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

by Carol Tavris

At its core, therefore, science is a form of arrogance control.

The problem for most people who have suffered traumatic experiences is not that they forget them but that

they cannot forget them: The memories keep intruding.

This is obviously disconfirming information for clinicians committed to the belief that people who have been brutalized for years will repress the memory. If they are right, surely Holocaust survivors would be leading candidates for repression.

If preschoolers overhear adults exchanging rumors about some event, for example, many of the children will later come to believe they actually experienced the event themselves.

In all these studies, the most powerful finding is that adults are highly likely to taint an interview when they go into it already convinced that a child has been molested. When that is so, there is only one “truth” they are prepared to accept when they ask the child to tell the truth. Like Susan Kelley, they never accept the child’s “no”; “no” means the child is denying or repressing or afraid to tell. The child can do nothing to convince the adult she has not been molested.

Today, some of the psychotherapists who joined the recovered-memory movement continue to do what they have been doing for years, helping clients uncover “repressed” memories. (Most have become cautious, however, fearing lawsuits.) Others have quietly dropped their focus on repressed memories of incest as the leading explanation of their clients’ problems; it has gone out of fashion, just as penis envy, frigidity, and masturbatory insanity did decades ago. They drop one fad when it loses steam and sign on for the next, rarely pausing to question where all the repressed incest cases went. They might hear vaguely that there is controversy, but it’s easier to stay with what they have always done, and maybe add a newer technique to go along with it.

and fortune by claiming that repressed memories of abuse cause multiple personality disorder, eventually agreed that “suggestible individuals can have memories elaborated within their minds because of poor therapeutic technique.”

Chapter 5 Law and Disorder

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.’”21 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.

The most common justification for lying and planting evidence is that the end justifies the means. One officer told the Mollen Commission investigators that he was “doing God’s work.” Another said, “If we’re going to catch these guys, fuck the Constitution.”

Detectives are proud of their ability to trick a suspect into confessing; it’s a mark of how well they have learned their trade. The greater their confidence, the greater the dissonance they will feel if confronted with evidence that they were wrong, and the greater the need to reject that evidence.

Wrong. The “natural human reaction” is usually not anger and mistrust but confusion and hopelessness—dissonance—because most innocent suspects trust the investigator not to lie to them. The interrogator, however, is biased from the start.

Once an interrogation like this has begun, there is no such thing as disconfirming evidence.

The interrogator’s presumption of guilt creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. It makes the interrogator more aggressive, which in turn makes innocent suspects behave more suspiciously.

“I was at an International Police Interviewing conference in Quebec, on a debate panel with Joe Buckley, president of the Reid School,” he told us. “After his presentation, someone from the audience asked whether he was concerned that innocent people might confess in response to his techniques. Son of a gun if he didn’t say it, word for word; I was so surprised at his overt display of such arrogance that I wrote down the quote and the date on which he said it: ‘No, because we don’t interrogate innocent people.’”

If you are strong enough, wealthy enough, or have had enough experience with the police to know that you are being set up, you will say the four magic words: “I want a lawyer.” But many people believe they don’t need a lawyer if they are innocent.

Believing as they do that the police are not allowed to lie to them, they are astonished to hear that there is evidence against them that they cannot explain.

you repressed the memory; you didn’t know that you have multiple personality disorder,

Chapter 6 Love’s Assassin: Self-justification in Marriage

Every marriage is a story, and like all stories, it is subject to its participants’ distorted perceptions and memories that preserve the narrative as each side sees

Self-justification is blocking each partner from asking: Could I be wrong? Could I be making a mistake? Could I change?

The trouble is that once people develop an implicit theory, the confirmation bias kicks in and they stop seeing evidence that doesn’t fit 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.

