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The Rationalizing Animal *

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 5

The Rationalizing Animal *

Elliot Aronson

Man likes to think of himself as a rational animal. However, it is more true

that man is a rationalizing animal, that he attempts to appear reasonable to
himself and to others. Albert Camus even said that man is a creature who
spends his entire life in an attempt to convince himself that he is not absurd.
Some years ago a woman reported that she was receiving messages from
outer space. Word came to her from the planet Clarion that her city would
be destroyed by a great flood on December 21. Soon a considerable number
of believers shared her deep commitment to the prophecy. Some of them
quit their jobs and spent their savings freely in anticipation of the end.
On the evening of December 20, the prophet and her followers met to
prepare for the event. They believed that flying saucers would pick them up,
thereby sparing them from disaster. Midnight arrived, but no flying saucers.
December 21 dawned, but no flood.
What happens when prophecy fails? Social psychologists Leon Fes-
tinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter infiltrated the little band of
believers to see how they would react. They predicted that persons had
expected the disaster, but awaited it alone in their homes, would simply lose
faith in the prophecy. But those who awaited the outcome in a group, who
had thus admitted their belief publicly, would come to believe even more
strongly in the prophecy and tum into active proselytizers.
That is exactly what happened. At first the faithful felt despair and
shame because all their predictions had been for naught. Then, after waiting
nearly five hours for the saucers, the prophet had a new vision. The city had
been spared, she said, because of the trust and faith of her devoted group.
This revelation was elegant in its simplicity, and the believers accepted it
enthusiastically. They now sought the press that they had previously
·avoided. They turned from believers into zealots.

• Reprinted from Psychology Todny. May 1973, by permission of Psychology Today Maga-
zine. Copyright © 1973 ZifI'-Davis Publishing Company.

67
 68 Section" Two The" Motlvutlonlll 8l1Sis-of 8ehllVlortn Orgunizlltions

UVINC ON THE FAULT

In 1957, Leon Feslinger proposed his theory of cognitive dissonance,
which describes and predicts man's rationalizing behavior. Dissonance oc-
curs whenever a person simultaneously holds two inconsistent cognitions
(ideas. beliefs. opinions). "For example." the belief that the world will end on a
certain day·is dissonant with the awareness. when the day breaks. that the
world has not ended. Festinger maintained that this state of inconsistency is
so uncomfortable that people strive to reduce the conOict in the easiest way
possible. They will change one or both cognitions so that they will "fit
together" better.
Consider what happens when a smoker is confronted with evidence that
smoking causes cancer. He will become motivated to change either his
attitudes about smoking or his behavior. And as who has tried to quit
knows, the former alternative is easier.
The smoker may decide that the studies are lousy. He may point to
friends ("If Sam. Jack, and Harry smoke, Cigarettes can't be all that dan-
gerou,1, He may conclude that filters trap all the 'cancer-producing mate-
rials. Or he may argue that'he Would rather live a short and happy life with
cigarettes than a long and miserable lire without them.
The more a person Is committed to a course of action , the more resistant
he will be to information that threatens that course. Psychologists have
reported that the people who are least likely to believe the dangers of
smoking are those who tried to quit-and failed. they have become more
committed to smoking. Simiiarly, a person who builds a fl00,OOO house
astride the San Andreas Fault will be less receptive to arguments about
imminent earthquakes than would a perSon who is renting the house for a
few months. The new bomeowner is committed; he want to believe
that he did an absurd thing.
When a person reduces his dissonance. he defends his ego and keeps a
positive self-image. But self-justification can reach startling extremes; people
will ignore danger in order to' avoid dissonance. even when that ignorance
can cause their deaths. I mean that lJterally.
Suppose you are Jewish In a country occupied by Hitler's forces. What
should you do? You could try to leave the country; you could try to pass as
, "Aryan"; you could do nothing hope for the best. The first two choices
are dangerous: If you are caught you will be executed. If you decide to sit
tight, you will try to t.'onvince yourself tbat you made tbe best decision. You
may reason that, while Jews are indeed being treated unfairly, they are not
being killed unless they break the law.
Now suppose that a respected man from your town announces that he
has seen Jews being butchered mercilessly, including everyone who has'
deported from your village. If you believe him, you might
have a chance to escape. If you don't believe him, you and your family will
be slaughtered.
 5 The Rlllion;&lizinK Alliin;&) 69

Dissonance theory would predict that you will not listen to the witness,
because to do so would be to admit that your judgment and decisions were
wrong. You will dismiss his information as untrue, and decide that he was
lying or hallucinating. Indeed, Elie Wiesel reported that this happened to
the JeWs in Sighet. a small town in Hungary, in 1944. Thus people are not
passive receptacles for the deposit of The manner in which they
view and distort the objective world in order to avoid and reduce dissonance
is entirely predictable. But one cannot divide the world into rational people
on one side and dissonance reducers on the other. While people vary in their
ability to tolerate dissonance. we are all capable of rational or irrational
behavior. depending on the circumstances-some of which follow.

DISSONANCE BECAUSE OF EFFORT

Judson M iUs and I found that if people go through a lot of trouble to gain
admission to a group, and the group turns out to be dull and dreary, they will
experience dissonance. It is a rare person who wi)) accept this situation with
an "Oh, pshaw. I worked hard for nothing. Too bad." One way to resolve the
dissonance is to decide that the group is worth the effort it took to get
admitted. .
We told a number of co)Jege women that they would have to undergo an
initiation to join a group that would discuss the psychology of sex. One third
of them had severe initiation: They had to recite a list of obscene words and
read some lurid sexual passages from novels in the presence of a male
experimenter (in 1959, this really was a "severe" and embarrassing task).
One third went through a mild initiation in which they rend words that were
sexual but not obscene (such as "virgin" and and the last third had
no initiation at all. Then all of the women listened to an extremely boring
taped discussion of the group they bad presumably joined. The women in
the severe initiation group rated the discussion and its drab participants
much more favorably than those in' the other groups.
I am not asserting that people enjoy painful experiences. or that they.
enjoy things that are associated with painful experiences. If you got hit on
the head by a brick on the way to a fraternity initiation, you would not like
that group any better.. But if you volunteered to get hit with a hrick in O,.de,.
to join the fraternity, you definitely would like the group more than if you
had been admitted without fuss.
After a decision-especially a diffICult one that involves much time,
money, or eBOrt-people almost always experience dissonance. Awareness
of defects in the preferred ohject is dissonant with having chosen it;
awareness of positive aspects of the uncooscm object is dissonant with having
rejected it.
Accordingly, researchers found that, before making a deci-
sion, people seek as much information as possible about the alternatives.
 ·70 Section Two The Mutlwtloru&l&sls- of. Belll4v1ur··ln· OrgalliZlltluns·

Afterward, however, they seek reassurance that they did the right thing, and
do so by seeking information in support of their choice or by simply changing
the infonnation is already in their heads. In one of the earliest experi';'
ments on dissonance theory, Jack Brehm gave a group of women their choice
between two appliances, such as a toaster or a blender, that they bad
previously rated for desirability. When the subjects reevaluated the ap-
pliances after choosing one of them, they increased their liking for the one
they had chosen and downgraded their evaluation of the rejected appliance.
Similarly, Danuta Ehrlich and her associates found that person about to a
buy a new car does so carefully, reading all ads and accepting facts openly on
various makes and models. But after he buys his Volvo, for instance, he will
read advertisements more selectively, and he will tend to avoid ads for
Volkswagens, Chevrolets, and 50 on.

