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

by Carol Tavris

In the midterm elections of 2006, which most political observers regarded as a referendum on the war, the Republican Party lost both houses of Congress; a report issued shortly thereafter by sixteen American intelligence agencies announced that the occupation of Iraq had actually increased Islamic radicalism and the risk of terrorism. Yet Bush said to a delegation of conservative columnists, “I’ve never been more convinced that the decisions I made are the right decisions.”1

The phrase “Mistakes were made” is such a glaring effort to absolve oneself of culpability that it has become a national joke—what the political journalist Bill Schneider called the “past exonerative” tense. “Oh, all right, mistakes were made, but not by me, by someone else, someone who shall remain nameless.”

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.

You can see one immediate benefit of understanding how dissonance works: Don’t listen to Nick. The more costly a decision in terms of time, money, effort, or inconvenience and the more irrevocable its consequences, the greater the dissonance and the greater the need to reduce it by overemphasizing the good things about the choice made. Therefore, when you are about to make a big purchase or an important decision—which car or computer to buy, whether to undergo plastic surgery, or whether to sign up for a costly self-help program—don’t ask someone who has just done it. That person will be highly motivated to convince you that it is the right thing to do.

Feeling stressed? One internet source teaches you how to make your own little Dammit Doll, which “can be thrown, jabbed, stomped and even strangled till all the frustration leaves you.” A little poem goes with it: Whenever things don’t go so well, And you want to hit the wall and yell, Here’s a little dammit doll that you can’t do without. Just grasp it firmly by the legs and find a place to slam it. And as you whack the stuffing out, yell, “Dammit, dammit, dammit!”

Actually, decades of experimental research have found exactly the opposite: when people vent their feelings aggressively, they often feel worse, pump up their blood pressure, and make themselves even angrier.21

Children learn to justify their aggressive actions early; a child hits his younger sibling, who starts to cry, and immediately the boy claims, “But he started it! He deserved it!” Most parents find these childish self-justifications to be of no great consequence, and usually they aren’t. But it is sobering to realize that the same mechanism underlies the behavior of gangs who bully weaker children, employers who mistreat workers, lovers who abuse each other, police officers who continue beating a suspect who has surrendered, tyrants who imprison and oppress ethnic minorities, and soldiers who commit atrocities against civilians.

At his sentencing, Magruder said to Judge John Sirica: “I know what I have done, and Your Honor knows what I have done. Somewhere between my ambition and my ideals, I lost my ethical compass.” How do you get an honest man to lose his ethical compass? You get him to take one step at a time, and self-justification will do the rest.

In fact, there is no causal relationship between autism and thimerosal, the preservative in the vaccines that was the supposed cause (thimerosal was removed from the vaccines in 2001, with no attendant decrease in autism rates).

Without feeling attached to groups that give our lives meaning, identity, and purpose, we would suffer the intolerable sensation that we were loose marbles rattling around in a random universe. Therefore, we will do what it takes to preserve these attachments. Evolutionary psychologists argue that ethnocentrism—the belief that your own culture, nation, or religion is superior to all others—aids survival by strengthening your bonds to your primary social groups and thus increasing your willingness to work, fight, and occasionally die for them.

Prejudice justifies the ill treatment we inflict on others, and we want to inflict ill treatment on others because we don’t like them. And why don’t we like them? Because they are competing with us for jobs in a tough job market. Because their presence makes us doubt that ours is the one true religion. Because we want to preserve our positions of status, power, and privilege. Because our country is waging war against them. Because we are uncomfortable with their customs, especially their sexual customs, those promiscuous perverts. Because they refuse to assimilate into our culture. Because they are trying too hard to assimilate into our culture. Because we need to feel we are better than somebody.

Of course, some people do invent or embellish stories to manipulate or deceive their audiences (or sell books). But most of us, most of the time, are neither telling the whole truth nor intentionally deceiving. We aren’t lying; we are self-justifying.

That is why memory researchers love to quote Nietzsche: “ ‘I have done that,’ says my memory. ‘I cannot have done that,’ says my pride, and remains inexorable. Eventually—memory yields.”

In their paper “The Seductive Appeal of Neuroscience Explanations,” 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.

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.

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.

