How We Live With Contradictions

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. In the hit TV show Breaking Bad, high school chemistry teacher Walter White learns he is dying from cancer. To make money for his cancer treatments for his family, he uses his chemistry expertise to start manufacturing crystal meth. When his wife Skyler finds out he's been selling drugs, she is appalled. In an effort to win her back, Walter asks her to see things from his point of view.

I've done a terrible thing, but I did it for a good reason.

I did it for us.

Walter thinks of himself as a good person, a good husband, a good father. He believes that the money he gets from manufacturing drugs will keep a roof over his family's heads once he dies. But as Walter gets sucked into the underworld of crime and illicit drugs, He starts to commit acts of violence in order to keep the money coming. The deeper he goes, the more rationalizations he invents. Breaking Bad won a raft of awards season after season. I personally think of it as the greatest TV show ever made. What makes the story so powerful is that even though the plot is improbable, it has the ring of psychological truth. All of us tell ourselves stories about why we do the things we do. We explain away our flaws and failures, and we come up with plausible explanations for our actions. Today on the show, the first episode of a 2-part series into the human capacity for self-justification. It's also the story of a researcher who has studied the phenomenon for nearly 3 quarters of a century. He has explored the psychology of rationalization and the many ways it ends up being used for evil, but also the curious ways it can be used for good. How we explain our actions to ourselves, this week on Hidden Brain. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Southern New Hampshire University. Science consistently tells us learning starts with motivation. That's why SNHU offers over 200 flexible, affordable online programs to help you get where you want to go. Take classes that spark your curiosity, shape your skill set, and prepare you for what's next. A degree can help move you forward no matter what motivates you. Start yours at snhu.edu/brain. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Planet Visionaries. Professional climber and environmental advocate Alex Honnold hosts Planet Visionaries, a podcast spotlighting the people tackling climate challenges with real hopeful solutions. Throughout season 6, Alex brings together extraordinary changemakers for powerful conversations about grit, determination, and the power of hope to fuel our fight for a better future. In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, This is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, affiliates, and other insurers. Not available in all states.

I was a very shy little kid, and I was overshadowed by my older brother, Jason, who was a star.

Growing up, Elliot Aronson loved his brother Jason. But Elliot often found himself unnoticed while his brother got all the attention.

He was 2 and a half years older than I, and whenever we went to a family gathering, all my aunts and uncles would say, hey, here's Jason! And they were all excited about Jason, and then they'd say, oh, hi, Elliot. Billy Batson and his mentor travel the highways and byways of the land on a never-ending mission.

One time, Elliott saw a movie about a shy kid who was transformed into the superhero Captain Marvel.

And I immediately went home and tied a towel around my neck as if it were a cape. To summon awesome forces at the utterance of a single word.

Shazam!

And I got up onto my porch, which was about 4 feet off the ground. I stretched out my arm and I said, Shazam! Which transformed Billy Batson, this meek little kid, into Captain Marvel, this strong Avenger. And I said, Shazam! And I leaped off the porch and I landed badly and sprained my ankle. That was a story— that was a signature story that captures how I was as a little kid.

Eliot didn't realize it at the time, but it was an early example of his own capacity to tell himself a story and believe it. Some time later, he came by a more serious example. Eliot and his family lived in a town outside Boston.

We were just about the only Jewish family in a virulently anti-Semitic neighborhood. This was in the late 1930s, early 1940s. I had to go to Hebrew school when I was 9 years old, and walking home from Hebrew school in the dark, frequently I was waylaid by gangs of teenagers. Mostly they simply shouted antisemitic things at me, called me a dirty Jew, and I didn't think I was particularly dirty. I didn't understand it. And sometimes they pushed me around a little. Every once in a while, they really beat me up. And one of my vivid memories was after one of these drubbings, sitting on a curbstone, nursing a bloody nose and a split lip, and wondering why these kids hated me so much when they didn't even know me.

But in time, when Eliot was the same age as his tormentors, he found himself behaving in a way that his younger self would have found incomprehensible.

