Page 254 - The Social Animal

236 The Social Animal

yourself that the person is an insufferable, self-centered bore (with
bad breath!) and that you deserve better. The process is more con-
vincing if it happens below the level of conscious awareness. Because
the dissonance reduction process is mostly unconscious, however, we
do not anticipate that it will save us from future angst, so we predict
that the next time we get dumped it will hurt more than it does.
One implication of this is that we tend to experience far less re-
gret than we think we will if we make the “wrong” decision. Con-
sider what would have happened at the end of the classic movie
Casablanca, for example, if Ingrid Bergman did not rejoin her hus-
band but instead remained with Humphrey Bogart in Morocco.
Would she, as Bogart tells her in a famously heart-wrenching speech,
have regretted it—“maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon,
and for the rest of [her] life”? Or did she forever regret leaving Bog-
art? I suspect that the answer to both questions is no; either decision
would have made her happy in the long run. Bogart was eloquent but
wrong, and dissonance theory tells us why: Ingrid would have found
reasons to justify either choice, along with reasons to be glad she did
not make the other. 65

The Importance of Self-Esteem
Throughout this chapter, we have seen how our commitment to a
particular course of action can freeze or change our attitudes, distort
our perceptions, and determine the kind of information we seek out.
In addition, we have seen that a person can become committed to a
situation in a number of different ways—by making a decision, by
working hard to attain a goal, by believing something is inevitable,
by engaging in any action having serious consequences (such as hurt-
ing someone), and so on. As I have mentioned before, the deepest
form of commitment takes place in those situations in which a per-
son’s self-esteem is at stake. Thus, if I perform a cruel or stupid ac-
tion, this threatens my self-esteem because it turns my mind to the
possibility that I am a cruel or stupid person. In the hundreds of ex-
periments inspired by the theory of cognitive dissonance, the clear-
est results were obtained in those situations in which a person’s
self-esteem was involved. Moreover, as one might expect, we have
seen that those individuals with the highest self-esteem experience
the most dissonance when they behave in a stupid or cruel manner.