Page 259 - The Social Animal

Self-Justification 241

nal essay, thus creating dissonance. Again, dissonance theory predicts
that such participants will change their attitudes, bringing them in
line with their essays to reduce their uncomfortable arousal state.
However, if some of the participants think the arousal they are expe-
riencing is due to the pill, they won’t need to alter their attitudes to
feel better about themselves. At the opposite end of the spectrum, if
some of the participants think they should be feeling relaxed because
of the pill, any arousal they experience should be particularly power-
ful for them because it is taking place in spite of the pill. Accordingly,
these people should change their attitudes a great deal.Thus the the-
ory predicts that attitude change will come or go across conditions,
depending on whether the arousal due to dissonance is masked by an
alternative explanation (“Oh, right—I took a pill that’s supposed to
make me feel tense; that’s why I’m feeling this way”) or magnified by
an alternative explanation (“Oh, no—I took a pill that’s supposed to
make me feel relaxed and I feel tense”).
And that is exactly what Zanna and Cooper found. Participants
in the control condition underwent considerable attitude change, as
would be expected in a typical dissonance experiment. Participants
in the aroused condition, however, did not change their attitudes—
they attributed their discomfort to the pill, not their counterattitudi-
nal essay. Finally, participants in the relaxed condition changed their
attitudes even more than the control participants did. They inferred
that writing the counterattitudinal essay had made them very tense,
since they were feeling aroused despite administration of a relaxing
drug. Thus they inferred that their behavior was very inconsistent
with their perception of themselves as decent and reasonable people,
and they changed their attitude to bring it into line with their essay
contents.
Finally, neuroscientists have recently shown that cognitive disso-
nance is unpleasant and that restoring consonance brings pleasure. In
a study of people who were wired up to fMRIs while they were try-
ing to process dissonant or consonant information, Drew Westen
76
and his colleagues found that the reasoning areas of the brain vir-
tually shut down when a person is confronted with dissonant infor-
mation (suggesting that people don’t want to contemplate
information at odds with their cherished beliefs). But when subjects
began to reduce cognitive dissonance, the emotional centers of their
brains lit up—the same regions that get activated during any pleas-
urable experience, like eating ice cream or acing an exam.