You know, in junior high school, when, when kids are beginning to flex their muscles, I was sort of in the center of the pack. I was a pretty good student. I was a pretty good athlete. And then there were kids at the lower end who were often bullied by kids at the high end. And I remember joining in the bullying, in the taunting, in the teasing, in the pushing around of the kids at the low end. And I remember really clearly feeling at the time, I want to identify with the better group, with the group that was more popular, more athletic, and not with the lower group. I wanted to make sure that they didn't include me with the group that was being bullied. So I joined in the bullying, much to my regret later when I thought about that. I wish I had been the kind of kid at age 13 or 14 who would have stood up for the Smaller kids, the kids with the glasses, the kids who were the target of intense bullying. But instead, I joined in because I wanted the kids at the top of the hierarchy to think I was one of them rather than one of those guys at the bottom of the hierarchy.

When Elliot tied a cape around his neck and jumped off the back porch as a little kid, the consequences of his self-justifications were experienced by Elliot himself. His aching ankle told him that he was not, in fact, Captain Marvel. But when he bullied children who were weaker and told himself that he was doing it to keep from being bullied himself, this rationalization had real victims. At home, Eliot saw another form of self-justification play out in the actions and words of his father.

As I remember him, he was a tough guy who grew up on the streets of Boston. He was uneducated. I think he had only a 6th or 7th grade education, and he began his life as, Selling socks and underwear from a pushcart. That's how he earned his living when he was a teenager. And he later graduated to owning a small dry goods store where he sold socks and underwear from behind a counter. And during the Great Depression, he lost his stores. But he was also a gambler. And my father would bet on anything. He would bet on— he'd be standing on the corner with a bunch of guys and he would bet on how many cars would pass through that intersection in a 5-minute period.

Wow.

He was a gambler, which was okay when he had a little money. But during the Great Depression, when he lost his stores, And he kept on gambling with whatever money he had left. We were extremely poor.

How did that affect you and the family? I mean, of course, just the circumstances you're describing sound really, really rough, but did anyone in the family question what he was doing? Did he justify to himself his own behavior? And if so, how?

Well, my mother questioned it, of course, and I think my mother felt that he lost his stores because of his gambling.

Hmm.

She felt that he wasn't a good businessman, that he was too busy having fun and losing money on gambling. In the one serious conversation I had with my father about it when I was about 14 or 15 years old, he said, you know, your mother blames me for the Great Depression, but everybody lost their jobs then. And I lost my stores because we were living in a poor neighborhood and my customers were poor people and they were unemployed. And of course, I extended them credit. Your mother, he said, faulted me for that. But those were my only customers.

Hmm.

If I couldn't extend them credit, I couldn't do any business at all. I extended them credit, and of course they weren't able to pay me back, and that's how we lost the stores. Not because of my gambling, he said, but because of the Great Depression.

Elliot's father didn't think he was a bad businessman. He didn't think he had a gambling problem. To him, the fault lay in the Great Depression. In time, Elliot was to help discover the psychological mechanisms for the stories we tell ourselves. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, affiliates, and other insurers. Not available in all states. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Quince. We all have those pieces in our closet that we can count on— the versatile jacket, the perfect t-shirt. These are the pieces that make getting dressed easy, and that's what Quince does best. Quince makes elevated everyday essentials using premium materials in designs that are timeless, thoughtfully crafted, and made to be worn again and again. And when the temperatures start to drop, Quince makes it easy to build on these everyday staples with versatile layers designed to keep you warm and comfortable all season long. Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers, or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Hidden Brain. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. As a kid, Elliot Aronson had noticed how both he and the people around him would justify their own actions to themselves. He had no thought of becoming a psychologist, even though the questions that sometimes went through his head were questions at the heart of psychology. When he got beaten up for being Jewish, for example—

I think I was 9 years old at the time. I started to wonder, if they got to know me better and realized what a sweet and charming little boy I was, would they like me more? And then wondering, hey, if they liked me more, would that make them maybe hate other Jews less? I didn't realize it at the time, but of course, these are profound social psychological questions.

At Brandeis University, Eliot decided to major in economics. It was the 1950s, but the Depression years of his childhood still lingered in his mind. Surely, training in economics would allow him to figure out how to make a living. But his plans changed one day. Because of a date.

One afternoon, I was having a cup of coffee with a young woman, a fellow student, who I was interested in romantically. And so I was trying very hard to impress her in this conversation we were having at coffee.

