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

by Carol Tavris

“The only hope of substantially reducing police lying is a preventative approach aimed at keeping good cops from turning bad,” he argues. Cognitive dissonance theory offers “a potent, inexpensive, and inexhaustible tool for accomplishing this goal: the officer’s own self-concept.”

From the viewpoint of dissonance theory, we can see why the victims of wrongful convictions are treated so harshly. That harshness is in direct proportion to the system’s inflexibility. If you know that errors are inevitable, you will not be surprised when they happen and you will have contingencies in place to remedy them. But if you refuse to admit to yourself or the world that mistakes do happen, then the exoneration of those who have been wrongfully imprisoned is stark, humiliating evidence of how wrong you are. Apologize to them? Give them money? Don’t be absurd. They got off on a technicality. Oh, the technicality was DNA? Well, they were guilty of something else.

When we explain our own behavior, self-justification allows us to flatter ourselves: We give ourselves credit for our good actions but let the situation excuse the bad ones.

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.

While happy partners are giving each other the benefit of the doubt, unhappy partners are doing just the opposite.5 If the partner does something nice, it’s because of a temporary fluke or situational demands:

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.

But because most new partners do not start out in a mood of complaining and blaming, psychologists have been able to follow couples over time to see what sets some of them, but not others, on a downward spiral. They have learned that negative ways of thinking and blaming usually come first and are unrelated to the couple’s frequency of anger or either party’s feelings of depression.

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).

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

In contrast, the couples who grow together over the years have figured out a way to live with a minimum of self-justification, which is another way of saying that they are able to put empathy for the partner ahead of defending their own territory.

In good marriages, a confrontation, difference of opinion, clashing habits, and even angry quarrels can bring the couple closer, by helping each partner learn something new and by forcing them to examine their assumptions about their abilities or limitations.

In a rift, no one is going to admit that he or she lied or stole or cheated without provocation; only a bad person would do that, just as only a heartless child would abandon a parent in need. Therefore, each side justifies its own position by claiming that the other side is to blame; each is simply responding to the offense or provocation as any reasonable, moral person would do.

When we construct narratives that “make sense,” however, we do so in a self-serving way. Perpetrators are motivated to reduce their moral culpability; victims are motivated to maximize their moral blamelessness.

Only one of the sixty-three victim stories described the perpetrator as having been justified in behaving as he did, and none thought the perpetrators’ actions “could not be helped.”

By the time many victims get around to expressing their pain and anger, especially over events that the perpetrators have wrapped up and forgotten, perpetrators are baffled. No wonder most thought their victims’ anger was an overreaction, though few victims felt that way.

The pope assured his forces that killing a Muslim was an act of Christian penance. Anyone killed in battle, the pope promised, would bypass thousands of years of torture in purgatory and go directly to heaven. Does this incentive to generate martyrs who will die for your cause sound familiar? It has everything but the virgins.

Once people commit themselves to an opinion about “who started this?,” whatever the “this” may be—a family quarrel or an international conflict—they become less able to accept information that is dissonant with their positions. Once they have decided who the perpetrator is and who the victim is, their ability to empathize with the other side is weakened, even destroyed.

This brutality is not confined to brutes—that is, sadists or psychopaths. It can be, and usually is, committed by ordinary individuals, people who have children and lovers, “civilized” people who enjoy music and food and making love and gossiping as much as anyone else. This is one of the most thoroughly documented findings in social psychology, but it is also the most difficult for many people to accept because of the enormous dissonance it produces: “What can I possibly have in common with perpetrators of murder and torture?” It is much more reassuring to believe that they are evil and be done with them.

Understanding without vengeance, reparation without retaliation, are possible only if we are willing to stop justifying our own position.

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.

These courageous individuals take us straight into the heart of dissonance and its innermost irony: the mind wants to protect itself from the pain of dissonance with the balm of self-justification, but the soul wants to confess.

The legal scholar Cass Sunstein found in his studies that for many people today, “apologies are for losers.” They can backfire, because if you don’t like the person apologizing, you take his or her words as evidence of weakness or incompetence.

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.

Kardon’s exercise illuminates just how difficult it is to say, “Boy, did I mess up,” without the protective postscript of self-justification—to say “I dropped a routine fly ball with the bases loaded” rather than “I dropped the ball because the sun was in my eyes” or “because a bird flew by” or “because it was windy” or “because a fan called me a jerk.”