THE DECISION TO BEHAVE IMMORAU.Y

Your conscience, let Us suppose, tells you that itis wrong to cheat, lie,
steal, your neighbor's husband or wife, or whatever. Let us suppose
further that you are in a situation in which you are sorely tempted to ignore
your conscience. If you give in to temptation, the cognition "I am a decent,
moral person" will be dissonant with the cognition "I have committed an
immoral act. If you resist, the cognition "I WBnt to get a good grade (have
H

that money, seduce that person)" is dissonant with the cognition "I could
have acted so as to get that grade. but I chose not to." .
The easiest way to reduce dissonance in either case is to minimize the
negative 8.1pects of the action one has chosen, and to change one's attitude.
about its immorality. If Mr. C. decides to cheat, he will probably decide that
cheating isn't really so bad. It hurts no one; everyone does it; it's part of
human nature. If Mr. D. decides not to cheat, he will DO doubt come. to
believe that cheating is a sin, and deserves severe punishment.
The point here is that the initial attitudes of these' men are virtually the
same. Moreover, their decisions could be a hair's breadth apart. But once
the action is taken, their attitudes diverge sharply.
Judson Mills confirmed these speculations in an experiment with sixth-·
grade childreD.First he measured their attitudes toward cheating, and then
.put them in a competitive ·situation. He arranged the test so that it was
impossible to win without cheating, and so it was easy for the children to
cheat, thinking they would be unwatched. The next day. he asked the
. children again how they felt about cheating. Those who bad cheated on the'
test had become more lenient in their attitudes; those who had resisted
the temptation adopted harsher attitudes. .
The data are provocative. They suggest that the most zealous
arc not those who are removed from the problem they oppose. I would
. haz.ard to say that the people who are most angry about "the sexual prom is-
 5 The. BMtionalizingAnimll1. 71

cuity of the young" are not those who have never dreamed of being promis-
cuous. On the contrary, they would be persons who had been seriously
tempted by illicit sex, who came very close to giving in to their desires, but
who Snally resisted. People who almost live in glass houses are the ones who
are most likely to throw stones.

INSUFFICIENT JUSTIFICATION
If I offer George .20 to do a boring task and offer Richard $1 to do the
same thil)g, which one will decide that the assignment was mildly interest-
ing? If I threaten one child .with harsh punishment if he does something
forbidden and threaten another child with mild punishment, which one will
transgress?
Dissonance theory predicts that, when people find themselves doing
something and they have neither been rewarded adequately for doing it nor
threatened with dire consequences for not doing it, they will find internal
reasons for their behavior.
Suppose you dislike Woodrow Wilson and I want you to make a speech
in his favor. The most efficient thing 1 can do is to pay you a lot of money for
making the speech, or threaten to kill you if you don't. In either case, you
will probably comply with my wish, but you won't change your altitude
toward Wilson. If that were my goal, I would have to give you a minimal
reward or threat. Then, in order not to appear absurd. you would have to
seek additional reasons for your speech-this could lead you to find good
things about Wilson and. hence, to conclude that you really do like Wilson
after all. Lying produces great attitude change only when the liar is
undercompensated.
Festlnger and J. Merrill Carlsmith asked college students to work on
boring and repetitive tasks. lben the experimenters persuaded the students
to lie about the work, to. tell a fellow student that the task would be
interesting and enjoyable. They offered half of their subjects $20 for telling
the lie, and they offered the others only $1. Later they asked all subjects how
much they bad really liked the tasks,
The students who earned $20 for their lies rated the work as deadly
dull, which it was. They experienced no dissonance: they lied. but they were
well paid for that behavior. By contrast, students who got $1 decided that
the tasks were rather enjoyable. lOe doUar was apparently enough to get
them to teU the lie but not enougb to keep them from feeling that lying for so
paltry a sum was foolish. To reduce dissonance, they decided that they
hadn't Ued after all; the task was fun.
Similarly, Carlsmith and I found that mild threats are· more effective
than harsh threats in changing a child's attitude about a forbidden object. in
this case a delightful toy. In the severe-threat condition. children refrained
from playing with the toys and had a good reason for refraining-the very
 72 Scctlllll Two ·111" Motivation ..1 Oasis III" n.. lla\'iOl" ill Orxulli:uliolls

