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

by Carol Tavris

That is why self-justification is more powerful and more dangerous than the explicit lie.

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.

A president who justifies his actions to the public might be induced to change them. A president who justifies his actions to himself, believing that he has the truth, is impervious to self-correction.

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.

To preserve our belief that we are smart, all of us will occasionally do dumb things. We can’t help it. We are wired that way.

The brain is designed with blind spots, optical and psychological, and one of its cleverest tricks is to confer on its owner the comforting delusion that he or she does not have any.

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.

The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none. —Thomas Carlyle, historian and essayist

Us is the most fundamental social category in the brain’s organizing system, and the concept is hardwired. Even the plural pronouns us and them are powerful emotional signals.

A stereotype might bend or even shatter under the weight of disconfirming information, but the hallmark of prejudice is that it is impervious to reason, experience, and counterexample.

Because we need to feel we are better than somebody. By understanding prejudice as our self-justifying servant, we can better see why some prejudices are so hard to eradicate: They allow people to justify and defend their most important social identities—their “white” race, their religion, their gender, their sexuality—while reducing the dissonance between “I am a good person” and “I really don’t like those people.” Fortunately, we can also better understand the conditions under which prejudices diminish: when the economic competition subsides, when the truce is signed, when the profession is integrated, when they become more familiar and comfortable, when we stop seeing them as an undifferentiated mass and realize that they are as diverse a collection of individuals as we are.

Memories are not buried somewhere in the brain like bones at an archaeological site; you can’t dig them up, perfectly preserved.

It’s uncomfortable—dissonant—to realize that some of your colleagues are tainting your profession with silly or dangerous ideas.

While happy partners are giving each other the benefit of the doubt, unhappy partners are doing just the opposite.5

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.

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

when victims are armed and able to strike back, perpetrators will feel less need to reduce dissonance by belittling them than they do when their victims are helpless.

It is much more reassuring to believe that they are evil and be done with them.14 We dare not let a glimmer of their humanity in the door, because it might force us to face the haunting truth of cartoonist Walt Kelly’s great character Pogo, who famously said: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

A man travels many miles to consult the wisest guru in the land. When he arrives, he asks the great man: “O wise guru, what is the secret of a happy life?” “Good judgment,” says the guru. “But, O wise guru,” says the man, “how do I achieve good judgment?” “Bad judgment,” says the guru.

Most American children, however, are denied the freedom to noodle around, experiment, and be wrong in ten ways, let alone ten thousand. The focus on constant testing, which grew out of the reasonable desire to measure and standardize children’s accomplishments, has intensified their fear of failure. 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.

Understanding how the mind yearns for consonance and rejects information that questions our beliefs, decisions, or preferences not only teaches us to be open to the possibility of error but also helps us let go of the need to be right.

The happiest, most mature adults were those who could embrace the losses in their lives and transform them into sources of deep gratitude—not with platitudes or Pollyanna glosses, say the researchers, but by discovering the genuinely positive aspects of their multifaceted lives.

Some people don’t want the scar on the soul to heal over. They see it as a reminder of what they did, a protest against apathy or forgetting.

The road to redemption starts with the understanding that who we are includes what we have done but also transcends it, and the vehicle for transcending it is self-compassion.

That’s part of you now, of who you are. But it need not be all of you. It need not define you—unless you keep justifying that act mindlessly.