Swallowing the goldfish

Why we love the things that hurt us

A friend of mine drank a gallon of milk, ate a live goldfish, got alcohol poisoning, and slept in a basement for a month, all to join a frat—where he then lived in literal squalor for the next academic year.

Nearly thirty years later, he still donates to their alumni fund.

A few years ago, I asked him why he keeps writing checks to an organization that made him sleep on concrete. He got a bit defensive, told me I didn’t understand what Greek life was about—which, true… I didn’t join a fraternity in college. 

It was about community and lifelong connections, he said. Which is also true.

The thing is, for many people who don’t join fraternities, college is also a time of community and connections. What was special about this community, these connections? 

In fact, there was a weirdly inverse relationship between how much abuse he received at his frat and how loudly he defended the abuse. It was almost as if, the worse they treated him, the more loyal he became. 

And that? That’s effort justification, the bias that tricks you into defending your bad decisions.

Photo by Kyaw Tun on Unsplash

But first, a disclaimer

Before I get into how effort justification was first described, an important disclaimer. 

So much of the research that underpins the classic cognitive biases was first done in the 1950s to 1980s, in an era where experimenting on a bunch of white male Harvard or Yale undergrads—and then extrapolating your findings to the entire population—was not just ok… It was how things were done.

Blindness to systemic structures that might underpin these findings—things like systemic injustices, supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, and elitism—weren’t as explicitly obvious back then.

I’ve honestly struggled with how to deal with this. The systems that explain these biases, the systems of dominance and suppression that may even inculcate these biases in us—they’re for sure to blame for some of the pain our brains put us through. They definitely need questioning and dismantling.

At the same time, dismantling takes a long time. And in that time, we’re all falling afoul of these biases. 

In the end, discussing the individual biases reminds me a bit of the surgical work I do in West Africa, where tumors grow to the size of pumpkins because people don’t have access to surgery. The systems that keep them from getting surgery? Those are awful and must be dismantled. At the same time, that tumor still needs to be removed.

A clumsy analogy, but here we are…

Anyway, on to effort justification.

A really uncomfortable experiment

This experiment was published in 1959. It’s, well, a very 1959 experiment.

The psychologists Elliot Aronson and Judson Mills wanted to ask, does suffering for something make us value it more?

Their methodology was, shall we say, very suspect.

They recruited female college students into a discussion group about sex. But before they could become members of the group, some of the students had to pass an embarrassment test. Aronson and Mills broke their respondents up into three groups:

The first group had no barrier to entry. They got in once they enrolled.

The other two groups had to read passages aloud to male experimenters. In the “mild embarrassment” group, those passages were lists of 1950s-level-provocative words, like virgin and prostitute. Meanwhile, the “severe embarrassment” group had to read out a detailed sexual vocabulary list, as well as explicit passages from Lady Chatterley’s Lover, aloud, to a male experimenter.

Here’s Aronson describing the experiment in a 2020 podcast:

We wanted people to volunteer to be in a discussion group that was to meet for several times, and what could that discussion group be that would make people want to volunteer to be in it? And so, we thought, “Well, if they were talking about sex,” this was the 1950s, “all students are interested in sex.” 

And then we thought, “Okay, so that would be the discussion group.” 

And then what kind of initiation to have? Well, it has to have something, some barrier to it, some difficult thing, and then we thought, “Well, what if they had to show that they could talk about this by reciting a list of really provocative words and passages from novels like Lady Chatterley’s Lover that describe sexual things?” 

And then we realized that the only way to do it… We started with, the first experiment was with college women, and they had to… We asked them to go through either a mild initiation, where they read dictionary words, like sexual intercourse or something like that, or words that could be embarrassing to them, and read the passage from Lady Chatterley’s Lover in order to get into the group.

Aside: “And then we realized that the only way to do it…we started with college women” is a…choice.

Anyway. 

Once the subjects passed their initiation, they were given headsets and told they were listening into a discussion group meeting that just happened to be in progress right then. Of course, it wasn’t actually in progress (because why not throw some deception onto a passage from Lady Chatterley?). In reality, it was a recording of a deliberately, excruciatingly boring meeting. Like, the most boring discussion about sex that the researchers could find. 

Then they asked their subjects, how much did you enjoy the group?

Here’s Aronson again:

So, the people who went through the severe initiation, we hypothesized would be asking themselves, “How come I went through hell and high water to get into this boring group?” And they would begin to see some of the boring things as a lot less boring than the people in the mild or no initiation condition, which is the way it came out.

