Page 265 - The Social Animal

Self-Justification 247

can you!” In the mindful condition we also asked the students to re-
spond to a water conservation “survey,” which consisted of items de-
signed to make them aware of their proconservation attitudes and
the fact that their showering behavior was sometimes wasteful.
The students then proceeded to the shower room, where a sec-
ond research assistant was unobtrusively waiting (with a hidden wa-
terproof stopwatch) to time their showers. Exactly as in the condom
experiment, we had a major impact on the students’ behavior only in
the high-dissonance condition—that is, where the students were in-
duced to advocate short showers and also were made mindful of their
own past behavior. In this condition, students became aware that
they were not practicing what they were preaching:The length of the
1
average shower was just over 3 ⁄2 minutes (that’s short!) and was far
shorter than in the control conditions.

Shedding Light on the Power of Cult Leaders Disso-
nance theory has shown itself to be useful as a way of increasing
our understanding of events that totally confound our imagina-
tion—like the enormous power certain cult leaders like Jim Jones
(the massacre at Jonestown, Guyana), David Koresh (the confla-
gration at Waco, Texas), and Marshall Herff Applewhite (the group
suicide of the Heaven’s Gate cult) have had over the hearts and
minds of their followers. Let us focus on the Jonestown massacre.
It goes without saying that the event was tragic in the extreme. It
seems beyond comprehension that a single individual could have
such power that, at his command, hundreds of people would kill
their own children and themselves. How could this happen? The
tragedy at Jonestown is far too complex to be understood fully by
a simple and sovereign analysis. But one clue does emanate from
the foot-in-the-door phenomenon discussed earlier in this chap-
ter. Jim Jones extracted great trust from his followers one step at
a time. Indeed, close scrutiny reveals a chain of ever-increasing
commitments on the part of his followers. Although it is almost
impossible to comprehend fully the final event, it becomes slightly
more comprehensible if we look at it as part of a series. As I men-
tioned earlier in this chapter, once a small commitment is made,
the stage is set for ever-increasing commitments.
Let us start at the beginning. It is easy to understand how a
charismatic leader like Jones might extract money from the members
of his church. Once they have committed themselves to donating a