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

by Carol Tavris

They would know that cognitive and behavioral methods are the psychological treatments of choice for panic attacks, depression, eating disorders, insomnia, chronic anger, and other emotional disorders. These methods are often as effective or more effective than medication.8 In contrast, most psychiatrists, who have medical degrees, learn about medicine and medication, but they rarely learn much about basic research in psychology.

The word psychotherapist is largely unregulated; in many states, anyone can say that he or she is a therapist without having any training in anything.

In the past decades, as the number of mental-health practitioners of all kinds has soared, most counseling-psychology and psychotherapy-training programs have cut themselves off from their scientifically trained cousins in university departments of psychology.

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 interaction means that therapists who lack training in science and skepticism have no internal corrections to the self-protecting cognitive biases that afflict us all. What these therapists see confirms what they believe, and what they believe shapes what they see. It’s a closed loop. Did my client improve? Excellent; what I did was effective. Did my client remain unchanged or get worse? That’s unfortunate, but she is resistant to therapy and deeply troubled; besides, sometimes the client has to get worse before she can get better. Do I believe that repressed rage causes sexual difficulties? If so, my client’s erection problem must reflect his repressed rage at his

mother or his wife. Do I believe that sexual abuse causes eating disorders? If so, my client’s bulimia must mean she was molested as a child.

For anyone in private practice, skepticism and science are ways out of the closed loop.

If you are going to use hypnosis, you had better know that while hypnosis can help clients learn to relax, manage pain, and quit smoking, you should never use it to help your client retrieve memories, because your willing, suggestible client will often make up a memory that is unreliable.

Yet today there are many thousands of psychiatrists, social workers, counselors, and psychotherapists who go into private practice with neither skepticism nor evidence to guide them.

Deena Weisberg and her colleagues demonstrated that if you give one group of laypeople a straightforward explanation of some behavior and another group the same explanation but with vague references to the brain thrown in (“brain scans indicate” or “the frontal-lobe brain circuitry known to be involved”), people assume the latter is more scientific—and therefore more real. Many intelligent people, including psychotherapists, fall prey to the seductive appeal of this language, but laypeople aren’t called upon in court to try to explain what it means.

An understanding of how to think scientifically may not aid therapists in the subjective process of helping a client who is searching for answers to existential questions. But it matters profoundly when therapists claim expertise and certainty in domains in which their unverified clinical opinions can ruin lives. The scientific method consists of the use of procedures designed to show not that our predictions and hypotheses are right, but that they might be wrong. Scientific reasoning is useful to anyone in any job because it makes us face the possibility, even the dire reality, that we were mistaken. It forces us to confront our self-justifications and put them on public display for others to puncture. At its core, therefore, science is a form of arrogance control.

So if analysts see castration anxiety in their patients, Freud was right, and if they fail to see it, they are “overlooking” it, and Freud is still right. Men themselves cannot tell you if they feel castration anxiety, because it’s unconscious, but if they deny that they feel it, they are in denial. What a terrific theory! No way for it to be wrong. But that is the very reason that Freud, for all his illuminating observations about civilization and its discontents, was not doing science. For any theory to be scientific, it must be stated in such a way that it can be shown to be false as well as true. If any outcome confirms your hypothesis that all men unconsciously suffer from castration anxiety (or that intelligent design, rather than evolution, accounts for the diversity of species, or that your favorite psychic would accurately have predicted 9/11 if only she hadn’t been taking a shower that morning), your beliefs are a matter of faith, not science. Freud, however, saw himself as the consummate scientist. In 1934, the American psychologist Saul Rosenzweig wrote to him, suggesting that Freud subject his psychoanalytic assertions to experimental testing. “The wealth of dependable observations on which these assertions rest make them independent of experimental verification,” Freud replied loftily. “Still, [experiments] can do no harm.”18

Observation and intuition without independent verification are unreliable guides; like roguish locals misdirecting the tourists, they occasionally send us off in the wrong direction.

