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

by Carol Tavris

If you know that errors are inevitable, you will not be surprised when they happen and you will have contingencies in place to remedy them. But if you refuse to admit to yourself or the world that mistakes do happen, then every wrongfully imprisoned person is stark, humiliating evidence of how wrong you are.

Benjamin Franklin, who advised, “Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, and half shut afterward,” understood the power of dissonance in relationships.

Frank doesn’t say that Debra did a crazy thing, following him around the house demanding that he talk to her, and he doesn’t say she acted that way because she was feeling frustrated that he would not talk to her; he calls her a crazy person. Debra doesn’t say that Frank avoided talking after the dinner party because he was weary and didn’t want to have a confrontation last thing at night; she says he is a passive person.

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).

One of the reasons for that brick wall is that pain felt is always more intense than pain inflicted, even when the actual amount of pain is identical.

The researchers concluded that the escalation of pain is “a natural by-product of neural processing.”

Depending on which side of the wall we are on, we systematically distort our memories and account of the event to produce the maximum consonance between what happened and how we see ourselves.

“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.

That is why history is written by the victors, but it’s victims who write the memoirs.

dissonance involved in being a person who oppresses people out of love for them,” wrote Louis Menand, “is summed up in a poster that Baby Doc Duvalier had put up in Haiti. It read, ‘I should like to stand before the tribunal of history as the person who irreversibly founded democracy in Haiti.’ And it was signed, ‘Jean-Claude Duvalier, president-for-life.’”9

The implications of these studies are ominous, for they show that people do not perform acts of cruelty and come out unscathed. Success at dehumanizing the victim virtually guarantees a continuation or even an escalation of the cruelty: It sets up an endless chain of violence, followed by self-justification (in the form of dehumanizing and blaming the victim), followed by still more violence and dehumanization. Combine self-justifying perpetrators and victims who are helpless, and you have a recipe for the escalation of brutality. This brutality is not confined to brutes—that is, sadists or psychopaths. It can be, and usually is, committed by ordinary individuals, people who have children and lovers, “civilized” people who enjoy music and food and making love and gossiping as much as anyone else. 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.”

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.

In a public e-mail to the members of the space-shuttle program, Hale took full responsibility for the disaster: I had the opportunity and the information and I failed to make use of it. I don’t know what an inquest or a court of law would say, but I stand condemned in the court of my own conscience to be guilty of not preventing the Columbia disaster. We could discuss the particulars: inattention, incompetence, distraction, lack of conviction, lack of understanding, a lack of backbone, laziness. The bottom line is that I failed to understand what I was being told; I failed to stand up and be counted. Therefore look no further; I am guilty of allowing Columbia to crash.3

For as a wise man once said, ‘An error does not become a mistake until you refuse to correct it.’ . . .

Kardon’s exercise illuminates just how difficult it is to say, “Boy, did I mess up,” without the protective postscript of self-justification—to say “I dropped a routine fly ball with the bases loaded” rather than “I dropped the ball because the sun was in my eyes” or “because a bird flew by” or “because it was windy” or “because a fan called me

Maybe this is why the Truth works? It allows people to comfortably self-justify?

Consider the bias we discussed in the first chapter, naïve realism: the bias that we see things clearly and therefore have no bias.

In a study with Jewish Israelis and Palestinian Israelis, making them aware of naïve realism and how it operates was enough to lead even the most hawkish participants to see the bias in themselves and become more open to seeing the other side’s point of view.13

Peres took a third course. “When a friend makes a mistake,” he said, “the friend remains a friend, and the mistake remains a mistake.”

And when the dissonance is caused by something we ourselves did, we 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?”

Mindful awareness of how dissonance operates is therefore the first step toward controlling its effects. But two psychological impediments remain. One is the belief that mistakes are evidence of incompetence and stupidity; the other is the belief that our personality traits, including self-esteem, are embedded and unchangeable.

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. Of course, that belief is precisely what keeps them from learning from their mistakes.

Anyone who understands dissonance knows why. Shouting “What were you thinking?” will backfire because it means “Boy, are you stupid.”

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.

There are no second acts in American lives. —F. Scott Fitzgerald

“But in any play, Act 2 is where the action is,” said Elliot. “In life as in a play, you can’t leap from Act 1 to Act 3. We skip Act 2 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 3, we have learned something. Fitzgerald was telling us that Americans are inclined to bypass Act 2; they don’t want to go through the pain that self-discovery requires.”

Willy Loman introduces his sons Biff and Happy to his older brother Ben, their impressively rich uncle, who represents the American dream. WILLY:[to his sons]: Boys! Boys! Listen to this. This is your Uncle Ben, a great man! Tell my boys how you did it, Ben! BEN: Why, boys, when I was seventeen I walked into the jungle and when I was twenty-one I walked out. And by God I was rich! WILLY:[to the boys]: You see what I been talking about? The greatest things can happen! “What the hell happened in the jungle?” Elliot would ask his students. “That’s where the story is! That’s Act 2! How did Ben do it? How did he solve his problems? How did he get rich? Did he help people? Did he kill people? Did he lie, steal, cheat? What did he learn, and was it a lesson he can now offer his nephews?”

There is, in short, a big difference between superficial self-compassion and earned self-compassion.

Exactly: maturity requires 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.

Something we did can be separated from who we are and who we want to be.