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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Carol Tavris
Read between
June 16 - July 14, 2025
When politicians’ backs are against the wall, they may reluctantly acknowledge error but not their responsibility for it.
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.
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.
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.
To err is human, but humans then have a choice between covering up and fessing up. The choice we make is crucial to what we do next. We are forever being told that we should learn from our mistakes, but how can we learn unless we first admit that we made those mistakes?
Indeed, even reading information that goes against your point of view can make you all the more convinced you are right.
Once we are invested in a belief and have justified its wisdom, changing our minds is literally hard work.
People become more certain they are right about something they just did if they can’t undo it.
It’s the people who almost decide to live in glass houses who throw the first stones.
Introspection alone will not help our vision, because it will simply confirm our self-justifying beliefs that we, personally, cannot be co-opted or corrupted and that our dislikes or hatreds of other groups are not irrational but reasoned and legitimate. Blind spots enhance our pride and activate our prejudices.
The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.
All of us recognize variation within our own gender, party, ethnicity, or nation, but we are inclined to generalize about people in other categories and lump them all together as them.
Our greatest hope of self-correction lies in making sure we are not operating in a hall of mirrors in which all we see are distorted reflections of our own desires and convictions. We need a few trusted naysayers in our lives, critics who are willing to puncture our protective bubble of self-justifications and yank us back to reality if we veer too far off.
If we were perfectly rational beings, we would try to remember smart, sensible ideas and not bother taxing our minds by remembering foolish ones. But dissonance theory predicts that we will conveniently forget good arguments made by an opponent, just as we forget foolish arguments made by our own side. A silly argument in favor of our own position arouses dissonance because it raises doubts about the wisdom of that position or the intelligence of the people who agree with it. Likewise, a sensible argument by an opponent arouses dissonance because it raises the possibility that the other side,
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On the contrary, we tell our stories in the confidence that the listener will not dispute them or ask for disconfirming evidence, which means we rarely have an incentive to scrutinize them for accuracy.
Parent blaming is a popular and convenient form of self-justification because it allows people to live less uncomfortably with their regrets and imperfections. Mistakes were made, but only by my parents.
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.
“Only by studying actual events and questioning your own motives will the complex inner truths ever emerge from the darkness,”
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.
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 weakness of the relationship between accuracy and confidence is one of the best-documented phenomena in the 100-year history of eyewitness memory research,”
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.
training does not increase accuracy; it increases people’s confidence in their accuracy.
Their experience and training did not improve their performance. Their experience and training simply increased their belief that it did.
Doubt is not the enemy of justice; overconfidence is.
Self-justification will then cause their hearts to harden against the entreaties of empathy.
He criticized me for being so irrational. Which was probably true. I do get irrational when I get desperate. But I think he uses that accusation as a way of justifying himself. It’s sort of like “If you’re irrational, then I can dismiss all your complaints and I am blameless.”
From our standpoint, therefore, misunderstandings, conflicts, personality differences, and even angry quarrels are not the assassins of love; self-justification is.
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.
pain felt is always more intense than pain inflicted, even when the actual amount of pain is identical.
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.
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.
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.
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.
‘An error does not become a mistake until you refuse to correct it.’ . . .
Although most Americans know they are supposed to say “We learn from our mistakes,” deep down they don’t believe it for a minute. They think that making mistakes means they are stupid. That belief is precisely what keeps them from learning from their mistakes.
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.
Understanding how the mind yearns for consonance and rejects information that questions our beliefs, decisions, or preferences not only teaches us to be open to the possibility of error but also helps us let go of the need to be right. Confidence is a fine and useful quality; none of us would want a physician who was forever wallowing in uncertainty and couldn’t decide how to treat our illness, but we do want one who is open-minded and willing to learn.
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.
He considers those who point out his faults as his most benevolent teachers.
