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

by Carol Tavris

The people who believe that the Bible’s book of Revelation or the writings of the sixteenth-century self-proclaimed prophet Nostradamus have predicted every disaster from the bubonic plague to 9/11 cling to their convictions, unfazed by the small problem that these vague and murky predictions were intelligible only after the events occurred.

if a person voluntarily goes through a difficult or painful experience in order to attain some goal or object, that goal or object becomes more attractive.

decades of experimental research have found exactly the opposite: when people vent their feelings aggressively, they often feel worse, pump up their blood pressure, and make themselves even angrier.

“He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another than he whom you yourself have obliged.”

How do you get an honest man to lose his ethical compass? You get him to take one step at a time, and self-justification will do the rest.

We take our own involvement in an issue as a source of accuracy and enlightenment

once you accept the first small inducement and justify it that way, you have started your slide down the pyramid.

The apparent correlation was coincidental, a result of the fact that autism is typically diagnosed in children at the same age they are vaccinated.

As of 2019, more than a dozen large-scale, peer-reviewed studies, including a Danish project involving more than 650,085 children, had found no relationship between the MMR vaccine and autism.

being given a gift evokes an implicit desire to reciprocate.

By admitting that Elliot didn’t fit her stereotype, she was able to feel open-minded and generous while maintaining her basic prejudice toward the whole category of Jews.

The daily, dissonance-reducing distortions of memory help us make sense of the world and our place in it, protecting our decisions and beliefs.

recovering a memory is not at all like retrieving a file or playing back a recording; it is like watching a few unconnected frames of a film and then figuring out what the rest of the scene must have been like.

when we learn that a memory is wrong, we feel stunned, disoriented, as if the ground under us has shifted. In a sense, it has. It has made us rethink our own role in the story.

Parent blaming is a popular and convenient form of self-justification because it allows people to live less uncomfortably with their regrets and imperfections. Mistakes were made, but only by my parents.

The men’s current self-concepts blurred their memories, bringing their past selves into harmony with their present ones.

Sleep paralysis, says Richard J. McNally, a Harvard psychological scientist and clinician who studies memory and trauma, is “no more pathological than a hiccup.” It is quite common, he says, “especially for people whose sleep patterns have been disrupted by jet lag, shift work, or fatigue.” About 30 percent of the population has had the sensation of sleep paralysis, but only about 5 percent have had the waking hallucinations as well. Just about everyone who has experienced sleep paralysis plus waking dreams reports that the feeling this combination evokes is terror.28 It is, dare we say, an alien sensation.

Every one of the people Clancy interviewed was aware of the scientific explanation and had angrily rejected it.

Why would people claim to remember that they had suffered harrowing experiences if they hadn’t, especially when that belief causes rifts with families or friends? By distorting their memories, these people can get what they want by revising what they had, and what they want is to turn their present bleak or merely mundane lives into dazzling victories over adversity. Memories of abuse also help them resolve the dissonance between “I am a smart, capable person” and “My life sure is a mess right now” with an explanation that makes them feel better about themselves and removes responsibility: “It’s not my fault my life is a mess and I never became the world-class singer I could have been.

Semmelweis discovered that when his medical students washed their hands before attending women in labor, fewer women died of childbed fever.

The word psychotherapist is largely unregulated; in many states, anyone can say that he or she is a therapist without having any training in anything.

If you are going to use hypnosis, you had better know that while hypnosis can help clients learn to relax, manage pain, and quit smoking, you should never use it to help your client retrieve memories, because your willing, suggestible client will often make up a memory that is unreliable.

Whereas an interview is a conversation designed to get general information from a person, an interrogation is designed to get a suspect to admit guilt. (The suspect is often unaware of the difference.)

training does not increase accuracy; it increases people’s confidence in their accuracy.

for vulnerable people, the need to make sense of what is happening to them trumps even the need for self-preservation.

contempt. In his groundbreaking study of more than seven hundred couples whom he followed over a period of years, psychologist John Gottman found that contempt—criticism laced with sarcasm, name calling, and mockery—is one of the strongest signs that a relationship is in free fall.

We believe that contempt is a predictor of divorce not because it causes the wish to separate but because it reflects the couple’s feelings of psychological separation. Contempt emerges only after years of squabbles and quarrels that keep resulting, as for Frank and Debra, in yet another unsuccessful effort to get the other person to behave differently.

The tipping point at which a couple starts rewriting their love story, Gottman finds, is when the “magic ratio” dips below five to one: Successful couples have a ratio of five times as many positive interactions (such as expressions of love, affection, and humor) to negative ones (such as expressions of annoyance and complaints). It doesn’t matter if the couple is emotionally volatile, quarreling eleven times a day, or emotionally placid, quarreling once a decade; it is the ratio that matters.

Observers of divorcing couples are often baffled by what seems like unreasonable vindictiveness on the part of the person who initiated the separation; what they are observing is dissonance reduction in action.

In the name of equality I tormented every man who’d ever loved me until he left me: I called them on everything, never let anything go, held them up to accountability in ways that wearied us both. There was, of course, more than a grain of truth in everything I said, but those grains, no matter how numerous, need not have become the sandpile that crushed the life out of love.”

Most people want to believe that their government is working on their behalf, that it knows what it’s doing, and that it’s doing the right thing. Therefore, if the government decides that torture is necessary in the war against terrorism, most citizens, to avoid dissonance, will agree. Yet, over time, that is how the moral conscience of a nation deteriorates. Once people take that first small step off the pyramid in the direction of justifying abuse and torture, they are on their way to hardening their hearts and minds

says political scientist Darius Rejali. “Nothing predicts future behavior as much as past impunity.”

“He could be removed from office, reelected, defeated, start a war with Iran, cause a civil war here—who can say?” We can’t, of course. But as social scientists, we do have a great deal to say about how the case study of Donald Trump sheds light on a larger issue—the Trump phenomenon.

Demagogues thrive and flourish on the reasoning and self-justifications of those willing to push aside their moral objections in exchange for political advantage. And, above all, demagogues exploit public prejudices and ignorance, fomenting anger and hatred at the expense of reasoned argument.