Mistakes Were Made

Authors: Tavris & Aronson

What follows is less a review of this wonderful book than a collection of concepts I found useful in the reading. Most of the verbiage is that of the original authors, but the italicized comments are mine; additions that help me solidify the authors’ findings in my own understanding.

Self-justification is more powerful and more dangerous than the explicit lie. It helps us to blur disparities between our actions and our moral convictions.

Cognitive dissonance is a state of tension that occurs whenever a person holds two cognitions (ideas, attitudes, beliefs, opinions) that are psychologically inconsistent, such as “Smoking is dumb and could kill me” and “I smoke two packs a day.” We try to reduce the discomfort of dissonance either by changing our behavior or by finding some way to justify the behavior.

Dissonance reduction is designed to preserve one’s positive self-image. People want to believe that, as smart and rational individuals, they know why they make the choices they do, so they are not always happy to find (or be shown) evidence that contradicts this belief.

No one (who cares about reputation or self-image) is immune to the need to reduce dissonance.

C.S. Lewis, Benjamin Franklin, and Dostoevsky all understood this principle: that treating a person in a certain way, whether charitably or maliciously, increases one’s propensity to treat that person similarly in the future. This deep desire for consonance is a great truth about human nature. It may have been partly for this reason that God made each of us start out as dependent babies in whose lives our parents would invest much, and in so doing, become highly committed to our survival and success.

Self-justification starts a process of entrapment — action, justification, further action — that increases our commitment to our initial decision, 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.

Battling Biases

Naive realism is the inescapable conviction that we perceive objects and events “as they really are.” People of this frame of mind are convinced that “Any opinion I hold must be reasonable; if it weren’t, I wouldn’t hold it.”

Our innate biases are like optical illusions in two important respects — they lead us to wrong conclusions from data, and their apparent rightness persists even when we have been shown the trick.

A gift evokes an implicit desire to reciprocate. Much medical danger to the public comes from the self-justifications of well-intentioned scientists and physicians who, because of their need to reduce dissonance, truly believe themselves to be above the influence of their corporate funders.

We make confession and repentance a daunting prospect for healthcare professionals and others by expecting perfection (not to say omniscience) from those we hold up as experts. Their defensive entrenchment is partly a result of what we are likely to do to them if they show their humanity by admitting their mistakes.

Practicing Science

If you hold a set of beliefs that guides your practice, and you learn that some of those beliefs are mistaken, you have a choice: you must either acknowledge your error (if only to yourself), or reject your new understanding.

When what you observe always confirms what you believe (because our beliefs filter what we perceive) your perspective is enclosed in a self-confirming loop. If you adapt disconfirming evidence to support the position you held prior to the observation, what will ever be able to break you out of the loop? But that’s the point: you don’t want out.

For any theory to be scientific, it must be stated in such a way that it can be shown to be false as well as true.

The good scientist looks for disconfirming evidence. So, too, the good man.

Among the Politicians

By creating a cabinet that included four of his political opponents, Abraham Lincoln avoided the illusion 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.

The last American president to tell the country he had made a terrible mistake was John F. Kennedy in 1961.

America is a mistake-phobic culture… people treat mistakes like hot potatoes, eager to get rid of them as fast as possible, even if they have to toss them in someone else’s lap.

Unreliable Memory

“I have done that,” says my memory. “I cannot have done that,” says my pride, and remains inexorable. Eventually, memory yields.” Friedrich Nietzsche

Memory is an unreliable historian. Recovering a memory is like watching a few unconnected frames of a film and then trying to figure out what the rest of the scene must have been like. Once we have a narrative, we shape our memories to fit into it.

Why would people claim to remember that they had suffered harrowing experiences if they hadn’t, especially when that belief causes rifts with family or friends? By distorting their memories these people can “get what they want by revising what they had,” and what they want is to turn their present lives, no matter how bleak or mundane, into a dazzling victory over adversity.

Memories of abuse help them resolve the dissonance between “I am a smart, capable person” and “My life sure is a mess right now” with an explanation that makes them feel good and removes responsibility: “It’s not my fault my life is a mess. Look at the horrible things they did to me,” (even when no such horrible things were done to them).

