Coming Clean

0:00This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. In nearly every dimension of our lives, we have two selves. We have the self that knows what the right thing is to do, and then we have, well, ourselves. In high school, we know that hard work and preparation are crucial to success. But when it comes time to choose between study and play, many of us choose the easy path. As adults, we know that kindness and civility are what allow communities to function. Yet when we are late or upset, we often act impulsively. We know that we should visit elderly parents or stay in touch with friends who have fallen on hard times.

0:42We know we should exercise regularly and make the time to eat healthy. We know sleep and social connection are engines for contentment and well-being. We know these things, but it is so tempting to settle a little deeper into the couch, crack open a fizzy drink, and let Netflix auto-stream another episode of our favorite television show.

1:09Over the last several decades, the psychologist Elliot Aronson has worked to understand how our minds justify our actions. We explored the origins of Eliot's research in the previous episode. If you missed it, I strongly recommend you start there and listen to it first. We looked at the curious ways cognitive dissonance works, and we examined the clash between two of Eliot's mentors, the famous psychologists Abraham Maslow and Leon Festinger.

1:41This week on Hidden Brain, psychological jiu-jitsu. How to use your mind, to get your mind, to do what your mind would rather not do.

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3:34In one of Aesop's fables, a fox notices a bunch of grapes high up on a vine. The grapes look delicious, and the fox's mouth starts to water. The fox jumps as high as it can, but fails to reach the grapes. The fox tries again. It takes a running start and leaps into the air with all its strength. Again, it misses.

4:02Over and over, the fox tries to reach the grapes. Finally, it gives up. But before it walks away, it looks contemptuously at the grapes and exclaims, they are sour grapes anyway.

4:22The parable, of course, is not about foxes, but about us. When we want something but cannot get it, we quiet our disappointment and frustration by denigrating the thing we wanted but cannot have. But let's give the parable a little twist. After leaping and failing to catch the grapes, let's say the fox takes one final mighty leap and manages to reach the grapes. What happens now? Do the sought-after grapes taste just like grapes? No, of course not. They taste like the best grapes in the world. As we explored in our previous episode, the story of the fox and the sour grapes is a textbook example of the phenomenon known as cognitive dissonance.

5:11First conceived by the psychologist Leon Festinger and then developed by Elliot Aronson when he was Leon Festinger's student, the theory suggests it is difficult to hold contrasting or dissonant thoughts inside our heads. In the parable, the fox wants the grapes, but it cannot get them. This dissonance is frustrating. So the fox changes whether it wanted the grapes in the first place. It tells itself the grapes were not really desirable. Elliot says the same thing happens in every domain of our lives. We are all master storytellers, and we are quick to invent stories that reduce our cognitive dissonance.

5:53An early experiment that Elliot helped to set up illustrates this idea. It's an experiment on cheating. The way I visualize it is, and I'd like you and your listeners to visualize it this way, think of a pyramid and think of the apex, the very tippy top of that pyramid, as being a person's attitude on a particular issue, let's say on cheating. Now, suppose you're a student and you want to go to medical school and you're in a biology class in your senior year and you know it's an important class and how well you do in this class is going to have a major impact on whether or not you can get admitted to a good medical school.

6:43You go in for the final exam, you think you know the stuff well enough and you look at the questions and you pulled a blank. You panic, you don't know a single thing, it's as if you never took the class and you break into a cold sweat, you don't know what to do. And then you look around and you see that you happen to be sitting right behind the smartest person in the class who also has the largest and most easily readable handwriting. So you can decide just by craning my neck a little, I can read what's on her paper, copy it, and do well on the course and get into medical school, but it's an immoral thing to do.

7:31Now, imagine there are two people in exactly the same position, and they're both sitting on the apex of that pyramid and have almost identical attitudes toward cheating. It's not a good thing to do, but it's not the worst thing in the world, and a lot of people do it and it's kind of built into the system. It's not so bad. It's immoral, but there are much worse things in the world. And one of them decides to cheat and one of them decides not to cheat. Now imagine as soon as they make that decision, they're sliding down opposite sides of that pyramid. Elliot calls this thought experiment the pyramid of choice.

