Mistakes Were Made - Carol Tavris [11]
You can see one immediate benefit of understanding how dissonance works: Don’t listen to Nick. The more costly a decision, in terms of time, money, effort, or inconvenience, and the more irrevocable its consequences, the greater the dissonance and the greater the need to reduce it by overemphasizing the good things about the choice made. Therefore, when you are about to make a big purchase or an important decision—which car or computer to buy, whether to undergo plastic surgery, or whether to sign up for a costly self-help program—don’t ask someone who has just done it. That person will be highly motivated to convince you that it is the right thing to do. Ask people who have spent twelve years and $50,000 on a particular therapy if it helped, and most will say, “Dr. Weltschmerz is wonderful! I would never have found true love [got a new job] [lost weight] if it hadn’t been for him.” After all that time and money, they aren’t likely to say, “Yeah, I saw Dr. Weltschmerz for twelve years, and boy, was it ever a waste.” If you want advice on what product to buy, ask someone who is still gathering information and is still open-minded. And if you want to know whether a program will help you, don’t rely on testimonials: Get the data from controlled experiments.
Self-justification is complicated enough when it follows our conscious choices; at least we know we can expect it. But it also occurs in the aftermath of things we do for unconscious reasons, when we haven’t a clue about why we hold some belief or cling to some custom but are too proud to admit it. For example, in the introduction we described the custom of the Dinka and Nuer tribes of the Sudan, who extract several of the permanent front teeth of their children—a painful procedure, done with a fish hook. Anthropologists suggest that this tradition originated during an epidemic of lockjaw; missing front teeth would enable sufferers to get some nourishment. But if that were the reason, why in the world would the villagers continue this custom once the danger had passed?
A practice that makes no sense at all to outsiders makes perfect sense when seen through the lens of dissonance theory. During the epidemic, the villagers would have begun extracting the front teeth of all their children, so that if any later contracted tetanus, the adults would be able to feed them. But this is a painful thing to do to children, especially since only some would become afflicted. To further justify their actions, to themselves and their children, the villagers would need to bolster the decision by adding benefits to the procedure after the fact. For example, they might convince themselves that pulling teeth has aesthetic value—say, that sunken-chin look is really quite attractive—and they might even turn the surgical ordeal into a rite of passage into adulthood. And, indeed, that is just what happened. “The toothless look is beautiful,” the villagers say. “People who have all their teeth are ugly: They look like cannibals who would eat a person. A full set of teeth makes a man look like a donkey.” The toothless look has other aesthetic advantages: “We like the hissing sound it creates when we speak.” And adults reassure frightened children by saying, “This ritual is a sign of maturity.” 15 The original medical justification for the practice is long gone. The psychological self-justification remains.
People want to believe that, as smart and rational individuals, they know why they made the choices they did, so they are not always happy when you tell them the actual reason for their actions. Elliot learned this firsthand after that initiation experiment. “After each participant had finished,” he recalls, “I explained the study in detail and went over the theory carefully. Although everyone who went through the severe initiation said that they found