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

by Carol Tavris

Memories are often pruned and shaped with an ego-enhancing bias that blurs the edges of past events, softens culpability, and distorts what really happened.

The results are always the same: severe initiations increase a member’s liking for the group.

Once we are invested in a belief and have justified its wisdom, changing our minds is literally hard work. It’s much easier to slot that new evidence into an existing framework and do the mental justification to keep it there than it is to change the framework.

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. Therefore, when you are about to make a big purchase or an important decision—which car or computer to buy, whether to undergo plastic surgery, or whether to sign up for a costly self-help program—don’t ask someone who has just done it. That person will be highly motivated to convince you that it is the right thing to do.

Throw that doll, hit a punching bag, shout at your spouse; you’ll feel better afterward. Actually, decades of experimental research have found exactly the opposite: when people vent their feelings aggressively, they often feel worse, pump up their blood pressure, and make themselves even angrier.

When people do a good deed, particularly when they do it on a whim or by chance, they will come to see the beneficiary of their generosity in a warmer light. Their cognition that they went out of their way to do a favor for this person is dissonant with any negative feelings they might have had about him. In effect, after doing the favor, they ask themselves: “Why would I do something nice for a jerk? Therefore, he’s not as big a jerk as I thought he was—as a matter of fact, he is a pretty decent guy who deserves a break.”

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.”

How do you get an honest man to lose his ethical compass? You get him to take one step at a time, and self-justification will do the rest.

Closer to home, social psychologist Geoffrey Cohen found that Democrats will endorse an extremely restrictive welfare proposal, one usually associated with Republicans, if they think it has been proposed by the Democratic Party, and Republicans will support a generous welfare policy if they think it comes from the Republican Party.

conservative members of the Roberts court ruled in favor of conservative speakers about 65 percent of the time and liberal speakers about 21 percent. The gap for liberal justices was not as great, more like 10 percent, but they too were more likely to vote in support of speakers whose political philosophy they shared.

We take our own involvement in an issue as a source of accuracy and enlightenment (“I’ve felt strongly about gun control for years, therefore I know what I’m talking about”), but we regard such personal feelings on the part of others who hold different views as a source of bias (“She can’t possibly be impartial about gun control because she’s felt strongly about it for years”).

But in this study, some of the experts were told they’d been hired by the defense; others were told they’d been hired by the prosecution, with the result that their assessments tilted toward their presumed employer: those who believed they were working for the prosecution assigned higher risk scores to offenders, and those who believed they were working for the defense assigned lower risk scores.

Once people have a prejudice, just as once they have a political ideology, they do not easily drop it, even if the evidence indisputably contradicts a core justification for it. Rather, they come up with another justification to preserve their belief or rationalize a course of action.

Participants successfully control their negative feelings under normal conditions, but as soon as they become angry or frustrated or when their self-esteem wobbles, they express their prejudice directly because now they can justify it: “I’m not a bad or prejudiced person, but, hey—he insulted me!”

Social psychologist Anthony Greenwald has described the self as being ruled by a “totalitarian ego” that ruthlessly destroys information it doesn’t want to hear and, like all fascist leaders, rewrites history from the standpoint of the victor.

Each side tended to remember the plausible arguments agreeing with their own position and the implausible arguments agreeing with the opposing position; each side forgot the implausible arguments for their view and the plausible arguments for the opposition.

In 1962, Daniel Offer, a young resident in psychiatry, and his colleagues interviewed seventy-three teenage boys about their home lives, sexuality, religion, parents, parental discipline, and other emotionally charged topics. Offer and his colleagues were able to re-interview almost all these fellows thirty-four years later, when they were forty-eight years old, to ask them what they remembered. “Remarkably,” the researchers concluded, “the men’s ability to guess what they had said about themselves in adolescence was no better than chance.”

This dance of ambiguity benefits both partners; through vagueness and indirection, each party’s ego is protected in case the other says no. Indirection saves a lot of hurt feelings, but it also causes problems: the woman really thinks the man should have known she wanted him to stop, and he really thinks she gave consent.

When people recall actions that are dissonant with their current view of themselves—for example, when religious people are asked to remember times they did not attend religious services when they felt they should have, or when antireligious people remember attending services—they visualize the memory from a third-person perspective, as if they were impartial observers. But when they remember actions that are consonant with their current identities, they tell a first-person story, as if they were looking at their former selves through their own eyes.

