Integrity as dissonance reduction

Counterattitudinal advocacy

In one classic dissonance experiment, subjects were asked to perform a boring, repetitive task - rotating screws in holes of a pegboard - and after­wards were paid to tell the next student waiting to perform the same task that it was really very interesting.

Subsequent research has refined the dissonance idea. Experiments reveal that we don’t always resolve dissonance between cognitions by changing our beliefs. Rather, we do so when the dissonant cognitions threaten to undermine our own self-concept - paradigmatically, when it occurs to us that we may have done something wrong.⁵ Apparently, we are all highly resistant to the thought of our own wrongdoing, and the result is that we will bend our moral beliefs and even our perceptions to fight off the harsh judgment of our own

Were the Lawyers?).

See Leon Festinger & James M. Carlsmith, Cognitive Consequences of Forced Compliance, 58 J. Abnormal & Soc. Psych. 203 (1959). See also the discussion in Lee Ross & Richard E. Nisbett, The Person and the Situation: Perspectives of Social Psychology 66 (1991), and additional sources cited therein.

⁵ See Elliot Aronson, The Social Animal 230-33 (7th edn., 1995), on this refinement of the dissonance idea.

behavior. As some psychologists say, we are intuitive lawyers.^[497] Nietzsche had a similar insight. “‘I have done that,’ says my memory. ‘I cannot have done that,’ says my pride, and remains inexorable. Eventually - memory yields.”^[498]

Of course, a little niggling voice might call this self-deception. Some might find it less than entirely admirable. If so, lawyers for pay can perhaps take comfort from the counterattitudinal advocacy experiment: it suggests that the higher they bill, the less likely they are to deceive themselves into believing what they say on behalf of clients. But they shouldn’t take too much comfort, because the difference between them and their pro bono peers is only a matter of degree. Other experiments have shown that counterattitudinal advocacy, whether it be cheap or dear, typically nudges beliefs in the direction of the advocacy. Furthermore, bystanders aren’t immune to the same effect. Observers hearing someone give a speech supporting or opposing Fidel Castro will believe that the speaker’s own attitude is either pro- or anti-Castro even if they know that someone else has picked which side the speaker should argue.^[499] Indeed, observers will draw conclusions about the speaker’s belief even knowing that the speaker is merely reading out loud an essay written by someone else.^[500] More bizarrely, subjects told that a person being described to them had been assigned to write a pro- or anti-abortion essay will believe that the person favors the conclusion supported in the essay, without reading the essay.^[501] Our tendency to infer attitudes from advocacy-behavior apparently leads us to discount almost entirely information about external constraints on what others are advocating.^[502] Add to this finding the fact - about which more later - that what those around us believe influences what we believe, and it should scarcely be surprising that the very process of advocacy tends to swing our beliefs into line with the positions we advocate.

More importantly, well-paid lawyers have people around them, called clients, who may believe strongly in what they tell their lawyer to say - and our beliefs have a tendency to fall in line with those of the people around us. In the famous experiments of Solomon Asch, many people identified a short line-segment as longer than a long line-segment, after having heard other people (who in reality were confederates of the experimenter) say that the shorter line was longer. Asch’s results have been duplicated in numerous settings, both in and out of the laboratory, and the startling conclusion that bare-bones sense perception can be influenced by the company we keep is robustly supported by the evidence.^[503]

Lon Fuller noticed the phenomenon in the work lives of lawyers. He puts the observation in the form of a hypothetical story about a young lawyer, five or six years out of law school,

working in an office with at least, let us say, six other lawyers - perhaps with as many as a hundred or more... When he was in law school he used to worry that he might be called upon by his office to advocate causes in which he did not personally believe. He finds that this is not a real problem... In those instances where he had some doubts about the client’s case at the beginning, these doubts evaporate after he has worked on the case for a few days; his client’s cause then comes to seem at once logical and just. He worries a little that he might have experienced the same con­version had he been working on the other side, but this slight concern does not detract from his zeal or his desire to advance his client’s interests.^[504]

In Fuller’s shrewdly perceptive fable, we see dissonance reduction in the direction of advocacy and the socially induced perception of the justness of the client’s cause as two sides of a single phenomenon.