severity of the threat provided ample justification fur not playing with the
toy. In the mild-threat condition, however, the children refrained from
playing with the toy but, when they asked themselves, "How come I'm not
playing with the toy?" they did not have a superabundant justifICation
(because the threat was not terribly severe). Accordingly, they provided
additional justification in the form of convincing themselves that the attrac-
tive toy was really not very attractive and that they didn't really want to play
with it very much in the Srst place. Jonathan Freedman extended our
findings and showed that severe threats do not have a lasting effect on a
child's behavior. Mild threats, by contrast, can change behavior for many
months.
Perhaps the most extraordinary example of insufficient justification
occurred in India, where Jamuna Prasad analyzed the rumors that were
circulated li4ter a terrible earthquake in 1950. Prasad found that people in
towns that were not in immediate danger were spreading rumors of impend-
ing doom from floods, cyclones, or unforeseeable calamities. Certainly the
rumors could not help people feel more secllre; why then perpetrate them? I
believe that dissonance helps explain this phenomenon. The people were
terribly frightened-after all, the neighboring villages had been de-
stroyed-but they did not have ample excuse for their fear, since the
earthquake had missed them. So they invented their own excuse; if a cyclone
is on the way, it is reasonable to be afraid. Later, Durganand Sinha studied
rumors in a town that had actually been destroyed. The people were scared,
but they had good reason to be; they didn't need to seek additional justifica-
tion for their terror. And their rumors showed no predictions of impending
disaster and no serious exaggerations.

THE DECISION TO BE CRUEL

The need for people to believe that they are kind and decent can lead
them to say and do unkind and indecent things. After the National Guard
killed four students at Kent State, several rumors quickly spread: The slain
girls were pregnant, so their deaths spared their families from shame; the
students were filthy and had lice on them. These rumors were totally
untrue, but the townspeople were eager to believe them. Why? The local
people· were conservative and infuriated at the radical behavior of some of
the students. Many had hoped that the students would get their comeup-
pance. But death is an awfully severe penalty. The severity of this penalty
outweighs and is dissonant with the "crimes" of the students. In these
circumstances, any information that put the victims in a bad light reduces
dissonance by implying, in effect, . that it was good that the young people
died. One high school teacher even avowed that anyone with "long hair,
dirty clothes, or [who goes] barefooted deserves to be shot."
 5 111" Anilllal 73

Keith Davis and Edward Jones dt!Inonstrated the need to justify cru-
elty. They persuaded students to help them with an experiment, in the
course of which the volunteers had to teU another student that he was a
shallow, untrustworthy, and dull person. Volunteers managed to convince
themselves that they didn't like the victim of their cruel analysis. They found
him less attractive than they did before they had to criticize him.
Similarly, David Glass persuaded a group of subjects to deliver electric
shocks to others. The subjects, again, decided that the victim must Jeserve
the cruelty; they rated him as stupid, mean, etc. Then Glass went a step
further. He found that a subjeCt with high self-esteem was most likely to
derogate the victim. This led Glass to conclude, ironkally, that it is precisely
because a person thillks he is nice that he decides that the persofl he has hurt
is a rat. "Since nice guys like me don't go arollnd hurting innocent people,"
Glass's subjects seemed to say, "you must have deserved it." But individuals
who have low self-esteem do not feel the need to justify their behavior and
derogate their victims; it is consonant for such persons to believe they have
behaved badly. "Worthless people like me do unkind things."
Ellen Berscheid and her colleagues found another factor that limits the
need to derogate one's victim: the victim's capacity to retaliate. If the person
doing harm feels that the situation is balanced, that his victim will pay him
back in coin, he had no need to justify his behavior. In Bersclteid's experi-
ment,which involved electric shocks, college students did not derogate or
dislike the persons they shocked if they believed the victims could retaliate.
Students who were led to believe that the victims would· not be able to
retaliate did derogate them. lIer work suggests that soldiers may have a
greater need to disparage civilian victims (becallse they can't retaliate) than
military victims. Lt. William L. Calley, who considered the "gooks" at My
Lai to be something less than human, would be a case in point.

