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By Root 1261 0

our broken fingernail is serious—turns out to be an accurate description of our neurological wiring. English neurologists paired people in a tit-for-tat experiment. Each pair was hooked up to a mechanism that exerted pressure on their index fingers, and each participant was instructed to apply the same force on their partner’s finger that they had just felt. They could not do it fairly, although they tried hard to do so. Every time one partner felt the pressure, he retaliated with considerably greater force, thinking he was giving what he had gotten. The researchers concluded that the escalation of pain is “a natural by-product of neural processing.”3 It helps explain why two boys who start out exchanging punches on the arm as a game soon find themselves in a furious fistfight, and why two nations find themselves in a spiral of retaliation: “They didn’t take an eye for an eye, they took an eye for a tooth. We must get even—let’s take a leg.” Each side justifies what it does as merely evening the score.

Social psychologist Roy Baumeister and his colleagues showed how smoothly self-justification works to minimize any bad feelings we might have as doers of harm, and to maximize any righteous feelings we might have as victims.4 They asked sixty-three people to provide autobiographical accounts of a “victim story,” when they had been angered or hurt by someone else, and a “perpetrator story,” a time when they had made someone else angry. They did not use the term perpetrator in its common criminal sense, to describe someone actually guilty of a crime or other wrongdoing, and in this section neither will we; we will use the word, as they do, to mean anyone who perpetrated an action that harmed or offended another.

From both perspectives, accounts involved the familiar litany of broken promises and commitments; violated rules, obligations, or expectations; sexual infidelity; betrayal of secrets; unfair treatment; lies; and conflicts over money and possessions. Notice that this was not a he-said/she-said study, the kind that marriage counselors and mediators present when they describe their cases; rather, it was a he-said-this-and-he-said-that study, in which everyone reported an experience of being on each side. The benefit of this method, the researchers explained, is that “it rules out explanations that treat victims and perpetrators as different kinds of people. Our procedures indicate how ordinary people define themselves as victims or as perpetrators—that is, how they construct narratives to make sense of their experiences in each of those roles.” Again, personality differences have nothing to do with it. Sweet, kind people are as likely as crabby ones to be victims or perpetrators, and to justify themselves accordingly.

When we construct narratives that “make sense,” however, we do so in a self-serving way. Perpetrators are motivated to reduce their moral culpability; victims are motivated to maximize their moral blamelessness. Depending on which side of the wall we are on, we systematically distort our memories and account of the event to produce the maximum consonance between what happened and how we see ourselves. By identifying these systematic distortions, the researchers showed how the two antagonists misperceive and misunderstand each other’s actions.

In their narratives, perpetrators drew on different ways to reduce the dissonance caused by realizing they did something wrong. The first, naturally, was to say they did nothing wrong at all: “I lied to him, but it was only to protect his feelings.” “Yeah, I took that bracelet from my sister, but it was originally mine, anyway.” Only a few perpetrators admitted that their behavior was immoral or deliberately hurtful or malicious. Most said their offending behavior was justifiable, and some of them, the researchers added mildly, “were quite insistent about this.” Most of the perpetrators reported, at least in retrospect, that what they did was reasonable; their actions might have been regrettable, but they were understandable, given the circumstances.

The second strategy