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

by Carol Tavris

Spirals of Violence—and Virtue Feeling stressed? One internet source teaches you how to make your own little Dammit Doll, which “can be thrown, jabbed, stomped and even strangled till all the frustration leaves you.” A little poem goes with it: Whenever things don’t go so well, And you want to hit the wall and yell, Here’s a little dammit doll that you can’t do without. Just grasp it firmly by the legs and find a place to slam it. And as you whack the stuffing out, yell, “Dammit, dammit, dammit!” 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.21 Venting is especially likely to backfire when a person commits an aggressive act against another person directly, and that is exactly what cognitive dissonance theory would predict. When you do anything that harms others—get them in trouble, verbally abuse them, or punch them out—a powerful new factor comes into play: the need to justify what you did. Take a boy who goes along with a group of his fellow seventh graders who are taunting and bullying a weaker kid who did them no harm...