And, in fact, the 1992 Mollen Commission, reporting on patterns of corruption in the New York Police Department, concluded that the practice of police falsification of evidence is “so common in certain precincts that it has spawned its own word: ‘testilying.’”25 In such police cultures, police routinely lie to justify searching anyone they suspect of having drugs or guns, swearing in court that they stopped a suspect because his car ran a red light, because they saw drugs changing hands, or because the suspect dropped the drugs as the officer approached, giving him probable cause to arrest and search the guy.* Norm Stamper, a police officer for thirty-four years and former chief of the Seattle Police Department, has written that there isn’t a major police force in the country “that has escaped the problem: cops, sworn to uphold the law, [are] seizing and converting drugs to their own use [and] planting dope on suspects.”

Promoters of the manual claim that their method trains investigators to determine whether someone is telling the truth or lying with an 80 to 85 percent level of accuracy. There is simply no scientific support for this claim. As with the psychotherapists we discussed in chapter 4, training does not increase accuracy; it increases people’s confidence in their accuracy. In one of numerous studies that have documented the false-confidence phenomenon, Kassin and his colleague Christina Fong trained a group of students in the Reid Technique. The students watched the Reid training videos, read the manual, and were tested on what they had learned to make sure they got it. Then they were asked to watch videos of people being interviewed by an experienced police officer. The filmed suspects were either guilty of a crime but denying it, or denying it because they were innocent. The training did not improve the students’ accuracy by an iota. They did no better than chance, but it did make them feel more confident of their abilities. Still, they were only college students, not professionals. So Kassin and Fong asked forty-four professional detectives in Florida and Ontario, Canada, to watch the tapes. These professionals averaged nearly fourteen years of experience each, and two-thirds had had special training, many in the Reid Technique. Like the students, they did no better than chance, yet they were convinced that their accuracy rate was close to 100 percent. Their experience and t...

Legal scholars and social scientists have suggested various constitutional remedies and important piecemeal improvements to reduce the risk of false confessions, unreliable eyewitness testimony, police “testilying,” and so forth.48 But from our vantage point, the greatest impediment to admitting and correcting mistakes in the criminal justice system is that most of its members reduce dissonance by denying that there is a problem. “Our system has to create this aura of close to perfection, of certainty that we don’t convict innocent people,” said former prosecutor Bennett Gershman.49 The benefit of this certainty to police officers, detectives, and prosecutors is that they do not spend sleepless nights worrying that they might have put an innocent person in prison. But a few sleepless nights are called for. Doubt is not the enemy of justice; overconfidence is.

When William Butler Yeats got married in 1917, his father wrote him a warm letter of congratulations. “I think it will help you in your poetic development,” he said. “No one really knows human nature, men as well as women, who has not lived in the bondage of marriage, that is to say, the enforced study of a fellow creature.”

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.

Implicit theories have powerful consequences because they affect, among other things, how couples argue, and even the very purpose of an argument. If a couple is arguing from the premise that each is a good person who did something wrong but fixable, or who did something blunder-headed because of momentary situational pressures, there is hope of correction and compromise. But, once again, unhappy couples invert this premise. Because each partner is expert at self-justification, each blames the other’s unwillingness to change on personality flaws but excuses his or her own unwillingness to change as personality virtues. If they don’t want to admit they were wrong or modify a habit that annoys or distresses their partner, they say, “I can’t help it. It’s natural to raise your voice when you’re angry. That’s the way I am.” You can hear the self-justification in these words because, of course, they can help it.

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.

The tipping point at which a couple starts rewriting their love story, Gottman finds, is when the “magic ratio” dips below five to one: Successful couples have a ratio of five times as many positive interactions (such as expressions of love, affection, and humor) to negative ones (such as expressions of annoyance and complaints).

“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.”

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...

Riccardo Orizio interviewed seven other ruthless dictators, including Idi Amin, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, Mira Markovic (the “Red Witch,” Milosevic’s wife), and Jean-Bédel Bokassa of the Central African Republic (known to his people as the Ogre of Berengo). Every one of them claimed that anything they did—torturing or murdering their opponents, blocking free elections, starving their citizens, looting their nation’s wealth, launching genocidal wars—was done for the good of their country. The alternative, they said, was chaos, anarchy, and bloodshed. Far from seeing themselves as despots, they saw themselves as self-sacrificing patriots.

