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

by Carol Tavris

As we follow the trail of self-justification through the territories of family, memory, therapy, law, prejudice, conflict, and war, two fundamental lessons from dissonance theory emerge: First, the ability to reduce dissonance helps us in countless ways, preserving our beliefs, confidence, decisions, self-esteem, and well-being. Second, this ability can get us into big trouble. People will pursue self-destructive courses of action to protect the wisdom of their initial decisions. They will treat those they have hurt even more harshly, because they convince themselves that their victims deserve it. They will cling to outdated and sometimes harmful procedures in their work. They will support torturers and tyrants who are on the right side—that is, theirs. People who are insecure in their religious beliefs may feel the impulse to silence and harass those who disagree with them, because the mere existence of those naysayers arouses the painful dissonance of doubt.

These courageous individuals take us straight into the heart of dissonance and its innermost irony: the mind wants to protect itself from the pain of dissonance with the balm of self-justification, but the soul wants to confess. To reduce dissonance, most of us put an enormous amount of mental and physical energy into protecting ourselves and propping up our self-esteem when it sags under the realization that we have been foolish, gullible, mistaken, corrupt, or otherwise human.

The need to reduce dissonance is a universal mental mechanism, but, as these stories illustrate, that doesn’t mean we are doomed to be controlled by it. Human beings may not be eager to change, but we have the ability to change, and the fact that many of our self-protective delusions and blind spots are built into the way the brain works is no justification for not trying. Is the brain designed to defend our beliefs and convictions? Fine—the brain also wants us to stock up on sugar, but most of us learn to eat vegetables. Is the brain designed to make us flare in anger when we think we are being attacked? Fine—but most of us learn to count to ten and find alternatives to beating the other guy with a cudgel. An appreciation of how

dissonance works, in ourselves and others, gives us some ways to override our wiring. And protects us from those who can’t. Or won’t.

There are plenty of good reasons for admitting mistakes, starting with the simple fact that you will probably be found out anyway—by your family, your company, your colleagues, your enemies, your biographer. But there are more positive reasons for owning up. Other people will like you more. Someone else may be able to pick up your fumble and run with it; your error might inspire someone else’s solution. Children

will realize that everyone screws up on occasion and that even adults have to say “I’m sorry.” And if you can admit a mistake when it is the size of an acorn, it will be easier to repair than if you wait until it becomes the size of a tree, with deep, wide-ranging roots.

Most human beings and institutions are going to do everything in their power to reduce dissonance in ways that are favorable to them, that allow them to justify their mistakes and maintain business as usual. They will not be grateful for the evidence that their methods of interrogation have put innocent people in prison for life. They are not going to thank us for pointing out to them why their study of some new drug, into whose development they have poured millions, is fatally flawed. And no matter how deftly or gently we do it, even the people who love us dearly are not going to be amused when we correct their fondest self-serving memory . . . with the facts.

If letting go of self-justification and admitting mistakes is so beneficial to the mind and to relationships, why aren’t more of us doing it? If we are so grateful to others when they do it, why don’t we do it more often? Most of the time we don’t do it because, as we have seen, we aren’t even aware that we need to.

By looking at our actions critically and dispassionately, as if we were observing someone else, we stand a chance of breaking out of the cycle of action, followed by self-justification, followed by more committed action. We can learn to put a little space between what we feel and how we respond, insert a moment of reflection, and think about whether we really want to buy that canoe in January, really want to send good money after bad, really want to hold on to an opinion that is unfettered by facts.

Social scientists are finding that once people are aware of their biases, know how they work, and pay mindful attention to them—in effect, once they bring them into consciousness and say, “There you are, you little bastard”—they have greater power to control them.

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

attorney was disbarred for prosecutorial misconduct). We can try to balance sympathy and skepticism. And then we can learn to hold our conclusions lightly, lightly enough so that we can let them go if justice demands that we do. Becoming aware that we are in a state of dissonance can also help us make sharper, smarter, conscious choices instead of letting automatic, self-protective mechanisms resolve our discomfort in our favor. Suppose your unpleasant, aggressive coworker has just made an innovative suggestion at a group meeting. You could say to yourself, “An ignorant jerk like her could not possibly have a good idea about anything,” and shoot her suggestion down in flames because you dislike the woman so much (and, you admit it, you feel competitive with her for your manager’s approval). Or you could give yourself some breathing room and ask yourself: “Could the idea be a smart one? How would I feel about it if it came from my ally on this project?” If it is a good idea, you might support your coworker’s proposal even if you continue to dislike her as a person. You keep the message separate from the messenger. In this way, we might learn how to change our minds before our brains freeze our thoughts into consistent patterns.

