Page 229 - The Social Animal

Self-Justification 211

the students who had been paid only $1 for lying? They rated the
task as enjoyable. In other words, people who received abundant ex-
ternal justification for lying told the lie but didn’t believe it, whereas
those who told the lie in the absence of a great deal of external justi-
fication moved in the direction of believing that what they said was
true.
Research support for the “saying is believing” phenomenon has
extended beyond relatively unimportant attitudes like the dullness of
a monotonous task. Attitude change has been shown on a variety of
important issues. For example, in one experiment, Arthur R. Cohen 32
induced Yale University students to engage in a particularly difficult
form of counterattitudinal behavior. Cohen conducted his experiment
immediately after a student riot in which the New Haven police had
overreacted and behaved brutally toward the students. The students
(who strongly believed the police had behaved badly) were asked to
write a strong and forceful essay in support of the actions taken by the
police. Before writing the essay, some students were paid $10; others,
$5; still others, $1; and a fourth group, 50 cents. After writing his or
her essay, each student was asked to indicate his or her own private
attitudes about the police actions. The results were perfectly linear:
The smaller the reward, the greater the attitude change. Thus, stu-
dents who wrote in support of the New Haven police for the meager
sum of 50 cents developed a more favorable attitude than did those
who wrote the essay for $1; the students who wrote the essay for $1
developed a more favorable attitude toward the actions of the police
than did those who wrote the essay for $5; and those who wrote the
essay for $10 remained the least favorable.
Let’s look at race relations and racial prejudice—surely one of
our nation’s most enduring problems. Would it be possible to get
people to endorse a policy favoring a minority group—and then see
if their attitudes become more favorable toward that group? In an
important set of experiments, Mike Leippe and Donna Eisenstadt 33
induced white college students to write an essay demonstrating
counter-attitudinal advocacy: publicly endorsing a controversial
proposal at their university—to double the amount of funds avail-
able for academic scholarships for African American students. Be-
cause the total amount of scholarship funds were limited, this meant
cutting by half the amount of funds available for scholarships for
white students. As you might imagine, this was a highly dissonant