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

by Carol Tavris

How in the world can they live with themselves? The answer is: exactly the way the rest of us do.

Stanford students were invited to join a group that would be discussing the psychology of sex, but to qualify for admission, they first had to fulfill an entrance requirement.

Stanford sure is up for weird experiments

Therefore, if you want advice on what product to buy, ask someone who is still gathering information and is still open-minded. And if you want to know whether a program will help you, don’t rely on testimonials; get the data from controlled experiments.

It’s the people who almost decide to live in glass houses who throw the first stones.

We assume that other reasonable people see things the same way we do.

Our innate biases are, as two legal scholars put it, “like optical illusions in two important respects—they lead us to wrong conclusions from data, and their apparent rightness persists even when we have been shown the trick.”

that is why all scientific studies require replication and refinement and why most findings are open to legitimate differences of interpretation.

They were persuaded that vaccines didn’t cause autism, but they came up with other concerns or vague discomforts to justify their reluctance to vaccinate.

Therefore, when people apologize by saying, “I don’t really believe those things I said; I was [tired/worried/angry/drunk]”—or, as Al Campanis put it, “wiped out”—we can be pretty sure they really do believe it.

In fact, they are representative of the many thousands of people who have come to remember accounts of terrible suffering in their childhoods or adulthoods—experiences that were later proved beyond reasonable doubt to never have happened to them.

Like many clinicians, he is confident that he knows when a client is telling the truth, whether a memory is true or false, based on his clinical experience;

And as I learned in “Talking to Strangers”, people are piss poor at spotting untruthful statements

The scientific method consists of the use of procedures designed to show not that our predictions and hypotheses are right, but that they might be wrong.

What a terrific theory! No way for it to be wrong. But that is the very reason that Freud, for all his illuminating observations about civilization and its discontents, was not doing science.

For any theory to be scientific, it must be stated in such a way that it can be shown to be false as well as true.

“The notion that the mind protects itself by repressing or dissociating memories of trauma, rendering them inaccessible to awareness, is a piece of psychiatric folklore devoid of convincing empirical support.”21

The problem for most people who have suffered traumatic experiences is not that they forget them but that they cannot forget them; the memories keep intruding.

They might be signs of nervousness, adolescence, cultural norms, deference to authority—or anxiety about being falsely accused.

the Reid method, whose “vast edifice of pseudoscience, misinformation, self-delusion and outright deceit does not advance the objectives of the criminal justice system. In the 1950s, it was heralded as a vast improvement over the barbaric methods it replaced. Such justification stopped being applicable decades ago.”

“They each think the other is at fault,” their therapists observed, “and thus they selectively remember parts of their life, focusing on those parts that support their own points of view.”

Successful partners extend to each other the same self-forgiving ways of thinking we extend to ourselves: They forgive each other’s missteps as being due to the situation but give each other credit for the thoughtful and loving things they do.

“I have found that nothing foretells a marriage’s future as accurately as how a couple retells their past,”

And the pitiless remark said by many a departing spouse after twenty or thirty years: “I never loved you.” The cruelty of that last particular lie is commensurate with the teller’s need to justify his or her behavior.

The pain of living with horrors you have committed but cannot morally accept is searing, which is why most people will reach for any justification available to assuage the dissonance.

Once having acted against the victim, these subjects found it necessary to view him as an unworthy individual, whose punishment was made inevitable by his own deficiencies of intellect and character.”13

Indeed, several military intelligence officers told the International Committee of the Red Cross that between 70 and 90 percent of the Iraqi detainees had been arrested by mistake.

But in the end, torture’s failure to serve its intended purpose isn’t the main reason to oppose its use. I have often said, and will always maintain, that this question isn’t about our enemies; it’s about us. It’s about who we were, who we are and who we aspire to be. It’s about how we represent ourselves to the world.

but we have the ability to change, and the fact that many of our self-protective delusions and blind spots are built into the way the brain works is no justification for not trying.

If the person who admits mistakes or harm is a business or political leader, you will probably feel reassured that you are in the capable hands of someone big enough to do the right thing, which is to learn from the wrong thing.

Yet when was the last time I heard a political figure apologizing?

Children will realize that everyone screws up on occasion and that even adults have to say “I’m sorry.”

This is so true

“Tell me what appealed to you about the guy that made you trust him.” Con artists take advantage of people’s best qualities—their kindness, politeness, and desire to honor their commitments, reciprocate a gift, or help a friend.

The researchers also found that American parents, teachers, and children were far more likely than their Japanese and Chinese counterparts to believe that mathematical ability is innate; if you have it, you don’t have to work hard, and if you don’t have it, there’s no point in trying.

Many of the children who were praised for their efforts even when they didn’t get it right eventually performed better and liked what they were learning more than children who were praised for their natural abilities did. They were also more likely to regard mistakes and criticism as useful information that would help them improve. In contrast, children praised for their natural ability were more likely to care more about how competent they looked than about what they were actually learning.22

It is a lesson for all ages: the importance of seeing mistakes not as personal failings to be denied or justified but as inevitable aspects of life that help us improve our work, make better decisions, grow, and grow up.

To keep the pope from speaking out against anti-Semitism, Mussolini persuaded him that the Italian version was different from the Nazi version, and besides, Mussolini said, he wouldn’t treat Jews any more savagely than the Church itself had.

Not promising much

Both wooed their natural adversaries with blandishments, rewards, and a few sops to achieve their goals.

My loyalty to Mr. Trump has cost me everything—my family’s happiness, friendships, my law license, my company, my livelihood, my honor, my reputation, and, soon, my freedom. I pray the country doesn’t make the same mistakes I have made. —Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former personal attorney and fixer, on being sentenced to three years in prison

For Jim Mattis, the former secretary of defense, the last straw was Trump’s abrupt announcement at the end of 2018 that he was withdrawing American forces in Syria, where they were fighting the Islamic State. This move would mean abandoning America’s Kurdish allies and giving Turkey and Russia the political plum that they wanted. Mattis, a strong believer in alliances, knew that a retreat from Syria would threaten the security of American troops elsewhere in the region as well as infuriate the Kurds and other allies in the anti-ISIS coalition, who would justifiably feel betrayed. Mattis urged Trump to reconsider his decision, but Trump remained obstinate. Mattis was willing to stay on another two months to minimize disruption in the department.

We have learned about the importance of voting, even if it means choosing a candidate we regard as the lesser of two evils rather than our number-one purely pristine perfect preference.