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

by Carol Tavris

As fallible human beings, all of us share the impulse to justify ourselves and avoid taking responsibility for actions that turn out to be harmful, immoral, or stupid. Most of us will never be in a position to make decisions affecting the lives and deaths of millions of people, but whether the consequences of our mistakes are trivial or tragic, on a small scale or a national canvas, most of us find it difficult if not impossible to say “I was wrong; I made a terrible mistake.” The higher the stakes—emotional, financial, moral—the greater the difficulty. It goes further than that. Most people, when directly confronted by evidence that they are wrong, do not change their point of view or plan of action but justify it even more tenaciously.

The phrase “Mistakes were made” is such a glaring effort to absolve oneself of culpability that it has become a national joke—what the political journalist Bill Schneider called the “past exonerative” tense. “Oh, all right, mistakes were made, but not by me, by someone else, someone who shall remain nameless.”2

We look at the behavior of politicians with amusement or alarm or horror, but what they do is no different in kind, though certainly in consequence, from what most of us have done at one time or another in our private lives. We stay in an unhappy relationship or one that is merely going nowhere because, after all, we invested so much time in making it work. We stay in a deadening job way too long because we look for all the reasons to justify staying and are unable to clearly assess the benefits of leaving. We buy a lemon of a car because it looks gorgeous, spend thousands of dollars to keep the damn thing running, and then spend even more to justify that investment. We self-righteously create a rift with a friend or relative over some real or imagined slight yet see ourselves as the pursuers of peace—if only the other side would apologize and make amends.

That is why self-justification is more powerful and more dangerous than the explicit lie. It allows people to convince themselves that what they did was the best thing they could have done.

Self-justification minimizes our mistakes and bad decisions; it also explains why everyone can recognize a hypocrite in action except the hypocrite.

When we cross these lines, we are justifying behavior that we know is wrong precisely so that we can continue to see ourselves as honest people and not criminals or thieves. Whether the behavior in question is a small thing like spilling ink on a hotel bedspread or a big thing like embezzlement, the mechanism of self-justification is the same.

Now, between the conscious lie to fool others and unconscious self-justification to fool ourselves, there’s a fascinating gray area patrolled by an unreliable, self-serving historian—memory. Memories are often pruned and shaped with an ego-enhancing bias that blurs the edges of past events, softens culpability, and distorts what really happened.

A president who justifies his actions to the public might be induced to change them. A president who justifies his actions to himself, believing that he has the truth, is impervious to self-correction.

Self-justification has costs and benefits. By itself, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. It lets us sleep at night. Without it, we would prolong the awful pangs of embarrassment. We would torture ourselves with regret over the road not taken or over how badly we navigated the road we did take. We would agonize in the aftermath of almost every decision: Did we do the right thing, marry the right person, buy the right house, choose the best car, enter the right career? Yet mindless self-justification, like quicksand, can draw us deeper into disaster. It blocks our ability to even see our errors, let alone correct them. It distorts reality, keeping us from getting all the information we need and assessing issues clearly. It prolongs and widens rifts between lovers, friends, and nations. It keeps us from letting go of unhealthy habits. It permits the guilty to avoid taking responsibility for their deeds. And it keeps many professionals from changing outdated attitudes and procedures that can harm the public.

It’s fascinating, and sometimes funny, to read doomsday predictions, but it’s even more fascinating to watch what happens to the reasoning of true believers when the prediction flops and the world keeps muddling along. Notice that hardly anyone ever says, “I blew it! I can’t believe how stupid I was to believe that nonsense”? On the contrary, most of the time the doomsayers become even more deeply convinced of their powers of prediction.

The engine that drives self-justification, the energy that produces the need to justify our actions and decisions—especially the wrong ones—is the unpleasant feeling that Festinger called “cognitive dissonance.” Cognitive dissonance is a state of tension that occurs when a person holds two cognitions (ideas, attitudes, beliefs, opinions) that are psychologically inconsistent with each other, such as “Smoking is a dumb thing to do because it could kill me” and “I smoke two packs a day.”

