Mistakes Were Made - Carol Tavris [10]
Ingrid’s Choice, Nick’s Mercedes, and Elliot’s Canoe
Dissonance theory came to explain far more than the reasonable notion that people are unreasonable at processing information. It also showed why they continue to be biased after they have made important decisions. 12 Social psychologist Dan Gilbert, in his illuminating book Stumbling on Happiness, asks us to consider what would have happened at the end of Casablanca if Ingrid Bergman did not patriotically rejoin her Nazi-fighting husband but instead remained with Humphrey Bogart in Morocco.13 Would she, as Bogart tells her in a heart-wrenching speech, have regretted it—”maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life”? Or did she forever regret leaving Bogart? Gilbert marshals a wealth of data to show that the answer to both questions is no, that either decision would have made her happy in the long run. Bogart was eloquent but wrong, and dissonance theory tells us why: Ingrid would have found reasons to justify either choice, along with reasons to be glad she did not make the other.
Once we make a decision, we have all kinds of tools at our disposal to bolster it. When our frugal, unflashy friend Nick traded in his eight-year-old Honda Civic on a sudden impulse and bought a new, fully loaded Mercedes, he began behaving oddly (for Nick). He started criticizing his friends’ cars, saying things like “Isn’t it about time you traded in that wreck? Don’t you think you deserve the pleasure of driving a well-engineered machine?” and “You know, it’s really unsafe to drive little cars. If you got in an accident, you could be killed. Isn’t your life worth an extra few thousand dollars? You have no idea how much peace of mind it brings me to know that my family is safe because I’m driving a solid automobile.”
It’s possible that Nick simply got bitten by the safety bug and decided, coolly and rationally, that it would be wonderful if everyone drove a great car like the Mercedes. But we don’t think so. His behavior, both in spending all that money on a luxury car and in nagging his friends to do the same, was so uncharacteristic that we suspected that he was reducing the dissonance he must have felt over impulsively spending a big chunk of his life’s savings on what he would once have referred to as “just a car.” Besides, he was doing this just when his kids were about to go to college, an event that would put a strain on his bank account. So Nick began marshalling arguments to justify his decision: “The Mercedes is a wonderful machine; I’ve worked hard all my life and I deserve it; besides, it’s so safe.” And if he could persuade his cheapskate friends to buy one too, he would feel doubly justified. Like Mrs. Keech’s converts, he began to proselytize.
Nick’s need to reduce dissonance (like Ingrid’s) was increased by the irrevocability of his decision; he could not unmake that decision without losing a lot of money. Some scientific evidence for the power of irrevocability comes from a clever study of the mental maneuverings of gamblers at a racetrack. The racetrack is an ideal place to study irrevocability because once you’ve placed your bet, you can’t go back and tell the nice man behind the window you’ve changed your mind. In this study, the researchers simply intercepted people who were standing in line to place two-dollar bets and other people who had just left the window. The investigators asked everyone how certain they were that their horses would win. The bettors who had placed their bets were