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

by Carol Tavris

Why would people like anything associated with pain? But for Elliot, the answer was obvious: self-justification. The cognition “I am a sensible, competent person” is dissonant with the cognition “I went through a painful procedure to achieve something”—say, join a group—“that turned out to be boring and worthless.” Therefore, a person would distort his or her perceptions of the group in a positive direction, trying to find good things about it and ignoring the downside.

Why would people like anything associated with pain? But for Elliot, the answer was obvious: self-justification. The cognition “I am a sensible, competent person” is dissonant with the cognition “I went through a painful procedure to achieve something”—say, join a group—“that turned out to be boring and worthless.” Therefore, a person would distort his or her perceptions of the group in a positive direction, trying to find good things about it and ignoring the downside.

I will look at any additional evidence to confirm the opinion to which I have already come. —Lord Molson, twentieth-century British politician

I will look at any additional evidence to confirm the opinion to which I have already come. —Lord Molson, twentieth-century British politician

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

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

when people vent their feelings aggressively, they often feel worse, pump up their blood pressure, and make themselves even angrier.21

when people vent their feelings aggressively, they often feel worse, pump up their blood pressure, and make themselves even angrier.21

we can see prejudices in everyone but ourselves. Thanks to our ego-preserving blind spots, we cannot possibly have a prejudice, which is an irrational or mean-spirited feeling about all members of another group. Because we are not irrational or mean-spirited, any negative feelings we have about another group are justified; our dislikes are rational and well founded.

stereotypes flatten out differences within the category we are looking at and exaggerate differences between categories. Red Staters and Blue Staters often see each other as nonoverlapping categories, but plenty of Kansans do want evolution taught in their schools, and plenty of Californians oppose any kind of gun control.

All of us recognize variation within our own gender, party, ethnicity, or nation, but we are inclined to generalize about people in other categories and lump them all together as them.

Without feeling attached to groups that give our lives meaning, identity, and purpose, we would suffer the intolerable sensation that we were loose marbles rattling around in a random universe. Therefore, we will do what it takes to preserve these attachments. Evolutionary psychologists argue that ethnocentrism—the belief that your own culture, nation, or religion is superior to all others—aids survival by strengthening your bonds to your primary social groups and thus increasing your willingness to work, fight, and occasionally die for them. When things are going well, most of us feel pretty tolerant of other cultures and religions—and even of the other sex!—but when we are angry, anxious, or threatened, our blind spots are automatically activated. We have the human qualities of intelligence and deep emotions, but they are dumb, they are crybabies, they don’t know the meaning of love, shame, grief, or remorse.37

if we have enslaved members of another group, deprived them of decent educations or jobs, kept them from encroaching on our professional turfs, or denied them their human rights, then we invoke stereotypes about them to justify our actions. By persuading ourselves that they are unworthy, unteachable, incompetent, inherently math-challenged, immoral, sinful, stupid, or even subhuman, we avoid feeling guilty or unethical about how we treat them. And we certainly avoid feeling that we are prejudiced. Why, we even like some of those people, as long as they know their place, which, it goes without saying, is not here in our club, our university, our job, our neighborhood. In short, we use stereotypes to justify behavior that would otherwise make us feel bad about the kind of people we are or the kind of country we live in.

Prejudice justifies the ill treatment we inflict on others, and we want to inflict ill treatment on others because we don’t like them. And why don’t we like them? Because they are competing with us for jobs in a tough job market. Because their presence makes us doubt that ours is the one true religion. Because we want to preserve our positions of status, power, and privilege. Because our country is waging war against them. Because we are uncomfortable with their customs, especially their sexual customs, those promiscuous perverts. Because they refuse to assimilate into our culture. Because they are trying too hard to assimilate into our culture. Because we need to feel we are better than somebody.

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.

We do not remember everything that happens to us; we select only highlights. If we didn’t forget, our minds could not work efficiently, because they would be cluttered with mental junk—the temperature last Wednesday, a boring conversation on the bus, the price of peaches at the market yesterday. A very few people have a condition that allows them to remember just about everything, from a random fact like the weather on March 12, 1997, to public events to personal experiences, but this talent is not always the blessing it might appear. One woman with this ability described her memory as “non-stop, uncontrollable and totally exhausting” and “a burden.”5 Judicious pruning of memories is thus adaptive, and even people with extraordinary memories are not “recording” everything that happens to them as if on video.

