Page 239 - The Social Animal

Self-Justification 221

the dissonance by simply blaming his inaction on a severe threat.The
child must find a way to justify the fact that he is not aggressing
against his little sister.The best way is to try to convince himself that
he really doesn’t like to beat his sister up, that he didn’t want to do it
in the first place, and that beating up little kids is not fun. The less
severe the threat, the less external justification; the less external jus-
tification, the greater the need for internal justification. Allowing
people the opportunity to construct their own internal justification
can be a large step toward helping them develop a permanent set of
values.
To test this idea, I performed an experiment at the Harvard Uni-
versity nursery school in collaboration with J. Merrill Carlsmith. 45
For ethical reasons, we did not try to change basic values like aggres-
sion; parents, understandably, might not approve of our changing
important values. Instead, we chose a trivial aspect of behavior—toy
preference.
We first asked 5-year-old children to rate the attractiveness of
several toys; then, in each instance, we chose one toy that the chil-
dren considered quite attractive and told them they couldn’t play
with it. We threatened half of the children with mild punishment for
transgression—“I would be a little angry”; we threatened the other
half with more severe punishment—“I would be very angry; I would
have to take all of the toys and go home and never come back again;
I would think you were just a baby.” After that, we left the room and
allowed the children to play with the other toys—and to resist the
temptation of playing with the forbidden one. All the children resis-
ted the temptation; none played with the forbidden toy.
On returning to the room, we asked the children again to rate
the attractiveness of all the toys. The results were both striking and
exciting.Those children who underwent a mild threat now found the
forbidden toy less attractive than before. In short, lacking adequate
external justification for refraining from playing with the toy, they
succeeded in convincing themselves that they hadn’t played with it
because they didn’t really like it. On the other hand, the toy did not
become less attractive for those who were severely threatened. These
children continued to rate the forbidden toy as highly desirable; in-
deed, some even found it more desirable than they had before the
threat. The children in the severe-threat condition had good exter-
nal reasons for not playing with the toy—and they therefore had no