Baby, baby, won't you talk to me and tell me you're mine?

And suddenly she looks at her watch and says, oh my God, I'm going to be late for class.

Just a little, won't you walk with me?

And I walked along with her to her class, and she told me it was a class in introductory psychology, and it was a large lecture class. And I figured, oh, maybe we can sit together in the back of the classroom and hold hands or something. I got there and the class was being taught by some guy named Abraham Maslow. I had never heard of Abraham Maslow. I thought, you know, just another professor. And so I'm sitting in the back of the room with this young woman holding hands, and Maslow was talking about the psychology of prejudice. And As he was lecturing, I tuned in a little bit and he was raising some of the very same questions that I had raised 10 years earlier when I was 9 years old sitting on that curbstone nursing a split lip and a bloody nose in Revere, Massachusetts. And so I thought, hey, this is interesting. I let go of the girl's hand and I started to take notes. And I lost the girl, but I gained a vocation because I got so excited about what Maslow was talking about that the very next day I switched my major from economics to psychology. Within a few months, I began working with Maslow and I eventually became a protégé of his, and it changed my life.

Abraham Maslow went on to become one of the most famous psychologists ever. He's best known for his theory about a hierarchy of needs.

The most basic need is the need we have for oxygen, for water, for food. And then we have needs that go a little beyond that, need for safety, a need to have a lodging that keeps us out of the rain and out of the weather. And then there's another level, a need for self-respect, a need to be esteemed by others, a need for love. And it gradually, it's kind of like in the shape of a pyramid. As they get higher and higher, it gets narrower and narrower and ends with a need that he calls self-actualization. which is the highest place to be. And I've always thought about that as not really a place to be. It's a process that never ends. And we become who we want to be by how we behave in crucial situations.

Psychology at this time was split between 2 groups. There were the Freudians, who had lots of interesting theories about the mind and how experiences early in life shape our outlook on life. And then there were the behaviorists, led by Fred Skinner, who dismissed the Freudians as unscientific. Forget about all that stuff inside people's heads, they said. Let's just measure how they behave. In a range of experiments, the behaviorists showed animal behavior was powerfully shaped or reinforced by rewards and punishments. Eliot loved Abraham Maslow and his humanistic theory of human nature, but he sensed that the older scholar was not really a scientist. The behaviorists had scientific rigor, but to Eliot, they lacked soul. Yes, humans are animals, and human behavior can be shaped by incentives, But people are more complex than rats running through mazes to find food. As he started his PhD at Stanford, Eliot found himself drawn to a new professor at the school.

He had a reputation for being mean, nasty, impatient, who was capable of devouring tender young graduate students like me for breakfast. He was very difficult. But he also had the reputation for being a bit of a genius. So I signed up for Leon Festinger's course, and within a few weeks, I learned that everything they said about him was true. He was a genius. He was very, very smart. It was a terrific seminar, very high level. But if you came into that seminar room the least bit unprepared, there was hell to pay. He was capable of embarrassing you in the worst possible way. One day he assigned a term paper, so I wrote this term paper in a few hours and handed it in. The next day I'm walking past his office, he called me into his office and said, Aronson, come in here. I walked into his office and he took my term paper. He stretched out his arm, held it between his thumb and forefinger, turned his head away, and said, I believe this is yours. So with all the bravado, the false bravado I could muster, I said, gee, Dr. Festinger, I guess you didn't like it very much. And he gave me a look. That was— I'd never seen that look on anyone else before. It was a mixture of contempt and pity. He said, that's right, I didn't like it very much.

Eliot reread his paper with fresh eyes and realized it was poorly argued.

So I went back home, and for the next 3 days, I reworked that paper and I reworked that paper. And then I walked into Festinger's office, put it on his desk, and then I walked back to my own office. And to his great credit, he must have dropped whatever he was doing and read the paper because what he did, he came back into my office, put the paper in front of me, Sat on the corner of my desk, put his hand on my shoulder, and said, now this is worth criticizing. This is worth criticizing, which doesn't sound like much, but what he was telling me with that gesture is, That if you're willing to meet me halfway, if you're willing to work as hard as you possibly can to make the thing you're doing as good as it possibly can be, he would give you everything he had. And from that moment on, we became teacher and student. Within a few months, he began to treat me like a colleague. It was an incredible experience for me.