DISSONANCE AND THE SELF-CONCEPT

On the hasis of recent experiments, I have reformulated Festingeis
uriginal theory in terms of the self-concept. lbat is, dissonance is most
powerful when self-esteem is threatened. Thus, the important aspect of
dissonance is not "I said one thing and I believe another," but "I have misled
people-and 1 am a truthful, nice person." Conversely, the cognitions, "I
believe the task is dull," and "I tolJ someone the task was interesting," are
not dissonant for a psychopathic liar.
David Mettee and I predicted in a recent experiment that persons who
had low opinions of themselves would be more likely to cheat than persons
with high self-esteem. We assumed that if an average person gets a tempo-
niry blow to his self-esteem (by being jilted, say, or not getting a promotion),
he will temporarily feel stupid and worthless, and hence do any number of
 71 Sedion Two The Ba)is of Behaviur ill

stupid and worthless things-cheat at cards, bungle an assignment, break a

valuable vase.
Mettee and I temporarily changeo 45 female students' self-esteem. We
gave one third of them positive feedback about a personality test they had
taken (we said that they were interesting, mature, deep, et.c.); we gave one
third negative feedback (we said that they were relatively immature, shal-
low, etc.); and one third of the students got no information at all. Then all the
students went on to participate in what they thought was an unrelated
experiment, in which they gambled in a competitive game of cards. We
arranged tfw situation so that the students could cheat and thereby win a
considerable sum of money, or not cheat, in which case they were sure to
lose.
The results showed that the students who had received blows to their
self-esteem cheated far more than those who had gotten positive feedback
aoout themselves. It may well be that low self-esteem Is a critical antecedent
of criminal or cruel behavior.
The theory of cognitive dissonance has proved useful in generating
research; it has uncovered a wide range of data. In formal terms, however, it
is a very sloppy theory. Its very simplicity provides both its greatest strength
and its most serious weakness. That is, while the theory has generated a
great deal of data, it has not been easy to define the limits of the theoretical
statement, to determine the specific predictions that can be made. An too
often researchers have had to resort to the very unscientific rule of thumb,
"If you want to be sure, ask Leon."

LOGIC AND PSYCHOLOGIC

Part of the problem is that the theory does not deal with logical
inconsistency, but psychological inconsistency. Festinger maintains that two
cognitions are inconsistent if the opposite of one fo))ows from the other.
Strictly speaking, the information that smoking causes cancer does not make
it illogical to smoke. But these cognitions produce dissonance because they
do not make sense psychologically, assuming that the smoker does not want
cancer.
One cannot always predict dissonance with accuracy. A man may ad-
mire Franklin Roosevelt enormously and discover that throughout his mar-
riage FDR carried out a clandestine affair. If he places a high value on
fideljty and he believes that great men are not exempt from this value, then
he will experience dissonance. Then I can predict that he will either change.
his attitudes about Roosevelt or soften his attitudes about fidelity. But, he
may believe that marital infidelity and political greatness are totally unre-
lated; if this were the case, he might simply shrug off these data without
modifying his opinions either about Roosevehor about Adelity.
 5 The Iblioll'lli'lillg Allilll,,1 75

Because of the sloppiness in the theory, several commentators have

criticized a great many of the findings first uncovered by dissonance theory.
l1Jese criticisms have served a useful purpose. ORen, they have goaded us to
perform more precise research, which in turn has led to a clarification of
some of the findings which, ironically enough, has elimillatedthe alternative
explanations proposed by the critics themselves.
For example, Alphonse and Natalia Chapanis argued that the "severe
initiation" experiment could have completely djfferent causes. It might be
that the young were not embarrassed at having to read sexual words,
but rather were aroused, and their arousal in turn led them to rate the dull
discussion group as interesting. Or, to the contrary, the women in the
severe-initiation condition could have felt much sexual anxiety, fullowed by
relief that the discussion was so banal. They associated relief with the group,
and so rated it favorably.
So Harold Gerard and Grover Mathewson replicated our experiment,
using electric shocks in the initiation procedure. Our original findings were
supported-subjects who underwent severe shocks ill order to join a discus-
sion group rated that group more favorably than subjects who had undt!r-
gone mild shocks. Moreover, Gerard and Mathewson went on to show that
merely linking an electric shock with the group discussion (as in a simple
conditioning experiment) did not produce greater liking for the group. Thc
increase in liking for the grollp occurred only when subjects volunteered for
the shock in order to gain membership in the grollp-jllst as dissonance
theory would predict.