Parent blaming is a popular and convenient form of self-justification because it allows people to live less uncomfortably with their regrets and imperfections. Mistakes were made, but only by my parents. Never mind that I raised hell about those lessons or stubbornly refused to take advantage of them. Memory thus minimizes our own responsibility and exaggerates theirs.

The public’s typical impulse is to take one party’s side and conclude that the other side is lying. But an understanding of memory and self-justification leads us to a more nuanced perspective: a person doesn’t have to be lying to be wrong.

All of us do grow and mature, but generally not as much as we think. This bias in memory explains why each of us feels that we have changed profoundly, but our friends, enemies, and loved ones are the same old friends, enemies, and loved ones they ever were. We run into Harry at the high-school reunion, and while Harry is busy describing how much he’s learned and grown since graduation, we’re nodding and saying to ourselves, “Same old Harry; a little fatter, a little balder.”

they are representative of the many thousands of people who have come to remember accounts of terrible suffering in their childhoods or adulthoods—experiences that were later proved beyond reasonable doubt to never have happened to them. Psychologists who have tested many of these individuals report that they do not suffer from schizophrenia or other psychotic disorders. Their mental problems, if they have any, fall within the usual range of human miseries: depression, anxiety, eating disorders, loneliness, or existential anomie. So, no, Wilkomirski and Andrews are not crazy or deceitful, but their memories are false, and false for particular, self-justifying reasons.

Certainly one of the most powerful stories that many people wish to live by is the victim narrative. Nobody has actually been abducted by aliens (though experiencers will argue fiercely with us), but millions have survived cruelties as children: neglect, sexual abuse, parental alcoholism, violence, abandonment, the horrors of war. Many people have come forward to tell their stories: how they coped, how they endured, what they learned, how they moved on. Stories of trauma and transcendence are inspiring examples of human resilience.37 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, rape, and other sexual traumas that allegedly were repressed from memory until they entered therapy in adulthood. Why would people claim to remember that they had suffered harrowing experiences if they hadn’t, especially when that belief causes rifts with families or friends? 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 bleak or merely mundane lives into dazzling victories over adversity. Memories of abuse also help them resolve the dissonance between “I am a smart, capable person” and “My life sure is a mess right now” with an explanation that m...

most of the people who have created false memories of early suffering, like those who believe they were abducted by aliens, go to great lengths to justify and preserve their new explanations. Consider the story of a young woman named Holly Ramona, who, after a year in college, went into therapy for treatment of depression and bulimia. The therapist told her that these common problems were usually symptoms of childhood sexual abuse, which Holly denied had ever happened to her. Yet over time, at the urging of the therapist and then at the hands of a psychiatrist who administered sodium amytal (popularly but mistakenly called “truth serum”), Holly came to remember that between the ages of five and sixteen she had been repeatedly raped by her father, who even forced her to have sex with the family dog. Holly’s outraged father sued both therapists for malpractice for “implanting or reinforcing false memories that [he] had molested her as a child.” The jury agreed, exonerating the father and finding the therapists guilty.39 This ruling put Holly in a state of dissonance that she could resolve in one of two ways: She could accept the verdict, realize that her memories were false, beg her father’s forgiveness, and attempt to reconcile the family that had been torn apart over her accusations. Or she could reject the verdict as a travesty of justice, become more convinced than ever that her father had abused her, and renew her commitment to recovered-memory therapy. The former, chan...

Where do epidemics go when they die? How come celebrities have not been turning up on talk shows lately to reveal their recovered memories of having been tortured as infants? Where are all the multiple personality cases? Have all the sadistic pedophiles closed down their daycare centers? Most of the teachers who were convicted have been freed on appeal, but many teachers and parents remain in prison, are confined to house arrest, or must live out their lives as registered sex offenders. Many lives were shattered and countless families have never been reunited. But cases of recovered memories of abuse in childhood still appear in the courts, in the news, in films.6 If you look closely at these stories, many involve a therapist who helped the person “recover” his or her memories. As for MPD, the clinics were eventually closed by successful lawsuits against the psychiatrists who had been inducing vulnerable patients to believe they had the disorder, and MPD began to fade from the cultural scene. In 2011, investigative journalist Debbie Nathan published a biography of Sybil showing that Cornelia Wilbur had virtually concocted the whole story to promote herself and sell books. Sybil did not have a childhood trauma that caused her personality to fragment; she generated her so-called personalities in response to pressures, subtle and coercive, by Wilbur, whom she wanted desperately to please—and who threatened to stop giving Sybil the drugs Wilbur had been prescribing for her and...