Leon Festinger was on the cusp of developing an important theory that would explain an extraordinary range of human behavior. Soon, he and Elliott were working on it together.

It's a very simple theory with enormous ramifications. The basic theory is if a person holds an idea or an opinion that conflicts with some behavior that you yourself have done, 2 ideas or opinions that don't quite match, that may be the opposite of one another, you experience something called cognitive dissonance, which is a clash. And it acts as a negative drive state, like extreme hunger or extreme thirst, you will do whatever you can to reduce that negative drive state. And the way to reduce it is by finding a way to distort your own thinking so that those 2 ideas or events Become closer and closer together, less disparate, less opposite from one another.

Think about a kid who gets beaten up because he is Jewish. He cannot understand why older boys would hurt him. But then, a few years later, the boy himself becomes a tormentor of other children. In that moment, to explain his own behavior to himself, To resolve his cognitive dissonance, he comes up with a self-justification.

I wanted to make sure that they didn't include me with the group that was being bullied.

In this telling, Elliot the bully isn't really a bully. He's just a frightened kid who's trying to protect himself from being harmed again. Elliot's father didn't want to think of himself as being an irresponsible husband who gambled away his family's well-being. So he came up with an explanation for why his business failed. It was the Great Depression.

And we all do that as best we can. And it happens at an unconscious level, just below the usual level of consciousness that we walk around with, so that we are trying to make sense of the world. It really is a theory of sense-making. How can we make sense of the world That we can hold these 2 ideas, they seem to be the opposite of each other, but we find a way to make them fit.

In one of the early experiments that Leon Festinger conducted, he looked at people's willingness to Tell a lie in exchange for different sums of money. Tell me about that experiment, Elliot. What was the experiment aiming to do? What did it find?

That to me is one of the single most important experiments ever done in social psychology. He put people through a very, very boring task, turning a bunch of screws one quarter turn to the right and then turning back 2 quarters of a turn to the left.

Each subject's assignment: to turn each of the wooden pegs a quarter turn to the right, then to start over and turn them again and again and again.

Over and over and over again.

Until the experimenter tells him to stop. It is the most boring and fatiguing task we could devise.

The researcher then told the volunteers to tell someone in the next room that the task was very interesting.

And he offers to pay the person. In one condition, he pays them $1. In another condition, he pays them $20.

So I'd like to offer you a $20 retainer and have you remain on call for us. Uh, would that be all right?

$20?

That'd be fine. We'd like to give you a dollar as a sort of a retainer and have you remain on call with us. Uh, would that be all right with you?

Yes, that'll be all right.

And the job is to convince the other person, yeah, I just was in that experiment and it really is interesting.

Well, we turned pegs and knobs the same way each time, and that's about what it was, but it was very interesting.

They gave us some pegs to turn, and, uh, well, I turned them for a while and it was a lot of fun. It's sort of interesting, I guess. Really? Well, that's strange because a friend of mine took the experiment last week. I think it was the same experiment, and he said it was pretty miserable and that I should do everything I could to get out of it. Well, I think maybe your friend was wrong. Perhaps it was a different experiment because this was a lot of fun. It appeared to me as if it were a puzzle. We had to turn these—

After the study subjects lied about how interesting the experiment was to the person in the next room, Leon Festinger then asked the study subjects what they themselves thought of the original task.

And what you found that if you told the lie for $20, you didn't like the task very much. You thought it was boring, it was ugly, etc. I hated it.

Did you enjoy working on the manual task? Well, it really wasn't too enjoyable. In fact, it was rather boring.

But if you were paid only one dollar, you actually liked the task in retrospect.

Tell me, how much did you learn from this experiment?

Well, at first I don't think I was learning it too much, but when I got into it, I think it was quite interesting, and after a while it got better.

Did you enjoy working on the manual task?

Yes, I enjoyed it.

Now.