ROUTES TO CONSONANCE
In the rea) world there is IIsually more than one way to squirm out of
inconsistenCY. Laboratory experiments carefully cOlltrol a person's alter-
natives, and the conclusions drawn may be misleading if applied to everyday
situations. For example, suppose a prestigious university rejects a young
Ph. D. for its one available teaching position. If she feels that she is a good
scholar, she will experience dissonance. She can then decide that members
of that department are narrow-minded and senile, sexist, and wouldn't
recognize talent if it sat on their laps. Or she could dt!cide that, if tlley eould
reject someone as fine and intelligent as she, they must be extraordinarily
brilliant. Both techniques will reduce dissonance, but note that they leave
this woman with totally opposite opinions about professors at the university.
This is a seriolls conceptual problem. One solution is to specify the
conditions under which a person will take one route to consonance over
another. For example, if a person struggles to reach a goal and fails, he may
decide that the goal wasn't worth it (as Aesop's fox did) or that the effort was
justified anyway (the fox got a lot of exercise in jumping for the grapes). My
 '16 Sl!Ction Two The Mutivatiumtl uf Bt:havior- ill Organizatiolls

own research suggests that a person will take the first means when he has
expended relatively little effort. But when he has put in a great deal of effort •.
dissonance will take the form of the energy.
This line of work is encouraging. I do not think that it is very fruitful to
demand to know what the mode of dissonance reduction is; it is more
instructive to isolate the various modes that occur, and determine the
optimum conditions for each.

IGNORANCE OF ABSURDITY
No dissonance theorist takes issue with ,'the fact that people frequently
work to get rewards. In our experiments, however, small rewards tend to be
associated with greater attraction and greater attitude change. Is the reverse
ever true?
Jonathan Freedman told college students to work on a dull task after
first telling them (0) their results would be of no use to him, since his
experiment was basically over, or (b) their results would be of great value to
him. Subjects in the first condition were in a state of dissonance, for they had
unknowingly agreed to work on a boring chore that apparently had no
purpose. They reduCed their dissonance by deciding that the task was
enjoyable.
Then Freedman ran the same experiment with one change. He waited
until the subjects finished the task to tell them whether their work would be
important. In this study he found incentive effects: students told that the
task was valuable enjoyed it more than those who were told that their work
was useless. In short, dissonance theory does not appJy when an individual
performs an action in good faith without having any way of knowing it was
absurd. When we agree to participate in an experiment we naturally assume
that it is for a purpose. If we are infonned afterward that it had no purpose,
how were we to have known? In this instance we like the task better if it had
an important purpose. But if we agreed to perform it knowing that it had no
purpose, we try to convince ourselves that it is an attractive ,task in order to
avoid looking absurd.

MAN CANNOT UVE BY CONSONANCE ALONE

Dissonance reduction is only one of several motives, and other powerful
drives can counteract it. If human beings had a pervasive, aJJ-encompassing
need to reduce all forms of dissonance, we would not grow, mature, or admit
to our mistakes. We would sweep mistakes under the rug or, wone, turn the
, mistakes into virtues; in neither case would we profit from enor.
But obviously people do learn &om experience. They often do tolerate
dissonance because the dissonant information has great utility. A person
cannot ignore forever a leaky roof, even if that flaw is inconsistent with
 5 - Thc&tion.. li1inll: Anim"! 77

having spent a fortune on the house. As utility increases, individuals will

come to prefer dissonance-arousing but useful infonnation. But as disso-
nance increases, or when commitment is high, future utility and information
tend to be ignored.
It is clear that people will go to extraordinary lengths to justify their
actions. They wiU lie, cheat, live on the San Andreas Fault, accuse innocent
bystanders of being vicious provocateurs, ignore information that might save
their lives, and generally engage in all manner of absurd postures. Beforewe
write off such behavior as bizarre; crazy, or evil. we would be wise to
examine the situations that set up the need to reduce dissonance. Perhaps
our awareness of the mechanism that makes us so often irrational will help
tum Camus' observation on absurdity into a philosophic curiosity.

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