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

by Carol Tavris

When there is incontrovertible evidence of wrongdoing, the public longs to hear authorities own up, without weaseling or blowing smoke, followed by the next part: “And I will do my best to ensure that it will not happen again.”

Traditionally, most doctors have been adamant in their refusal to admit mistakes in diagnosis, procedure, or treatment on the self-justifying grounds that doing so would encourage malpractice suits. They are wrong. Studies of hospitals across the country have found that patients are actually less likely to sue when doctors admit and apologize for mistakes and when changes are implemented so that future patients will not be harmed in the same way.

Doctors’ second self-justification for not disclosing mistakes is that doing so would puncture their aura of infallibility and omniscience, which, they maintain, is essential to their patients’ compliance and confidence in them. They are wrong about this too.

Because “believing is seeing,” people can watch the same videos of the same events—such as the dozens of police killings of African Americans that spurred the Black Lives Matter movement—and come away with entirely different views of what they saw and who was to blame.

We can try to balance sympathy and skepticism. And then we can learn to hold our conclusions lightly, lightly enough so that we can let them go if justice demands that we do.

Understanding how dissonance operates helps us rethink our own muddles, and it’s also a useful skill for helping friends and relatives get out of theirs. Too often, out of the best of intentions, we do the very thing guaranteed to make matters worse: We hector, lecture, bully, plead, or threaten.

It is certainly important for children to learn to succeed, but it is just as important for them to learn not to fear failure. When children or adults fear failure, they fear risk. They can’t afford to be wrong.

In the final analysis, a nation’s character, and an individual’s integrity, do not depend on being error free. It depends on what we do after making the error.

As dissonance theory would also predict, only a minority of Trump’s supporters have changed their minds about him, and we believe it is crucial to understand how and why they did, given the personal, professional, and psychological costs that many of them paid.

Americans are well aware of the deadliest demagogues of the twentieth century—Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini—but we have long endured our share of homegrown examples.

Demagogues typically thrive by sowing division among citizens and inciting scapegoating and violence, and no American president before Trump fomented us-versus-them thinking to such an extreme degree, much less tacitly endorsed violence by “us” against “them.” He refers to the free press, the very bedrock of a democracy, as an “enemy of the people,” which has led some of his supporters—apparently thinking it was funny—to wear T-shirts that say NOOSE. TREE. JOURNALIST. SOME ASSEMBLY REQUIRED.

The election of a demagogue to the White House has arguably been the greatest internal threat to our democracy since the Civil War, and justifying Trump’s behavior requires far more contortions than supporting George Bush’s disastrous Iraq War did.

The rise of any demagogue never happens overnight, and it’s never the result of one election. It occurs because of the slow shift in beliefs and values that follows every self-justifying decision that citizens make. One step at a time.

As of mid-2019, nearly 90 percent of Republicans approved of Trump’s performance in office, even though 65 percent also said they considered his conduct “unpresidential.”

My, how far they have fallen. By the midterm elections of 2018, Trump could not have had more sycophantic endorsers than Cruz and Graham. Cruz, evidently willing to not only hold Mussolini’s jacket but also give its wearer a bear hug, did just that at a Trump rally in Texas. By 2019, Graham, the man who had called Trump a “kook,” a “con man,” a “complete idiot,” and a “race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot,” was denying that Trump was a racist or that his supporters’ chant to “Send [Ilhan Omar] back” was racist, and besides, he said on Fox and Friends, those congresswomen are “Communists” who hate America. How did Cruz, Graham, and thousands of other Republican politicians and opinion leaders get to that point?

Moreover, while it is not unusual for politicians to disagree with a president in their own party or even say negative things about him, the vitriol directed against Trump is unique in American history—and it has come from his employees, friends, allies, and members of his inner circle, including his secretary of state, his secretary of defense, his national security adviser, and his chief of staff.

Seeing disagreement as disloyalty is another hallmark of demagogues, dictators, and strong-arm leaders.

Political scientist Ashley Jardina, author of White Identity Politics, has studied that anger, and much of it, she found, stems from the misperception that white people are getting a disproportionately low share of the nation’s resources.

And he is their voice especially when it comes to religious identity. If anyone should be feeling dissonance about their support of Donald Trump, it is the voters for whom religious convictions are central to their self-concepts. The greater the dissonance caused by the gap between such a basic belief and support for a politician who violates virtually every ethical and moral element of that belief, the greater the need to either disavow the politician or justify his behavior.

The majority of evangelicals and Republicans who watch Fox News said in a survey there was nothing Trump could do to lose their approval and that nothing he has done has “hurt the dignity of the presidency.”

Americans say that they value the courage of those rare employees who alert the public to safety violations, crimes, and unethical behavior on the part of their employers. But most whistleblowers end up paying a big price; they often lose their jobs, families, friends, and security.

We have learned how precarious democracy is, how easily fear and anger can be invoked to manipulate a population.

We have learned that a democracy rests not only on its laws and institutions but also on its norms and values—and on the consensus of its citizenry that those norms and values are worth upholding.

In clinical psychology, the picture is the same; there is an extensive scientific literature showing that behavioral, statistical, and other objective measures of behavior are consistently superior to the insight of experts and their clinical predictions and diagnoses.

“A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.”

lol

Korda said of Eisenhower: “When things went right, he praised his subordinates and made sure they got the praise; and when things went wrong, he took the blame. Not many presidents have done that, and very few generals.”