Pride and Preferences – Or How We Live With Our Decisions
No one likes to admit to having made a mistake. Just look at all the politicians and business people who, with a mess on their hands and owing the public or shareholders an explanation, have uttered the famously weak cop out “Mistakes were made” – a rhetorical device that political consultant William Schneider has suggested we call the "past exonerative” tense. While acknowledging an error, the passive voice of the past exonerative distances the speaker from any causal role in their execution.
Realising — and, worse still, publicly admitting — that we have made an error of judgement, a bad call, or acted in a way we are less than proud of is frequently a painful experience. Whether it’s our choice of job, which political party we voted in, the stereo we bought, or how we responded to the homeless guy panhandling at the ATM, most us like to think that we’re intelligent, competent decision-makers and, in general, morally worthy people. When we’re confronted with evidence to the contrary, we feel a mental strain and discomfort that psychologists call cognitive dissonance – two dissonant cognitions, such as “I’m a smart consumer” and “I’ve paid my hard-earned cash for this crappy stereo”, are in conflict, and something has to give. Typically, the preferred cognition is preserved and the other discarded (1).
Since the notion was first put forward some 50 years ago, psychologists have made cognitive dissonance one of the most-studied mental phenomena around. And one thing is abundantly clear from this research: humans are equipped with a variety of dissonance-reducing mechanisms that enable us to live with our decisions, our actions and, ultimately, ourselves.
The study of cognitive dissonance has thrown up some paradoxical results. For example, people tend to prefer an outcome if they endure more hardship, pain or suffering to achieve that end. In one study, participants were more satisfied with a fraternity they joined the harsher the initiation into the fraternity, all else being equal. From the behaviourist perspective dominant when the idea of cognitive dissonance was first mooted, this makes no sense: why should an outcome associated with pain or suffering be deemed more rewarding than one reached through a less unpleasant route?
Seen through the lens of dissonance reduction, however, it makes more sense. As an intelligent, sensible person, we wouldn’t go through a painful or humiliating experience if it wasn’t worth the outcome – in this case joining the fraternity. The dissonance produced by the two cognitions “I am not an idiot who would suffer pointlessly” and “I underwent a severe hazing to join this fraternity” is resolved by declaring the fraternity to be worth joining – and the harsher the hazing, the better the decision (2).
One of the ugliest sides to cognitive dissonance comes to light in the self-serving rhetoric we use to justify prejudices. It is depressingly common that persecuted individuals and groups are dehumanised and made to appear as animals — by being kept cramped and naked and filthy in concentration camps, for instance. The victimisers then respond with disgust at the debased and depraved creatures they have created: “Look at these revolting people! How justified I am in treating them as animals!”.
Yet for all the importance of cognitive dissonance, the precise mechanisms by which we deal with discordant thoughts and feelings, and the ultimate purpose these mechanisms serve, are not well understood. One way to approach these issues to look at the origins and evolutionary roots if dissonance reduction in human children and nonhuman primates. And in a
recent study published in
Psychological Science,
Louisa Egan,
Laurie Santos and
Paul Bloom have taken just such a comparative, developmental tack to the problem of cognitive dissonance (3).
The Proper Study Of Mankind: Pride and Preferences ? Or How We Live With Our Decisions
