Thinking and Deciding

DETERMINANTS AND RELATED PHENOMENA 219
The results were clear: The effect of the essay on the student’s own opinion
depended on the effect that the essay was supposed to have on the committee, not
on what the essay said. In particular, subjects who wrote against the fee increase
but whose essays would be read early changed their opinion about the fee increase
just as much as subjects who wrote against the increase and whose essays would
be read late. This study shows clearly that the effect of writing the essay is not in
the “dissonance” between the content of the essay and the student’s original belief.
The results are easily explained by the hypothesis that subjects wanted to avoid selfblame
for moving the committee in the wrong direction. If the direction were not so
wrong, less self-blame would be needed.
In general, then, people do not like to think of themselves as liars or bad decision
makers, and they manipulate their own beliefs so as to convince themselves that they
are not, and were not in the past. This appears to be a type of wishful thinking,
possibly also involving self-deception.
What is the relation between the effects we have been discussing and the general
phenomenon of the irrational persistence of belief? For one thing, the “dissonance”
experiments are a type of irrational persistence in their own right. What seems to
persist is each person’s belief that he is a good decision maker, moral and intelligent.
This belief is maintained, however, in a peculiar way. When a person runs
into evidence against the belief, evidence suggesting that a bad decision may have
been made, the person changes his beliefs about his own desires (“I must really have
wanted it, or I wouldn’t have done it for so little money,” or “put in so much effort,”
and so forth). These beliefs about desires, in turn, may influence the desires
themselves, as we have just seen.
Just as we want to think of ourselves as good decision makers, we want to think
of ourselves as good belief formers. When a belief is challenged, our first impulse
is often to bolster it (Janis and Mann, 1977), in order to maintain our belief in our
earlier intelligence. We want to have been right all along — whereas it would be
more reasonable to want to be right in the present (even if that means admitting
error). This is what makes us into lawyers, hired by our own earlier views to defend
them against all accusations, rather than detectives seeking the truth itself.
Related results
Two other results show essential mechanisms underlying irrational persistence. Selective
exposure is the tendency to search selectively for evidence that will support
current beliefs. Belief overkill is the tendency to deny conflicting arguments, even if
they do not need to be denied.
Selective exposure
People maintain their beliefs by exposing themselves to information that they know
beforehand is likely to support what they already want to believe. Liberals tend to
read liberal newspapers, and conservatives tend to read conservative newspapers.