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By Root 1336 0

is why Amos Oz is wrong. Oz didn’t reckon with the power of self-justification: We are good people. Therefore, if we deliberately inflict pain on another, the other must have deserved it. Therefore, we are not doing evil, quite the contrary. We are doing good. The relatively small percentage of people who cannot or will not reduce dissonance this way pay a large psychological price in guilt, anguish, anxiety, nightmares, and sleepless nights. The pain of living with horrors they have committed, but cannot morally accept, would be searing, which is why most people will reach for any justification available to assuage the dissonance. In the previous chapter, we saw on a smaller scale why many divorcing couples justify the hurt they inflict on each other. In the horrifying calculus of self-deception, the greater the pain we inflict on others, the greater the need to justify it to maintain our feelings of decency and self-worth. Because our victims deserved what they got, we hate them even more than we did before we harmed them, which in turn makes us inflict even more pain on them.

Experiments have confirmed this mechanism many times. In one experiment by Keith Davis and Edward Jones, students watched another student being interviewed and then, on instruction by the experimenters, had to report to the target student that they found him to be shallow, untrustworthy, and dull. As a result of making this rather nasty assessment, the participants succeeded in convincing themselves that the victim actually deserved their criticism, and they found him less appealing than they had before they hurt his feelings. Their change of heart occurred even though they knew that the other student had done nothing to merit their criticism, and that they were simply following the experimenter’s instructions. 7

Are all perpetrators alike? No; not everyone feels the need to reduce dissonance by denigrating the victim. Who do you imagine would be most likely to blame the victim: perpetrators who think highly of themselves and have strong feelings of self-worth, or those who are insecure and have low self-worth? Dissonance theory makes the nonobvious prediction that it will be the former. For people who have low self-esteem, treating others badly or going along mindlessly with what others tell them to do is not terribly dissonant with their self-concept. Moreover, they are more likely to be self-deprecating and modest, because they don’t think they are especially wonderful. It is the people who think the most of themselves who, if they cause someone pain, must convince themselves the other guy is a rat. Because terrific guys like me don’t hurt innocent people, that guy must deserve every nasty thing I did to him. An experiment by David Glass confirmed this prediction: The higher the perpetrators’ self-esteem, the greater their denigration of their victims.8

Are all victims alike in the eyes of the perpetrator? No; they differ in their degree of helplessness. Suppose you are a marine in a hand-to-hand struggle with an armed enemy soldier. You kill him. Do you feel much dissonance? Probably not. The experience may be unpleasant, but it does not generate dissonance and needs no additional justification: “It was him or me … I killed an enemy … We are in this to win … I have no choice here.” But now suppose that you are on a mission to firebomb a house that you were told contains enemy troops. You and your team destroy the place, and then discover you have blown up a household of old men, children, and women. Under these circumstances, most soldiers will try to find additional self-justifications to reduce the dissonance they feel about killing innocent civilians, and the leading one will be to denigrate and dehumanize their victims: “Stupid jerks, they shouldn’t have been there … they were probably aiding the enemy … All those people are vermin, gooks, subhuman.” Or, as General William Westmoreland famously said of the high number of civilian casualties during the Vietnam War, “The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does a Westerner.