Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts - by Carroll Tavris and Elliot Aronson
Date read: 2020-04-04How strongly I recommend it: 6/10
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A study of human behavior when it relates to cognitive dissonance and biases. We all have them and it's not about eliminating them, but becoming more aware so you can counteract your decisions appropriately.
Contents:
My Notes
Self-justification minimizes our mistakes and bad decisions; it also explains why everyone can recognize a hypocrite in action except the hypocrite.
We are forever being told that we should learn from our mistakes, but how can we learn unless we first admit that we made those mistakes?
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 a dumb thing to do because it could kill me” and “I smoke two packs a day.”
Severe initiations increase a member’s liking for the group. If a person voluntarily goes through a difficult or a painful experience in order to attain some goal or object, that goal or object becomes more attractive.
These mechanisms provide a neurological basis for the observation that once our minds are made up, it is hard to change them. People become more certain they are right about something they just did if they can’t undo it.
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. 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.
If you want advice on what product to buy, ask someone who is still gathering information and is still open-minded. And if you want to know whether a program will help you, don’t rely on testimonials; get the data from controlled experiments.
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.
Our convictions about who we are carry us through the day, and we are constantly interpreting the things that happen to us through the filter of those core beliefs.
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.
Social psychologist Lee Ross calls this phenomenon “naïve realism,” the inescapable conviction that we perceive objects and events clearly, “as they really are.” We assume that other reasonable people see things the same way we do. If they disagree with us, they obviously aren’t seeing clearly.
Just as we can identify hypocrisy in everyone but ourselves, just as it’s obvious that others can be influenced by money but not ourselves, so we can see prejudices in everyone but ourselves.
Once people have a prejudice, just as once they have a political ideology, they do not easily drop it, even if the evidence indisputably contradicts a core justification for it. Rather, they come up with another justification to preserve their belief or rationalize a course of action.
We need a few trusted naysayers in our lives, critics who are willing to puncture our protective bubble of self-justifications and yank us back to reality if we veer too far off. This is especially important for people in positions of power.
History is written by the victors, and when we write our own histories, we have the same goals as the conquerors of nations have: to justify our actions and make us look and feel good about ourselves and what we did or failed to do. If mistakes were made, memory helps us remember that they were made by someone else. If we were there, we were just innocent bystanders.
Confabulation, distortion, and plain forgetting are the foot soldiers of memory, and they are summoned to the front lines when the totalitarian ego wants to protect us from the pain and embarrassment of actions we took that are dissonant with our core self-images.
Parent blaming is a popular and convenient form of self-justification because it allows people to live less uncomfortably with their regrets and imperfections.
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.
Their experience and training did not improve their performance. Their experience and training simply increased their belief that it did.
Police officers, detectives, and prosecutors do not spend sleepless nights worrying that they might have put an innocent person in prison. But a few sleepless nights are called for. Doubt is not the enemy of justice; overconfidence is.
Self-justification doesn’t care whether it reaps benefits or wreaks havoc. It keeps many marriages together (for better or worse) and tears others asunder (for better or worse).
We give ourselves credit for our good actions but let the situation excuse the bad ones. When we do something that hurts another, for example, 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.
The remarkable thing about self-justification is that it allows us to shift from one role to the other and back again in the blink of an eye—without applying what we have learned from one role to the other. Feeling like a victim of injustice in one situation does not make us less likely to commit an injustice against someone else, nor does it make us more sympathetic to victims. It’s as if there is a brick wall between those two sets of experiences, blocking our ability to see the other side.
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.
Understanding without vengeance, reparation without retaliation, are possible only if we are willing to stop justifying our own position.
These courageous individuals take us straight into the heart of dissonance and its innermost irony: the mind wants to protect itself from the pain of dissonance with the balm of self-justification, but the soul wants to confess.
For as a wise man once said, ‘An error does not become a mistake until you refuse to correct it.’ .
And if you can admit a mistake when it is the size of an acorn, it will be easier to repair than if you wait until it becomes the size of a tree, with deep, wide-ranging roots.
Social scientists are finding that once people are aware of their biases, know how they work, and pay mindful attention to them—in effect, once they bring them into consciousness and say, “There you are, you little bastard”—they have greater power to control them.
And when the dissonance is caused by something we ourselves did, we keep Peres’s third way in mind: Articulate the cognitions and keep them separate. “When I, a decent, smart person, make a mistake, I remain a decent, smart person and the mistake remains a mistake. Now, how do I remedy what I did?”
We can try to balance sympathy and skepticism. And then we can learn to hold our conclusions lightly, lightly enough so that we can let them go if justice demands that we do.
Although most Americans know they are supposed to say “We learn from our mistakes,” deep down they don’t believe it for a minute. They think that making mistakes means they are stupid. Of course, that belief is precisely what keeps them from learning from their mistakes.
Instead of irritably asking “How could you possibly have listened to that creep?” you say, “Tell me what appealed to you about the guy that made you trust him.” Con artists take advantage of people’s best qualities—their kindness, politeness, and desire to honor their commitments, reciprocate a gift, or help a friend. Praising the victim for having these worthy values, says Pratkanis, even if they got the person into hot water in this particular situation, will offset feelings of insecurity and incompetence.
Maturity requires an active, self-reflective struggle to accept the dissonance we feel about hopes we did not realize, opportunities we let slide by, mistakes we made, challenges we could not meet, all of which changed our lives in ways we could not anticipate.
Something we did can be separated from who we are and who we want to be.
Our past selves need not be a blueprint for our future selves.