Page 253 - The Social Animal

Self-Justification 235

though this was a major earthquake, most experts agree that “the big
one” is still pending. Do you think that the earthquake of 1994 will
lead people to be better prepared for the next one?
As you may have noticed, there is a curious difference between
the responses of children facing a disliked vegetable or college stu-
dents facing an inevitable interaction with another person, on the
one hand, and the responses of UCLA students to the threat of an
impending earthquake, on the other hand. In the former situations,
the inevitable is accepted and attitudes stressing the positive aspects
of the unavoidable event are embraced.The latter situation, however,
involves confronting a highly probable event that is life-threatening
and largely uncontrollable. It would be stretching the limits of the
human imagination to redefine a major earthquake as desirable—or
as anything less than a catastrophe. And we can’t prevent earth-
quakes; the best we can hope for is to respond adaptively to one, with
no guarantee that safety measures will really save us. Thus, the na-
ture of our response may very well depend on whether we believe
preventive steps will genuinely increase our sense of control over the
inevitable. If such steps seem largely futile, then the prospect of ex-
pending energy on them will only serve to increase our feeling of dis-
sonance even further. Under such circumstances, we are likely to
justify not taking safety measures by denying the probability of the
potential disaster or vastly underestimating its magnitude. By the
same token, most scientists agree that global warming poses a major
threat to the planet. Yet, only a small minority of people list this
threat as one of their major concerns. It appears that the danger is so
overwhelming that people either deny its existence or actively disre-
gard the scientific evidence.

Is Dissonance Reduction Unconscious? As noted in the
previous chapter, people are not very good at predicting how quickly
they will adjust to negative events. In other words, we are unaware
of how successfully we will reduce dissonance, how adept we tend to
be at making our skeletons dance. And, again, this has important
consequences for the choices we make. Given that people have suc-
cessfully reduced dissonance in the past, why is it that they are not
aware that they will do so in the future? The answer is that the
process of reducing dissonance is largely unconscious. People don’t
sit down and say, “I guess I will reduce some dissonance now.” What
happens when your lover dumps you? Gradually, you will convince