Diffusion of responsibility and social cognition

The socially influenced character of perception also helps to explain so-called “diffusion of responsibility,” the well-known fact that groups of people are often less likely to respond helpfully in emergency situations than are indi­viduals.

It may appear that social cognition theory and cognitive dissonance theory represent two distinct ideas: one, that we conform our beliefs to the perceived beliefs of the people around us, and the other, that we conform our beliefs to our own prior actions.

Bem suggested a simpler mechanism than unconscious experiences (unexperienced experiences) to explain the alteration of belief after coun- terattitudinal action. According to Bem, we have no direct introspective access to our own beliefs. Man, remember, is a great riddle to himself. Instead, we infer our own beliefs in exactly the same way we infer other people’s beliefs: by observing our behavior and its context, and reasoning from outward manifestation to inner belief.

In effect, Bem invites us to regard our own self as a sequence of different selves, each one a time-slice of the four-dimensional space-time worm called “me.” Inferring my own beliefs from the observed behavior of the society of my own past selves seems, on this interpretation, no different from inferring my own beliefs about the length of a line-segment or the urgency of a scream in the next room from the observed behavior of those around me. Dissonance reduction turns out to be a special case of social cognition.

Recursively reinforcing commitment and the road to perdition

One consequence of dissonance theory is that once I act, my beliefs will rationalize the action and therefore impel me to further action of the same sort - which, in turn, calls for renewed rationalization, and further action.

action → rationalization → commitment → further action

has a recursive character. Psychologists call this the foot-in-the-door effect. In 1966, Freedman and Fraser dramatically demonstrated that persuading someone to place a one-inch-square pro-driving-safety sticker in their win­dow quadruples their willingness to consent two weeks later to having a ferociously ugly, large pro-driving-safety sign in their yard.^[510]

To moralists, the step-by-step road to perdition forms a familiar trope. “Let me tell you how you will start acting unethically,” Patrick Schiltz writes in a well-known article on life in large law firms. It starts with the time sheets, Schiltz tells us - with the moment when you first pad a time sheet just a little bit, intending to pay back the “loan” from the client with a little unbilled time next month. Soon the loans become more frequent, and after a while you lose the desire to pay them back. Then come the lies - first, the white lie about why you missed a deadline, then the darker lie that you carefully proofread the prospectus that you didn’t, then the misleading answer to a deposition that you prep your client to give, then the smoking-gun document that you don’t turn over in discovery. In every case, you will have a rationalization. Speaking, he tells us, from personal experience, Schiltz ruefully observes that “after a couple years of this, you won’t even notice that you are lying and cheating and stealing every day that you practice law.”^[511]

C. S. Lewis concurs. According to Lewis, “To nine out of ten of you the choice which could lead to scoundrelism will come, when it does come, in no very dramatic colours. Obviously bad men, obviously threatening or bribing, will almost certainly not appear.”^[512] According to Lewis, the fatal first step on the road to perdition comes simply because you want oh so much to belong to the Inner Ring, or the inner circle or in-crowd. A member of the in-crowd offers you a hint of friendship and a glimpse of life on the inside, and tempts you to do something that “we always do” - “and at the word ‘we’ you try not to blush for mere pleasure”^[513] - that isn’t quite kosher. Once you have been tempted, “next week it will be something a little further from the rules, and next year something further still, but all in the jolliest, friendliest spirit. It may end in a crash, a scandal, and penal servitude: it may end in millions, a peerage and giving the prizes at your old school. But you will be a scoundrel.”²³

The trope, I have said, is familiar - but what strikes me as less familiar is that this pattern, the very picture of lost integrity, exemplifies to social psychologists something close to the opposite - the self’s incessant pursuit of integrity, of harmony between belief and action. That first small departure from the straight and narrow is like the one-inch-square sticker in Freedman and Fraser’s experiments.²⁴ Agreeing to place it in our window leads us to reformulate our self-concept in a way that rationalizes the action, and the new self-concept impels us toward further action of the same sort as its own vindication. What Lewis implies, and Schiltz says outright, is that all the while that you’re giving the Devil his due, a little bit more each day, you’re also persuading yourself that the Devil is a misunderstood fellow whose hidden virtues are only now becoming transparent to you.

