Page 249 - The Social Animal

Self-Justification 231

easier to hurt and kill “subhumans” than to hurt and kill fellow
human beings. Thus, reducing dissonance in this way has terrible fu-
ture consequences; it increases the likelihood that the atrocities we
are willing to commit will become greater and greater. I will elabo-
rate on this theme in the next chapter. For now, I would like to en-
large on a point I made in Chapters 1 and 2: In the final analysis,
people are accountable for their own actions. Not everyone behaved
as Lieutenant Calley behaved. At the same time, it should be noted
that Lieutenant Calley was not alone in his behavior; he stands as a
striking example of a rather common phenomenon. With this in
mind, it is important to acknowledge that certain situational factors
can exert a very powerful impact upon human actions. Accordingly,
before we can write off such behavior as merely bizarre, or merely
crazy, or merely villainous, it would be wise to examine the situation
that sets up the mechanism for this kind of behavior. We can then
begin to understand the terrible price we are paying for allowing cer-
tain conditions to exist. Perhaps, eventually, we can do something to
avoid these conditions. Dissonance theory helps to shed some light
on this mechanism.
Of course, this kind of situation is not limited to wars. Many vi-
olent acts can be perpetrated on innocent victims and can lead to jus-
tifications that, in turn, can lead to more violence. Imagine you live
in a society that is unfair to minority groups like blacks and Latinos.
Just to take a wild example, let us pretend that, for several decades,
the white majority did not allow blacks and Latinos to attend first-
rate public schools but instead provided them with a second-rate and
stultifying education. As a consequence of this “benign neglect,” the
average black child and the average Latino child are less well edu-
cated and less motivated than the average white child at the same
grade level. They demonstrate this by doing poorly on achievement
tests. Such a situation provides a golden opportunity for civic lead-
ers to justify their discriminatory behavior and, hence, to reduce dis-
sonance. “You see,” they might say, “those people are stupid (because
they perform poorly on the achievement test); see how clever we
were when we decided against wasting our resources by trying to
provide them with a high-quality education. These people are un-
teachable.” This self-fulfilling prophecy provides a perfect justifica-
tion for cruelty and neglect. So, too, is the attribution of moral
inferiority to blacks and Latinos. We imprison racial minorities in
overcrowded ghettos, and we set up a situation in which skin color