Page 247 - The Social Animal

Self-Justification 229

It seems fantastic that anyone would believe that Beria had ac-
tually perpetrated this deed on more than 100 women. And yet,
Khrushchev apparently believed it—perhaps because he had a strong
need to believe it.
These examples fit my analysis based on dissonance theory, but
they offer nothing resembling definitive proof. For example, it might
be that the National Guardsmen at Kent State believed that the stu-
dents deserved to die even before they fired at them. Perhaps
Khrushchev would have believed those fantastic stories about Beria
even before he had caused Beria’s demise; it might even be true that
Khrushchev didn’t believe those rumors at all—but merely repeated
them, cynically, to further discredit Beria.
To be more certain that the justification of cruelty can occur in
such situations, it is essential for the social psychologist to step back
from the helter-skelter of the real world (temporarily) and test pre-
dictions in the more controlled world of the experimental laboratory.
Ideally, if we want to measure attitude change as a result of dissonant
cognitions, we should know what the attitudes were before the disso-
nance-arousing event occurred. Such a situation was produced in an
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experiment performed by Keith Davis and Edward Jones. They
persuaded students to volunteer to help with an experiment: Each
student’s participation consisted of watching another student being
interviewed and then, on the basis of this observation, telling the
other student he believed him to be shallow, untrustworthy, and dull.
The major finding in this experiment was that participants who vol-
unteered for this assignment succeeded in convincing themselves
that they didn’t like the victim of their cruelty. In short, after saying
things certain to hurt the other student, they convinced themselves
he deserved it—that is, they found him less attractive than they did
before they hurt him. This shift occurred in spite of the fact that the
participants were aware that the other student had done nothing to
merit their criticism and that their victimizing him was merely in re-
sponse to the experimenter’s instructions.
An experiment by David Glass had a similar result. In this
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study, when induced to deliver a series of electric shocks to other
people, individuals who considered themselves good and decent peo-
ple derogated their victims as a result of having caused them this
pain. This result is clearest among people with high self-esteem. If I
consider myself to be a scoundrel, then causing others to suffer does