The universal justification for torture is the ticking-time-bomb excuse. As the columnist Charles Krauthammer put it, “A terrorist has planted a nuclear bomb in New York City. It will go off in one hour. A million people will die. You capture the terrorist. He knows where it is. He’s not talking. Question: If you have the slightest belief that hanging this man by his thumbs will get you the information to save a million people, are you permitted to do it?” Yes, says Krauthammer, and not only are you permitted to, it’s your moral duty.19 You don’t have time to call the Geneva Conventions people and ask them if it’s okay; you will do whatever you can to get the terrorist to tell you the bomb’s location. When put that way, most Americans might set aside their moral qualms and decide that torturing one person is worth saving a million lives. The trouble with that line of reasoning is that its pragmatic justification doesn’t hold up: tortured suspects will say anything. As one editorial put it, “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.”20 Indeed, the Senate Intelligence report confirmed that no information gained from torturing detainees had proved useful i...

The debate about torture has properly focused on its legality, its morality, and its utility. As social psychologists, we want to add one additional concern: what torture does to the individual perpetrator and the ordinary citizens who go along with it. Most people want to believe that their government is working on their behalf, that it knows what it’s doing, and that it’s doing the right thing. Therefore, if the government decides that torture is necessary in the war against terrorism, most citizens, to avoid dissonance, will agree. Yet, over time, that is how the moral conscience of a nation deteriorates. 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.

In our favorite version of an ancient Buddhist parable, several monks are returning to their monastery after a long pilgrimage. Over high mountains and across low valleys they trek, honoring their vow of silence outside the monastery. One day they come to a raging river where a beautiful young woman stands. She approaches the eldest monk and says, “Forgive me, Roshi, but would you be so kind as to carry me across the river? I cannot swim, and if I remain here or attempt to cross on my own, I shall surely perish.” The old monk smiles at her warmly and says, “Of course I will help you.” With that, he picks her up and carries her across the river. On the other side, he gently sets her down. She thanks him, departs, and the monks continue their wordless journey. After five more days of arduous travel, the monks arrive at their monastery, and the moment they do, they turn on the elder in a fury. “How could you do that?” they admonish him. “You broke your vows! You not only spoke to that woman, you touched her! You not only touched her, you picked her up!” The elder replies, “I only carried her across the river. You have been carrying her for five days.” The monks carried the woman in their hearts for days; some perpetrators and victims carry their burdens of guilt, grief, anger, and revenge for years. What does it take to set those burdens down?

Traditionally, most doctors have been adamant in their refusal to admit mistakes in diagnosis, procedure, or treatment on the self-justifying grounds that doing so would encourage malpractice suits. They are wrong. Studies of hospitals across the country have found that patients are actually less likely to sue when doctors admit and apologize for mistakes and when changes are implemented so that future patients will not be harmed in the same way.

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.

Instead, Peres took a third course. “When a friend makes a mistake,” he said, “the friend remains a friend, and the mistake remains a mistake.”16 Consider for a moment the benefits of being able to separate dissonant thoughts as clearly as Peres did: People can remain passionately committed to their nation, religion, political party, and family while disagreeing with actions or policies they find inappropriate, misguided, or immoral.

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.

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.

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.

All of us will have hard decisions to make at times in our lives; not all of them will be right, and not all of them will be wise. Some are complicated, with consequences we could never have foreseen. 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 are no second acts in American lives. —F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Don’t Americans go to the theater?” Elliot said. “There are three acts in a traditional play. His quote is not about second chances—it’s much more interesting than that. Besides, Gatsby himself is the best example in American literature of a man reinventing himself. You don’t think F. Scott Fitzgerald knew about comebacks?” “Well, that’s the common meaning,” said Swanger. “But in any classic play, act two is where the action is,” said Elliot. “In life as in a play, you can’t leap from act one to act three. We skip act two at our peril, for that’s when we go through the turmoil of confronting our demons—the selfishness, immorality, murderous thoughts, disastrous choices—so that when we enter act three, we have learned something. Fitzgerald was telling us that Americans are inclined to bypass act two; they don’t want to go through the pain that self-discovery requires.”

