Most of the people in this world consider themselves as good people, while simultaneously thinking that the majority of everyone else is a basket case. I have personally been subjected to this criticism. Why is that?

For instance, a woman is driving her car home from the grocery store,loses her concentration and hits a man crossing the street. To make herself feel better about the accident that just occurred, she might refer to the person as a dirty bum who had too much to drink, which is the reason why he walked out in front of her car.

By producing this derogatory vision of the man, she reduces the cognitive dissonance inside of her; therefore she feels better about the accident that just happened. Festinger (1957) noticed that individuals tend to make themselves feel better when harming another individual; they do this by degrading the other person's appearance, even though their conclusions about the other are usually inaccurate.

People who think of themselves as good people often come into conflict with themselves after hurting someone, either intentionally or unintentionally.

This bad feeling inside of them, which was caused by hurting another, contradicts what they think of themselves internally. The discrepancy between thoughts causes cognitive dissonance. An individual can not change the situation of harming another; the only thing that can be changed is their feelings towards the victim.

The perpetrator will invent a reason why the person deserved the negative treatment. Thus, by thinking that the victim was already a bad person, the individual who caused the harm can reduce or even eliminate the dissonance inside of them.

In my initial example, when the woman associated the thought that the man was a dirty bum who drank too much instead of a regular man, it calmed the conflict within her head because she now believes that the person deserved to get hit by her car. Thus, the individual justifies her cruelty.

By associating a negative appearance with the victim, it appears that they deserved to be hurt because the victim caused the perpetrator aggravation and stress.

Individuals who use racial slurs do it to dehumanize victims. Racial slurs are a very common method in justifying cruelty, because an individual using them assumes the negative qualities of their victim.

Thus, the attacker does not have to treat the person she is attacking as a real human being, thus justifying the attack on the individual.

Justifying cruelty is involved in our daily lifestyles. Society might not recognize justification of cruelty because individuals have been doing this for centuries.

From the study that was done by Glass (1964) which supported his hypothesis, those who have a positive self image and those who choose to act in an aggressive manner will have a greater dissonance and will then attribute negative characteristics to the victim in order to have their feelings coincide with their “good” view of themselves.

Another common method of reducing the dissonance of cruelty is by a self-fulfilling prophecy. A self fulfilling prophecy is defined as “the case whereby people (1) have an expectation about what another person is like, which (2) influences how they act toward that person, which (3) causes that person to behave in a way consistent with those people's original expectations (Aronson, 1999). There are many examples of dehumanization and the self fulfilling prophecy; web sites entitled Storm Front and Hitler display a variety of techniques in justifying cruelty.

There are many ways to justify bad behavior; two of the most common ones are self-fulfilling prophecy and the tendency to dehumanize people. So the next time you are caught in a situation where you harm another individual, take the blame and deal with the converging emotions inside and maybe, just maybe, you won't destroy someone's life.
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References
Aronson, E. (1999). The Social Animal. New York: Worth Publishers.
Bramel, D. (1962). A dissonance theory approach to defensive projection. Journal of Abnormal Social Psychology,64, 121-129.

Festinger, L. (1957). A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Evanston. Il.: Row, Peterson.

Glass, David. (1964). Changes in liking as a means of reducing cognitive discrepancies between self esteem and aggression. Journal of Personality, 32, 531-549.