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

by Carol Tavris

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.