Page 250 - The Social Animal

232 The Social Animal

almost inevitably unleashes forces preventing people from participat-
ing in the opportunities for growth and success existing for most
white Americans. Through the magic of television, minorities see
people succeeding and living in the luxury of middle-class re-
spectability. They become painfully aware of the opportunities, com-
forts, and luxuries unavailable to them. If their frustration leads them
to violence or if their despair leads them to drugs, it is fairly easy for
their white brothers and sisters to sit back complacently, shake their
heads knowingly, and attribute this behavior to some kind of moral
59
inferiority. As Edward Jones and Richard Nisbett point out, when
some misfortune befalls us, we tend to attribute the cause to some-
thing in the environment; but when we see the same misfortune be-
falling another person, we tend to attribute the cause to some
weakness inherent in that person’s character.

The Psychology of Inevitability

George Bernard Shaw was hard hit by his father’s alcoholism, but he
tried to make light of it. He once wrote: “If you cannot get rid of the
60
family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.” In a sense, disso-
nance theory describes the ways people have of making their skele-
tons dance—of trying to live with unpleasant outcomes. This is
particularly true when a situation arises that is both negative and in-
evitable. Here people attempt to make the best of things by cogni-
tively minimizing the unpleasantness of the situation. In one
61
experiment, Jack Brehm got children to volunteer to eat a vegetable
they had previously said they disliked a lot. After they had eaten the
vegetable, the experimenter led half the children to believe they
could expect to eat much more of that vegetable in the future; the re-
maining children were not so informed. The children who were led
to believe it was inevitable that they would be eating the vegetable in
the future succeeded in convincing themselves that the vegetable was
not so bad. In short, the cognition “I dislike that vegetable” is disso-
nant with the cognition “I will be eating that vegetable in the future.”
To reduce the dissonance, the children came to believe the vegetable
was really not as noxious as they had previously thought. John Dar-
ley and Ellen Berscheid showed that the same phenomenon works
62
with people, as well as vegetables. In their experiment, college
women volunteered to participate in a series of meetings in which