Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions and Hurtful Acts

by Carol Tavris

Aldous Huxley was right when he said, “There is probably no such thing as a conscious hypocrite.”

So powerful is the need for consonance that when people are forced to look at disconfirming evidence, they will find a way to criticize, distort, or dismiss it so that they can maintain or even strengthen their existing belief.

In this study, the researchers simply intercepted people who were standing in line to place two-dollar bets and other people who had just left the window. The investigators asked everyone how certain they were that their horses would win. The bettors who had placed their bets were far more certain about their choice than were the folks waiting in line.14 But, of course, nothing had changed except the finality of placing the bet.

Therefore, when you are about to make a big purchase or an important decision—which car or computer to buy, whether to undergo plastic surgery, or whether to sign up for a costly self-help program—don’t ask someone who has just done it. That person will be highly motivated to convince you that it is the right thing to do.

While serving in the Pennsylvania legislature, Franklin was disturbed by the opposition and animosity of a fellow legislator. So he set out to win him over. He didn’t do it, he wrote, by “paying any servile respect to him”—that is, by doing the other man a favor—but by inducing his target to do a favor for him— loaning him a rare book from his library: He sent it immediately and I returned it in about a week with another note, expressing strongly my sense of the favor. When we next met in the House, he spoke to me (which he had never done before), and with great civility; and he ever after manifested a readiness to serve me on all occasions, so that we became great friends, and our friendship continued to his death. This is another instance of the truth of an old maxim I had learned, which says, “He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another than he whom you yourself have obliged.”19

When you enter the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, you find yourself in a room of interactive exhibits designed to identify the people you can’t tolerate. The familiar targets are there (blacks, women, Jews, gays), but also short people, fat people, blond-female people, disabled people, . . . You watch a video on the vast variety of prejudices, designed to convince you that everyone has at least a few, and then you are invited to enter the museum proper through one of two doors: one marked PREJUDICED, the other marked UNPREJUDICED. The latter door is locked, in case anyone misses the point, but occasionally some people do. When we were visiting the museum one afternoon, we were treated to the sight of four Hasidic Jews pounding angrily on the Unprejudiced door, demanding to be let in.

Naïve realism creates a logical labyrinth because it presupposes two things: One, people who are open-minded and fair ought to agree with a reasonable opinion. And two, any opinion I hold must be reasonable; if it weren’t, I wouldn’t hold it. Therefore, if I can just get my opponents to sit down here and listen to me, so I can tell them how things really are, they will agree with me. And if they don’t, it must be because they are biased.

By admitting that Elliot didn’t fit her stereotype, she was able to feel open-minded and generous, while maintaining her basic prejudice toward the whole category of Jews.

These days, most Americans who are unashamedly prejudiced know better than to say so, except to a secure, like-minded audience, given that many people live and work in environments where they can be slapped on the wrist, publicly humiliated, or sacked for saying anything that smacks of an “ism.” However, just as it takes mental effort to maintain a prejudice despite conflicting information, it takes mental effort to suppress those negative feelings. Social psychologists Chris Crandall and Amy Eshelman, reviewing the huge research literature on prejudice, found that whenever people are emotionally depleted—when they are sleepy, frustrated, angry, anxious, drunk, or stressed—they become more willing to express their real prejudices toward another group.

Participants successfully control their negative feelings under normal conditions, but as soon as they become angry or frustrated, or their self-esteem wobbles, they express their prejudice directly because now they can justify it: “I’m not a bad or prejudiced person, but hey—he insulted me!”

After a while, you won’t be able to distinguish your actual memory from subsequent information that crept in from elsewhere. That phenomenon is called “source confusion,” otherwise known as the “where did I hear that?” problem.5

On the contrary, we tell our stories in the confidence that the listener will not dispute them or ask for contradictory evidence, which means we rarely have an incentive to scrutinize them for accuracy.

Parent blaming is a popular and convenient form of self-justification because it allows people to live less uncomfortably with their regrets and imperfections. Mistakes were made, by them. Never mind that I raised hell about those lessons or stubbornly refused to take advantage of them. Memory thus minimizes our own responsibility and exaggerates theirs.

