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

by Carol Tavris

That is why self-justification is more powerful and more dangerous than the explicit lie. It allows people to convince themselves that what they did was the best thing they could have done.

When we cross these lines, we are justifying behavior that we know is wrong precisely so that we can continue to see ourselves as honest people and not criminals or thieves.

Memories are often pruned and shaped by an ego-enhancing bias that blurs the edges of past events, softens culpability, and distorts what really happened.

Over time, as the self-serving distortions of memory kick in and we forget or distort past events, we may come to believe our own lies, little by little.

Chapter 1 Cognitive Dissonance: The Engine of Self-justification

Dissonance is disquieting because to hold two ideas that contradict each other is to flirt with absurdity and, as Albert Camus observed, we humans are creatures who spend our lives trying to convince ourselves that our existence is not absurd.

The results are always the same: Severe initiations increase a member’s liking for the group. These findings do not mean that people enjoy painful experiences, such as filling out their income-tax forms, or that people enjoy things because they are associated with pain. What they do show is that if a person voluntarily goes through a difficult or a painful experience in order to attain some goal or object, that goal or object becomes more attractive.

I will look at any additional evidence to confirm the opinion to which I have already come. —Lord Molson, British politician (1903–1991)

There was no proof then or later to support this rumor. Indeed, the Army’s West Coast commander, General John DeWitt, admitted that they had no evidence of sabotage or treason against a single Japanese-American

American citizen. “The very fact that no sabotage has taken place,” he said, “is a disturbing and confirming indication that such action will be taken.”

Gilbert marshals a wealth of data to show that the answer to both questions is no, that either decision would have made her happy in the long run. Bogart was eloquent but wrong, and dissonance theory tells us why: Ingrid would have found reasons to justify either choice, along with reasons to be glad she did not make the other.

People become more certain they are right about something they just did if they can’t undo it.

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.

decades of experimental research have found exactly the opposite: that when people vent their

feelings aggressively they often feel worse, pump up their blood pressure, and make themselves even angrier.16 Venting is especially likely to backfire if a person commits an aggressive act against another person directly, which is exactly what cognitive dissonance theory would predict.

Fyodor Dostoevsky understood perfectly how this process works. In The Brothers Karamazov, he has Fyodor Pavlovitch, the brothers’ scoundrel of a father, recall “how he had once in the past been asked, ‘Why do you hate so and so, so much?’ And he had answered them, with his

shameless impudence, ‘I’ll tell you. He has done me no harm. But I played him a dirty trick, and ever since I have hated him.’”

Hundreds of studies have shown that predictions based on an expert’s “personal experience” or “years of training” are rarely better than chance, in contrast to predictions based on actuarial data. But when experts are wrong, the centerpiece of their professional identity is threatened. Therefore, as dissonance theory would predict, the more self-confident and famous they are, the less likely they will be to admit mistakes.

Our convictions about who we are carry us through the day, and we are constantly interpreting the things that happen to us through the filter of those core beliefs.

Self-justification, therefore, is not only about protecting high self-esteem; it’s also about protecting low self-esteem if that is how a person sees himself.

The Milgram experiment shows us how ordinary people can end up doing immoral and harmful things through a chain reaction of behavior and subsequent self-justification.

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.

Chapter 2 Pride and Prejudice . . . and Other Blind Spots

Big Pharma was producing new, lifesaving drugs but also drugs that were unnecessary at best and risky at worst: More than three-fourths of all drugs approved between 1989 and 2000 were no more than minor improvements over existing medications, cost nearly twice as much, and had higher risks.

The greater danger to the public comes from the self-justifications of well-intentioned scientists and physicians who, because of their need to reduce dissonance, truly believe themselves to be above the influence of their corporate funders. Yet, like a plant turning toward the sun, they turn toward the interests of their sponsors without even being aware that they are doing so.

Once you take the gift, no matter how small, the process starts. You will feel the urge to give something back, even if it’s only, at first, your attention, your willingness to listen, your sympathy for the giver.

Eventually, you will become more willing to give your prescription, your ruling, your vote. Your behavior changes, but, thanks to blind spots and self-justification, your view of your intellectual and professional integrity remains the same.