Because the shamed person has nowhere to go to escape the desolate feeling of humiliation, Tangney found, shamed spouses tend to strike back in anger: “You make me feel that I did an awful thing because I’m reprehensible and incompetent. Since I don’t think I am reprehensible and incompetent, you must be reprehensible to humiliate me this way.”

the most destructive emotion a relationship can evoke: contempt.

Contemptuous exchanges like this one are devastating because they destroy the one thing that self-justification is designed to protect: our feelings of self-worth, of being loved, of being a good and respected person.

Contempt emerges only after years of squabbles and quarrels that keep resulting, as for Frank and Debra, in yet another unsuccessful effort to get the other person to behave differently.

Anger reflects the hope that a problem can be corrected. When it burns out, it leaves the ashes of resentment and contempt. And contempt is the handmaiden of hopelessness.

Thanks to the revisionist power of memory to justify our decisions, by the time many couples divorce, they can’t remember why they married.

Observers of divorcing couples are often baffled by what seems like unreasonable vindictiveness on the part of the person who initiated the separation; what they are observing is dissonance reduction in action.

In contrast, the couples who grow together over the years have figured out a way to live with a minimum of self-justification, which is another way of saying that they are able to put empathy for the partner ahead of defending their own territory.

Successful, stable couples are able to listen to the partner’s criticisms, concerns, and suggestions undefensively. In our terms, they are able to yield, just enough, on the self-justifying excuse “That’s the kind of person I am.” They reduce the dissonance caused by small irritations by overlooking them, and they reduce the dissonance caused by their mistakes and major problems by solving them.

we asked these couples, in effect, how, over the years, they reduced the dissonance between “I love this person” and “This person is doing something that is driving me crazy.”

Chapter 7 Wounds, Rifts, and Wars

High-stomached are they both, and full of ire, In rage deaf as the sea, hasty as fire. —William Shakespeare, Richard II

As social psychologists, we want to add one additional concern: what torture does to the individual perpetrator and to the ordinary citizens who go along with it.

Most people want to believe that their government is working in their behalf, that it knows what it’s doing, and that it’s doing the right thing. Therefore, if our 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.

“Every successful revolution,” observed the historian Barbara Tuchman, “puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.” Why not? The victors, former victims, feel justified.

Chapter 8 Letting Go and Owning Up

A man travels many miles to consult the wisest guru in the land. When he arrives, he asks the wise man: “Oh, wise guru, what is the secret of a happy life?” “Good judgment,” says the guru. “But oh, wise guru,” says the man, “how do I achieve good judgment?” “Bad judgment,” says the guru.

is to learn from the wrong thing. The last American president to tell the country he had made a terrible mistake was John F. Kennedy in 1961.

The invasion was a disaster, but Kennedy learned from it. He reorganized his intelligence system and determined that he would no longer accept uncritically the claims of his military advisers, a change that helped him steer the country successfully through the subsequent Cuban missile crisis.

The need to reduce dissonance is a universal mental mechanism, but that doesn’t mean we are doomed to be controlled by it. 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 appreciation of how dissonance works, in ourselves and others, gives us some ways to override our wiring. And protect us from those who can’t.

“When a friend makes a mistake,” he said, “the friend remains a friend, and the mistake remains a mistake.”

Consider for a moment the benefits of being able to separate dissonant thoughts as clearly as Peres did: Friendships that might otherwise be terminated in a huff are preserved; mistakes that might otherwise be dismissed as unimportant are properly criticized and their perpetrator held accountable.

Pratkanis says. “A lecture just makes the victim feel more defensive and pushes him or her further into the clutches of the fraud criminal.” Anyone who understands dissonance knows why. Shouting “What were you thinking?” will backfire because it means “Boy, are you stupid. Such accusations cause already embarrassed victims to withdraw further into themselves and clam up, refusing to tell anyone what they are doing.

Therefore, says Pratkanis, before a victim of a scam will inch back from the precipice, he or she needs to feel respected and supported. Helpful relatives can encourage the person to talk about his or her values and how those values influenced what happened, while they listen uncritically.