Shouting “What were you thinking?” will backfire because it means “Boy, are you stupid.” Such accusations cause already embarrassed victims to withdraw further into themselves and clam up, refusing to tell anyone what they are doing. And what they are doing is investing more money or buying more magazines, because now they really have an incentive to get the family savings back, show they are not stupid or senile, and prove that what they were thinking was perfectly sensible.20

Instead of irritably asking “How could you possibly have listened to that creep?” you say, “Tell me what appealed to you about the guy that made you trust him.” Con artists take advantage of people’s best qualities—their kindness, politeness, and desire to honor their commitments, reciprocate a gift, or help a friend. Praising the victim for having these worthy values, says Pratkanis, even if they got the person into hot water in this particular situation, will offset feelings of insecurity and incompetence.

In the 1970s, psychologists Harold Stevenson and James Stigler became interested in the math gap in performance between Asian and American schoolchildren: by the fifth grade, the lowest-scoring Japanese classroom was outperforming the highest-scoring American classroom. To find out why, Stevenson and Stigler spent the next decade comparing elementary classrooms in the United States, China, and Japan. Their epiphany occurred as they watched a Japanese boy struggle with the assignment of drawing cubes in three dimensions on the blackboard. The boy kept at it for forty-five minutes, making repeated mistakes, as Stevenson and Stigler became increasingly anxious and embarrassed for him. Yet the boy himself was utterly unself-conscious, and the American observers wondered why they felt worse than he did. “Our culture exacts a great cost psychologically for making a mistake,” Stigler recalled, “whereas in Japan, it doesn’t seem to be that way. In Japan, mistakes, error, confusion [are] all just a natural part of the learning process.”21 (The boy eventually mastered the problem, to the cheers of his classmates.) The researchers also found that American parents, teachers, and children were far more likely than their Japanese and Chinese counterparts to believe that mathematical ability is innate; if you have it, you don’t have to work hard, and if you don’t have it, there’s no point in trying. In contrast, most Asians regard math success like achievement in any other domain; it’s a...

It is certainly important for children to learn to succeed, but it is just as important for them to learn not to fear failure. When children or adults fear failure, they fear risk. They can’t afford to be wrong.

Research by psychologist Carol Dweck suggests one reason for the cultural differences that Stevenson and Stigler observed: American children typically believe that making mistakes reflects poorly on their inherent abilities. In Dweck’s experiments, some children were praised for their efforts in mastering a new challenge; others were praised for their intelligence and ability (“You’re a natural math whiz, Johnny”). Many of the children who were praised for their efforts even when they didn’t get it right eventually performed better and liked what they were learning more than children who were praised for their natural abilities did. They were also more likely to regard mistakes and criticism as useful information that would help them improve. In contrast, children praised for their natural ability were more likely to care more about how competent they looked than about what they were actually learning.22 They became defensive if they did not do well or if they made mistakes, and this reaction set them up for a self-defeating cycle: If they didn’t do

well, then, to resolve the ensuing dissonance (“I’m smart and yet I screwed up”), they simply lost interest in what they were learning (“I could do it if I wanted to, but I don’t want to”). It is a lesson for all ages: the importance of seeing mistakes not as personal failings to be denied or justified but as inevitable asp...

If we can resist the temptation to justify our actions in a rigid, overconfident way, we can leave the door open to empathy and an appreciation of life’s complexity, including the possibility that what was right for us might not have been right for others.

There is, in short, a big difference between superficial self-compassion and earned self-compassion. This distinction is especially important nowadays, because in recent years there has been a growing movement in positive psychology emphasizing the emotional, cognitive, and even motivational benefits of self-compassion. Who could be critical of this glowing concept? Yet it is more complex than it first appears, and it is easy to oversimplify it into a buzzword.

All of us can carry this understanding into our private lives: something we did can be separated from who we are and who we want to be. Our past selves need not be a blueprint for our future selves. The road to redemption starts with the understanding that who we are includes what we have done but also transcends it, and the vehicle for transcending it is self-compassion.

In the final analysis, a nation’s character, and an individual’s integrity, do not depend on being error free. It depends on what we do after making the error.

A great nation is like a great man: When he makes a mistake, he realizes it. Having realized it, he admits it. Having admitted it, he corrects it. He considers those who point out his faults as his most benevolent teachers.