“The notion that the mind protects itself by repressing or dissociating memories of trauma, rendering them inaccessible to awareness, is a piece of psychiatric folklore devoid of convincing empirical support.”21 Overwhelmingly, the evidence shows just the opposite. The problem for most people who have suffered traumatic experiences is not that they forget them but that they cannot forget them; the memories keep intruding.

To guard against the bias of our own direct observations, scientists invented the control group: the group that isn’t getting the new therapeutic method, the patients who aren’t getting the new drug. Most people understand the importance of control groups in a study of a new drug’s effectiveness, because without a control group, you can’t say if people’s positive response is due to the drug or to the placebo effect—the general expectation that the drug will help them.

To date, hundreds of studies have demonstrated the unreliability of clinical predictions. This evidence is dissonance-creating news to the mental-health professionals whose self-confidence rests on the belief that their expert assessments are extremely accurate.30 When we said that science is a form of arrogance control, that’s what we mean.

“Believing is seeing” was the principle that created every one of the daycare scandals of the 1980s and 1990s.

The scientists have shown that children under age five often cannot tell the difference between something they were told and something that actually happened to them. If preschoolers overhear adults exchanging rumors about some event, many of the children will later come to believe they actually experienced the event themselves.

The researchers sampled many groups of professional psychologists and psychotherapists and found that the more scientifically trained they were, the more accurate their beliefs about memory and trauma. Among members of the Society for a Science of Clinical Psychology, only 17.7 percent believed that “traumatic memories are often repressed.” Among general psychotherapists, it was 60 percent; among psychoanalysts, 69 percent; and among neurolinguistic programming therapists and hypnotherapists, 81 percent—which is about the same percentage found in

the general public.41 “The memory wars have not vanished,” wrote a team of memory scientists in 2019. “They have continued to endure and contribute to potentially damaging consequences in clinical, legal, and academic contexts.”42

This is uncomfortably dissonant information for anyone who wants to believe that the system works. Resolving it is hard enough for the average citizen, but if you are a participant in the justice system, your motivation to justify its mistakes, let alone yours, will be immense.

It is precisely because prosecutors believe they are pursuing the truth that they do not torpedo their own cases when they need to; thanks to self-justification, they rarely think they need to.

The police and prosecutors use methods gleaned from a lifetime of experience to identify a suspect and build a case for conviction. Usually, they are right. Unfortunately, those same methods increase their risks of pursuing the wrong suspect, ignoring evidence that might implicate another, reinforcing their commitment to a wrong decision, and, later, refusing to admit their error.

Married partners are forced to learn more about each other than they ever expected (or perhaps wanted) to know. With no one else, not even with our children or parents, do we learn so much about another human being’s adorable and irritating habits, ways of handling frustrations and crises, and private, passionate desires. Yet, as John Butler Yeats knew, marriage also forces couples to face themselves, to learn more about themselves and how they behave with an intimate partner than they ever expected (or perhaps wanted) to know. No other relationship so profoundly tests the extent of our own willingness to be flexible and forgiving, to learn and change—if we can resist the allure of self-justification.

Many newlyweds, seeking confirmation that they have married the perfect person, overlook or dismiss any evidence that might be a warning sign of trouble or conflict ahead: “He goes into a sulk if I even chat with another man; how cute, it means he loves me.” “She’s so casual and relaxed about household matters; how charming, it means she’ll make me less compulsive.” Unhappy spouses who have long tolerated each other’s cruelty, jealousy, or humiliation are also busy reducing dissonance. To avoid facing the devastating possibility that they have 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 be alone.”

From our standpoint, therefore, misunderstandings, conflicts, personality differences, and even angry quarrels are not the assassins of love; self-justification is. Frank and Debra’s evening with the new couple might have ended very differently if both of them had not been so busy spinning their own self-justifications and blaming the other, and if they had thought about the other’s feelings first. Each of them understands the other’s point of view perfectly, but the need for self-justification is preventing them from accepting the other’s position as legitimate. It is motivating each of them to see his or her own way as the better way, indeed the only reasonable way.

They are saying, “I am the right kind of person and you are the wrong kind of person. And because you are the wrong kind of person, you cannot appreciate my virtues; foolishly, you even think some of my virtues are flaws.”

