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

by Carol Tavris

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.

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. When those beliefs are violated, even by a good experience, it causes us discomfort. An appreciation of the power of self-justification helps us understand why people who have low self-esteem or who simply believe that they are incompetent in some domain are not totally overjoyed when they do something well; on the contrary, they often feel like frauds. If the woman who believes she is unlovable meets a terrific guy who starts pursuing her seriously, she will feel momentarily pleased, but that pleasure is likely to be tarnished by a rush of dissonance: “What does he see in me?” Her resolution is unlikely to be “How nice; I must be more appealing than I thought I was.” More likely, it will be “As soon as he discovers the real me, he’ll dump me.” She will pay a high psychological price to have that consonance restored.

This process illustrates how people who have been sorely tempted, battled temptation, and almost given in to it—but resisted at the eleventh hour—come to dislike, even despise, those who did not succeed in the same effort.

When the person at the top of the pyramid is uncertain, when there are benefits and costs for both choices, then he or she will feel a particular urgency to justify the choice made. But by the time the person is at the bottom of the pyramid, ambivalence will have morphed into certainty, and he or she will be miles away from anyone who took a different route.

In one experiment, Ross took peace proposals created by Israeli negotiators, labeled them as Palestinian proposals, and asked Israeli citizens to judge them. “The Israelis liked the Palestinian proposal attributed to Israel more than they liked the Israeli proposal attributed to the Palestinians,” he says. “If your own proposal isn’t going to be attractive to you when it comes from the other side, what chance is there that the other side’s proposal is going to be attractive when it actually comes from the other side?”

All of us are as unaware of our blind spots as fish are unaware of the water they swim in, but those who swim in the waters of privilege have a particular motivation to remain oblivious.

When affluent people speak of the underprivileged, they rarely thank their lucky stars that they are privileged, let alone consider that they might be overprivileged.

A stereotype might bend or even shatter under the weight of disconfirming information, but the hallmark of prejudice is that it is impervious to reason, experience, and counterexample.

Social psychologists Chris Crandall and Amy Eshelman, reviewing the huge research literature on prejudice, found that whenever people are emotionally depleted—when they are sleepy, frustrated, angry, anxious, drunk, or stressed—they become more willing to express their real prejudices toward another group.

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. This is especially important for people in positions of power.

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, God forbid, may be right or have a point we should take seriously.

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.”

Elizabeth Loftus, a leading scientist in the field of memory, calls this process “imagination inflation,” because the more you imagine something, the more confident you become that it really happened—and the more likely you are to inflate it into an actual memory, adding details as you go.

Currently, the professional training of most police officers, detectives, judges, and attorneys includes almost no information about their own cognitive biases; how to correct for them, as much as possible; and how to manage the dissonance they will feel when their beliefs meet disconfirming evidence. On the contrary, much of what they learn about psychology comes from self-proclaimed experts with no training in psychological science and who, as we saw, do not teach them to be more accurate in their judgments, merely more confident that they are accurate: “An innocent person would never confess.”

Yet training that promotes the certainties of pseudoscience rather than a humbling appreciation of our cognitive biases and blind spots increases the chances of wrongful convictions in two ways. First, it encourages law enforcement officials to jump to conclusions too quickly. A police officer decides that a suspect is the guilty party and then closes the door to other possibilities. A district attorney decides impulsively to prosecute a case, especially a sensational one, without having all the evidence; she announces her decision to the media and then finds it difficult to back down when subsequent evidence proves shaky. Second, once a case is prosecuted and a conviction won, officials will be motivated to reject any subsequent evidence of the defendant’s innocence.

Some couples find in marriage a source of solace and joy, a place to replenish the soul, a relationship that allows them to flourish as individuals and as a couple. For others, marriage becomes a source of bickering and discord, a place of stagnation, a relationship that squashes their individuality and dissipates their bond. Our goal in this chapter is not to imply that all relationships can and should be saved, but rather to show how self-justification contributes to these two different outcomes.

Each of them understands the other’s point of view perfectly, but the need for self-justification is preventing them from accepting the other’s position as legitimate. It is motivating each of them to see his or her own way as the better way, indeed the only reasonable way.

Debra’s implicit theory is that Frank is socially awkward and passive; his theory is that Debra is insecure and cannot accept herself or him as they are. 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.

The shouter who protests, “That’s the way I am!” is, however, rarely inclined to extend the same self-forgiving justification to the partner. On the contrary, he or she is likely to turn it into an infuriating insult: “That’s the way you are—you’re just like your mother!” Generally, the remark does not refer to your mother’s sublime baking skills or her talent at dancing the tango. It means that you are like your mother genetically and irredeemably; there’s nothing you can do about it.

And when people feel they can’t do anything about it, they feel unjustly accused, as if they were being criticized for being too short or too freckled. 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.

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.

The Crusades indeed gave European Christians license to massacre hundreds of thousands of Muslim “infidels.” (Thousands of Jews were also slaughtered as the pilgrims marched through Europe to Jerusalem, which is why some Jewish historians call the Crusades “the first Holocaust.”)

Who were the victims? It depends on how many years, decades, and centuries you take into account. By the middle of the tenth century, more than a hundred years before the Crusades began, half the Christian world had been conquered by Muslim Arab armies: the city of Jerusalem and countries in which Christianity had been established for centuries, including Egypt, Sicily, Spain, and Turkey. In 1095, Pope Urban II called on the French aristocracy to wage holy war against all Muslims.

The pope assured his forces that killing a Muslim was an act of Christian penance. Anyone killed in battle, the pope promised, would bypass thousands of years of torture in purgatory and go directly to heaven. Does this incentive to generate martyrs who will die for your cause sound familiar? It has everything but the virgins.

And Garton Ash was moving the start date back only a couple of centuries. Others would move it back a couple of millennia. 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.

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.

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.

Social scientists are finding that once people are aware of their biases, know how they work, and pay mindful attention to them—in effect, once they bring them into consciousness and say, “There you are, you little bastard”—they have greater power to control them. Consider the bias we discussed in the first chapter, naive realism: the bias to believe that we see things clearly and therefore have no bias. This bias is the central impediment to negotiations between any two individuals or groups in conflict who see things entirely differently.

thought of Reagan’s action, Peres neither condemned Reagan personally nor minimized the seriousness of the visit to Bitburg. 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

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. People who hold both of these ideas are often afraid to admit error because they take it as evidence that they are blithering idiots; they cannot separate the mistake from their identity and self-esteem.

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.

So embedded is the link between mistakes and stupidity in American culture that it can be shocking to learn that not all cultures share it.

Their epiphany occurred as they watched a Japanese boy struggle with the assignment of drawing cubes in three dimensions on the blackboard. The boy kept at it for forty-five minutes, making repeated mistakes, as Stevenson and Stigler became increasingly anxious and embarrassed for him. Yet the boy himself was utterly unself-conscious, and the American observers wondered why they felt worse than he did. “Our culture exacts a great cost psychologically for making a mistake,” Stigler recalled, “whereas in Japan, it doesn’t seem to be that way. In Japan, mistakes, error, confusion [are] all just a natural part of the learning process.”21

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.

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.

Demagogues thrive and flourish on the reasoning and self-justifications of those willing to push aside their moral objections in exchange for political advantage. And, above all, demagogues exploit public prejudices and ignorance, fomenting anger and hatred at the expense of reasoned argument.

someone who “sucks up and shits down”

have learned that a democracy rests not only on its laws and institutions but also on its norms and values—and on the consensus of its citizenry that those norms and values are worth upholding.