By distorting their memories, these people can “get what they want by revising what they had,” and what they want is to turn their present lives, no matter how bleak or mundane, into a dazzling victory over adversity. Memories of abuse also help them resolve the dissonance between “I am a smart, capable person” and “My life sure is a mess right now” with an explanation that makes them feel good and removes responsibility: “It’s not my fault my life is a mess. Look at the horrible things they did to me.”

If you hold a set of beliefs that guide your practice and you learn that some of them are mistaken,

Probably a matter of emphasis or probability, not something absolute. Even the most pro-repressed memory psychologist doesn't believe all their patients are so afflicted.

But even when an individual scientist is not self-correcting, science eventually is. The mental-health professions are different.

In contrast, most psychiatrists, who have medical degrees, learn about medicine and medication, but they rarely learn much about the scientific method or even about basic research in psychology.

Moreover, by its very nature, psychotherapy is a private transaction between the therapist and the client. No one is looking over the therapist’s shoulder in the intimacy of the consulting room, eager to pounce if he or she does something wrong. Yet the inherent privacy of the transaction means that therapists who lack training in science and skepticism have no internal corrections to the self-protecting cognitive biases that afflict us all.

“Truly traumatic events—terrifying, life-threatening experiences—are never forgotten, let alone if they are repeated,” says McNally. “The basic principle is: if the abuse was traumatic at the time it occurred, it is unlikely to be forgotten. If it was forgotten, then it was unlikely to have been traumatic. And even if it was forgotten, there is no evidence that it was blocked, repressed, sealed behind a mental barrier, inaccessible.”

In one study headed by two eminent developmental psychologists, Maggie Bruck and Stephen Ceci, a child pounded a stick into the doll’s vagina to show her parents what supposedly had happened to her during a doctor’s exam that day.23 The (videotaped) doctor had done no such thing,

They drop one fad when it loses steam and sign on for the next, rarely pausing to question where all the repressed incest cases went.

"they" = psychotherapists. The authors are not fans...

“The more the suspect denies his involvement,” writes Louis Senese, vice president of Reid and Associates, “the more difficult it becomes for him to admit that he committed the crime”—precisely, because of dissonance. Therefore, Senese advises interrogators to be prepared for the suspect’s denials and head them off at the pass. Interrogators, he says, should watch for nonverbal signs that the suspect is about to deny culpability (“holding his hand up or shaking his head no or making eye contact”), and if the suspect says, straight out, “Could I say something?,” interrogators should respond with a command, using the suspect’s first name (“Jim, hold on for just a minute”) and then return to their questioning.29

Benjamin Franklin, who advised, “Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, and half shut afterward,” understood the power of dissonance in relationships.

When you buy a house, you will start reducing dissonance immediately. You will tell your friends the wonderful things you love about it—the view of the trees, the space, the original old windows—and minimize the things that are wrong with it—the view of the parking lot, the cramped guest room, the drafty old windows.

Unhappy spouses who have long tolerated one another’s cruelty, jealousy, or humiliation are also busy reducing dissonance. To avoid facing the devastating possibility that they invested so many years, so much energy, so many arguments, in a failed effort to achieve even peaceful coexistence, they say something like “All marriages are like this. Nothing can be done about it, anyway. There are enough good things about it. Better to stay in a difficult marriage than to be alone.”

Some couples find in marriage a source of solace and joy, a place to replenish the soul, a relationship that allows them to flourish as individuals and as a couple. For others, marriage becomes a source of bickering and discord, a place of stagnation, a relationship that squashes their individuality and dissipates their bond.

But the vast majority of couples who drift apart do so slowly, over time, in a snowballing pattern of blame and self-justification. Each partner focuses on what the other one is doing wrong, while justifying his or her own preferences, attitudes, and ways of doing things.

Differences need not cause rifts. But once there is a rift, the couple explains it as being an inevitable result of their differences.

When we explain our own behavior, self-justification allows us to flatter ourselves: We give ourselves credit for our good actions but let the situation excuse the bad ones.