8:20Picture a triangle in your mind. Two people are at the apex, about to make a decision on whether to cheat. They make different decisions and start to slide down opposite sides of the triangle. When they reach the bottom, they are far apart. The base of the triangle has two ends, and these ends represent diametrically different views about cheating. On the left-hand side is, it's not important, it's a minor thing, it's everybody does it. It's a victimless crime. Nobody is harmed by my cheating. And on the extreme right-hand side of that base is cheating is a terrible thing to do. You're depriving other people of an opportunity to do as well as you're doing.

9:07You're taking somebody else's place in medical school. It's not a victimless crime. It's terrible. And if everybody always did it, it would be a terrible society, and anyone who's caught cheating should be immediately kicked out of school. Those are the two extreme positions. And according to dissonance theory, if you decide to cheat, your cognition that you are a moral, ethical person is dissonant with your cognition that you committed an immoral, unethical act, and therefore Or you will slide down that left-hand side of the pyramid and end up at the bottom saying, cheating is nothing, everybody does it.

9:54If you decide not to cheat, you will slide down the other side of the pyramid. Because you experience cognitive dissonance. I had a chance to go to a great medical school. All I had to do was look over that girl's shoulder at her exam, and I flubbed that opportunity. Therefore, I have to believe that if I had taken that opportunity, I would have committed a terrible sin. Cheating is a terrible thing. I'm glad I didn't do it. Either way, you see, whether you decide to cheat or not to cheat, you experience cognitive dissonance. And so you get to change attitudes dramatically in either one direction or the other, depending upon that one decision that a person makes.

10:44And in some ways, both those people who are sliding down these opposite ends of the pyramid, you know, unconsciously, what they're really doing is trying to get to a place where they can sleep well at night. So one person is saying, you know, yes, I cheated on the exam, and maybe that wasn't the best thing to do. But on the other hand, you know, I'm going to become an ophthalmologist one day and I'm going to save people's eyes and I'll be able to help them see. And, you know, I'm going to do all of this good in the world. And the fact that I had to do a little bit of bad to do all this good is totally worthwhile.

11:13And the other person basically says, you know, I'm a moral person because I didn't cheat. And, yes, it does mean that I couldn't go to medical school. But isn't being a moral person good for me and good for my soul and ultimately good for society? And both people are telling themselves stories that allow them to sleep well at night. Exactly right. Exactly right. Now we have this person who's able to think going through this elaborate thing, which is making him feel good about the action he's just taken.

11:49So do you ever wonder, Elliot, given the fact that our ability to study our own minds is something that we are doing with our minds, and our minds as we are seeing are sort of these flawed machines. It's hard to sort of know what the correct thing is to think in the situation, in the cheating experiment. Regardless of which choice you make, you're going to experience cognitive dissonance and you're going to rationalize the decision you've made. Is it actually absurd to ask what the right answer is? Because regardless of what you do, your mind is going to come up with a story that tells you it's the right thing to do.

12:25When it comes to making a moral decision, especially one that has consequences for other people, we really have to be very careful. If you're the leader, especially the leader of a country, you have to surround yourself with people who might not always agree with you so that they can point out the flaws in your thinking. exactly what, according to Doris Kearns Goodwin in her wonderful book about Abraham Lincoln, how he surrounded himself with three people who ran against him for the presidency of the United States at that time. They were all in his cabinet, and he listened to them. I think that's the thing to do.

13:15If you surround yourself with yes-men, you're apt in your need to reduce dissonance, you're apt to go ahead and make some terrible mistakes because everybody around will agree with you. When it's an important decision that involves other people, you really have to scrutinize yourself carefully and ask yourself, is this something I truly believe in or am I simply justifying something that I've done in the past or justifying my own needs for the future? And am I fooling myself to make myself feel a little bit better? These are the important questions we need to ask ourselves when the decision is an important one.

