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

by Carol Tavris

We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield. —George Orwell, 1946

The Dammit Doll reflects one of the most entrenched convictions in our culture, fostered by the psychoanalytic belief in the benefits of catharsis: expressing anger or behaving aggressively gets rid of anger. Throw that doll, hit a punching bag, shout at your spouse; you’ll feel better afterward. Actually, 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.

In the experimental condition, the students were allowed to vent their anger by informing Kahn’s supervisor of his insults; thus, they believed they were getting him in big trouble. In the control condition, the students did not get a chance to express their anger. Kahn, a good Freudian, was astonished by the results: Catharsis was a total flop in terms of making people feel better. The people who were allowed to express their anger about Kahn felt far greater animosity toward him than those who were not given that opportunity.

In 2017, researchers at the Yale School of Medicine reported that nearly one-third of all new medications approved by the FDA between 2001 and 2010 had major safety issues that were not apparent until they had been on the market for an average of four years.

“In normal circumstances,” wrote Hitler’s henchman Albert Speer in his memoirs, “people who turn their backs on reality are soon set straight by the mockery and criticism of those around them, which makes them aware they have lost credibility. In the Third Reich there were no such correctives, especially for those who belonged to the upper stratum. On the contrary, every self-deception was multiplied as in a hall of distorting mirrors, becoming a repeatedly confirmed picture of a fantastical dream world which no longer bore any relationship to the grim outside world. In those mirrors I could see nothing but my own face reproduced many times over.”

What we . . . refer to confidently as memory . . . is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. —William Maxwell, memoirist and editor

But when we do misremember, our mistakes aren’t random. The daily, dissonance-reducing distortions of memory help us make sense of the world and our place in it, protecting our decisions and beliefs. The distortion is even more powerful when it is motivated by the need to keep our self-concept consistent, by the wish to be right, by the need to preserve self-esteem, by the need to excuse failures or bad decisions, or by the need to find an explanation, preferably one safely in the past, of current problems.

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

In 1962, Daniel Offer, a young resident in psychiatry, and his colleagues interviewed seventy-three teenage boys about their home lives, sexuality, religion, parents, parental discipline, and other emotionally charged topics. Offer and his colleagues were able to re-interview almost all these fellows thirty-four years later, when they were forty-eight years old, to ask them what they remembered. “Remarkably,” the researchers concluded, “the men’s ability to guess what they had said about themselves in adolescence was no better than chance.” Most of those who remembered themselves as having been bold, outgoing teenagers had, at age fourteen, described themselves as shy.

an understanding of memory and self-justification leads us to a more nuanced perspective: a person doesn’t have to be lying to be wrong.