Would you like—

What's interesting about this, as you can easily see, is it's the exact opposite of what Fred Skinner would have predicted. It's the opposite of reinforcement theory. Here is a task that's associated with a small reward, and you like it more than a task associated with a large reward? How could that possibly be? Well, the way it works Because we are cognitive animals. In the $20 condition, the people in that experiment sold their soul for $20, and it was worth it. They were paid well for telling that lie. They had no reason to justify it. I told a lie for $20. It was worth it. If you did it for only $1, You did it, but you felt bad about doing it, and you didn't receive much of a reward for it. So there was no justification for doing it. So you have to say, well, you know, that task wasn't so bad. Actually, when I was turning those screws, I was actually getting good exercise for my wrist, and that will improve my tennis game. Or some other way of reducing dissonance. To try to convince yourself that something that you would initially have found very dull actually had some virtue to it.

So what you're saying is that when I do the task for $20, I know that I'm being paid to do something unpleasant, but I'm being paid well. So I feel, okay, I'm taking— getting the money. I don't like the task, but I'm going to do it anyway. You're saying when I'm asked to lie, but I'm only given $1, I now have to tell myself, if I was telling myself the truth, I would have to say, not only did I sell my soul, I sold my soul for only a dollar. Now, that just doesn't make me a bad person. It makes me a fool. You're saying that produces cognitive dissonance.

Absolutely. You can see now why our whole educational system is wrong because we reward people for learning things. We give them an external reward equivalent to the $20. We give them good grades or high praise for doing well and things like that. What prevents people from doing is convincing themselves that they're learning about the geography of Indonesia because it's interesting in and of itself. They convince themselves, I'm doing it in order to get a good grade. Who Who cares about the geography of Indonesia? And I think that is the great innovation that Leon Festinger produced for us. It isn't that reward reinforcement theory is wrong, it's that it's incomplete, that it does work, but there are situations and a great many of them in the real world where just the opposite happens. If you're underpaid for doing something, you will find something about that job that is inherently interesting in order to justify the fact that you're doing it for no external reward or for very little external reward.

I want to draw your attention to something else that you've told me that I think is really interesting, which is that you've had not one mentor here, but 2 mentors. You had Abraham Maslow and Leon Festinger. First of all, it's very fortunate to have 2 mentors who are both giants of a field. at the very formative stages of your career, so it's very fortunate. But these 2 people were completely unlike one another, and in fact, they didn't particularly like one another. Did you experience that as a form of cognitive dissonance?

That's putting it mildly. They hated each other. When I started to work with Leon, and I actually had done a couple of experiments at Stanford that were really exciting to me, I went back east and while I was there, I called on Maslow and we were having lunch and Maslow said, well, who are you working with out there at Stanford? And I said, oh, I'm working with this guy, Leon Festinger. And Maslow said, Festinger, that bastard. How can you stand him? And then I went back to Stanford and a few months later, Leon and I are at a bar having a drink and he said, hey, Elliot, tell me, how did you first get interested in psychology? And I said, oh, I happened to wander into a lecture given by Abraham Maslow and he became my mentor as an undergraduate. And Festinger said, Maslow, wow, that guy's ideas are so bad, they're not even wrong. And by that, by that he meant you can't test them. There's no way to disprove them. My 2 mentors, 2 guys I loved and respected enormously, who really hated each other. And that did cause me a little initial dissonance. But then I realized that I was in some way somebody who could bridge the gap between those 2 guys. And people have said that my own research really is a kind of a marriage between Festinger and Maslow. And Whatever was the cause of it, it produced some interesting stuff.

To summarize then, Eliot Aronson, one of the founders of the field of cognitive dissonance, helped develop the theory of cognitive dissonance in part to deal with his own cognitive dissonance about his 2 mentors. Talk about research really being me-search. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Instagram. Instagram teen accounts' automatic protections limit who can contact teens. the content they can see, and the time they spend on the app. Teens are automatically placed into Teen Accounts. Teens under 16 will need a parent's permission to change any of those settings to be less strict. Learn more about Teen Accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts.

Working as a dedicated Fidelity advisor, I always ask, what's important to you? I'll look at those priorities and goals alongside your full financial picture to build a comprehensive plan designed to help grow and protect your wealth. With proactive portfolio insights and an eye on taxes, I'm here to help you make the most of your money. I'm Laura Maxwell, and I'm a dedicated Fidelity advisor. Learn more at fidelity.com/wealth. Investment minimums apply. Fidelity Brokerage Services, LLC, member NYSE SIPC.