14:01If it's a trivial one that only involves myself, cognitive dissonance reduction can be a very useful tool that helps me sleep well at night and help me feel good about the decisions that I've made, it would do no good to worry about that decision afterward and doesn't help anybody.

14:30Cognitive dissonance can seem like a bad thing, and it can in fact have serious consequences. But it is really just a tool in the brain that allows us to resolve seemingly unresolvable issues. When we come back, Elliot shares how cognitive dissonance can be deployed to accomplish important goals. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

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15:56I'm Shankar Vedantam. Psychologist Elliot Aronson has spent decades thinking about cognitive dissonance. He has explored how our minds come up with justifications for our actions and when those justifications can be harmful and when they can have salutary effects. An early example of the power of cognitive dissonance came in Elliot's own life. Early in his career, he landed a plum job at Harvard University. I was there for two years, and it's just starting my third year when I was offered a wonderful position at the University of Minnesota. And it was just, it was a dream job. But in order to go there, I had to leave Harvard, which was, in most respects, a very nice place to be.

16:48Elliot debated long and hard about whether to make the move. I finally decided to take that job. And when I got to Minnesota, I realized for the first time, Harvard is a place which is very stratified. There's not a lot of intermingling between the assistant professors and the full professors. When I got to Minnesota, the whole atmosphere was very, very different. Everybody becomes buddies with everybody else in it. The status of the person makes very little difference. There was a much more democratic atmosphere that I noticed. But of course, as I'm noticing this, I'm aware of the fact that the things I'm doing right now are convincing myself that the University of Minnesota is a great place to be.

17:42and maybe I was motivated, highly motivated to see those advantages. And of course, if you had stayed at Harvard instead of moving to Minnesota, presumably your mind would have come up with rationalizations about why that was the right decision. I would assume so. And boy, you know, it's a useful mechanism once you're in it, as long as it doesn't do you any harm because it helps you sleep at night. After Elliott moved to Minnesota, he went house hunting with his wife. As would-be house hunters everywhere often discover, the experience provided ample opportunities for cognitive dissonance. We didn't have much money, but we wanted to buy a house.

18:28And there were only two houses that we could afford that we really liked, and they couldn't have been more different. One was near campus. It was a beautiful little Victorian. It was also near an industrial area where Pillsbury was grinding up grain and things like that. And it didn't have much of a yard. But boy, I really wanted that house because it was close to campus. And my image was to have my graduate students come over at four or five o 'clock in the afternoon. and we could sit around and drink scotch or coffee and talk about research ideas in my living room. That, to me, was the ideal of being a professor.

19:20The other house was out in the suburbs, a 20-minute drive from campus. It was plenty of room, plenty of space. It wasn't, the houses were not cheek to jowl, but they were all separated. Beautiful big backyard, but a very common looking house. Nothing good about it, particularly, but a great place for the kids. We had four young kids between the ages of six months old and seven years old. And we needed space for the kids. Oh, and we were near a lake, Lake Owasso. So my wife and I couldn't decide which of the two houses to get. We went back and forth several times. And finally, we decided on the house in the suburbs for the sake of the children.

20:11It wasn't what Elliot had wanted, but soon enough, he began to rationalize the decision. He had to give up that image of himself at the center of a circle of graduate students in his Victorian living room. But wasn't this better for the kids? And wasn't that more important?

20:31In time, though, the story Elliot told himself about the democratic, egalitarian nature of his Minnesota colleagues and the extra space provided by his suburban home ran into a large obstacle. Even though he was coming to the Midwest from New England, where the winters are hard, it was difficult not to notice the approach of the fearsome Minnesota winter. Soon enough, Elliot's mind came up with a way to grapple with this challenge, too. So what happened was, we bought the house in early November. In early December, about three or four weeks after we bought the house, I saw an ad in the newspaper for a used canoe, and I went out and bought it.

21:17We had this old station wagon with a luggage rack on top. I tied the canoe to the top of the station wagon and drove back to this house in the suburbs, drove into the driveway. My wife sees me coming, looks out the kitchen window, sees the canoe on top of the car and bursts into laughter. And I go in the house, I said, what's so funny? She points to the canoe and she says, ask Leon, meaning Leon Festinger. He could tell you why I find it so funny.

