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

by Carol Tavris

It allows us to create a distinction between our moral lapses and someone else’s and blur the discrepancy between our actions and our moral convictions.

Memories are often pruned and shaped with an ego-enhancing bias that blurs the edges of past events, softens culpability, and distorts what really happened.

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, such as “Smoking is a dumb thing to do because it could kill me” and “I smoke two packs a day.”

People become more certain they are right about something they just did if they can’t undo it.

But that’s nothing compared to how you would feel if you did the immoral thing. If you regard yourself as a person of high integrity and you do something that harms another person, you’ll feel a much more devastating rush of dissonance than you would on hearing about a favorite movie star’s transgression. After all, you can always abandon your allegiance to a celebrity or find another hero. But if you violate your own values, you’ll feel much greater dissonance because, at the end of the day, you have to go on living with yourself.

Experts can sound pretty impressive, especially when they bolster their claims by citing their years of training and experience in a field. Yet hundreds of studies have shown that, compared to predictions based on actuarial data, predictions based on an expert’s years of training and personal experience are rarely better than chance.

This process illustrates how people who have been sorely tempted, battled temptation, and almost given in to it — but resisted at the eleventh hour — come to dislike, even despise, those who did not succeed in the same effort. It’s the people who almost decide to live in glass houses who throw the first stones.

This process blurs the distinction that people like to draw between “us good guys” and “those bad guys.” Often, when standing at the top of the pyramid, we are faced not with a black-or-white, go-or-no-go decision but with gray choices whose consequences are shrouded. The first steps along the path are morally ambiguous, and the right decision is not always clear. We make an early, apparently inconsequential decision, and then we justify it to reduce the ambiguity of the choice. This starts a process of entrapment — action, justification, further action — that increases our intensity and commitment and may end up taking us far from our original intentions or principles.

How do you get an honest man to lose his ethical compass? You get him to take one step at a time, and self-justification will do the rest.