a reason-
able, decent, and truthful person.” What does he do to reduce disso-
nance? He searches around for external justifications. First, it occurs
to Joe that he might have been drunk and therefore not responsible
for what he said. But he remembers he had only one or two beers—
no external justification there. Because Joe cannot find sufficient ex-
ternal justification for his behavior, it is necessary for him to attempt
to explain his behavior by using internal justification, changing his
attitude in the direction of his statements. That is, if Joe can succeed
in convincing himself that his statements were not so very far from
the truth, then he will have reduced dissonance; that is, his behavior
of the preceding night will no longer be absurd in his own view. I do
not mean to imply that Joe will suddenly become an avowed Com-
munist revolutionary. What I do mean is that he might begin to feel
a little less harsh about the Cuban regime than he felt before he made
those statements. Most events and issues in our world are neither
completely black nor completely white; there are many gray areas.