Page 230 - The Social Animal

212 The Social Animal

situation. How might the students reduce dissonance? The best way
would be to convince themselves that they really believed deeply in
that policy—that, taking the big picture into consideration, it was
only fair to offer more financial aid to African Americans. More-
over, it is reasonable to suggest that dissonance reduction might
generalize beyond the specific policy—that is, the theory would pre-
dict that their general attitude toward African Americans would be-
come more favorable and much more supportive. And that is exactly
what Leippe and Eisenstadt found.

What Constitutes External Justification? As I men-
tioned a moment ago, external justification can and does come in a
variety of forms. People can be persuaded to say things or do things
that contradict their beliefs or preferences if they are threatened with
punishment or enticed by rewards other than monetary gain—such
as praise or the desire to please. Furthermore, most of us would con-
sider doing something that we otherwise wouldn’t do if a good friend
asked us to do it as a favor. To take a farfetched example, suppose a
friend asked you to eat an unusual food she or he had recently learned
to prepare in an “exotic foods” cooking class. And just to make things
interesting, let’s say the food in question was a fried grasshopper.
Now, imagine the reverse situation—that someone you didn’t like
very much asked you to sink your teeth into a fried grasshopper.
Okay, are you ready? Assuming you went ahead and ate the
grasshopper, under which circumstance do you think you would
enjoy the taste of it more—when asked to eat it by a good friend or
by someone you didn’t like? Common sense might suggest that the
grasshopper would taste better when recommended by a friend.
After all, a friend is someone you can trust and, hence, would be a
far more credible source of information than someone you didn’t like.
But think about it for a moment: Which condition involves less ex-
ternal justification? Common sense notwithstanding, the theory of
cognitive dissonance would predict that you would come to like eat-
ing grasshoppers more if you ate one at the request of someone you
didn’t like.
Here’s how it works: Your cognition that eating a grasshopper is
repulsive would be at odds with the fact that you just ate one. But if
it was your friend who made the request, you would have a great deal
of external justification for having eaten it—you did it as a favor for