Any effort or any commitment, whether it’s money, whether it’s embarrassment, whether it’s hard work, you will like the thing better if you work hard for it. You will find things about it. You will blind yourself to some of the really negative aspects of it.

Why do people stay in jobs that torture them, in marriages that aren’t going anywhere, in elite clubs they can no longer afford?

Effort justification.

Our brains are bad accountants

Our brains hate inconsistency. In fact, Aronson and Mills built their entire experiment on the concept of cognitive dissonance. 

We really don’t like cognitive dissonance. We’ll avoid it harder than we’ll avoid being wrong. 

And that means that if you’ve suffered for something, if you’ve paid for something—whether it’s in money, time, effort, or dignity—then your brain faces a problem, almost no matter how good or bad that something is. 

Either a) you’re an idiot who suffered for nothing, or b) the thing you suffered for must be valuable. 

And you’re definitely not an idiot, so…your effort justifies the outcome.

Holding two conflicting beliefs (“I’m a smart person” and “I did something stupid”) as simultaneously true causes your brain to perform such mental gymnastics that it needs a lower-back heating pad.

An easier solution is simply to resolve the dissonance. I’m smart. I paid good money for this exclusive club. Ergo, the club is truly brilliant.

I see this everywhere. You probably do too. That friend who spent four years in law school, hates being a lawyer, but still insists it’s the most “intellectually stimulating” job out there. The couple who spent $50,000 on a wedding and won’t admit their marriage is falling apart. The startup founder working 80-hour weeks on an app that they don’t even want any more. The charity worker who’s burnt out but is still convinced that the work her organization does is the most important thing she’ll ever do.

The more we invest, the harder we defend.

Why you’re still in that relationship

I usually write about how these biases affect us in our work lives, but, in my opinion, nowhere is effort justification more destructive than in relationships.

You know the couple (and, heck, maybe you are the couple). They’ve been together for seven years. They fight constantly. Nothing big, at least not in public. Just snipes and quiet sarcasm.

Still, their friends have a group chat specifically for debriefing after their dinners. 

And sometimes, unbidden, one of them will say that they’re still together because “we’ve been through so much.”

Everyone outside the relationship knows that “so much” isn’t a foundation. But from inside, things look different.

I describe my first-ever serious relationship as “a three-year relationship that lasted eight.” (Because if there’s one thing I’m very good at, it’s persisting).

We fought constantly, and we were long-distance. Surely, I reasoned, if we could handle that, then we were meant to be together. The effort of maintaining connection across time zones, expensive flights, lonely nights, and constant fights—it all had to mean something. Right?

And it did mean something: it just meant I was really good at justifying a bad fit. All because I’d put in so much work.

This is effort justification’s cruelest trick: it turns past suffering into future chains. Every fight you’ve worked through, every compromise you’ve made, every therapy session you’ve attended—instead of being reasons to leave, they each become reasons to stay.

“We’ve invested so much already” becomes the (worst) reason to invest more.

No one gives you a merit badge for surviving

The most successful people often suffer from effort justification the worst.

I hated med school and residency, but I can never answer the would you do it all over again? question. My usual answer is a cop-out: “Well it sucked, but it made me who I am now.” 

And that’s as true as it is effort justification. 

How about for you? Did that terrible job actually make you who you are? Did that abusive coach who screamed at you for years actually “bring out your best.” What about that brutal startup experience where you didn’t see your family for months? Is it actually true that you “wouldn’t change a thing.”

We tell ourselves these stories because the alternative—admitting that all we did was survive, and we may have the psychological scars to show for it—is too painfully dissonant. 

So we transform our trauma into triumph, our scars into stories of strength.

The thing is, you can acknowledge that you survived something without deifying it. You can recognize your strength without romanticizing your suffering. They don’t give out merit badges for surviving, but surviving toxicity is success enough. 

Maybe you didn’t become successful because of the suffering. Maybe you became successful despite it.

Your past effort is a sunk cost. It doesn’t have to be a life sentence.

The truth shall set you free (and probably piss you off)

What’s underneath Aronson and Mills’s discovery is the truth that we’ve all swallowed a few goldfish in our time. 

And the hardest thing to admit is that sometimes, it was all for nothing. Sometimes the initiation was just a hazing and the exclusive club is just a bunch of people justifying their goldfish to each other. 

Sometimes the thing you worked so hard for is just…bad. 

And that’s okay. 

Your worth isn’t determined by your ability to transform every effort into value. Sometimes effort is just effort. Sometimes suffering is just suffering. And sometimes survival is its own merit.

The question isn’t whether your past efforts were worth it. They’re done. There’s no unswallowing the goldfish.

The question is: are your future efforts worth it?

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