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

by Carol Tavris

As fallible human beings, all of us share the impulse to justify ourselves and avoid taking responsibility for actions that turn out to be harmful, immoral, or stupid.

That is why self-justification is more powerful and more dangerous than the explicit lie. It allows people to convince themselves that what they did was the best thing they could have done.

Cognitive dissonance is a state of tension that occurs when a person holds two cognitions (ideas, attitudes, beliefs, opinions) that are psychologically inconsistent with each other,

So powerful is the need for consonance that when people are forced to look at disconfirming evidence, they will find a way to criticize, distort, or dismiss it so that they can maintain or even strengthen their existing belief. This mental contortion is called the “confirmation bias.”

Once we are invested in a belief and have justified its wisdom, changing our minds is literally hard work. It’s much easier to slot that new evidence into an existing framework and do the mental justification to keep it there than it is to change the framework.

When the person at the top of the pyramid is uncertain, when there are benefits and costs for both choices, then he or she will feel a particular urgency to justify the choice made. But by the time the person is at the bottom of the pyramid, ambivalence will have morphed into certainty, and he or she will be miles away from anyone who took a different route.

In short, we use stereotypes to justify behavior that would otherwise make us feel bad about the kind of people we are or the kind of country we live in.

The problem is that when the narrative becomes a major source of self-justification, one the storyteller relies on to excuse mistakes and failings, memory becomes warped in its service.

Self-justification causes individuals to distort or rewrite their memories to conform to their views of themselves, which is why they can “remember” saying things that they only thought about saying or intended to say at the time.

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.

Married partners are forced to learn more about each other than they ever expected (or perhaps wanted) to know.

marriage also forces couples to face themselves, to learn more about themselves and how they behave with an intimate partner than they ever expected (or perhaps wanted) to know.

But the vast majority of couples who drift apart do so slowly, over time, in a snowballing pattern of blame and self-justification. Each partner focuses on what the other one is doing wrong while justifying his or her own preferences, attitudes, and ways of doing things.

From our standpoint, therefore, misunderstandings, conflicts, personality differences, and even angry quarrels are not the assassins of love; self-justification is.

The kind that can erode a marriage, however, reflects a more serious effort to protect not what we did but who we are, and it comes in two versions: “I’m right and you’re wrong” and “Even if I’m wrong, too bad; that’s the way I am.”

Self-justification is blocking each partner from asking: Could I be wrong? Could I be making a mistake? Could I change?

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.

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.

Instead, we asked these couples, in effect, how, over the years, they had reduced the dissonance between “I love this person” and “This person is doing something that is driving me crazy.”

When we construct narratives that “make sense,” however, we do so in a self-serving way.

“We are good people. Therefore, if we deliberately inflict pain on another, the other must have deserved it. Therefore, we are not doing evil, quite the contrary. We are doing good.”

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.

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.”

The guiding metaphor of this book has been the pyramid of choice: As soon as people make a decision, whether reasoned or impulsive, they will change their attitudes to conform to that choice and start minimizing or dismissing any information suggesting they chose the wrong option.

How does a person justify support for an unpresidential president? Easy. If you were on the fence about him, you are likely to jump over it to his side now, because after all, you voted for him, and if you voted for him, you want your vote to be consistent with your feelings about him today.

Why? Because by the time you are at the bottom of the pyramid, admitting you were wrong means acknowledging that you sacrificed your better judgment to your immediate self-interest or that you—smart, politically savvy, professionally experienced you—failed to control, constrain, or even influence your thin-skinned boss. It would mean that all your earlier justifications were . . . mistaken.