Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [270]
Cognitive dissonance theory stirred up a good deal of hostile criticism, which Festinger scathingly dismissed as “garbage,” and attributed to the fact that the theory presented a “not very idealistic” image of humankind.25 Whatever the motives of the critics, a flood of experiments showed cognitive dissonance to be a robust (consistent) finding. And, moreover, a fertile theory. Reminiscing, the eminent social psychologist Elliot Aronson said, “All we had to do was sit around and we could generate ten good hypotheses in an evening… the kinds of hypotheses that no one would even have dreamed of a few years earlier.”26 The theory also explained a number of kinds of social behavior that could not be accounted for within behaviorist theory. Here are a few examples, all verified by experiments:27
—The harder it is to gain membership in a group (as, for instance, when there is grueling screening or hazing), the more highly the group is valued by a person who is accepted. We convince ourselves we love what has caused us pain in order to feel that the pain was worthwhile.
—When people behave in ways they are likely to see as either stupid or immoral, they change their attitudes so as to believe that their behavior is sensible and justified. Smokers, for instance, say that the evidence about smoking and cancer is inconclusive; students who cheat say that everyone else cheats and therefore they have to in order not to be at a disadvantage.
—People who hold opposing views are apt to interpret the same news reports or factual material about the disputed subject quite differently; each sees and remembers what supports his views but glosses over and forgets what would create dissonance.
—When people who think of themselves as reasonably humane are in a situation where they hurt innocent others, as soldiers often harm civilians in the course of combat, they reduce the resulting dissonance by derogating their victims (“Those SOBs are helping the enemy. They’d knife you in the back if they could”). When people benefit from social inequities that cause others to suffer, they often tell themselves that the sufferers aren’t capable of anything better, are content with their way of life, and are dirty, lazy, and immoral.
Finally, one case of a “natural experiment” that illustrates the human tendency to reduce cognitive dissonance by rationalization:
—After a 1983 California earthquake the city of Santa Cruz, in compliance with a new California law, commissioned Dave Steeves, a well-regarded engineer, to assess how local buildings would fare in a major earthquake. Steeves identified 175 buildings that would suffer severe damage, many of them in the prime downtown shopping area. The city council, aghast at the report and what it implied about the work that would have to be done, dismissed his findings and voted unanimously to wait for clarification of the state law. Steeves was called an alarmist and his report a threat to the well-being of the town, and no further action was taken. On October 17, 1989, an earthquake of magnitude 7.1 hit just outside Santa Cruz. Three hundred homes were destroyed and five thousand seriously damaged in Santa Cruz County; the downtown area was reduced to ruins; five people were killed and two thousand injured.
Because of its explanatory power, cognitive dissonance theory easily survived all attacks. Twenty-five years after Festinger first advanced it and sixteen years after he left social psychology to study archaeology, a survey of social psychologists found that 79 percent considered him the person who had contributed most to their field.28 Today, a generation later, Festinger’s name and fame have dimmed, but cognitive dissonance remains a bedrock