Page 243 - The Social Animal

Self-Justification 225

because they are associated with painful experiences. What I am stat-
ing is that, if a person goes through a difficult or a painful experience
in order to attain some goal or object, that goal or object becomes
more attractive—a process called justification of effort. Thus, if on
your way to a discussion group you got hit on the head by a brick,
you would not like that group any better; but if you volunteered to
get hit on the head by a brick to join the group, you would definitely
like the group better. 50
51
The biologist Robert Sapolsky describes a medical phenome-
non that took place in the 20th century that nicely demonstrates the
justification of effort. At that time, some Swiss physicians believed
that they could slow down the aging process by injecting people with
testosterone. As Sapolsky put it

Thus, a craze developed of aged, moneyed gentlemen checking
into impeccable Swiss sanitariums and getting injected daily in
their rears with testicular extracts from dogs, from roosters,
from monkeys. By the 1920s, captains of industry, heads of
state, famous religious leaders—all were doing it, and reporting
wondrous results. Not because the science was accurate, but be-
cause if you’re paying a fortune for painful daily injections of ex-
tracts of a dog’s testicles, there’s a certain incentive to decide you
feel like a young bull. One big placebo effect.

In most dissonant situations, there is more than one way to re-
duce dissonance. In the initiation experiment, for example, we found
that people who make a strong effort to get into a dull group con-
vince themselves that the group is interesting. Is this the only way
they could have reduced dissonance? No. Another way of making
sense of the effort we’ve expended is to revise our memory of the
past—that is, to misremember what things were like before we suf-
fered or worked hard. In an experiment by Michael Conway and
52
Michael Ross, one group of students participated in a study-skills
course that promised more than it actually delivered; another group
of students signed up but did not participate. Whether or not they
took the course, all students were asked to evaluate their study skills.
After 3 weeks of useless training, the students who participated
wanted to believe that their skills had improved, but the objective
data showed that they were not doing well in their coursework. How