Page 284 - The Social Animal

266 The Social Animal

the dissonance. The greater the dissonance, the greater your need to
derogate him. Recall the incident I described in Chapter 1. During
an anti-war protest at Kent State University, four students were shot
and killed by the Ohio National Guard. Whatever those students
might have been doing (shouting obscenities, teasing, taunting), it
hardly merited being shot and killed. Yet after they were killed they
were described in very negative terms. Once I have shot dissenting
students at Kent State, I will try to convince myself they really de-
served it, and I will hate dissenting students even more than I did be-
fore I shot them. Likewise, once I have denied African Americans a
decent education, I will become even more convinced that they are
stupid and couldn’t have profited from a good education to begin
with. And how do you think members of anti-American terrorist
groups and their sympathizers felt about Americans after the sense-
less slaughter of September 11? Do you think they felt sorrow and
compassion for the thousands of innocent victims, rescue workers,
and their families? Do you think they decided that Americans had
suffered enough? In most situations, committing or condoning vio-
lence does not reduce the tendency toward violence. Committing acts
of violence increases our negative feelings about the victims. Ulti-
mately, this is why violence almost always breeds more violence.
But what would happen if we could somehow arrange it so that
retaliation is not allowed to run roughshod over the instigator of ag-
gression? That is, what if the degree of retaliation is reasonably con-
trolled so that it is not significantly more intense than the action that
precipitated it? In such a circumstance, I would predict that there
would be little or no dissonance. “Sam has insulted me; I’ve paid him
back exactly in kind; we are even.” Experiments confirm that when
the retaliation matches the provocation, people do not derogate the
provocateur. 32
There is a major point here that must be emphasized: Most sit-
uations in the real world are far messier than this; retaliation almost
always exceeds the original offense. Recent research tells us why:The
pain we receive always feels more intense than the pain we inflict.
The old joke—the other guy’s broken leg is trivial; our broken fin-
gernail is serious—turns out to be an accurate description of our neu-
33
rological wiring. A team of English neurologists paired people in a
“tit-for-tat” experiment. Each pair was hooked up to a mechanism
that exerted pressure on their index fingers, and each participant was
instructed to apply the same force on their partner’s finger that they