Our implicit theories of why we and other people behave as we do come in one of two versions. We can say it’s because of something in the situation or environment: “The bank teller snapped at me because she is overworked today; there aren’t enough tellers to handle these lines.” Or we can say it’s because something is wrong with the person: “That teller snapped at me because she is plain rude.”

Successful partners extend to each other the same self-forgiving ways of thinking we extend to ourselves: They forgive each other’s missteps as being due to the situation but give each other credit for the thoughtful and loving things they do. If one partner does something thoughtless or is in a crabby mood, the other tends to write it off as a result of events that aren’t the partner’s fault: “Poor guy, he is under a lot of stress”; “I can understand why she snapped at me; she’s been living with back pain for days.” But if one does something especially nice, the other credits the partner’s inherent good nature and sweet personality: “My honey brought me flowers for no reason at all,” a wife might say; “he is the dearest guy.”

While happy partners are giving each other the benefit of the doubt, unhappy partners are doing just the opposite.5

Social psychologist June Tangney has found that being criticized for who you are rather than for what you did evokes a deep sense of shame and helplessness; it makes a person want to hide, disappear.

By the time a couple’s style of argument has escalated into shaming and blaming each other, the fundamental purpose of their quarrels has shifted. It is no longer an effort to solve a problem or even to get the other person to modify his or her behavior; it’s just to wound, to insult, to score.

Happy and unhappy partners simply think differently about each other’s behavior, even when they are responding to identical situations and actions.

As the new story takes shape, with husband and wife rehearsing it privately or with sympathetic friends, the partners become blind to each other’s good qualities, the ones that initially caused them to fall in love.

Gottman and his team conducted in-depth interviews of fifty-six couples and were able to follow up with forty-seven of them three years later. At the time of the first interview, none of the couples had planned to separate, but the researchers were able to predict with 100 percent accuracy the seven couples who divorced. (Of the remaining forty couples, the researchers had predicted that thirty-seven would still be together, still an astonishing accuracy rate.) During the first interview, those seven couples had already begun recasting their history, offering a despondent story with confirming details to fit, telling Gottman they had married not because they were in love and couldn’t bear to be apart but because marriage seemed “natural, the next step.” The first year, the divorced couples now recalled, was full of letdowns and disappointments. “A lot of things went wrong but I don’t remember what they were,” said one soon-to-be-ex-husband. Happy couples, however, called the same difficulties “rough spots” and saw them proudly as challenges that they had survived, with humor and affection.

Thanks to the revisionist power of memory to justify our decisions, by the time many couples divorce, they can’t remember why they married. It’s as if they have had a nonsurgical lobotomy that excised the happy memories of how each partner once felt toward the other.

“They do not know what to give up in order to be a couple,” says Tiefer. “They each want to do what they feel entitled to do, and they can’t discuss the important issues that affect them as a pair. And as long as they stay mad at each other, they don’t have to discuss those matters, because discussion might actually require them to compromise or consider the partner’s point of view. They have a very difficult time with empathy, each one feeling completely confident that the other’s behavior is less reasonable than their own. So they bring up old resentments to justify their current position and their unwillingness to change, or forgive.”

Successful, stable couples are able to listen to each other’s criticisms, concerns, and suggestions undefensively. In our terms, they are able to yield, just enough, on the self-justifying excuse “That’s the kind of person I am.” They reduce the dissonance caused by small irritations by overlooking them, and they reduce the dissonance caused by their mistakes and major problems by solving them.

Charlie and Maxine made it clear that he did not turn into a lamb and she did not turn into a lion; personality, history, genetics, and temperament do put limitations on how much anyone can change.14 But each of them moved. In this marriage, assertiveness and the constructive expression of anger are no longer polarized skills, his and hers.

“The reality was,” she wrote, “that I was alone not because of my politics but because I did not know how to live in a decent way with another human being. In the name of equality I tormented every man who’d ever loved me until he left me: I called them on everything, never let anything go, held them up to accountability in ways that wearied us both. There was, of course, more than a grain of truth in everything I said, but those grains, no matter how numerous, need not have become the sandpile that crushed the life out of love.”

