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

by Carol Tavris

We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.

I see no reason why I should be consciously wrong today because I was unconsciously wrong yesterday. —Supreme Court Justice Robert

Children learn to justify their aggressive actions early; a child hits his younger sibling, who starts to cry, and immediately the boy claims, “But he started it! He deserved it!” Most parents find these childish self-justifications to be of no great consequence, and usually they aren’t. But it is sobering to realize that the same mechanism underlies the behavior of gangs who bully weaker children, employers who mistreat workers, lovers who abuse each other, police officers who continue beating a suspect who has surrendered, tyrants who imprison and oppress ethnic minorities, and soldiers who commit atrocities against civilians. In all these cases, a vicious circle is created: Aggression begets self-justification, which begets more aggression. Fyodor Dostoyevsky understood perfectly how this process works. In The Brothers Karamazov, he has Fyodor Pavlovitch, the brothers’ scoundrel of a father, recall “how he had once in the past been asked, ‘Why do you hate so-and-so so much?’ And he had answered them, with his shameless impudence, ‘I’ll tell you. He has done me no harm.

The specific tactics vary, but our efforts at self-justification are all designed to serve our need to feel good about what we have done, what we believe, and who we are.

And why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye, but do not consider the plank in your own eye?

When you enter the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, you find yourself in a room of interactive exhibits designed to identify the people you can’t tolerate. The familiar targets are there (blacks, women, Jews, gays), but also short people, fat people, blond-female people, disabled people . . . You watch a video on the vast variety of prejudices designed to convince you that all human beings have at least a few, and then you are invited to enter the museum proper through one of two doors, one marked PREJUDICED, the other marked UNPREJUDICED. The latter door is locked, in case anyone misses the point, and occasionally some people do. When we were visiting the museum one afternoon, we were treated to the sight of four Hasidic Jews pounding angrily on the Unprejudiced door, demanding to be let in.

Along with the confirmation bias, the brain comes packaged with other self-serving habits that allow us to justify our own perceptions and beliefs as being accurate, realistic, and unbiased. Social psychologist Lee Ross named this phenomenon “naive realism,” the inescapable conviction that we perceive objects and events clearly, “as they really are.”2 We assume that other reasonable people see things the same way we do. If they disagree with us, they obviously aren’t seeing clearly.

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 Marynia Farnham achieved fame and fortune during the 1940s and 1950s by advising women to stay at home and raise children or risk frigidity, neuroses, and a loss of femininity, she saw no inconsistency (or irony) in the fact that she was privileged to be a physician who was not staying at home raising her own two children. 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. Privilege is their blind spot.7 It is invisible and they don’t think twice about it; they justify their social position as something they are entitled to. In one way or another, all of us are blind to whatever privileges life has handed us, even if those privileges are temporary. Most people who normally fly in an airline’s main cabin regard the privileged people in business and first class as wasteful snobs, if enviable ones. Imagine paying all that extra money for a mere six-hour flight! But as soon as they are the ones paying for the business seats, that attitude vanishes, replaced by a self-justifying mixture of pity and disdain for their fellow passengers forlornly trooping past them into steerage.

Both parties believe they are telling the truth, but one or both may be wrong because of the unreliability of memory—which is reconstructive in nature and exquisitely susceptible to suggestion—and because both are motivated to justify their actions. Self-justification causes individuals to distort or rewrite their memories to conform to their views of themselves, which is why they can “remember” saying things that they only thought about saying or intended to say at the time. As a result, the woman might falsely remember saying things that she thought about saying but did not say to stop the situation, because she sees herself as an assertive person who would stand up for herself. The man might falsely remember that he tried to verify the woman’s consent (which he did not do), because he sees himself as a decent guy who would never rape a woman. She’s not necessarily lying; she’s misremembering. He’s not necessarily lying; he’s self-justifying.

memories might be wrong, might encourage people to hold their memories more lightly, drop the certainty that their memories are always accurate, and let go of the appealing impulse to use the past to justify problems of the present. We’re told to be careful what we wish for because it might come true. But we must also be careful which memories we select to justify our lives, because we will have to live by them.

Naturally, not all scientists are scientific—that is, open-minded and willing to give up their strong convictions or admit that conflicts of interest might taint their research. But even when an individual scientist is not self-correcting, science eventually is.

Scientific reasoning is useful to anyone in any job because it makes us face the possibility, even the dire reality, that we were mistaken.

Doubt is not the enemy of justice; overconfidence is.

Benjamin Franklin, who advised, “Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, and half shut afterward,” understood the power of dissonance in relationships. Couples first justify their decision to be together and then their decision to stay together. When you buy a house, you start reducing dissonance immediately. You tell your friends the wonderful things you love about it (the view of the trees, the space, the original old windows) and minimize the things that are wrong with it (the view of the parking lot, the cramped kitchen, the drafty old windows). In this case, self-justification will keep you feeling happy about your beautiful new home. If, before you fell in love with it, a geologist had told you that the cliff above you was unstable and might give way at any moment, you would have welcomed the information and walked away, sad but not heartbroken. But once you have fallen in love with your house, spent more than you could really afford to buy it, and moved in with your unwilling cat, you have too much invested, emotionally and financially, to walk away easily. If, after you are in the house, someone tells you that the cliff above you is precarious, that same impulse to justify your decision may keep you there far too long.

Anger reflects the hope that a problem can be corrected. When it burns out, it leaves the ashes of resentment and contempt. And contempt is the handmaiden of hopelessness.

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.

Social psychologist Roy Baumeister and his colleagues showed how smoothly self-justification works to minimize any bad feelings we have as doers of harm and to maximize any righteous feelings we have as victims.4 They asked sixty-three people to provide autobiographical accounts of a “victim story,” when they had been angered or hurt by someone else, and a “perpetrator story,” a time when they had made someone else angry. They did not use the term perpetrator in its common criminal sense, to describe someone actually guilty of a crime or other wrongdoing, and in this section neither will we; we will use the word, as they do, to mean anyone who perpetrated an action that harmed or offended another.

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.

It may sometimes be hard to define good, but evil has its unmistakable odor: Every child knows what pain is. Therefore, each time we deliberately inflict pain on another, we know what we are doing. We are doing evil.