Dissonance is disquieting because to hold two ideas that contradict each other is to flirt with absurdity, and, as Albert Camus observed, we are creatures who spend our lives trying to convince ourselves that our existence is not absurd.

Behavioral laws apply to human beings too, of course; no one would stay in a boring job without pay, and if you give your toddler a cookie to stop him from having a tantrum, you have taught him to have another tantrum when he wants a cookie. But, for better or worse, the human mind is more complex than the brain of a rat or a puppy. A dog may appear contrite for having been caught peeing on the carpet, but she will not try to think up justifications for her misbehavior. Humans think—and because we think, dissonance theory demonstrates, our behavior transcends the effects of rewards and punishments and often contradicts them.

Elliot predicted that if people go through a great deal of pain, discomfort, effort, or embarrassment to get something, they will be happier with that “something” than if it came to them easily. For behaviorists, this was a preposterous prediction. Why would people like anything associated with pain? But for Elliot, the answer was obvious: self-justification.

The results are always the same: severe initiations increase a member’s liking for the group.

These findings do not mean that people enjoy painful experiences or that they enjoy things because they are associated with pain. What they mean is that if a person voluntarily goes through a difficult or painful experience in order to attain some goal or object, that goal or object becomes more attractive.

Dissonance theory exploded the self-flattering idea that we humans, being Homo sapiens, process information logically. On the contrary; if new information is consonant with our beliefs, we think it is well founded and useful—“Just what I always said!” But if the new information is dissonant, then we consider it biased or foolish—“What a dumb argument!” 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. This mental contortion is called the “confirmation bias.”8

The confirmation bias is especially glaring in matters of political observation; we see only the positive attributes of our side and the negative attributes of theirs.

Indeed, to this day we occasionally get a query from a reader trying to persuade us that WMDs were found. We reply that Bush’s top officials—including Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, and Colin Powell—have all acknowledged that there were no WMDs other than a cache of mostly decaying chemical weapons, nothing that warranted going to war over. In his 2010 memoir Decision Points, Bush himself wrote, “No one was more shocked and angry than I was when we didn’t find the weapons. I had a sickening feeling every time I thought about it. I still do.” That “sickening feeling” is cognitive dissonance.

Drew Westen and his colleagues found that the reasoning areas of the brain virtually shut down when participants were confronted with dissonant information, and the emotion circuits of the brain were activated when consonance was restored.14 These mechanisms provide a neurological basis for the observation that once our minds are made up, it can be a major effort to change them.

Indeed, even reading information that goes against your point of view can make you all the more convinced you are right.

This frequently replicated finding explains why it is so difficult for scientists and health experts to persuade people who are ideologically or politically committed to a belief—such as “climate change is a hoax”—to change their minds even when overwhelming evidence dictates that they should. People who receive disconfirming or otherwise unwelcome information often do not simply resist it; they may come to support their original (wrong) opinion even more strongly—a backfire effect. Once we are invested in a belief and have justified its wisdom, changing our minds is literally hard work. It’s much easier to slot that new evidence into an existing framework and do the mental justification to keep it there than it is to change the framework.16

The confirmation bias even sees to it that no evidence—the absence of evidence—is evidence for what we believe.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt made the terrible decision to uproot thousands of Japanese Americans and put them in internment camps for the duration of World War II, he did so entirely on the basis of rumors that Japanese Americans were planning to sabotage the war effort. There was no proof then or later to support this rumor. Indeed, the U.S. Army’s West Coast commander, General John DeWitt, admitted that the military had no evidence of sabotage or treason against a single Japanese American citizen. Still: “The very fact that no sabotage has taken place,” he said, “is a disturbing and confirming indication that such action will be taken.”17

In his illuminating book Stumbling on Happiness, social psychologist Dan Gilbert asks us to consider what would have happened at the end of Casablanca if Ingrid Bergman had not patriotically rejoined her Nazi-fighting husband but instead remained with Humphrey Bogart in Morocco. Would she, as Bogart tells her in a heart-wrenching speech, have regretted it—“Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life”? Or did she forever regret leaving Bogart? Gilbert gathered a wealth of data that shows that the answer to both questions is no, that either decision would have made her happy in the long run. Bogart was eloquent but wrong, and dissonance theory tells us why: Ingrid would have found reasons to justify either choice, along with reasons to be glad she did not make the other.

