Page 248 - The Social Animal

230 The Social Animal

not introduce as much dissonance; therefore, I have less of a need to
convince myself that they deserved their fate. Consider the irony: It
is precisely because I think I am such a nice person that, if I do some-
thing that causes you pain, I must convince myself you are a rat. In
other words, because nice guys like me don’t go around hurting in-
nocent people, you must have deserved every nasty thing I did to you.
There are circumstances that limit the generality of this phe-
nomenon. One of those was mentioned above: Namely, people with
low self-esteem have less need to derogate their victims. Another fac-
tor limiting the derogation phenomenon is the capacity of the victim
to retaliate. If the victim is able and willing to retaliate at some fu-
ture time, then a harm-doer feels that equity will be restored and thus
has no need to justify the action by derogating the victim. In an in-
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genious experiment by Ellen Berscheid and her associates, college
students volunteered for an experiment in which each of them deliv-
ered a painful electric shock to a fellow student; as expected, each
participant derogated the victim as a result of having delivered the
shock. But half the students were told there would be a turnabout—
that is, the other students would be given the opportunity to shock
them. Those who were led to believe their victims would be able to
retaliate did not derogate them. In short, because the victims were
able to retaliate, dissonance was reduced. The harm-doers had no
need to belittle their victims to convince themselves that the victims
deserved it.
These results suggest that, during a war, soldiers might have a
greater need to derogate civilian victims (because they can’t retaliate)
than military victims. During the court-martial of Lieutenant
William Calley for his role in the slaughter of innocent civilians at
My Lai, his psychiatrist reported that the lieutenant came to regard
the Vietnamese people as less than human. Perhaps the research re-
ported in this section helps to shed some light on this phenomenon.
Social psychologists have learned that people do not perform acts of
cruelty and come out unscathed. I do not know for sure how Lieu-
tenant Calley (and thousands of others) came to regard the Viet-
namese as subhuman, but it seems reasonable to assume that when
we are engaged in a war in which, through our actions, a great num-
ber of innocent people are being killed, we might try to derogate the
victims to justify our complicity in the outcome. We might poke fun
at them, refer to them as “gooks,” and dehumanize them; but, once
we have succeeded in doing that, watch out—because it becomes