Page 244 - The Social Animal

226 The Social Animal

could they reduce dissonance? What they did was misremember how
bad they were before taking the course. That is, they underestimated
the skills they had before they enrolled in the course. Students who
signed up but did not participate showed no such self-justifying be-
havior; their recollections of earlier self-evaluations were accurate.
These results may explain why people who spend time and money to
get in shape may feel satisfied even if they don’t fully succeed. They
may not be able to convince themselves that they actually reached
their goals, but they may be able to overestimate the progress they
did make by distorting their memories of how out of shape they were
before they went into training. As Conway and Ross pointed out, one
way for people to get what they want is to revise what they had.*

The Justification of Cruelty

I have repeatedly made the point that we need to convince ourselves
that we are decent, reasonable people. We have seen how this can
cause us to change our attitudes on issues important to us. We have
seen, for example, that if a person makes a counterattitudinal speech
favoring the use and legalization of marijuana for little external jus-
tification, and learns that the videotape of the speech will be shown
to a group of persuadable youngsters, the individual tends to con-
vince him or herself that marijuana isn’t so bad—as a means of feel-
ing less like an evil person. In this section, I will discuss a variation
on this theme: Suppose you performed an action that caused a great
deal of harm to an innocent young man. Further, suppose that the
harm was real and unambiguous. Your cognition “I am a decent, fair,
and reasonable person” would be dissonant with your cognition “I
have hurt another person.” If the harm is clear, then you cannot re-
duce the dissonance by changing your opinion on the issue, thus con-

*The astute reader may have noticed a connection between this study and one
discussed earlier in this chapter, in which people who broke their New Year’s reso-
lutions felt bad about themselves for failing and later played down the importance
of the resolutions. I suggested that an alternative method of reducing the dissonance
associated with failure might involve making one’s definition of success less strin-
gent—such as settling for partial success. The study by Conway and Ross suggests
yet another alternative: If, for example, an individual trying to give up smoking has
not succeeded in either cutting down or quitting completely, the dissonance aroused
by failure can still be reduced if the person misremembers how much he or she
smoked prior to making the effort to quit.