These flaws stand in direct contrast to the positive attributes we believe we possess – trustworthiness, kindness, helpfulness and generally being a good person. Very few of us are full of self-loathing or un-hypocritical. That is why there is a dissonance. Presented with the evidence of our wrongdoing, we may realize there is a contradiction. When people experience the unpleasant state of cognitive dissonance, they naturally try to alleviate it. This can be achieved by revising one’s actions, attitudes or beliefs in order to restore consistency among them. So we say, ‘They had it coming’, ‘I didn’t like them in the first place anyway’, or ‘I always knew that they were a bad egg’ – anything to reframe the situation so that whatever negative thing we have done becomes justified as a reasonable way to behave.
In one fMRI study of cognitive dissonance,47 participants were scanned while they entertained the contradictory notion that the uncomfortable scanner environment was actually a pleasant experience. They were told that after forty-five minutes in the scanner they would be asked to rate the experience by answering questions. Half were asked to say that they actually enjoyed the experience in order to reassure a nervous participant who was waiting outside to do the study. The other half was a control group who were told that they would receive $1 each time they answered questions by saying that they enjoyed the experience. Imaging revealed that two regions were more active in the participants who had to endure the cognitive dissonance condition. These were the ACC, which detects conflicts in our thoughts and action, and the anterior insula, which registers negative emotional experiences – the same two regions that lit up during the study measuring what happens when we have to disagree with others. Not only were the ACC and the insular regions activated, but on a follow-up set of questions when there was no need to lie, the participants in the cognitive dissonance condition also rated the experience as more pleasant than the group who were paid, proving that they had indeed experienced a shift in their evaluation of the experience. In other words, they had convinced themselves that it was not such a bad experience, whereas the ones who had been paid knew they were lying for cash.
Cognitive dissonance is something that persuaders can so easily exploit. Imagine someone pushes in front of you in a queue to use a photocopier. Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer48 found that six out of ten would not object if the person said, ‘Excuse me, I only have five pages, can I use the photocopier?’ Even when the apology is not intended, more than half still let the queue-jumper in front. Why is that? For one reason, most people want to avoid conflict and so do not confront the individual. They may be annoyed but not to the extent that it is worth doing something about it. Very often under these sorts of situations we will rationalize our response by reasoning that our own inconvenience is minor and thus not worth the effort. As soon as the person gives a reason such as ‘Excuse me, I only have five pages, can I use the photocopier because I am in a rush?’, nine out of ten do not object. By providing a reason, they have made it easier for the people waiting patiently in the queue to justify their decision to acquiesce.
We are compliant because saying ‘no’ is uncomfortable. Of course, there are some individuals who seem perfectly happy to barge to the front of the queue and are indifferent to others, but many of us would squirm with embarrassment. Unless, of course, we apply our own cognitive dissonance by justifying our actions, for instance by convincing ourselves that ‘My needs are greater than others’. This allows us to realign our self-concept so that we do not have to entertain a contradiction that we have jumped the queue but are still really a nice person. With cognitive dissonance, we can be comfortably rude in the belief that our needs really do outweigh those of others. It is the self-deception that we discussed in the last chapter but one that applies to our whole concept of what we think we are like. Cognitive dissonance is dangerous because we can convince ourselves that we are doing the right thing even when we are not aware that we are distorting the truth. It enables us to live with our selfish behaviour and all the contradictions that entails.
Undercover racists
Most of us do not think we are hypocrites. As Aldous Huxley once wrote, ‘There is probably no such thing as a conscious hypocrite.’49 We like to think of ourselves in a positive light and very few of us would want to have all our attitudes exposed as racist, sexist or generally bigoted. And yet, despite the balanced, reasonable persona that we would like to present to the rest of the world, most of us may hold implicit ugly attitudes that are not acceptable in decent society. We know this because you can measure the level of implicit attitudes by asking participants to undertake a speeded response test where they have to match negative and positive words with different pictures.50 It could be different races, men and women, young and old, liberals and conservatives – any of the various groups that generate stereotypes. Although most of us do not consider ourselves bigoted, the implicit attitude test reveals that we are faster to associate negative words with members of other races and positive words to members of our own group. Deep down in our unconsciousness, we have stored vast amounts of associated thoughts that reflect all the experiences and exposure to attitudes that we have encountered over our lives.
Even if we do not hold deep-seated racist attitudes, then we can still be prone to stereotypes. This has been shown in a study where white and black US adults were presented with faces of their own in-group (same race) or out-group (other race) on a computer screen.51 When the face presented on the screen changed, they were given a painful electric shock. Eventually participants learned to associate all face changes with pain. Then the experimenters turned off the shocks to see how long it took participants to unlearn the painful association. Participants were much quicker to return to normal when the face changes were from their own race compared to faces from the other race. They took longer to become more trusting and less fearful of the other race even though they were not racist on measures taken before the test.
Does that mean that we are hard-wired to be racist irrespective of our wishes and desires? Not necessarily, because the effect was restricted to male faces and the race bias was not found in participants who had dated a member of the other race.52 Male faces are more characteristic of threatening individuals because males are more often portrayed as aggressive. However, the racial effect can be counteracted by exposure and experience of other races. What is clear is that despite our good intentions and choices that we know we should make, biases lurk deep down in most of us that influence our decisions. These findings do not mean that we behave like this in real life, but they do reveal the problem of undercover attitudes that might surface under the right circumstances.
Judging a book by its cover
One inevitable problem of joining and identifying with groups is that we generate stereotypes that influence our judgements about and attitudes towards others. Stereotypes are assumptions that we make about all members of the same group. The problem is that stereotypes lead us to jump to conclusions that are unfair. Consider the following story about a surgeon and the unexpected shock they get one day at work:
A father and his son were involved in a car accident in which the father was killed and the son was seriously injured. The father was pronounced dead at the scene of the accident and his body was taken to a local morgue. The son was taken by ambulance to a nearby hospital and was immediately wheeled into an emergency operating theatre. A surgeon was called. Upon arrival, and seeing the patient, the attending surgeon exclaimed, ‘Oh my God, it’s my son!’