People become more certain they are right about something they just did if they can’t undo it.

No one is immune to the need to reduce dissonance, even those who know the theory inside out.

The Dammit Doll reflects one of the most entrenched convictions in our culture, fostered by the psychoanalytic belief in the benefits of catharsis: expressing anger or behaving aggressively gets rid of anger. Throw that doll, hit a punching bag, shout at your spouse; you’ll feel better afterward. Actually, decades of experimental research have found exactly the opposite: when people vent their feelings aggressively, they often feel worse, pump up their blood pressure, and make themselves even angrier.21

Once the boy starts down the path of blaming the victim, he becomes more likely to beat up on the victim with even greater ferocity the next chance he gets. Justifying his first hurtful act sets the stage for more aggression. That’s why the catharsis hypothesis is wrong.

Catharsis was a total flop in terms of making people feel better. The people who were allowed to express their anger about Kahn felt far greater animosity toward him than those who were not given that opportunity. In addition, although everyone’s blood pressure went up during the experiment, subjects who expressed their anger showed even greater elevations; the blood pressure of those who were not allowed to express their anger soon returned to normal.22

Aggression begets self-justification, which begets more aggression.

Fortunately, dissonance theory also shows us how a person’s generous actions can create a spiral of benevolence and compassion, a “virtuous circle.” When people do a good deed, particularly when they do it on a whim or by chance, they will come to see the beneficiary of their generosity in a warmer light. Their cognition that they went out of their way to do a favor for this person is dissonant with any negative feelings they might have had about him. In effect, after doing the favor, they ask themselves: “Why would I do something nice for a jerk? Therefore, he’s not as big a jerk as I thought he was—as a matter of fact, he is a pretty decent guy who deserves a break.”

Dissonance is bothersome under any circumstances, but it is most painful to people when an important element of their self-concept is threatened—typically when they do something that is inconsistent with their view of themselves.26 If a celebrity you admire is accused of an immoral act, you will feel a pang of dissonance, and the more you liked and admired that person, the greater the dissonance you’ll feel.

When people have had a religious conversion, survived a disaster, suffered through cancer, or recovered from an addiction, they often feel transformed; the former self is “not me.” For people who have experienced such transformations, memory helps resolve the inconsistency between their past and current selves by literally changing their perspectives. When people recall actions that are dissonant with their current view of themselves—for example, when religious people are asked to remember times they did not attend religious services when they felt they should have, or when antireligious people remember attending services—they visualize the memory from a third-person perspective, as if they were impartial observers. But when they remember actions that are consonant with their current identities, they tell a first-person story, as if they were looking at their former selves through their own eyes.

Conway and Ross referred to this self-serving memory distortion as “getting what you want by revising what you had.” On the larger stage of life, many of us do just that: We misremember our history as being worse than it was, thus distorting our perception of how much we have improved so that we’ll feel better about ourselves now.

Elizabeth Loftus, a leading scientist in the field of memory, calls this process “imagination inflation,” because the more you imagine something, the more confident you become that it really happened—and the more likely you are to inflate it into an actual memory, adding details as you go.

People like Shermer react to this otherworldly experience by saying, in effect, “My, what a weird and scary waking dream; isn’t the brain fascinating?” But Will Andrews and the more than three million other Americans who believe they have had some kind of encounter with extraterrestrials step off the pyramid in a different direction.

“All of the subjects I interviewed,” she writes, “followed the same trajectory: once they started to suspect they’d been abducted by aliens, there was no going back . . . Once the seed of belief was planted, once alien abduction was even suspected, the abductees began to search for confirmatory evidence. And once the search had begun, the evidence almost always turned up.”

