Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts
Carol Tavris, Elliot Aronson
Language: English
Pages: 400
ISBN: 0544574788
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
“Entertaining, illuminating and—when you recognize yourself in the stories it tells—mortifying.” —Wall Street Journal
“Every page sparkles with sharp insight and keen observation. Mistakes were made—but not in this book!” —Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness
Why is it so hard to say “I made a mistake”—and really believe it?
When we make mistakes, cling to outdated attitudes, or mistreat other people, we must calm the cognitive dissonance that jars our feelings of self-worth. And so, unconsciously, we create fictions that absolve us of responsibility, restoring our belief that we are smart, moral, and right—a belief that often keeps us on a course that is dumb, immoral, and wrong. Backed by years of research, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) offers a fascinating explanation of self-justification—how it works, the damage it can cause, and how we can overcome it. This updated edition features new examples and concludes with an extended discussion of how we can live with dissonance, learn from it, and perhaps, eventually, forgive ourselves.
“A revelatory study of how lovers, lawyers, doctors, politicians—and all of us—pull the wool over our own eyes . . . Reading it, we recognize the behavior of our leaders, our loved ones, and—if we’re honest—ourselves, and some of the more perplexing mysteries of human nature begin to seem a little clearer.” —Francine Prose, O, The Oprah Magazine
misremembering donating money, see Christopher D. B. Burt and Jennifer S. Popple (1998), "Memorial Distortions in Donation Data," Journal of Social Psychology, 138, pp. 724–733. College students' memories of their high-school grades are also distorted in a positive direction; see Harry P. Bahrick, Lynda K. Hall, and Stephanie A. Berger (1996), "Accuracy and Distortion in Memory for High School Grades," Psychological Science, 7, pp. 265–271. 11 Lisa K. Libby and Richard P. Eibach (2002), "Looking
Tomasz Kranz, head of the research department at the Majdanek Museum, there were lice and fleas at the camp, but not rats (unlike other camps, such as Birkenau). Maechler, p. 169. 19 On the physical and psychological benefits of writing about previously undisclosed secrets and traumas, see James W. Pennebaker (1990), Opening Up. New York: William Morrow. 20 On imagination inflation, see Elizabeth F. Loftus (2004), "Memories of Things Unseen," Current Directions in Psychological Science, 13, pp.
West Wing. Although the expression has been thrown around a lot, few people fully understand its meaning or appreciate its enormous motivational power. In 1956, one of us (Elliot) arrived at Stanford University as a graduate student in psychology. Festinger had arrived that same year as a young professor, and they immediately began working together, designing experiments to test and expand dissonance theory.3 Their thinking challenged many notions that were gospel in psychology and among the
embarrassing thing to do.) Others were randomly assigned to a mildly embarrassing initiation procedure: reading aloud sexual words from the dictionary. After the initiation, each of the students listened to an identical tape recording of a discussion allegedly being held by the group of people they had just joined. Actually, the audiotape was prepared in advance so that the discussion was as boring and worthless as it could be. The discussants talked haltingly, with long pauses, about the
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, 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,