Chapter 3 Memory, the Self-justifying Historian

but their memories are false, and false for particular, self-justifying reasons. Their stories, so different on the face of it, are linked by common psychological and neurological mechanisms that

create false memories that nonetheless feel vividly, emotionally real. These memories do not develop overnight, in a blinding flash. They take months, sometimes years, to develop, and the stages by which they emerge are now well known to psychological scientists.

Certainly one of the most powerful stories that many people wish to live by is the victim narrative.

It is precisely because these accounts are so emotionally powerful that thousands of people have been drawn to construct “me, too” versions of them. A few have claimed to be Holocaust survivors; thousands have claimed to be survivors of alien abduction; and tens of thousands have claimed to be survivors of incest and other sexual traumas that allegedly were repressed from memory until they entered therapy in adulthood.

By distorting their memories, these people can “get what they want by revising what they had,” and what they want is to turn their present lives, no matter how bleak or mundane, into a dazzling victory over adversity.

For her entire adult life, for example, writer Mary Karr had harbored the memory of how, as an innocent teenager, she had been abandoned by her father. That memory allowed her to feel like a heroic survivor of her father’s neglect. But when she sat down to write her memoirs, she faced the realization that the story could not have been true.

“Only by studying actual events and questioning your own motives will the complex inner truths ever emerge from the darkness,” she wrote.

Chapter 4 Good Intentions, Bad Science: The Closed Loop of Clinical Judgment

In the 1980s and 1990s, the newly emerging evidence of the sexual abuse of children and women set off two unintended hysterical epidemics. One was the phenomenon of recovered-memory therapy, in which adults went into therapy with no memory of childhood trauma and came out believing that they had been sexually molested by their parents or tortured in Satanic cults, sometimes for many years, without ever being aware of it at the time and without any corroboration by siblings, friends, or physicians.

Another said her father had molested her from the ages of five to twenty-three, and even raped her just days before her wedding—memories she repressed until therapy. Others said they had been burned, although their bodies bore no scars. Some said they had been impregnated and forced to have abortions, although their bodies showed no evidence. Those who went to court to sue their alleged perpetrators were able to call on expert witnesses, many with impressive credentials in clinical psychology and psychiatry, who testified that these recovered memories were valid evidence of abuse.2

you were repeatedly traumatized in childhood, you probably repressed the memory of it. If you repressed the memory of it, hypnosis can retrieve it for you. If you are utterly convinced that your memories are true, they are.

They came from mental-health professionals who disseminated them at conferences, in clinical journals, in the media, and in bestselling books, and who promoted themselves as experts in diagnosing child sexual abuse and determining the validity of a recovered memory.

All the claims these therapists made have since been scientifically studied. All of them are mistaken.

When, months after the trial ended, the full story came out—about the emotionally disturbed mother who made the first accusation and whose charges became crazier and crazier until even the prosecutors stopped paying attention to her; about how the children had been coerced over many months to “tell” by zealous social workers on a moral crusade; about how the children’s stories became increasingly outlandish—we felt foolish and embarrassed that we had sacrificed our scientific skepticism on the altar of outrage.

Our intention is to examine the kinds of mistakes that can result from the closed loop of clinical practice, and show how self-justification perpetuates them.

For anyone in private practice, skepticism and science are ways out of the closed loop. Skepticism, for example, teaches therapists to be cautious about taking what their clients tell them at face value.

Yet today there are many thousands of psychiatrists, social workers, counselors, and psychotherapists who go into private practice with neither skepticism nor evidence to guide them.

An example of the problem Meehl feared can be seen in the deposition of a prominent psychiatrist, Bessel van der Kolk, who has testified frequently on behalf of plaintiffs in repressed-memory cases. Van der Kolk explained that as a psychiatrist, he had had medical training and a psychiatric residency, but had never taken a course in experimental psychology.

Author of The Body Keeps the Score.

At the time of this deposition, van der Kolk had not read any of the voluminous research literature on false memories or how hypnosis

can create them, nor was he aware of the documented unreliability of “clinical predictions based on interview information.” He had not read any of the research disconfirming his belief that traumatic memories are commonly repressed. Yet he has testified frequently and confidently on behalf of plaintiffs in repressed-memory cases. Like many clinicians, he is confident that he knows when a client is telling the truth, and whether a memory is true or false,

An understanding of how to think scientifically may not aid therapists in the subjective process of helping a client who is searching for answers to existential questions. But it matters profoundly when therapists claim expertise and certainty in domains in which unverified clinical opinion can ruin lives.

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.