Therefore, each side justifies its own position by claiming that the other side is to blame; each is simply responding to the offense or provocation as any reasonable, moral person would do.

Of all the stories that people construct to justify their lives, loves, and losses, the ones they weave to account for being the instigator or recipient of injustice or harm are the most compelling and have the most far-reaching consequences. In such cases, the hallmarks of self-justification transcend the specific antagonists (lovers, parents and children, friends, neighbors, or nations) and their specific quarrels (a sexual infidelity, a family inheritance, a betrayal of a confidence, a property line, or a military invasion). We have all done something that made others angry at us, and we have all been spurred to anger by what others have done to us. We all have, intentionally or unintentionally, hurt another person who will forever regard us as the villain, the betrayer, the scoundrel. And we have all felt the sting of being on the receiving end of an act of injustice, nursing a wound that never seems to fully heal. The remarkable thing about self-justification is that it allows us to shift from one role to the other and back again in the blink of an eye without applying what we have learned from one role to the other. Feeling like a victim of injustice in one situation does not make us less likely to commit an injustice against someone else, nor does it make us more sympathetic to victims. It’s as if there is a brick wall between those two sets of experiences, blocking our ability to see the other side.

Again, personality differences have nothing to do with it. Sweet, kind people are as likely as crabby ones to be victims or perpetrators and to justify themselves accordingly.

Many victims are unable to resolve their feelings because they keep picking at the scab on the wound, asking themselves repeatedly, “How could such a bad thing have happened to me, a good person?” This is perhaps the most painful dissonance-arousing question that we confront in our lives. It is the reason for the countless books offering spiritual or psychological advice to help victims find closure—and consonance.

Whether it is Jim and Karen, Michael Schiavo and his in-laws, or the Iran hostage crisis, the gulf between perpetrators and victims can be seen in the way each side tells the same story. 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. Thus, Americans who live in the North and West learn about the Civil War as a matter of ancient history: “Our brave Union troops forced the South to abandon the ugly institution of slavery; we defeated the traitor Jefferson Davis, and the country remained united. (We’ll just draw a veil over our own complicity as perpetrators and abettors of slavery; that was then.)” But most white Southerners tell a different story, one in which the Civil War is alive and kicking; then is now: “Our brave Confederate troops were victims of greedy, crude Northerners who defeated our noble leader Jefferson Davis, d...

Once people commit themselves to an opinion about “who started this?,” whatever the “this” may be—a family quarrel or an international conflict—they become less able to accept information that is dissonant with their positions. Once they have decided who the perpetrator is and who the victim is, their ability to empathize with the other side is weakened, even destroyed. How many arguments have you been in that sputtered out with an unanswerable “But what about . . . ?” As soon as you describe the atrocities that one side has committed, someone will protest: “But what about the other side’s atrocities?” We can all understand why victims would want to retaliate. But retaliation often makes the original perpetrators minimize the severity and harm of their side’s actions and claim the mantle of victim themselves, thereby setting in motion a cycle of oppression and revenge. “Every successful revolution,” observed the historian Barbara Tuchman, “puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.” Why not? The victors, former victims, feel justified.

If good guys justify the bad things they do, bad guys persuade themselves they are the good guys.

This is one of the most thoroughly documented findings in social psychology, but it is also the most difficult for many people to accept because of the enormous dissonance it produces: “What can I possibly have in common with perpetrators of murder and torture?” It is much more reassuring to believe that they are evil and be done with them.14 We dare not let a glimmer of their humanity in the door, because it might force us to face the haunting truth of cartoonist Walt Kelly’s great character Pogo, who famously said: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

“Torture is a terrible way to do the very thing that the administration uses to excuse it—getting accurate information. Centuries of experience show that people will tell their tormenters what they want to hear, whether it’s confessing to witchcraft in Salem, admitting to counterrevolutionary tendencies in Soviet Russia or concocting stories about Iraq and Al Qaeda.”

“If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy,” said Mandela. “Then he becomes your partner.”

Understanding without vengeance, reparation without retaliation, are possible only if we are willing to stop justifying our own position.