Page 245 - The Social Animal

Self-Justification 227

vincing yourself that you’ve done no harm, as the people in the mar-
ijuana experiment did. In this situation, the most effective way to re-
duce dissonance would be to maximize the culpability of the victim
of your action—to convince yourself that the victim deserved what
he got, either because he did something to bring it on himself or be-
cause he was a bad or reprehensible person.
This mechanism might operate even if you did not directly
cause the harm that befell the victim, but if you only disliked him
(prior to his victimization) and were hoping that harm would befall
him. For example, after four students at Kent State University were
shot and killed by members of the Ohio National Guard, several ru-
mors quickly spread: (1) both of the women who were slain were
pregnant (and therefore, by implication, were oversexed and wan-
ton); (2) the bodies of all four students were crawling with lice; and
(3) the victims were so ridden with syphilis that they would have
been dead in 2 weeks anyway. As I mentioned in Chapter 1, these
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rumors were totally untrue.The slain students were all clean, decent,
bright people. Indeed, two of them were not even involved in the
demonstrations that resulted in the tragedy but were peacefully
walking across campus when they were gunned down. Why were
the townspeople so eager to believe and spread these rumors? It is
impossible to know for sure, but my guess is that it was for reasons
similar to the reasons rumors were spread among the people in India
studied by Prasad and Sinha—that is, because the rumors were
comforting. Picture the situation: Kent is a conservative small town
in Ohio. Many of the townspeople were infuriated at the radical be-
havior of some of the students. Some were probably hoping the stu-
dents would get their comeuppance, but death was more than they
deserved. In such circumstances, any information putting the vic-
tims in a bad light helped to reduce dissonance by implying that it
was, in fact, a good thing that they died. In addition, this eagerness
to believe that the victims were sinful and deserved their fate was
expressed in ways that were more direct: Several members of the
Ohio National Guard stoutly maintained that the victims deserved
to die, and a Kent high-school teacher, whom James Michener in-
terviewed, even went so far as to state that “anyone who appears on
the streets of a city like Kent with long hair, dirty clothes or bare-
footed deserves to be shot.” She went on to say that this dictum ap-
plied even to her own children. 54