These beliefs did not pop up overnight in the cultural landscape, like mushrooms. 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. Their claims were based largely on lingering Freudian (and pseudo-Freudian) ideas about repression, memory, sexual trauma, and the meaning of dreams and on their own confidence in their clinical powers of insight and diagnosis. All of the claims these therapists made have since been scientifically studied. All of them are wrong.

None of us like learning that we were wrong, that our memories are distorted or confabulated, or that we made an embarrassing professional mistake. For people in any of the healing professions, the stakes are especially high. If you hold a set of beliefs that guide your practice and you learn that some of them are incorrect, you must either admit you were wrong and change your approach or reject the new evidence. If the mistakes are not too threatening to your view of your own competence and if you have not taken a public stand defending them, you will probably willingly change your approach, grateful to have a better one. But if some of those mistaken beliefs have made your clients’ problems worse, torn up your clients’ families, or sent innocent people to prison, then you, like Grace’s therapist, will have serious dissonance to resolve.

The word psychotherapist is largely unregulated; in many states, anyone can say that he or she is a therapist without having any training in anything.

thousands of mentally healthy people believe they were abducted by aliens and are able to report, with all the appropriate feeling, internally consistent stories of the bizarre experiments they believe they endured. As research psychologist John Kihlstrom observed, “The weakness of the relationship between accuracy and confidence is one of the best-documented phenomena in the 100-year history of eyewitness memory research,”14 but van der Kolk was unaware of a finding that just about every undergraduate who has taken Psychology 101 would know.

The courts agree that a person’s being in a coma stops the clock on the statute of limitations, but they do not agree about whether repressed memories also stop the clock. The resolution rests on the scientific merit of the claim that traumatic memories can be repressed or dissociated. If they can be, then civil and criminal actions can be brought within a certain time after the plaintiff remembers being molested rather than after the molestation itself. This is why, in such cases, the plaintiff’s attorneys bring in the biggest clinical guns they can find to testify about the existence of repression—or, nowadays, dissociation. Thanks to the huge popularity of neuroscience and studies of the brain, these experts, who testified for years about the existence of repressed memories, now wave around vague references to parts of the brain to support their new belief in the existence of dissociated memories,

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 their unverified clinical opinions 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. It forces us to confront our self-justifications and put them on public display for others to puncture. At its core, therefore, science is a form of arrogance control.

in his meticulous review of the experimental research and the clinical evidence, presented in his book Remembering Trauma, clinical psychologist Richard McNally concluded: “The notion that the mind protects itself by repressing or dissociating memories of trauma, rendering them inaccessible to awareness, is a piece of psychiatric folklore devoid of convincing empirical support.”21 Overwhelmingly, the evidence shows just the opposite. 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.

Clinicians who believe in repression see it everywhere, even where no one else does.

What is missing are the disconfirming cases, the abused children who do not grow up to become abusive parents. They are invisible to social workers and other mental-health professionals because, by definition, they don’t end up in prison or treatment. Research psychologists who have done longitudinal studies, following children over time, have found that while being physically abused as a child is associated with an increased chance of becoming an abusive parent, the great majority of abused children—nearly 70 percent—do not repeat their parents’ cruelties.24 If you are doing therapy with a victim of parental abuse or with an abusive parent, this information may not be relevant to you. But if you are in a position to make predictions that will affect whether, say, a parent should lose custody of a child, it most surely is.

said “Yes, it happened” to about 15 percent of the false allegations about the man’s visit; not a high percentage, but not a trivial one either. In the second group, however, the one in which influence tactics had been added, the three-year-olds said “Yes, it happened” to over 80 percent of the false allegations suggested to them, and the four- to six-year-olds said yes to about half the allegations. And those results occurred after interviews lasting only five to ten minutes; in actual criminal investigations, interviewers often question children repeatedly over weeks and months. In a similar study, this time with five- to seven-year-olds, investigators found they could easily influence the children to answer yes to preposterous questions, such as “Did Paco take you flying in an airplane?” What was more troubling was that within a short time, many of the children’s inaccurate statements had crystallized into stable, but false, memories.34

children under age five often cannot tell the difference between something they were told and something that actually happened to them.