The “eureka!” that experiencers feel at the fit between the alien-abduction explanation and their symptoms is exhilarating, as was the fit Wilkomirski found between the Holocaust-survivor explanation and his own difficulties. The abduction story helps experiencers explain their psychological distress and also avoid responsibility for their mistakes, regrets, and problems.

False memories allow people to forgive themselves and justify their mistakes, but sometimes at a high price: an inability to take responsibility for their lives. An appreciation of the distortions of memory, a realization that even deeply felt memories might be wrong, might encourage people to hold their memories more lightly, drop the certainty that their memories are always accurate, and let go of the appealing impulse to use the past to justify problems of the present. We’re told to be careful what we wish for because it might come true. But we must also be careful which memories we select to justify our lives, because we will have to live by them. Certainly one of the most powerful stories that many people wish to live by is the victim narrative.

Stories of trauma and transcendence are inspiring examples of human resilience.37

It is precisely because these accounts are so emotionally powerful that thousands of people have been drawn to construct me-too versions of them. A few have claimed to be Holocaust survivors, thousands have claimed to be survivors of alien abduction, and tens of thousands have claimed to be survivors of incest, rape, and other sexual traumas that allegedly were repressed from memory until they entered therapy in adulthood. Why would people claim to remember that they had suffered harrowing experiences if they hadn’t, especially when that belief causes rifts with families or friends? 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 bleak or merely mundane lives into dazzling victories 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 better about themselves and removes responsibility: “It’s not my fault my life is a mess and I never became the world-cla...

“Only by studying actual events and questioning your own motives will the complex inner truths ever emerge from the darkness,” she wrote.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the newly emerging evidence of the sexual abuse of children and women set off two unintended emotional epidemics, what social scientists call “moral panics.” One was the phenomenon of recovered-memory therapy, in which adults went into therapy with no memory of childhood trauma and came out believing that they had been sexually molested by their parents or tortured in satanic cults, sometimes for many years, without being aware of it at the time and without any corroboration by siblings, friends, or physicians.

If you look closely at these stories, many involve a therapist who helped the person “recover” his or her memories.

While the epidemics have subsided, the assumptions that ignited them remain embedded in popular culture: If you were repeatedly traumatized in childhood, you probably repressed the memory of it. If you repressed the memory of it, hypnosis can retrieve it for you. If you are utterly convinced that your memories are true, they are. If you have no memories but merely suspect that you were abused, you probably were. If you have sudden flashbacks or dreams of abuse, you are uncovering a true memory. Children almost never lie about sexual matters. Watch for signs: if your child has nightmares, wets the bed, wants to sleep with a night-light, or masturbates, he or she may have been molested.

These beliefs did not pop up overnight in the cultural landscape, like mushrooms. They came from mental-health professionals who disseminated them at conferences, in clinical journals, in the media, and in bestselling books, and who promoted themselves as experts in diagnosing child sexual abuse and determining the validity of a recovered memory. Their claims were based largely on lingering Freudian (and pseudo-Freudian) ideas about repression, memory, sexual trauma, and the meaning of dreams and on their own confidence in their clinical powers of insight and diagnosis. All of the claims these therapists made have since been scientifically studied. All of them are wrong.

None of us like learning that we were wrong, that our memories are distorted or confabulated, or that we made an embarrassing professional mistake. For people in any of the healing professions, the stakes are especially high. If you hold a set of beliefs that guide your practice and you learn that some of them are incorrect, you must either admit you were wrong and change your approach or reject the new evidence. If the mistakes are not too threatening to your view of your own competence and if you have not taken a public stand defending them, you will probably willingly change your approach, grateful to have a better one. But if some of those mistaken beliefs have made your clients’ problems worse, torn up your clients’ families, or sent innocent people to prison, then you, like Grace’s therapist, will have serious dissonance to resolve.

Naturally, not all scientists are scientific—that is, open-minded and willing to give up their strong convictions or admit that conflicts of interest might taint their research. But even when an individual scientist is not self-correcting, science eventually is. The mental-health professions are different. Professionals in these fields have an amalgam of credentials, training, and approaches that often bear little connection to one another.