Support for Hidden Brain comes from Air France. Air France business cabin offers comfort throughout the journey With priority check-in, boarding, and lounge access. Onboard, enjoy menus from renowned French chefs, wines and champagne selected by a sommelier, and free high-speed Wi-Fi. When it's time to rest, settle into a fully adjustable lie-flat bed with added mattress comfort. The art of travel elevated, because Air France Business Cabin goes further in every detail to make your journey exceptional. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. As a student, Elliot Aronson worked with 2 legends of psychology. Abraham Maslow was a humanist, and he proposed that human beings have a hierarchy of needs. When people have unmet needs for safety, for example, that basic need overshadows higher needs like the quest for self-respect. Leon Festinger was a scientist's scientist. He believed that the only ideas worth discussing were ones that could be subjected to scientific analysis. Using highly creative experiments, he came up with the theory of cognitive dissonance, the psychological toll we feel when 2 ideas in our heads clash with each other. The 2 senior scientists detested one another. Eliot, who loved them both, felt it was his responsibility to build a bridge between their ideas, even if he could not bridge their differences as people. In one of Eliot's earlier studies, he returned to the topic of bullying. He wanted to understand why bullying is tolerated in some organizations and the effects it has on victims.

Let me tell you the— first, the hypothesis and the reason for it. If you work hard for something or go through a severe initiation in order to get into a fraternity, for example, or go through severe basic training in order to get into the Marine Corps, or go through hell and high water in order to achieve something, anything negative about the thing you have achieved is dissonant with the fact that you worked so hard to get it, that you paid a lot for it to get that thing. And anything negative about that thing is embarrassing to think, I did all that work for that. So you reduce the dissonance by downplaying the negative things about the thing that you gained and upgrading any positive things.

Was this why bullying persisted at so many institutions? If you went through a terrible hazing period in order to be accepted, would you now perversely feel deeper loyalty to the institution in order to reduce your cognitive dissonance? And in turn, as you ascended the ranks at the institution, would you subject newcomers to the same kind of hazing that you suffered and come to see it as a tradition to be honored? It was the kind of humanistic insight Abraham Maslow would have loved, but the study deployed Leon Festinger's methods.

So in this experiment, we got people to volunteer to join a group discussion on the psychology of sex. We then had the people who volunteered, they came in and we said, in order to join this group, because we want to make sure that you're able to talk freely in the group, we have to put you through a little initiation experiment that will show us that you're capable of doing this. And in one condition, this was the severe initiation condition, they read a list of really filthy words, the kind of words that you wouldn't want your mother to hear you say, dirty words like words you might see scrawled on a bathroom wall in a men's room. And in this mild initiation condition, we had them read a list of dictionary words. Like instead of the F word, which was in the severe condition, they read something like sexual intercourse and things of that sort. So they were okay words that you could use in mixed company, but it still would be mildly embarrassing. And then there was a third condition where there was no talk of any kind of test or initiation procedure. So we had a severe initiation, a mild initiation, and a zero initiation condition.

Elliott then had the volunteers join the group and listen in on a discussion about sex. He arranged for the discussion to be mind-numbingly boring. Later, Elliott and his colleagues interviewed the volunteers, And asked them if they found the discussion interesting.

And we found out that those who went through the severe initiation liked the group a lot better than those in the mild condition, who liked it a little better than those in the no-initiation condition.

Volunteers who were put through the difficult initiation didn't want to tell themselves that they had endured a lot of embarrassment in order to join a boring group. So they rationalized away all the negatives.

When I interviewed them and I said, you really did like the group, those in the severe condition, you really did like the group. Didn't you notice that, you know, like some people didn't do the reading? Didn't that strike you as being wrong? And the people in the severe condition would say things like, I wish he had done the reading, but How good of him, how honest of him to immediately say, I didn't do the reading this time. I wasn't able to do it. I'm really happy to be in a group with a person like that. Whereas the people in the mild condition or in the no initiation condition would say things like, I don't want to be in a group with guys who don't do their obligation. And that's how dissonance reduction works. works, that the human mind is a very interesting thing.

