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

by Carol Tavris

Dissonance reduction operates like the burner on a stove, keeping our self-esteem bubbling along.

Self-justification, therefore, will protect high self-esteem to avoid dissonance, but it will also protect low self-esteem if that is a default self-perception.

mistakes were made, memory helps us remember that they were made by someone else. If we were there, we were just innocent bystanders.

By far, the most well-traveled path from uncomfortable or ambiguous sexual negotiations to honest false testimony is alcohol—especially alcohol in the amounts that make participants blind drunk or cause blackouts, an epidemic problem on college campuses. Alcohol not only reduces inhibitions but also significantly impairs the cognitive interpretation of another person’s behavior; men who are drunk are less likely to interpret non-consent messages accurately, and women who are drunk convey less emphatic signs of refusal. Most of all, alcohol severely impairs both partners’ memory of what transpired between them. And as they form their memories, self-justification will freeze them in amber.

The alternative, that you sent an innocent man to prison for fifteen years, is so antithetical to your view of your competence that you will jump through multiple mental hoops to convince yourself that you couldn’t possibly have made such a blunder.

Over time, observes McClurg, they “learn to smother their dissonance under a protective mattress of self-justification.”

“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.”

Self-justification doesn’t care whether it reaps benefits or wreaks havoc.

Differences need not cause rifts. But once there is a rift, the couple explains it as being an inevitable result of their differences.

From our standpoint, therefore, misunderstandings, conflicts, personality differences, and even angry quarrels are not the assassins of love; self-justification is.

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.

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.

Understanding without vengeance, reparation without retaliation, are possible only if we are willing to stop justifying our own position.

These courageous individuals take us straight into the heart of dissonance and its innermost irony: the mind wants to protect itself from the pain of dissonance with the balm of self-justification, but the soul wants to confess. To reduce dissonance, most of us put an enormous amount of mental and physical energy into protecting ourselves and propping up our self-esteem when it sags under the realization that we have been foolish, gullible, mistaken, corrupt, or otherwise human.

The need to reduce dissonance is a universal mental mechanism, but, as these stories illustrate, that doesn’t mean we are doomed to be controlled by it.

The ultimate correction for the tunnel vision that afflicts all of us mortals is more light.

Once we understand how and when we need to reduce dissonance, we can become more vigilant about the process and often nip it in the bud, catching ourselves before we slide too far down the pyramid.

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.

Understanding how the mind yearns for consonance and rejects information that questions our beliefs, decisions, or preferences not only teaches us to be open to the possibility of error but also helps us let go of the need to be right.