This is an excellent post; thank you very much for researching this!
There’s so much to take away from this, I hardly know what to comment on first… but here’s something that occurred to me about the “cognitive dissonance” angle:
Suppose we were able, somehow (via some unspecified, hypothetical, debiasing intervention), to increase people’s tolerance for cognitive dissonance, or, alternatively (and more or less equivalently, in this case), to make people feel more comfortable with a self-image of someone who follows situational incentives rather than immutable moral principles (i.e., chooses to cheat or not cheat depending on what topics are on the test, etc.).
What effect would this have on the average moral goodness of people’s behavior? Would the person who helped one Jew now no longer feel like they had to help more? Would the person who chose not to help no longer feel like they had to hate Jews in order for their choice to make sense? Would these things balance each other out, or would one effect predominate? Do more Jews get saved this way, or fewer…?
This is an excellent post; thank you very much for researching this!
There’s so much to take away from this, I hardly know what to comment on first… but here’s something that occurred to me about the “cognitive dissonance” angle:
Suppose we were able, somehow (via some unspecified, hypothetical, debiasing intervention), to increase people’s tolerance for cognitive dissonance, or, alternatively (and more or less equivalently, in this case), to make people feel more comfortable with a self-image of someone who follows situational incentives rather than immutable moral principles (i.e., chooses to cheat or not cheat depending on what topics are on the test, etc.).
What effect would this have on the average moral goodness of people’s behavior? Would the person who helped one Jew now no longer feel like they had to help more? Would the person who chose not to help no longer feel like they had to hate Jews in order for their choice to make sense? Would these things balance each other out, or would one effect predominate? Do more Jews get saved this way, or fewer…?