Thinking and Deciding

218 ACTIVELY OPEN-MINDED THINKING
(always) lower the score for both subjects by being either too timid or too overconfident,
but half of the time the source of the difficulty was the opposite of what the
subject expected. The interesting result was that the subject liked the partner more
(thus justifying her own decision to take part in the experiment) when the difficulty
had been foreseen than when it had not. When the difficulty was the opposite of what
was expected, the subject could not have foreseen it and therefore had less reason to
convince herself that her decision had been a good one.
Another study (Aronson, Chase, Helmreich, and Ruhnke, 1974) showed that subjects
can even feel responsible for unforeseen (but potentially foreseeable) outcomes
and that this responsibility can lead them to justify their decision in hindsight. Subjects
were asked to make a videotape recording in which they made arguments (from
an outline the experimenter gave them) advocating government regulation of family
size — a position with which they disagreed — ostensibly for use in another experiment.
In one condition, subjects were told, before they agreed to make the tape,
that those who would watch the tape would be either highly persuadable (other students
who were unsure of their opinion) or not at all persuadable (students who were
strongly against government regulation). Subjects who thought that their audience
was persuadable changed their opinion more in the direction of favoring government
regulation than the other subjects. Presumably, this is because the subjects who
thought that they might persuade their audience thought that they would be doing a
bad thing to convince someone else of a totally erroneous view, so they convinced
themselves that the view was acceptable, and thereby also maintained the belief that
they themselves were good people.
In another condition, the subjects were told nothing about the audience until after
they had made the tape. The same effect was found, although it was smaller. That
is, subjects changed their own attitude more in the direction of favoring regulation
when they were told, after making the videotape, that the audience was persuadable,
even though they had known nothing about the persuadability of the audience when
they agreed to make the tape. Apparently these subjects blamed themselves for being
duped. The effect was not found when the subjects were told initially that the tape
would not be shown to anyone and were later told that it would be. In this condition,
subjects were able to let themselves “off the hook” because the experimenter’s lie
had been so blatant.
In another experiment, Scher and Cooper (1989) asked college students if they
were willing to write essays either for or against an increase in student fees (a proposal
that most students opposed). The essays would be shown to the “Dean’s Committee
on Policy” as part of a study of the decision-making process of that committee.
After writing the essay, each student was told either that the essay would be one of
the first shown to the committee or one of the last (picked at random). Subjects were
also told — and here is the trick — that previous research indicated that the first few
essays had a “boomerang effect,” that is, “they tend to convince the committee to
take the other side.” Subjects whose essays would be read early thus thought that
their essay would move the committee in the opposite direction from the position
advocated in the essay.