Perhaps the most famous example of the slippery slope to fatal commit­ment is the Milgram experiments, in which subjects are ordered to administer escalating electrical shocks to another subject in an experiment on the effects of pain on learning. The victim, of course, is a confederate of the experi­menter, and the shocks are fake; the real goal of the experiment is to study subjects’ responses to destructive orders. Milgram’s astonishing discovery, replicated many times in several countries, is that almost two-thirds of the subjects prove willing to go all the way to the end of the sequence of shocks, despite the fact that the victim spends much of the time screaming for the experiment to stop, and eventually falls ominously silent, while the label on the shock-generator reads “Danger: Severe Shock.”^[514] The literature on these famous and alarming experiments is large, and many explanations have been offered for the depressingly high rate of compliance. The expla­nation I defended in the preceding chapter focuses on the gradually escalating character of the shocks. The shock-generator has thirty switches, beginning at 15 volts and going up in 15-volt increments to 450. The result is that Milgram’s subjects never confronted the pure question, “Should I administer this 330-volt shock?” Instead, the question was, “Should I administer this 330-volt shock given that a minute ago I administered a 315-volt shock - and I did that after administering twenty previous shocks?” To think, “That would be wrong!” virtually requires a subject to conclude that the previous shock, only insignificantly less severe, was also wrong - and cognitive dissonance makes that a very difficult conclusion to accept. It’s not that Milgram’s subjects became committed sadists. Rather, each shock they administered committed them to the belief that the next shock is neither sadistic nor even wrong (because the prior shocks were not sadistic or wrong). The dissonance- induced commitment leads the subjects unconsciously to gerrymander the boundary between right and wrong. Commitment breeds commitment, and leads to overshooting the bounds of reasonableness as outside observers perceive those bounds, but as the subject clearly does not. The subject is keeping faith with his own commitments, and the shock-victim must suffer at the hands of the subject’s pursuit of integrity.

Advocacy to excess

These reflections on the self-reinforcing character of commitment may help us explain puzzling cases in which lawyers whom one would have expected to dislike a particular cause or client, and to do the bare minimum that competent advocacy requires, instead go the extra mile on behalf of a cause they presumably detest. A celebrated example is Francis Bacon, who at one point in his career found himself prosecuting his own friend and patron, the Earl of Essex. As Macaulay reports, Bacon

did not confine himself to what would have been amply sufficient to procure a verdict. He employed all his wit, his rhetoric, and his learning, not to ensure a conviction, - for the circumstances were such that a conviction was inevitable, - but to deprive the unhappy prisoner of all those excuses which, though legally of no value, yet tended to diminish the moral guilt of the crime, and which, therefore, though they could not justify the peers in pronouncing an acquittal, might incline the Queen to grant a 26

pardon.

Then, after the execution of Essex, Bacon published a pamphlet to tra­duce his memory.^{[515] [516] It was this miserable last straw that led Macaulay to his often quoted rhetorical question about lawyers, “whether it be right that a man should, with a wig on his head, and a band round his neck, do for a guinea what, without those appendages, he would think it wicked and infamous to do for an empire.”[517] But those who quote this celebrated epigram sometimes forget that Macaulay did not criticize Bacon for fol­lowing the role-morality of lawyers - the separation of the personal and the professional. Macaulay had no wish to question the prevailing professional rules. “If... Bacon did no more than these rules required of him, we shall readily admit that he was blameless, or, at least, excusable.”29 The problem was that Bacon went so much further than the rules required, as Macaulay goes to great and entertaining rhetorical lengths to emphasize. Bacon did everything in his power to ensure that no mercy would or could be shown to Essex. Why? Macaulay thinks he knows the reason. “The real explanation of all this is perfectly obvious... The moral qualities of Bacon were not of a high order.”30 According to Macaulay’s diagnosis, Bacon’s “desires were set on things below.”31 Bacon was simply too enamored of “wealth, pre­cedence, titles, patronage, the mace, the seals, the coronet, large houses, fair gardens, rich manors, massy services of plate, gay hangings, curious cabinets.”32}

