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

by Carol Tavris

I see no reason why I should be consciously wrong today because I was unconsciously wrong yesterday. —Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, 1948

will look at any additional evidence to confirm the opinion to which I have already come. —Lord Molson, twentieth-century British politician

“I know what I have done, and Your Honor knows what I have done. Somewhere between my ambition and my ideals, I lost my ethical compass.”

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

Big Pharma was producing new, lifesaving drugs but also drugs that were unnecessary at best and risky at worst; more than three-fourths of all drugs approved between 1989 and 2000 were no more than minor improvements over existing medications, cost nearly twice as much, and had higher risks.

Once you take the gift, no matter how small, the process starts. You will feel the urge to give something back, even if it’s only, at first, your attention, your willingness to listen, your sympathy for the giver. Eventually, you will become more willing to give your prescription, your ruling, your vote. Your behavior changes, but, thanks to blind spots and self-justification, your view of your intellectual and professional integrity remains the same.

waving away disconfirming evidence as “exceptions that prove the rule.” (What would disprove the rule, we wonder.)

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

Abraham Lincoln was one of the rare presidents who understood the importance of surrounding himself with people willing to disagree with him. Lincoln created a cabinet that included four of his political opponents, three of whom had run against him for the Republican nomination in 1860 and who felt humiliated, shaken, and angry to have lost to a relatively unknown backwoods lawyer: William H. Seward (whom Lincoln made secretary of state), Salmon P. Chase (secretary of the treasury), and Edward Bates (attorney general). Although all shared Lincoln’s goal of preserving the Union and ending slavery, this “team of rivals” (as Goodwin calls them) disagreed with one another furiously on how to do it.

memory becomes our personal, live-in, self-justifying historian.

Nietzsche: “‘I have done that,’ says my memory. ‘I cannot have done that,’ says my pride, and remains inexorable. Eventually—memory yields.”

“getting what you want by revising what you had.”

It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is. It does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is—if it disagrees with [the] experiment it is wrong. That is all there is to it.