In a paper in Psychological Science, researchers at Yale report finding the first evidence of cognitive dissonance in monkeys. —The Times
Method: A monkey observed to have a particularly strong penchant for bananas is given a choice—he can continue his standard ration of one banana per day or he can give up bananas in exchange for an unlimited supply of a revolutionary product called New Banana. Unable to resist the lure of this perpetual bounty, the monkey throws caution to the wind and eschews his regular banana in favor of New Banana, which, unbeknownst to the monkey, is not actually a banana but a cake of hard-packed baking soda inside a banana peel.
Results: Initially, the monkey is revolted by New Banana and enters a prolonged period of depression, eyeing his fellow monkeys and their tasty bananas with a doleful expression. But, after a few months, the monkey gets used to New Banana, and by the end of the year he has become a vigorous proselyte, extolling the energetic, spiritual, and colonic properties of New Banana, while disparaging the musty tropical reek of traditional bananas. After a year, the monkey refuses to so much as touch a regular banana, and repeatedly proclaims that switching to New Banana was the best decision he ever made.
Method: Having lived in a research laboratory for ten years, a monkey is encouraged to get his own place, in midtown or maybe the East Village. A research assistant, posing as a broker, shows the monkey a cramped, overpriced studio off Second Avenue. The monkey balks—after all, he’s a grown monkey; doesn’t he deserve a little space? The monkey dismisses the research assistant and starts obsessively scanning the rental listings on Craigslist, determined to find an affordable one-bedroom with no fee.
Results: After responding to hundreds of listings and visiting more than twenty apartments—all of which are either dilapidated, vermin-infested, meth-lab-adjacent, or some combination of the three—the search begins to wear on the monkey, and he starts questioning why he was so fixated on getting a one-bedroom. After all, he’s a single monkey, and doesn’t he spend all his time at work anyway? Besides, with some creative light-palette decorating and a new flat-screen TV, a studio could look quite spacious. After a few days, this logic sinks in and the monkey not only signs a two-year lease for the Second Avenue place but recommends the “broker” to several other monkeys in the lab. Two months later, the monkey is tragically killed when he rolls out of his bed and directly into the trash compactor.
Method: An avowedly secular, antireligious monkey is introduced to a gorgeous female research assistant with a sarcastic edge that some would call harsh but he finds wholly endearing. Early in the relationship, the research assistant informs the monkey that, as much as she loves him, she cannot marry him unless he converts to Judaism. Undaunted, the monkey seeks out a rabbi and thrusts himself into the arduous, several-year process of Orthodox conversion. Then, fifteen months into conversion classes, the research assistant suddenly dumps the monkey, explaining that he has “changed.”
Results: Heartbroken, the monkey withdraws from everything that reminds him of the research assistant, denouncing religion and claiming that he never really liked Malaysian Expressionist cinema. But in a few weeks, the monkey is back with his rabbi, having determined that his spiritual journey was independent of the relationship and that he owes it to himself to see it through. Following his conversion, the monkey throws himself into Jewish life—running for treasurer at a small progressive temple in New Rochelle and contributing an online column to the magazine Hadassah—before falling madly in love with an Episcopalian underwear model he met during intermission at the Israel Philharmonic.
Method: A right-leaning monkey is invited to be a guest on what he believes is a Sunday-morning news program but is in fact a panel of research assistants sitting around a card table in pancake makeup. The panel proceeds to grill the monkey on the catastrophic intelligence failures and phantom WMDs that led to the invasion of Iraq, asking how he can justify his continued support of such a costly and destructive war launched under false pretenses.
Results: Unfazed, the monkey deftly reframes the debate, asserting that the war was never about WMDs but about transforming the political dynamic of the region, which is an ongoing historical process and thus immune to the partisan slings of shortsighted pundits. So polished is the monkey’s reasoning that he is recruited by the Heritage Foundation and soon becomes a fixture on the real Sunday-morning circuit, steadfastly denying the relevance of WMDs. All seems to be going well until he appears on ABC’s This Week and is ambushed with a 2003 tape of himself at a VFW post saying, “This war is about WMDs, pure and simple.” After a prolonged silence, the monkey stammers something about “out of context,” then leaps at George Stephanopoulos’s face, inflicting several small bite wounds. Six months later, the monkey’s confirmation as Ambassador to the United Nations is effectively sunk following a bizarre incident in which he is accused of throwing his feces at Barbara Boxer (although the monkey insists that it was the other way around).
2007