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

by Carol Tavris

When the dissonance is caused by something we ourselves did, it is even more vital to keep Peres’s third way in mind: Articulate the cognitions and keep them separate. “When I, a decent, smart person, make a mistake, I remain a decent, smart person and the mistake remains a mistake. Now, how do I remedy what I did?” By identifying the two dissonant cognitions that are causing distress, we can often find a way to resolve them constructively or, when we can’t, learn to live with them until we have more information. When we hear about a sensational allegation in the news, especially one in which sex is involved, we can resist the emotional impulse to hurl ourselves off that pyramid in outraged support of the accused or the accuser. Instead of slotting the story into an ideological framework—“Children never lie”; “Believe survivors, even if they remember nothing”; “All fraternity men are rapists”—we can do something harder and more radical: wait for the evidence. If we don’t and instead take sides impulsively, it will be difficult to accept that evidence later if it suggests that we were wrong, as happened in the McMartin preschool case (where, the nation later learned, children had been pressured to report increasingly preposterous allegations of abuse) or the Duke lacrosse case (where, the nation later learned, a stripper’s allegations of rape against a group of players were false, and the district