Leon Festinger theorized that cognitive dissonance arises when 2 thoughts contradict one another. The thoughts are inconsistent. You need to resolve that inconsistency. Eliot agreed, but he took Abraham Maslow's concept that we want to think highly of ourselves and married that idea to the theory of cognitive dissonance.

If you take that experiment I did where people who work hard to get into a group or go through an embarrassing initiation to get into the group will like that group better, one can talk about it in terms of pure cognition. I worked hard to get into a group. The group turned out to be lousy. Those are 2 dissonant cognitions. Those are like any cognition. But the way I would reframe it now is, I am a smart, sensible person, and I worked hard to get into a group that turned out to be really lousy. Okay? Smart, sensible people do not work hard to get into a lousy group. Bringing in the self-concept makes it clearer what we're predicting. And what people have said about my thinking in terms of the self-concept is that I converted cognitive dissonance theory into a theory about conflicting attitudes, into a theory about a behavior or an attitude that conflicts with a person's conception of himself.

Eliot writes, 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 others. It was obvious how self-justification could produce harms. But perhaps channeling Abraham Maslow's humanistic outlook, Elliot began to ask whether the human propensity for self-justification could also be used for good. While teaching at the University of Texas at Austin, the local public school district asked for his help in improving the performance of students.

It turned out that in Austin, like a great many American cities, was residentially segregated. And when the classrooms were desegregated, The Black and Mexican American students were bused into the white neighborhoods for the first time. The schools in the minority sections of town in Austin were understaffed, underfunded. They didn't have all the goodies, all the niceties that the schools in the richer sections of town had, so that when school desegregation occurred, If you take, say, the 5th grade, the white students were reading at a 5th and 6th grade level, whereas the Black students, for the most part, and Mexican American students were reading at only the 4th grade level. So what we saw in these classrooms was a highly competitive situation where the Black and brown kids were guaranteed to lose. Because they were underprepared, and they were also underconfident.

Students were trying to outdo one another, and the Black and brown kids could see themselves falling behind. Was there a way for students to feel the same camaraderie that members of a basketball team feel for each other? Elliott thought back to an experiment run by 2 of his students, John Jekker and David Landy. They induced cognitive dissonance in volunteers by asking them to do a favor for someone they didn't like. Afterwards, the volunteers actually liked the person more. Why would this happen? The very act of doing a favor for someone implies you like them. When you do a favor for someone you don't like, cognitive dissonance kicks in and encourages you to like the person. Elliot used this idea to create what he called The jigsaw classroom.

Take something like in social studies, uh, the, the topic of the day was lives of great Americans, and they were studying the life of Eleanor Roosevelt. So we broke the classroom down into 5-person groups, and we rewrote a short biography of Eleanor Roosevelt into 5 distinct paragraphs. In each group, each student has one paragraph and one paragraph only to learn and to learn it well, to read it over several times and to be prepared to teach it to the other students in their group. The group is as diverse as we can make it, and they're trying to teach it to each other. What's really interesting about that is they're all pulling together They're really trying hard. It didn't start out that way. So if Carlos, a young Mexican-American student, English is his second language, he speaks it all right, but he speaks with an accent. And when he's giving his report, he's hesitating a little and stumbling a little. And let's say one of the other students in his group sort of makes fun of him. The teacher can intervene at that point. Teacher's moving from group to group. To remind them, hey, it might be fun for you to make fun of Carlos, but you really have to learn about Eleanor Roosevelt's middle years, and the test is going to be in 15 minutes. So what she's saying is, it's a different kind of game. It might be a good idea to heckle people if you're in a highly competitive situation, like the usual classroom situation. But if you heckle one of your teammates, then you're missing out on the opportunity to learn what is in Carlos's head and which he's trying to convey to you. And that's exactly what happened.

Say I'm a child who has been taught negative stereotypes about students from another race. Now I find that in order to get ahead myself, I need to collaborate with one of those students. This situation produces cognitive dissonance. Why am I collaborating with someone I dislike? To resolve that uncomfortable state, just as the study about doing favors for someone you don't like had shown, I revise my negative views. The Austin Public School District started implementing the jigsaw classroom. Elliot analyzed the data to see if it worked.

