Mistakes Were Made - Carol Tavris [18]
Imagine that a distinguished-looking man in a white lab coat walks up to you and offers you twenty dollars to participate in a scientific experiment. He says, “I want you to inflict 500 volts of incredibly painful shock to another person to help us understand the role of punishment in learning.” Chances are you would refuse; the money isn’t worth it to harm another person, even for science. Of course, a few people would do it for twenty bucks and some would not do it for twenty thousand, but most would tell the scientist where he could stick his money.
Now suppose the scientist lures you along more gradually. Suppose he offers you twenty dollars to administer a minuscule amount of shock, say 10 volts, to a fellow in the adjoining room, to see if this zap will improve the man’s ability to learn. The experimenter even tries the 10 volts on you, and you can barely feel it. So you agree. It’s harmless and the study seems pretty interesting. (Besides, you’ve always wanted to know whether spanking your kids will get them to shape up.) You go along for the moment, and now the experimenter tells you that if the learner gets the wrong answer, you must move to the next toggle switch, which delivers a shock of 20 volts. Again, it’s a small and harmless jolt. Because you just gave the learner 10, you see no reason why you shouldn’t give him 20. And because you just gave him 20, you say to yourself, 30 isn’t much more than 20, so I’ll go to 30. He makes another mistake, and the scientist says, “Please administer the next level—40 volts.”
Where do you draw the line? When do you decide enough is enough? Will you keep going to 450 volts, or even beyond that, to a switch marked XXX DANGER? When people are asked in advance how far they imagine they would go, almost no one says they would go to 450. But when they are actually in the situation, two-thirds of them go all the way to the maximum level they believe is dangerous. They do this by justifying each step as they went along: This small shock doesn’t hurt; 20 isn’t much worse than 10; if I’ve given 20, why not 30? As they justified each step, they committed themselves further. By the time people were administering what they believed were strong shocks, most found it difficult to justify a sudden decision to quit. Participants who resisted early in the study, questioning the very validity of the procedure, were less likely to become entrapped by it and more likely to walk out.
The Milgram experiment shows us how ordinary people can end up doing immoral and harmful things through a chain reaction of behavior and subsequent self-justification. When we, as observers, look at them in puzzlement or dismay, we fail to realize that we are often looking at the end of a long, slow process down that pyramid. At his sentencing, Magruder said to Judge John Sirica: “I know what I have done, and Your Honor knows what I have done. Somewhere between my ambition and my ideals, I lost my ethical compass.” How do you get an honest man to lose his ethical compass? You get him to take one step at a time, and self-justification will do the rest.
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Knowing how dissonance works won’t make any of us automatically immune to the allure of self-justification, as Elliot learned when he bought that canoe in January. You can’t just say to people, as he did after the initiation experiments, “See how you reduced dissonance? Isn’t that interesting?” and expect them to reply, “Oh, thank you for showing me the real reason I like the group. That sure makes me feel smart!” All of us, to preserve our belief that we are smart, will occasionally do dumb things. We can’t help it. We are wired that way.
But this does not mean that we are doomed to keep striving to justify our actions after the fact—like Sisyphus, never reaching the top of the hill of self-acceptance. A richer understanding of how and why our minds work as they do is the first step toward breaking the self-justification habit. And