“I don’t want people short-circuiting the process,” he said. “It’s not enough to say, ‘Hey, I did a bad thing and I won’t do it again. It’s important for me to forgive myself.’ Yes, it is important, but the goal is not to use self-compassion as a Band-Aid to cover up the wound rather than take active steps toward its healing. People can go to confession, religiously or publicly, and admit they did a bad thing and they are sorry, but it won’t make a dime’s worth of difference if they don’t get what that bad thing was and get that they are not going to do it again.”

Psychologists Laura King and Joshua Hicks argue that maturity depends on the adult’s capacity to confront lost goals, or lost possible selves, and acknowledge regrets and sorrows over roads not taken or dreams unfulfilled.

Although it may be a peculiarly American instinct to search for the positive in any negative event, we argue that the active, self-reflective struggle to see the silver lining is a key ingredient of maturity.”24 Exactly: maturity means an active, self-reflective struggle to accept the dissonance we feel about hopes we did not realize, opportunities we let slide by, mistakes we made, challenges we could not meet, all of which changed our lives in ways we could not anticipate.

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. The poet Stephen Mitchell, in his poetic rendering of Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, writes: 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.

The Pope and Mussolini, David Kertzer

Most people who get caught in a lie, mistake, or hypocritical dance feel sharp dissonance and are motivated to squirm out of it with a flurry of self-justifications. But Trump has always been unfazed precisely because he feels no dissonance when caught. Feeling dissonance requires the ability to feel shame, guilt, empathy, and remorse, and he lacks that capacity.

Within two years, the Brookings Institution reported, he had a senior staff turnover rate of 43 percent, and Business Insider began keeping a running tally of all the top-level people who had been fired or who “resigned.”* “A high turnover rate is a signal of rot and decay within any organization,” wrote Stephanie Denning in Forbes, hardly a left-wing mouthpiece.18 Moreover, while it is not unusual for politicians to disagree with a president in their own party or even say negative things about him, the vitriol directed against Trump is unique in American history—and it has come from his employees, friends, allies, and members of his inner circle, including his secretary of state, his secretary of defense, his national security adviser, and his chief of staff.19 They have called him “a supreme sexist,” “like an 11-year-old child,” “morally unfit and untethered to truth,” “less a person than a collection of terrible traits,” “dumb as shit,” someone who “sucks up and shits down” (this from former Fox News chief Roger Ailes), “not only crazy but stupid,” and “an idiot.”

For supporters who cared only about a single issue—for example, appointing conservative judges to the Supreme Court, getting tax cuts, or backing Israel—Trump’s delivery on that issue was all that mattered. A Republican donor on the board of the Republican Jewish Coalition, when asked about the divisive tensions Trump had exacerbated among American Jews who were critical of Benjamin Netanyahu’s hardline policies, said, “My God, when I look at what he’s done for Israel, I’m not going to take issue with anything he’s said or done.”25 What about the rising number of anti-Semitic hate crimes in America that Trump’s rhetoric has facilitated, comments such as his claim that there were “good people” among those at the Charlottesville rally who were chanting “Jews will not replace us”? No dissonance there: Trump can’t be anti-Semitic; he has a Jewish son-in-law.

Weiner identified an even more convoluted stroke of self-justification: that Trump could not have achieved his policy agenda without the lying, vulgarity, and illicit behavior, so it all actually enhanced his effectiveness. This is what Weiner called the “post Trump, ergo propter Trump” fallacy: “It is a form of the ‘post hoc ergo propter hoc’ error in logic: ‘after, therefore because of.’ The classic illustration is the supposition that the rooster’s crow causes the sunrise because the second event follows the first. In the version of the fallacy his defenders espouse, Mr. Trump violates customary standards of presidential behavior and then delivers desired policies, so the assumption is that the violations produced the policies.”28

It’s a choice many of us have to make in our lives, whether the goals we seek are small or large, personal or political. We often have to determine whether a specific goal we care about—especially a righteous one, such as justice for abuse victims, ending sexual harassment in the workplace, or achieving a particular political reform—is more important than what we do to reach it. So what, we say, if we have to make a few unsavory alliances to get there? So what if a few innocent people are thrown under the bus? Certainly Pope Pius XI learned the answer: Sooner or later, we are likely to be thrown under that bus ourselves . . . or the bus will careen off the road with everyone in it.