“The notion that the mind protects itself by repressing or dissociating memories of trauma, rendering them inaccessible to awareness, is a piece of psychiatric folklore devoid of convincing empirical support.” (Richard McNally, Remembering Trauma) Overwhelmingly, the evidence shows just the opposite. The problem for most people who have suffered traumatic experiences is not that they forget them but that they cannot forget them.

False Confidence: Law & Enforcement

Training does not necessarily increase accuracy, but it always increases people’s confidence in their accuracy. The weakness of the relationship between accuracy and confidence is one of the best documented phenomena in the 100-year history of eyewitness memory research.

By the time prosecutors go to trial, they have made investments of time, effort, and intellect in the case they’ll be arguing, each investment deepening their commitment to prove the rightness of their (and their client’s) position. Sometimes these commitments outweigh their commitment to truth and justice.

After more than 130 prisoners had been freed by DNA testing in the space of fifteen years, Florida prosecutors decided they would respond by mounting a vigorous challenge to similar new cases — they could no longer stand by as their hard-won convictions were beginning to look more and more careless, if not fraudulent.

The American criminal justice system’s unwillingness to admit fallibility compounds the injustice it creates.

The most dangerous kind of evil is the kind that believes itself to be good, because it co-opts the energy of righteousness for the furtherance of evil.

Marriage & Relationships

Couples who drift apart often do so slowly, over time, in a snowballing pattern of blame and self-justification. Each partner focuses on what the other is doing wrong, while justifying his or her own preferences and attitudes.

Each side’s intransigence makes the other even more determined not to budge, and each feels righteous about their own position. Self-justification will then cause their hearts to harden against the entreaties of empathy.

The attitude of these people toward their partner is, “Yeah, yeah, I know how you feel about this, but I’m not going to change because I’m right.” Each of them understands the other’s point of view perfectly, but their need for self-justification prevents them from accepting their partner’s position as being as legitimate as their own.

The kind of self-justification that can erode a marriage 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.”

Such couples are in trouble because they have begun to justify their fundamental self-concepts, the qualities about themselves that they value and do not wish to alter or that they believe are inherent in their nature.

They’re not saying to each other, “I’m right and you’re wrong about that memory.” They are saying, “I am the right kind of person and you are the wrong kind of person. And because you’re the wrong kind of person, you cannot appreciate my virtues; foolishly, you even think some of my virtues are flaws.”

Because each partner is expert at self-justification, they blame the other’s unwillingness to change on personality flaws, but excuse their own willingness to change on the basis of their personality virtues.

Being criticized for who you are rather than for what you did evokes a deep sense of shame and helplessness; it makes a person want to hide. Because the ashamed person has nowhere to go to escape the feeling of humiliation, shamed spouses tend to strike back in anger.

Happy and unhappy partners simply think differently about each other’s behavior, even when they are responding to identical situations and actions. Couples who grow together over the years are able to live with a minimum of self-justification; they are able to put empathy for the partner ahead of defending their own territory. Successful, stable couples are able to listen to the partner’s criticisms, concerns, and suggestions undefensively.

Victims & Perpetrators

Each side in a conflict convinces itself that it is the injured party, and consequently is entitled to retaliate.

Perpetrators are motivated to reduce their moral culpability; victims are motivated to maximize their moral blamelessness.

The incomprehensibility of the perpetrator’s motives is a central aspect of the victim identity and the victim story.

Perpetrators write versions of history in which their behavior was justified and provoked. Victims tend to write accounts of the same history in which they describe the perpetrator’s actions as arbitrary and meaningless, or else intentionally malicious and brutal — in which their own retaliation was impeccably appropriate and morally justified.

The greater the pain we inflict on others, the greater the need to justify it to maintain our feelings of decency and self-worth.

In order to reduce the discomfort of dissonance — in order to go on believing that we are “good” people — we justify our sin. In doing so, we bind and abuse our consciences. How freeing, then, to understand and acknowledge the truth of what we are and what we are not. “Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free. (John 8:32)