In our private relationships, we are on our own, and that calls for some self-awareness. Once we understand how and when we need to reduce dissonance, we can become more vigilant about the process and often nip it in the bud, catching ourselves before we slide too far down the pyramid.

Social scientists are finding that once people are aware of their biases, know how they work, and pay mindful attention to them—in effect, once they bring them into consciousness and say, “There you are, you little bastard”—they have greater power to control them.

This is reassuring

People can remain passionately committed to their nation, religion, political party, and family while disagreeing with actions or policies they find inappropriate, misguided, or immoral.

When the dissonance is caused by something we ourselves did, it is even more vital to keep Peres’s third way in mind: Articulate the cognitions and keep them separate. “When I, a decent, smart person, make a mistake, I remain a decent, smart person and the mistake remains a mistake. Now, how do I remedy what I did?”

Instead of slotting the story into an ideological framework—“Children never lie”; “Believe survivors, even if they remember nothing”; “All fraternity men are rapists”—we can do something harder and more radical: wait for the evidence. If we don’t and instead take sides impulsively, it will be difficult to accept that evidence later if it suggests that we were wrong,

Mindful awareness of how dissonance operates is therefore the first step toward controlling its effects. But two psychological impediments remain. One is the belief that mistakes are evidence of incompetence and stupidity; the other is the belief that our personality traits, including self-esteem, are embedded and unchangeable.

“Our culture exacts a great cost psychologically for making a mistake,” Stigler recalled, “whereas in Japan, it doesn’t seem to be that way. In Japan, mistakes, error, confusion [are] all just a natural part of the learning process.”

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.

American children typically believe that making mistakes reflects poorly on their inherent abilities.

In Dweck’s experiments, some children were praised for their efforts in mastering a new challenge; others were praised for their intelligence and ability (“You’re a natural math whiz, Johnny”). 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.

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.

Confidence is a fine and useful quality; none of us would want a physician who was forever wallowing in uncertainty and couldn’t decide how to treat our illness, but we do want one who is open-minded and willing to learn.

There are no second acts in American lives. —F. Scott Fitzgerald

“But in any classic play, act two is where the action is,” said Elliot. “In life as in a play, you can’t leap from act one to act three. We skip act two at our peril, for that’s when we go through the turmoil of confronting our demons—the selfishness, immorality, murderous thoughts, disastrous choices—so that when we enter act three, we have learned something. Fitzgerald was telling us that Americans are inclined to bypass act two; they don’t want to go through the pain that self-discovery requires.”

but the goal is not to use self-compassion as a Band-Aid to cover up the wound rather than take active steps toward its healing. People can go to confession, religiously or publicly, and admit they did a bad thing and they are sorry, but it won’t make a dime’s worth of difference if they don’t get what that bad thing was and get that they are not going to do it again.”

Although it may be a peculiarly American instinct to search for the positive in any negative event, we argue that the active, self-reflective struggle to see the silver lining is a key ingredient of maturity.”

Exactly: maturity means an active, self-reflective struggle to accept the dissonance we feel about hopes we did not realize, opportunities we let slide by, mistakes we made, challenges we could not meet, all of which changed our lives in ways we could not anticipate.

How, though, can we forgive ourselves for actions we consider unforgivable? Causing an innocent person’s death is the most extreme mistake people can make; as Jonathan Shay said, it leaves a “scar on the soul.”

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.

Getting to true self-compassion is a process; it does not happen overnight. It does not mean forgetting the harm or error, as in “Ah, well, I’m basically a good, kind person, so I’ll treat myself gently and move on.” No; you might be a good, kind person but you are one who committed a grievously harmful act.

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.

A great nation is like a great man: When he makes a mistake, he realizes it. Having realized it, he admits it. Having admitted it, he corrects it. He considers those who point out his faults as his most benevolent teachers.

“What we should fear today,” he wrote, “is not the Big Lie but the profusion of little ones: an untallied daily cocktail of lies prescribed not to convince of some higher singularity but to confuse, to distract, to muddy, to flood. Today’s falsehood strategy does not give us one idea to organize our thoughts, but thousands of conflicting lies to confuse them.”

We have learned how precarious democracy is, how easily fear and anger can be invoked to manipulate a population. 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. 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. We have learned that heeding the rules of civility, decency, and diplomacy is a sign not of a nation’s weakness but of its strength.