Mistakes Were Made - Carol Tavris [16]
Now the question is: How do they feel about cheating a week later? Each student has had ample time to justify the course of action he took. The one who yielded to temptation will decide that cheating is not so great a crime. He will say to himself: “Hey, everyone cheats. It’s no big deal. And I really needed to do this for my future career.” But the one who resisted the temptation will decide that cheating is far more immoral than he originally thought: “In fact, people who cheat are disgraceful. In fact, people who cheat should be permanently expelled from school. We have to make an example of them.”
By the time the students are through with their increasingly intense levels of self-justification, two things have happened: One, they are now very far apart from one another; and two, they have internalized their beliefs and are convinced that they have always felt that way.24 It is as if they had started off at the top of a pyramid, a millimeter apart; but by the time they have finished justifying their individual actions, they have slid to the bottom and now stand at opposite corners of its base. The one who didn’t cheat considers the other to be totally immoral, and the one who cheated thinks the other is hopelessly puritanical. This process illustrates how people who have been sorely tempted, battled temptation, and almost given in to it—but resisted at the eleventh hour—come to dislike, even despise, those who did not succeed in the same effort. It’s the people who almost decide to live in glass houses who throw the first stones.
The metaphor of the pyramid applies to most important decisions involving moral choices or life options. Instead of cheating on an exam, for example, now substitute: deciding to begin a casual affair (or not), sample an illegal drug (or not), take steroids to improve your athletic ability (or not), stay in a troubled marriage (or not), name names to the House Un-American Activities Committee (or not), lie to protect your employer and job (or not), have children (or not), pursue a demanding career (or stay home with the kids). When the person at the top of the pyramid is uncertain, when there are benefits and costs of both choices, then he or she will feel a particular urgency to justify the choice made. But by the time the person is at the bottom of the pyramid, ambivalence will have morphed into certainty, and he or she will be miles away from anyone who took a different route.
This process blurs the distinction that people like to draw between “us good guys” and “those bad guys.” Often, standing at the top of the pyramid, we are faced not with a black-and-white, go/ no-go decision, but with a gray choice whose consequences are shrouded. The first steps along the path are morally ambiguous, and the right decision is not always clear. We make an early, apparently inconsequential decision, and then we justify it to reduce the ambiguity of the choice. This starts a process of entrapment—action, justification, further action—that increases our intensity and commitment, and may end up taking us far from our original intentions or principles.
It certainly worked that way for Jeb Stuart Magruder, Richard Nixon’s special assistant, who was a key player in the plot to burglarize the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate complex, concealed the White House’s involvement, and lied under oath to protect himself and others responsible. When Magruder was first hired, Nixon’s adviser Bob Haldeman did not tell him that perjury, cheating, and breaking the law were part of the job