Perhaps so; Bacon would hardly be the first or last lawyer to succumb to such temptations. But before accepting this diagnosis, let us consider a more contemporary example. In 1993, a black lawyer named Anthony Griffin made headlines by representing the grand dragon of the Texas Knights of the Ku Klux Klan as an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) volunteer. The KKK had engaged in a campaign to terrorize black residents who wished to move into an all-white housing project, and the State of Texas attempted to obtain the Klan’s membership lists in an effort to prosecute them. The ACLU agreed to represent the Klan’s grand dragon, and steered him to Griffin - who, as it happens, not only worked with the ACLU, but was also General Counsel for the Port Arthur Branch of the National Association for the

Advancement of colored people (NAACP), which soon fired Griffin because he was representing the Klan.^[518]

No great mystery exists about why the ACLU - or even a black ACLU lawyer - might wish to defend the Klan’s right to keep its membership lists secret. During the civil rights movement, the state of Alabama harassed the NAACP by demanding membership lists, and the Supreme Court’s decision in NAACP v. Alabama that the lists need not be given to the state stands as a landmark First Amendment protection of political association.^[519] The puzzle is that Griffin went much further than defending NAACP v. Alabama by representing the Klan. Apparently, Griffin couldn’t stop. He went on to represent the Klan in its attempt to “adopt a highway” next to the housing project, a transparent effort to evade a restraining order to keep away from the project.^[520] The integrity of the First Amendment hardly required this further representation, any more than Bacon’s persecution and assassination of the Earl of Essex had anything to do with the requirements of the prose­cutor’s role. Yet no one would suggest that Griffin had fallen under the sway of curious cabinets or massy services of plate.

David Wilkins, who has analyzed the ethics of Griffin’s representation of the Klan in great detail, gets closer to the truth than Macaulay in explaining the puzzle of counterattitudinal advocacy that goes above and beyond the call of duty in its zeal:

It is virtually impossible for someone in an adversarial role to keep their clients, and more importantly their client’s view of the world, at arms [sic] length. It is a familiar truth in social science that those who are called upon to support positions that they initially find morally abhorrent will search for ways to reduce the distance between their beliefs and their practices.³⁶

In short, cognitive dissonance strikes again. If Wilkins is right, Griffin - and, I am speculating, Bacon - went the extra mile in their advocacy to keep faith with their initial decision to undertake the advocacy in the first place. Apparently, their integrity called for nothing less.

Group polarization in adversary systems

I have suggested, in the spirit of Bem’s version of dissonance theory, a structural similarity between social cognition (the way our beliefs adapt to the beliefs of others) and individual belief modification (the way our beliefs adapt to our own prior actions). The similarity runs in both directions. Not only do we become committed to our own courses of action - out of soli­darity, one might say, with the company of our prior selves - but we become equally committed to other members of our own “team” in social competi­tions. Here, too, the relevance of the research to lawyer behavior should be obvious: the adversary system sets up a social competition in litigation, and the free-enterprise system sets up a social competition in transactional practice. Henri Tajfel told subjects that a test of their aesthetic tastes showed that they prefer Klee to Kandinsky - and that bit of misinformation proved sufficient for them to discriminate in favor of others who supposedly prefer Klee, and against those who supposedly prefer Kandinsky.^[521] Similarly, thirty- two young boys were told, after an experiment in visual perception, that they belonged to a group that systematically overestimates (or underestimates) the number of dots flashed on a screen. They were then given the task of dividing money among the group. They systematically discriminated in favor of those supposedly in the same perceptual group and against those in the other group - the phenomenon of in-group favoritism resulting from group polarization, intimately familiar to participants in adversarial proceedings.^[522] Remember that advocacy makes others think that we believe what we are advocating, even when they ought to know better - and, through a combi­nation of commitment and taking cues from those others, we are likely to believe it ourselves. Group polarization and belief-change in the direction of one’s group reinforce each other.