On the contrary, he or she is likely to turn it into an infuriating insult: “That’s the way you are—you’re just like your mother!” Generally, the remark does not refer to your mother’s sublime baking skills or her talent at dancing the tango. It means that you are like your mother genetically and irredeemably; there’s nothing you can do about it. And when people feel they can’t do anything about it, they feel unjustly accused, as if they were being criticized for being too short or too freckled.

We believe that contempt is a predictor of divorce not because it causes the wish to separate, but because it reflects the couple’s feelings of psychological separation. Contempt emerges only after years of squabbles and quarrels that keep resulting, as for Frank and Debra, in yet another unsuccessful effort to get the other person to behave differently. It is an indication that the partner is throwing in the towel, thinking, “There’s no point hoping that you will ever change; you are just like your mother after all.” Anger reflects the hope that a problem can be corrected. When it burns out, it leaves the ashes of resentment and contempt.

They shift from minimizing negative aspects of the marriage to overemphasizing them, seeking every bit of supporting evidence to fit their new story. As the new story takes shape, with husband and wife rehearsing it privately or with sympathetic friends,

If you are the one being left, you may suffer the ego-crushing dissonance of “I’m a good person and I’ve been a terrific partner” and “My partner is leaving me. How could this be?” You could conclude that you’re not as good a person as you thought, or that you are a good person but you were a pretty bad partner, but few of us choose to reduce dissonance by plunging darts into our self-esteem. It’s far easier to reduce dissonance by plunging darts into the partner, so to speak—say, by concluding that your partner is a difficult, selfish person, only you hadn’t realized it fully until now.

Instead, we asked these couples, in effect, how, over the years, they reduced the dissonance between “I love this person” and “This person is doing something that is driving me crazy.”

His efforts to explain himself made her angrier, and her anger made it more difficult for him to empathize with her suffering and respond to it.

Perpetrators, whether individuals or nations, write versions of history in which their behavior was justified and provoked by the other side; their behavior was sensible and meaningful; if they made mistakes or went too far, at least everything turned out for the best in the long run; and it’s all in the past now anyway. Victims tend to write accounts of the same history in which they describe the perpetrator’s actions as arbitrary and meaningless, or else intentionally malicious and brutal; in which their own retaliation was impeccably appropriate and morally justified; and in which nothing turned out for the best. In fact, everything turned out for the worst, and we are still irritated about it.

The pain of living with horrors they have committed, but cannot morally accept, would be searing, which is why most people will reach for any justification available to assuage the dissonance.

Who do you imagine would be most likely to blame the victim: perpetrators who think highly of themselves and have strong feelings of self-worth, or those who are insecure and have low self-worth? Dissonance theory makes the nonobvious prediction that it will be the former. For people who have low self-esteem, treating others badly or going along mindlessly with what others tell them to do is not terribly dissonant with their self-concept.

The implications of these studies are ominous: Combine perpetrators who have high self-esteem and victims who are helpless, and you have a recipe for the escalation of brutality.

Once torture is justified in rare cases, it is easier to justify it in others: Let’s torture not only this bastard we are sure knows where the bomb is, but this other bastard who might know where the bomb is, and also this bastard who might have some general information that could be useful in five years, and also this other guy who might be a bastard only we aren’t sure.

She brought Frey onto her show and started right off with an apology for her call to Larry King: “I regret that phone call,” she said to her audience. “I made a mistake and I left the impression that the truth does not matter. And I am deeply sorry about that, because that is not what I believe. I called in because I love the message of this book and—at the time, and every day I was reading e-mail after e-mail from so many people who have been inspired by it. And I have to say that I allowed that to cloud my judgment. And so to everyone who has challenged me on this issue of truth, you are absolutely right.”

When reporters asked Peres what he thought of Reagan’s action, Peres neither condemned Reagan personally nor minimized the seriousness of the visit to Biturg. Instead, Peres took a third course. “When a friend makes a mistake,” he said, “the friend remains a friend, and the mistake remains a mistake.”10