The end result is spectacular. We pitted teachers who were using Jigsaw against teachers in the system who was doing the same material in a traditional way, and what we found is kids in the Jigsaw group liked going to school better. They loved learning that stuff better. Absenteeism went down to a greater extent. They did better on objective exams on that material, better than students learning it in a traditional way. Students liked each other better. Prejudice was far down. Self-esteem of minority kids improved enormously. And in the playground, in schools that were using jigsaw, there was much more commingling When students had a choice as to who to chat with, much more integration. It was a phenomenal experiment.

In time, lots of schools began implementing Elliott's idea of a jigsaw classroom. Teachers began telling Elliott that they were not only seeing academic benefits, but social and emotional benefits from deploying cognitive dissonance in this fashion. Elliott remembers one teacher from the South Bronx.

Well, about a year earlier, I had done a workshop in the South Bronx for teachers, and I trained them to use Jigsaw. The South Bronx was a really difficult place, as you may know it, but the teachers who came to this Jigsaw workshop were terrific. They were very motivated and About 7 or 8 months after that workshop, I got a call from a teacher and she says, Dr. Aronson, I have to tell you this story. You're really gonna like this. I took my kids on a field trip to the Whitney Museum. Now, the Whitney Museum is only like a 20, 25-minute subway ride from the South Bronx. A lot of those kids had never been to a museum before. They go into the museum and she stops them in front of a painting by an artist named Arshile Gorky of a woman and a child. She gets them to look at that painting and really look at it. And then she has a book with her about Gorky's life. And in that book is a photograph of Gorky and his mother just a few months before she died prematurely when Gorky was a boy. And she asked them, why do you suppose, she said, that he went to the trouble of making a painting when he already had the photograph? It's a wonderful question. One student says, well, the painting is bigger. Another student says, well, the photograph is only in black and white and the picture is in color. Then she said, one of the kids, Willie Johnson, who he's been in my class all year, he never ever said a word in class, extremely shy, and his own mother had died a few months earlier of a drug overdose. He pointed to a thing in the portrait where you'll see that the mother's hands, he painted it in a kind of an idealized way. They don't look— there are no fingers. It looks like she's even wearing like white fuzzy mittens. And Willie Johnson called everybody's attention To the way Gorky painted his mother's hands and said, maybe he remembered his mother's hands as being so soft, like cotton. And so he wanted to paint the hands that way. That didn't show up that way in the photograph, but in his mind, He got what was in his mind about the mother's hands being soft. He got that into the painting. And then the teacher said to me on the phone, there was absolute silence in that group for about 30 seconds. And then the toughest, biggest, most strident, most aggressive kid in the class came over to where Willie Johnson was standing and put his arm around his shoulders. And then the whole group came together in kind of spontaneously in kind of a group hug. That's the kind of thing that the Jigsaw Classroom allows to happen. When kids begin to look at each other, begin to empathize with each other, become motivated to see the best in each other rather than the worst, you're going to get things like that. where a kid can express his feelings, and it rebounds back into the classroom as a whole.

In part 2 of our story, in our next episode, we follow Eliot as he uses cognitive dissonance to fight the AIDS epidemic and to help people stick to their resolutions. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Bridget McCarthy, Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Querelle, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, and Andrew Chadwick. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. Our unsung hero this week is Alice Zhang. Alice works at Apple Podcasts, and she played a key role in the development of artwork for our new podcast subscription, Hidden Brain Plus. Alice has a great eye for visual materials and the sort of can-do attitude that helps to move complex projects forward. Thank you for all of your help, Alice.

Thank you.

If you haven't yet given Hidden Brain Plus a try, it's where you'll find exclusive episodes featuring even more of the insights and ideas that we feature on the show. It's also where we'll share conversations with some of our most popular researchers who answer your questions on topics ranging from aging to self-doubt. You can find Hidden Brain Plus By searching for our show in the Apple Podcasts app or at apple.co/hiddenbrain. Your subscription helps to fund our work, and we're truly grateful for your support. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon. Having lots of choices sounds like it would be great. Who doesn't want more flavors of ice cream? It turns out the answer is us. Too many choices can make us anxious, overwhelmed. I'm Shankar Vedantam, host of the Hidden Brain podcast and YouTube channel. Each week, Hidden Brain brings you fascinating, science-backed insights about human behavior. So the next time you have to choose, choose Hidden Brain on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or hiddenbrain.org.

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