For people who have always remembered a traumatic or secret experience, writing can indeed be beneficial, often enabling sufferers to see their experience in a new light and begin to put it behind them.21 But for those who are trying to remember something that never happened, writing, analyzing dreams, and drawing pictures—techniques that are the staples of many psychotherapists—are all methods that quickly conflate imagination with reality.

In their paper “The Seductive Appeal of Neuroscience Explanations,” Deena Weisberg and her colleagues demonstrated that if you give one group of laypeople a straightforward explanation of some behavior and another group the same explanation but with vague references to the brain thrown in (“brain scans indicate” or “the frontal-lobe brain circuitry known to be involved”), people assume the latter is more scientific—and therefore more real.

For any theory to be scientific, it must be stated in such a way that it can be shown to be false as well as true.

Once a detective decides that he or she has found the killer, the confirmation bias sees to it that the prime suspect becomes the only suspect. And if the prime suspect happens to be innocent, too bad—he’s still on the ropes.

(Currently, in most jurisdictions, police trainees get one evening or a couple of hours on dealing with ethical problems.)

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.

Neither party pauses in mid-rant to consider if the ex’s terribleness might be a result of the terrible situation, much less to consider if the ex’s terribleness might be a response to their own terrible behavior. Each action that one partner takes evokes a self-justified retaliation from the other, and voilà, they are on a course of reciprocal, escalating animosity.

We have all done something that made others angry at us, and we have all been spurred to anger by what others have done to us. We all have, intentionally or unintentionally, hurt another person who will forever regard us as the villain, the betrayer, the scoundrel.

The old joke—the other guy’s broken leg is trivial; our broken fingernail is serious—turns out to be an accurate description of our neurological wiring.

When we construct narratives that “make sense,” however, we do so in a self-serving way. Perpetrators are motivated to reduce their moral culpability; victims are motivated to maximize their moral blamelessness.

Perpetrators may be motivated to get over the episode quickly and give it closure, but victims have long memories; an event that is trivial and forgettable to the former may be a source of lifelong rage to the latter.

We can all understand why victims would want to retaliate. But retaliation often makes the original perpetrators minimize the severity and harm of their side’s actions and claim the mantle of victim themselves, thereby setting in motion a cycle of oppression and revenge. “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.

The pain of living with horrors you have committed but cannot morally accept is searing, which is why most people will reach for any justification available to assuage the dissonance.

dehumanization. Combine self-justifying perpetrators and victims who are helpless, and you have a recipe for the escalation of brutality. This brutality is not confined to brutes—that is, sadists or psychopaths. It can be, and usually is, committed by ordinary individuals, people who have children and lovers, “civilized” people who enjoy music and food and making love and gossiping as much as anyone else. This is one of the most thoroughly documented findings in social psychology, but it is also the most difficult for many people to accept because of the enormous dissonance it produces: “What can I possibly have in common with perpetrators of murder and torture?” It is much more reassuring to believe that they are evil and be done with them.

Mediators and negotiators therefore have two challenges: to persuade perpetrators to acknowledge and atone for the harm they caused, and to persuade victims to relinquish the impulse for revenge while recognizing and sympathizing with the harm they have suffered.

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.

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 last American president to tell the country he had made a mistake that had disastrous consequences was John F. Kennedy in 1961.

Recipients of an honest admission of error are not the only beneficiaries. When we ourselves are forced to face our own mistakes and take responsibility for them, the result can be an exhilarating, liberating experience.

Kardon’s exercise illuminates just how difficult it is to say, “Boy, did I mess up,” without the protective postscript of self-justification—to say “I dropped a routine fly ball with the bases loaded” rather than “I dropped the ball because the sun was in my eyes” or “because a bird flew by” or “because it was windy” or “because a fan called me a jerk.”

And if you can admit a mistake when it is the size of an acorn, it will be easier to repair than if you wait until it becomes the size of a tree, with deep, wide-ranging roots.

Many of the children who were praised for their efforts even when they didn’t get it right eventually performed better and liked what they were learning more than children who were praised for their natural abilities did.

All of us can carry this understanding into our private lives: something we did can be separated from who we are and who we want to be. Our past selves need not be a blueprint for our future selves.