Blaming the victim

In a 1973 experiment, subjects were assigned tasks in pairs, in which a “worker” would carry out the task for pay while the “supervisor” would give instructions. They then watched an event in which a supervisor bungled the task, ruining a highly successful effort by the worker. Knowing the results of the other group polarization experiments, it should not surprise us that those who expected to be workers themselves blamed the supervisor, while those who expected to be supervisors blamed the equipment or circumstances, but did not blame the supervisor. More surprisingly, however, when it became clear that the mishap would cost the worker the money he had earned, the other “supervisors” went one step further, and severely disparaged the personal qualities of the worker.^[523]

This last phenomenon - blaming the victim - occurs even in settings where us-and-them polarization is not the issue. In an ingenious series of experiments, Melvin Lerner confirmed repeatedly that the worse someone is treated, the more likely observers are to regard the victim as an unattractive, flawed person.^[524] Lerner explains this phenomenon as an unconscious attempt to ward off the scary thought that if unfair treatment can happen to the victim, it can happen to me. We disparage the victim in order to find a distinction, some distinction, between her and us in order to reassure ourselves that we won’t be victimized next.^[525]

Lerner’s explanation of blaming the victim has the ring of truth, but I think that it may work in tandem with another phenomenon, more akin to the dissonance-based effects discussed above. Strikingly, out of over 1,000 subjects in Lerner’s experiments, not a single one tried to help the victim or walked out of the experiment in protest.^[526] Why not? One explanation, in the spirit of Darley and Latane’s diffusion-of-responsibility research, is that the subjects witnessed the scene of victimization in groups - and groups don’t act as readily as individuals do.^[527] Whether or not that explanation is right, the fact that no subject protested the injustice done to the victim suggests, according to dissonance theory, that these subjects will justify their own inaction to themselves by minimizing the injustice - and the simplest way to minimize the injustice is to denigrate the victim. This, too, is familiar common sense about lawyers: even if lawyers dislike the side they are representing, they often wind up disliking the other side even more, and they relieve their own discomfort at what representing their client requires them to do by the consoling thought that at least the party they are harming is a bad person who has it coming.

The scripted self: playing roles

Another important feature of the worker-supervisor experiment is that the subjects conformed their own pro and con attitudes to the role they them­selves anticipated playing. When placed in the role of worker before wit­nessing a scene in which a supervisor’s mistake costs the worker his pay, one faults the supervisor. When placed in the role of supervisor, one blames the equipment or circumstances and denigrates the worker. Along with the other dissonance-based phenomena discussed above - belief modification, social cognition, diffusion of responsibility, commitment escalation, the foot-in-the door effect, group polarization, and blaming the victim - conformity to social role plays a prominent part in our psychic make-up.

Undoubtedly the most famous of all experiments in the power of roles to shape cognitions is the Stanford Prison Experiment (“SPE”), conducted by Philip Zimbardo, Craig Haney, and their associates. Volunteer undergraduate subjects were divided randomly into “guards” and “inmates” in a mock prison. In less than a day, guards began bullying and brutalizing the inmates, while the inmates began to exhibit the pathologies of real-life prisoners, so much so that five had to be released very soon because of “extreme emo­tional depression, crying, rage and acute anxiety.”^[528] By the second day, the prisoners revolted and the guards put down the rebellion by blasting them with fire extinguishers.^[529]

The transformation of the subjects almost defies belief. One guard wrote in his diary before the experiment, “As I am a pacifist and nonaggressive individual, I cannot see a time when I might maltreat other living things.”^[530] By day five of the experiment, this same student wrote the following in his diary:

This new prisoner, 416, refuses to eat. That is a violation of Rule Two: “Prisoners must eat at mealtimes,” and we are not going to have any of that kind of shit... Obviously we have a troublemaker on our hands. If that’s the way he wants it, that’s the way he gets it. We throw him into the Hole ordering him to hold greasy sausages in each hand. After an hour, he still refuses... I decide to force feed him, but he won’t eat. I let the food slide down his face. I don’t believe it is me doing it. Ijust hate him more for not eating.^[531]

Part way through the experiment, some of the inmates’ parents came to visit them, and were horrified by the degraded state their sons had been reduced to. But after a little tough talk from Warden Zimbardo, the parents simply backed down.^[532] Later, the inmates were visited by a prison priest and a lawyer. Like the parents, neither of these professionals had been instructed to act in a role, or had agreed to do so - but both of them did. For example, it simply never occurred to the lawyer (or parents, or priests) to tell the students that they were not inmates, but rather volunteers in an experiment that they could leave at any time. Astoundingly, the prison script seemed to induce everyone to act in role.