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

by Carol Tavris

Every so often, a heartwarming news story tells of a shipwrecked sailor who was on the verge of drowning in a turbulent sea. Suddenly, a dolphin popped up at his side and, gently but firmly, nudged the swimmer safely to shore. Dolphins must really like human beings, enough to save us from drowning! But wait—are dolphins aware that humans don’t swim as well as they do? Are they actually intending to be helpful? To answer that question, we would need to know how many shipwrecked sailors have been gently nudged farther out to sea by dolphins, there to drown and never be heard from again. We don’t know about those cases, because the swimmers don’t live to tell us about their evil-dolphin experiences. If we had that information, we might conclude that dolphins are neither benevolent nor evil; they are just being playful. Sigmund Freud himself fell victim to the flawed reasoning of the benevolent-dolphin problem. When his fellow analysts questioned his notion that all men suffer from castration anxiety, he was amused. He wrote: “One hears of analysts who boast that, though they have worked for dozens of years, they have never found a sign of the existence of the castration complex. We must bow our heads in recognition of . . . [this] piece of virtuosity in the art of overlooking and mistaking.”17 So if analysts see castration anxiety in their patients, Freud was right, and if they fail to see it, they are “overlooking” it, and Freud is still right. Men themselves cannot tell you...