Page 231 - The Social Animal

Self-Justification 213

a good friend. On the other hand, you would not have as much ex-
ternal justification for munching on a grasshopper if you did it at the
request of someone you didn’t like. In this case, how could you jus-
tify your contradictory behavior to yourself? Simple. The way to re-
duce dissonance would be to change your attitude toward
grasshoppers in the direction of liking them better—“Gee, they’re
pretty tasty critters after all.”
Although this may seem a rather bizarre example of dissonance-
reducing behavior, it’s not as farfetched as you might think. Philip
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Zimbardo and his colleagues conducted an analogous experiment
in which army reservists were asked to try fried grasshoppers as part
of a study allegedly about “survival” foods. For half of the partici-
pants, the request was made by a warm, friendly officer; for the other
half, it was made by a cold, unfriendly officer.The reservists’ attitudes
toward eating grasshoppers were measured before and after they ate
them.The results were exactly as predicted above: Reservists who ate
grasshoppers at the request of the unpleasant officer increased their
liking for them far more than those who ate grasshoppers at the re-
quest of the pleasant officer. Thus, when sufficient external justifica-
tion was present—when reservists complied with the friendly
officer’s request—they experienced little need to change their atti-
tudes toward grasshoppers. They already had a convincing explana-
tion for why they ate them—they did it to help a “nice guy.” But
reservists who complied with the unfriendly officer’s request had lit-
tle external justification for their action. As a result, they adopted a
more positive attitude toward eating grasshoppers to rationalize their
discrepant behavior.

What Is Inadequate Justification? Throughout this section,
I have made reference to situations where there is inadequate external
justification and to those with an abundance of external justification.
These terms require some additional clarification. In the Festinger-
Carlsmith experiment, all of the participants did, in fact, agree to tell
the lie—including all of those paid only $1. In a sense, then, $1 was
adequate—that is, adequate to induce the participants to tell the lie;
but as it turns out, it wasn’t sufficient to keep them from feeling fool-
ish.To reduce their feelings of foolishness, they had to reduce the dis-
sonance that resulted from telling a lie for so paltry a sum. This
entailed additional bolstering in the form of convincing themselves