We can understand why so many Susan Kelleys, prosecutors, and parents have been quick to assume the worst; no one wants to let a child molester go free. But no one should want to contribute to the conviction of an innocent adult either. Today, informed by years of experimental research with children, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and some individual states have drafted new model protocols for social workers, police investigators, and others who conduct child interviews.37 These protocols emphasize the hazards of the confirmation bias; they instruct interviewers to test the hypothesis of possible abuse and not assume they know what happened. The guidelines recognize that most children will readily disclose actual abuse, and some need prodding; the guidelines also caution against the use of techniques known to produce false reports. This change, from the uncritical “believe the children” to the more discerning “understand the children,” reflects a recognition that mental-health professionals need to think more like scientists and less like advocates; they must weigh all the evidence fairly and consider the possibility that their suspicions are unfounded. If they do not, it will not be justice that is served, but self-justification.

What is the status today of recovered-memory therapy and its fundamental assumption that traumatic experiences are usually repressed? As sensational cases have faded from public attention, it might seem that the issues have been resolved, sanity and science having prevailed. But as dissonance theory predicts, once an incorrect idea has achieved prominence, and especially if that idea has caused widespread harm, it rarely fades away. It lies in wait, like the false belief that vaccines cause autism, reemerging at any opportunity that might allow its promoters to claim they were right all along. Lawsuits are still being filed, and families are still being broken apart by people who, in therapy, came to remember having been sexually molested or otherwise abused.

There are almost no psychotherapists who practiced recovered-memory therapy, no child experts who sent the dozens of Bernard Barans to prison, who have admitted that they were wrong.

A comprehensive analysis of 707 cases of confirmed misconduct in California from 1997 through 2009 showed that the courts set aside the conviction or sentence or declared a mistrial in only about 20 percent of them. And only 1 percent of the prosecutors who committed misconduct were publicly disciplined by the state bar. The report concluded that “prosecutors continue to engage in misconduct, sometimes multiple times, almost always without consequence. And the courts’ reluctance to report prosecutorial misconduct and the State Bar’s failure to discipline it” allows prosecutors to get away with murder—in the case of falsely convicting innocent men, sometimes literally.11

the greatest impediment to admitting and correcting mistakes in the criminal justice system is that most of its members reduce dissonance by denying that there is a problem. “Our system has to create this aura of close to perfection, of certainty that we don’t convict innocent people,” said former prosecutor Bennett Gershman.49 The benefit of this certainty to police officers, detectives, and prosecutors is that they do not spend sleepless nights worrying that they might have put an innocent person in prison. But a few sleepless nights are called for. Doubt is not the enemy of justice; overconfidence is.

The antidote to these all-too-human mistakes is to ensure that in police academies and law schools, students learn about cognitive dissonance and their own vulnerability to self-justification.

no one, no matter how well trained or well intentioned, is completely immune to the confirmation bias and his or her own cognitive blind spots,

Seeing as how they have lived with themselves their whole lives, “their own way” feels natural, inevitable. Self-justification is blocking each partner from asking: Could I be wrong? Could I be making a mistake? Could I change?

self-justification is the prime suspect in the murder of a marriage.

The remarkable thing about self-justification is that it allows us to shift from one role to the other and back again in the blink of an eye without applying what we have learned from one role to the other. Feeling like a victim of injustice in one situation does not make us less likely to commit an injustice against someone else, nor does it make us more sympathetic to victims. It’s as if there is a brick wall between those two sets of experiences, blocking our ability to see the other side.

Perpetrators are motivated to reduce their moral culpability; victims are motivated to maximize their moral blamelessness. Depending on which side of the wall we are on, we systematically distort our memories and account of the event to produce the maximum consonance between what happened and how we see ourselves. By identifying these systematic distortions, the researchers showed how the two antagonists misperceive and misunderstand each other’s actions.

history is written by the victors, but it’s victims who write the memoirs.

As we follow the trail of self-justification through the territories of family, memory, therapy, law, prejudice, conflict, and war, two fundamental lessons from dissonance theory emerge: First, the ability to reduce dissonance helps us in countless ways, preserving our beliefs, confidence, decisions, self-esteem, and well-being. Second, this ability can get us into big trouble.

The art of living with dissonance is as much about coping with the scars on the soul as it is about avoiding them. Just as Odysseus had to steer his ship between Homer’s mythical sea monsters Scylla and Charybdis—embodiments of rocky shoals and a whirlpool in the Strait of Messina, both perilous to sailors—so we must find a path between the Scylla of blind self-justification on one side and the Charybdis of merciless self-flagellation on the other.

It is important to stay on the hook for a while, to suffer some anguish, confusion, and discomfort on the road to understanding what went wrong. Only then can we gain an appreciation of what we have to do to make it right.

the mind wants to protect itself from the pain of dissonance with the balm of self-justification, but the soul wants to confess.