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

by Carol Tavris

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

mental-health professionals need to think more like scientists and less like advocates; they must weigh all the evidence fairly and consider the possibility that their suspicions are unfounded. If they do not, it will not be justice that is served, but self-justification.

It’s uncomfortable—dissonant—to realize that some of your colleagues are tainting your profession with silly or dangerous ideas.

slide down the pyramid.

Comment on this notion

if you are a participant in the justice system, your motivation to justify its mistakes, let alone yours, will be immense.

Suppose that you are presented with evidence that you did the legal equivalent of amputating the wrong arm: You helped send the wrong person to prison. What do you do? Your first impulse will be to deny your mistake for the obvious reason of protecting your job, reputation, and colleagues.

Either this overwhelming evidence is wrong or I was wrong—and I couldn’t have been wrong because I’m a good guy.’

Use this quote. We all do it.

Yet that kind of certainty is the hallmark of pseudoscience. True scientists speak in the careful language of probability—“Innocent people most certainly can be induced to confess, under particular conditions;

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.

Frank and Debra are in trouble because they have begun to justify their fundamental self-concepts, the qualities about themselves that they value and do not wish to alter or that they believe are inherent in their nature. They are not saying to each other, “I’m right and you’re wrong about that memory.” 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.”

As Debra and Frank’s problems accumulated, each developed an implicit theory of how the other person was wrecking the marriage. (These theories are called “implicit” because people are often unaware that they hold them.) Debra’s implicit theory is that Frank is socially awkward and passive; his theory is that Debra is insecure and cannot accept herself or him as they are.

Remonds me of Kahnemanns ideas of bias. We see faults and think they are personal instrad of environmental in others and vice versa on ourselves.

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.

contempt—criticism laced with sarcasm, name calling, and mockery—is one of the strongest signs that a relationship is in free fall.

“What can I possibly have in common with perpetrators of murder and torture?”

The banality of evil

“Our torture is never as severe and deadly as their torture”:

“There’s this notion that somehow there’s moral equivalence between what the terrorists do and what we do,” Cheney replied. “And that’s absolutely not true. We were very careful to stop short of torture. The Senate has seen fit to label their report torture. But we worked hard to stay short of that definition.”

Once people take that first small step off the pyramid in the direction of justifying abuse and torture, they are on their way to hardening their hearts and minds in ways that might never be undone. Uncritical patriotism, the kind that reduces the dissonance caused by information that their government—and especially their political party—has done something immoral and illegal, greases the slide down the pyramid.

three possible ways out of the emotional impasse. In the first, the perpetrator unilaterally puts aside his or her own feelings and, realizing that the victim’s anger masks enormous suffering, responds to that suffering with genuine remorse and apology. In the second, the victim unilaterally lets go of his or her repeated, angry accusations—after all, the point has been made—and expresses pain rather than anger, a response that may make the perpetrator feel empathic and caring rather than defensive. “Either one of these actions, if taken unilaterally, is difficult and for many people impossible,” Christensen and Jacobson say.28 The third way, they suggest, is the hardest but most hopeful for a long-term resolution of the conflict: Both sides drop their self-justifications and agree on steps they can take together to move forward.

the mind wants to protect itself from the pain of dissonance with the balm of self-justification, but the soul wants to confess.

Repentance is good for the soul

The last American president to tell the country he had made a mistake that had disastrous consequences was John F. Kennedy in 1961. He had trusted the claims and faulty intelligence reports of his top military advisers, who assured him that once Americans invaded Cuba at the Bay of Pigs,

Without debate, without criticism, no administration and no country can succeed—and no republic can survive.”

Doctors’ second self-justification for not disclosing mistakes is that doing so would puncture their aura of infallibility and omniscience, which, they maintain, is essential to their patients’ compliance and confidence in them. They are wrong about this too. The image of infallibility that many physicians try to cultivate often backfires, coming across as arrogance and even heartlessness.

Good for academics too

“In the end, most patients will forgive their doctor for an error of the head, but rarely for one of the heart.”

When we ourselves are forced to face our own mistakes and take responsibility for them, the result can be an exhilarating, liberating experience.

Thinking about this at the university

At work, institutions can be designed to reward admissions of mistakes as part of the organizational culture rather than making it uncomfortable or professionally risky for people to come forward.

Part of this is student reviews

Few organizations, however, welcome outside supervision and correction.

Nor would most of us wish to live without passions or convictions, which give our lives meaning and color, energy and hope. But an unbending need to be right inevitably produces self-righteousness. When confidence and convictions are unleavened by humility, by an acceptance of fallibility, people can easily cross the line from healthy self-assurance to arrogance.

Beware the leaven of the Pharisees