Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) Quotes

“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.14 We dare not let a glimmer of their humanity in the door, because it might force us to face the haunting truth of cartoonist Walt Kelly’s great character Pogo, who famously said: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
― Carol Tavris, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts

“Dissonance theory would therefore predict that when victims are armed and able to strike back, perpetrators will feel less need to reduce dissonance by belittling them than they do when their victims are helpless.”
― Carol Tavris, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts

“We can all understand why victims would want to retaliate. But retaliation often makes the original perpetrators minimize the severity and harm of their side’s actions and claim the mantle of victim themselves, thereby setting in motion a cycle of oppression and revenge. “Every successful revolution,” observed the historian Barbara Tuchman, “puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.” Why not? The victors, former victims, feel justified.”
― Carol Tavris, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts

“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. If one partner does something thoughtless or is in a crabby mood, the other tends to write it off as a result of events that aren’t the partner’s fault:”
― Carol Tavris, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts

“When we explain our own behavior, self-justification allows us to flatter ourselves: We give ourselves credit for our good actions but let the situation excuse the bad ones. When we do something that hurts another, we rarely say, “I behaved this way because I am a cruel and heartless human being.” We say, “I was provoked; anyone would do what I did”; or “I had no choice”; or “Yes, I said some awful things, but that wasn’t me—it’s because I was drunk.” Yet when we do something generous, helpful, or brave, we don’t say we did it because we were provoked or drunk or had no choice or because the guy on the phone guilt-induced us into donating to charity. We did it because we are generous and open-hearted.”
― Carol Tavris, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts

“As Debra and Frank’s problems accumulated, each developed an implicit theory of how the other person was wrecking the marriage. (These theories are called “implicit” because people are often unaware that they hold them.)”
― Carol Tavris, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts

“Self-justification is blocking each partner from asking: Could I be wrong? Could I be making a mistake? Could I change?”
― Carol Tavris, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts

“We are not referring here to the garden-variety kind of self-justification that we are all inclined to use when we make a mistake or disagree about relatively trivial matters, like who left the top off the salad dressing or who forgot to pay the water bill or whose memory of a favorite scene in an old movie is correct. In those circumstances, self-justification momentarily protects us from feeling clumsy, incompetent, or forgetful. 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.”
― Carol Tavris, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts

“sensitive lover.” From our standpoint, therefore, misunderstandings, conflicts, personality differences, and even angry quarrels are not the assassins of love; self-justification is.”
― Carol Tavris, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts

“As with the psychotherapists we discussed in chapter 4, training does not increase accuracy; it increases people’s confidence in their accuracy.”
― Carol Tavris, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts

“Cognitive psychologist Maryanne Garry finds that as people tell you how an event might have happened, it starts to feel real to them. Children are especially vulnerable to this suggestion.”
― Carol Tavris, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts

“Their stories, so different on the face of it, are linked by common psychological and neurological mechanisms that can create false memories that nonetheless feel vividly, emotionally real. These memories do not develop overnight, in a blinding flash. They take months, sometimes years, to develop, and the stages by which they emerge are now well known to psychological scientists.”
― Carol Tavris, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts

“Conway and Ross referred to this self-serving memory distortion as “getting what you want by revising what you had.” On the larger stage of life, many of us do just that: We misremember our history as being worse than it was, thus distorting our perception of how much we have improved so that we’ll feel better about ourselves now.15 All of us do grow and mature, but generally not as much as we think.”
― Carol Tavris, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts

“Because memory is reconstructive, it is subject to confabulation—confusing an event that happened to someone else with one that happened to you or coming to believe that you remember something that never happened. In reconstructing a memory, people draw on many sources. When you remember your fifth birthday party, you may have a direct recollection of your younger brother putting his finger in the cake and spoiling it for you, but you will also incorporate information that you got later from family stories, photographs, home videos, and birthday parties you’ve seen on television. You weave all these elements together into one integrated account. If someone hypnotizes you and regresses you to your fifth birthday party, you’ll tell a lively story about it that will feel terribly real to you, but it will include many of those party details that never actually happened. After a while, you won’t be able to distinguish your actual memory from subsequent information that crept in from elsewhere. That phenomenon is called “source confusion,” otherwise known as the “where did I hear that?” problem.”
― Carol Tavris, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts

“This small story illustrates three important things about memory: how disorienting it is to realize that a vivid memory, one full of emotion and detail, is indisputably wrong; how even being absolutely, positively sure a memory is accurate does not mean that it is; and how errors in memory support our current feelings and beliefs.”
― Carol Tavris, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts

“At the simplest level, memory smooths out the wrinkles of dissonance by enabling the confirmation bias to hum along, selectively causing us to forget discrepant, disconfirming information about beliefs we hold dear. If we were perfectly rational beings, we would try to remember smart, sensible ideas and not bother taxing our minds by remembering foolish ones. But dissonance theory predicts that we will conveniently forget good arguments made by an opponent, just as we forget foolish arguments made by our own side.”
― Carol Tavris, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts

“When two people produce entirely different memories of the same event, observers usually assume that one of them is lying. Of course, some people do invent or embellish stories to manipulate or deceive their audiences (or sell books). But most of us, most of the time, are neither telling the whole truth nor intentionally deceiving. We aren’t lying; we are self-justifying. All of us, as we tell our stories, add details and omit inconvenient facts; we give the tale a small, self-enhancing spin. That spin goes over so well that the next time we add a slightly more dramatic embellishment; we justify that little white lie as making the story better and clearer. Eventually the way we remember the event may bring us a far distance from what actually happened.”
― Carol Tavris, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts

“As a result of the ensuing debates with his advisers, all of whom had different ideas about how to keep both sides in line, Lincoln could not delude himself that he had group consensus on every decision. He was able to consider alternatives and eventually enlist the respect and support of his erstwhile competitors.”
― Carol Tavris, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts

“prejudice is the energy of ethnocentrism. It lurks there, napping, until ethnocentrism summons it to do its dirty work, justifying the occasional bad things we good people want to do.”
― Carol Tavris, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts

“The downside is that stereotypes flatten out differences within the category we are looking at and exaggerate differences between categories.”
― Carol Tavris, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts

“Prejudices emerge from the disposition of the human mind to perceive and process information in categories. Categories is a nicer, more neutral word than stereotypes, but it’s the same thing. Cognitive psychologists view stereotypes as energy-saving devices that allow us to make efficient decisions on the basis of past experiences; they help us quickly process new information, retrieve memories, understand real differences between groups, and predict, often with considerable accuracy, how others will behave or think.”
― Carol Tavris, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts

“Were the travelers aware of the power of reciprocity to affect their behavior? Not at all. But once reciprocity kicks in, self-justification will follow: “I’ve always wanted a copy of the Bhagavad Gita; what is it, exactly?” The power of the flower is unconscious. “It’s only a flower,” the traveler says. “It’s only a pizza,” the medical resident says. “It’s only a small donation for an educational symposium,” the physician says. Yet the power of the flower is one reason that the amount of contact doctors have with pharmaceutical representatives is positively correlated with the cost of the drugs the doctors later prescribe.”
― Carol Tavris, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts

“The reason Big Pharma spends so much on small gifts as well as the big ones is well known to marketers, lobbyists, and social psychologists: being given a gift evokes an implicit desire to reciprocate.”
― Carol Tavris, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts

“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. But when an expert is wrong, the centerpiece of his or her professional identity is threatened. Therefore, dissonance theory predicts that the more self-confident and famous experts are, the less likely they will be to admit mistakes.”
― Carol Tavris, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts

“Self-justification is complicated enough when it follows our conscious choices and we know we can expect it. But it also occurs in the aftermath of things we do for unconscious reasons, when we haven’t a clue about why we hold some belief or cling to some custom but are too proud to admit it.”
― Carol Tavris, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts

“if you want advice on what product to buy, ask someone who is still gathering information and is still open-minded.”
― Carol Tavris, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts

“Therefore, when you are about to make a big purchase or an important decision—which car or computer to buy, whether to undergo plastic surgery, or whether to sign up for a costly self-help program—don’t ask someone who has just done it. That person will be highly motivated to convince you that it is the right thing to do.”
― Carol Tavris, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts

“The more costly a decision in terms of time, money, effort, or inconvenience and the more irrevocable its consequences, the greater the dissonance and the greater the need to reduce it by overemphasizing the good things about the choice made.”
― Carol Tavris, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts

“The investigators asked them how certain they were that their horses would win. The bettors who had placed their bets were far more certain about their choice than the folks waiting in line.19 Yet nothing had changed except the finality of placing the bet. People become more certain they are right about something they just did if they can’t undo it.”
― Carol Tavris, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts

“Nick’s need to reduce dissonance was increased by the irrevocability of his decision; he could not unmake that decision without losing a lot of money.”
― Carol Tavris, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts