a mistake. Quite the contrary: they may be aggressive in its defense. “I would do it again in a second; she deserved everything she got.” It is difficult for them to resist reliving the crime, fantasizing again about the victim’s terror, pain, unanswered screams for help, and so on. They are justifying something with horribly negative consequences (for themselves as well now) that they cannot change. Their fate is instead to relive the pleasures of the original mistake, over and over again.
SOCIAL EFFECTS OF COGNITIVE DISSONANCE REDUCTION
The tendency of cognitive dissonance resolution to drive different individuals apart has been described in terms of a pyramid. Two individuals can begin very close on a subject—at the top of a pyramid, so to speak—but as contradictory forces of cognitive dissonance come into play and self-justification ensues, they may slide down the pyramid in different directions, emerging far apart at the bottom. As two experts on the subject put it:We make an early, apparently inconsequential decision and then we justify it to reduce the ambiguity of the approach. This starts a process of entrapment—action, justification, further action—that increases our intensity and commitment and may take us far from our original intentions or principles.
As we saw in Chapter 5, this process may be an important force driving married couples toward divorce rather than reconciliation. What determines the degree to which any given individual is prone to move down the pyramid when given the choice is a very important (unanswered) question.
A novel implication of cognitive dissonance concerns the best way to turn a possible foe into a friend. One might think that giving a gift to another would be the best way to start a relationship of mutual giving and cooperation. But it is the other way around—getting the other person to give you a gift is often the better way of inducing positive feelings toward you, if for no other reason than to justify the initial gift. This has been shown experimentally where subjects cajoled into giving a person a gift later rate that person more highly than those not so cajoled. The following folk expression from more than two hundred years ago captures the counterintuitive form of the argument (given reciprocal altruism):He that has once done you a kindness
will be more ready to do you another
than he whom you yourself have obliged.
COGNITIVE DISSONANCE IN MONKEYS AND YOUNG CHILDREN
It is of some interest to know whether animals show cognitive dissonance and at what age children show such effects. Birds often show the human bias of preferring items for which the birds work harder (in their case, food) over identical items achieved through less work. The same is true sometimes of rats.
A more novel set of experiments shows that when a monkey is forced to choose between two items it is equally fond of (say, a blue M&M instead of a red one), it will then prefer another color (say, a yellow M&M) over the one it just rejected (red), as if needing consistency. That is, having rejected red once, to remain consistent it must do so again. But if the initial choice is made by the human experimenter (blue over red), this either has no effect on the monkey’s subsequent choice or the monkey then chooses the one the human kept for itself, as if this must be the better one.
Nearly identical experiments run on four-year-olds produce nearly identical results. When the children are forced to choose between two equivalent objects, they continue to reject the one they rejected the first time, as if staying true to themselves. That is, having rejected one, the child acts as if there must have been a good reason and rejects it again. This occurs even if the child does not see which item it chose until after having made its choice. Once again, as with the monkeys, when the experimenter makes the choice instead of the child, this either has no effect on how the child chooses or it chooses the one the experimenter kept for itself, as if this must be the better one.
In short, though there are only a few studies of cognitive dissonance in other animals and in children, they tend to give similar results: each party acts as if it is rationalizing its prior choice as having been based on sound logic and hence worth repeating when given the same opportunity. Given the theory advanced in this book, it is tempting to argue that the children and the monkeys may be projecting a