21:55And of course, as soon as she said that, it dawned on me that I bought that canoe in the middle of winter. Now, winters in Minneapolis last for a very long time. In the wintertime, the lakes are frozen over, frozen so solid that people often drive their cars across the lakes as a shortcut. The unofficial first day of spring in Minneapolis is the first time a car falls through the ice, okay? And that wouldn't occur. I wouldn't be able to use that canoe on the lake until the middle of May sometime. So why did I buy the canoe in December when I couldn't use it till May. Well, maybe there was a bargain price or something.

22:46No, that's bullshit. The reason I bought it was because I was unhappy with the decision and I wanted to reduce dissonance by saying, aha, but this house we bought in the suburbs is close to a lake. I'm going to go out there with my kids and teach them how to canoe. It's going to be wonderful. We're going to have a great time. It's a beautiful example of cognitive dissonance because at the time I was doing it, I was unaware of why I was doing it. My wife pointing it out to me, I mean, I'm steeped in cognitive dissonance. And yet it's an unconscious process. I wasn't aware of it. As soon as my wife pointed it out, I realized I was doing it.

23:30And it was a reasonable thing to do. You know, one might say, yeah, but for the next six months, that canoe is just going to be taking up space in the garage. No, wrong. It's going to be helping me sleep at night because I can be thinking about, yeah, but I have this canoe and look at all the good things I can do with it, even though it's going to take me a few months before I can start doing that. It has a lot of value. Yeah. So this story, it's a charming story and it's a funny story, but you can also see when the stakes are much bigger, if I'm a politician, for example, and I launch my country into war and the war is not going well and things are backfiring on me, I now can either tell myself, you know, I made a dreadful mistake and as a result of the mistake that I've made, you know, other human beings have died and they're families that are going to grow up without a father or a brother or a mother or a friend.

24:28And so in order to not feel that, in order to sleep well at night, I say, all right, maybe what I should do is actually send even more troops there so we can finish up this war and come back victorious and everyone will say that I did the right thing. I'm really extrapolating here several orders of magnitude. I recognize I'm doing that. But I think the same mechanisms that happened with you and Minnesota and the canoe happen all the time at much, much bigger scales. Exactly right. And that's pretty much how I think George W. Bush went through when he invaded Iraq, because he thought that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

25:10Saddam Hussein has gone to elaborate lengths, spent enormous sums, taken great risks to build and keep weapons of mass destruction. And that was the whole justification for that invasion. As you may remember, it came on the heels of September 11th, but Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with September 11th, and he didn't have weapons of mass destruction, and they couldn't find them. And when they couldn't find them, George W. Bush was saying, oh, we'll find them. They're someplace. We do know that Saddam Hussein had the intent and the capabilities to cause great harm. We know he was a danger. But he never did find them, and when the war wasn't winding down as quickly as he expected, he put more troops in and more troops in.

26:03Did a lot of destruction, both in terms of people and places. You know, when we first got in there and started looking around and didn't find anything, you get that kind of sinking feeling that, uh-oh. And then, yeah, I felt terrible about it. And on the other hand, those reports did point out that Saddam Hussein was very dangerous, that he had the capacity to make weapons. And I'm convinced that if he were in power today, the world would be a lot worse off. And I think that's the kind of way that cognitive dissonance works on a political level, on an international level that can be and has been, in my opinion, disastrous.

26:49Why is it that we feel so impelled to self-justify our actions, Elliot, when we're choosing to do something, whether that is to move from Harvard to Minnesota or to marry one person or divorce someone else? Why is it that we feel this powerful urge to justify our own actions? Well, I think we're hardwired to believe that we are good, smart, competent, moral people. Most people think they're better than average in intelligence, better than average as a driver, better than average at most things. so that whenever they do something that seems stupid, incompetent, or immoral, it creates dissonance with that self-concept that almost all of us have, and therefore we need to reduce it.