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by
Carol Tavris
Andrew Wakefield, had had a conflict of interest he had failed to disclose to the journal: he was conducting research on behalf of lawyers representing parents of autistic children.
incentive to overlook other explanations. In fact, five major studies have found no causal relationship between autism and thimerosal, the preservative in the vaccines that was the supposed cause (thimerosal was removed from the vaccines in 2001, with no attendant decrease in autism rates).
That is the lingering legacy of self-justification, because most of the anti-vaccine alarmists have never said, “We were wrong, and look at the harm we caused.”
The evidence shows, however, that most physicians are influenced even more by small gifts than by big ones.
That year, Campanis punched a bigoted player who had insulted Robinson and, subsequently, championed the admission of black players into Major League Baseball.
In his timeless book The Nature of Prejudice, written in 1954, social psychologist Gordon Allport described the responses characteristic of a prejudiced man when confronted with evidence contradicting his beliefs: MR. X: The trouble with Jews is that they only take care of their own group. MR. Y: But the record of the Community Chest campaign shows that they give more generously, in proportion to their numbers, to the general charities of the community, than do non-Jews. MR. X: That shows they are always trying to buy favor and intrude into Christian affairs. They think of nothing but money;
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Memories create our stories, but our stories also create our memories. Once we have a narrative, we shape our memories to fit into it.
We misremember our history as being worse than it was, thus distorting our perception of how much we have improved so that we’ll feel better about ourselves now.
Before these physicians could accept his simple, lifesaving intervention, they would have had to admit that they had been the cause of the deaths of all those women in their care. This was an intolerable realization, for it went straight to the heart of the physicians’ view of themselves as medical experts and wise healers.
Every so often, a heartwarming news story tells of a shipwrecked sailor who was on the verge of drowning in a turbulent sea. Suddenly, a dolphin popped up at his side and, gently but firmly, nudged the swimmer safely to shore. It is tempting to conclude that dolphins must really like human beings, enough to save us from drowning. But wait—are dolphins aware that humans don’t swim as well as they do? Are they actually intending to be helpful? To answer that question, we would need to know how many shipwrecked sailors have been gently nudged farther out to sea by dolphins, there to drown and
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For example, in Philadelphia, District Attorney Bruce L. Castor Jr. refused to accept the results of a DNA test that exonerated a man who had been in prison for twenty years. When reporters asked him what scientific basis he had for rejecting the test, he replied, “I have no scientific basis. I know because I trust my detective and my tape-recorded confession.”43
Early in an investigation, the police use DNA to confirm a suspect’s guilt or rule the person out. But when DNA tests are conducted after a defendant has been indicted and convicted, the prosecutors typically dismiss DNA results as irrelevant, not important enough to reopen the case.
