Tavris & Aronson's "Mistakes Were Made (but not by me)"

This book walks you through how "cognitive dissonance" plays a role in making mistakes and persisting in mistakes, and making our mistakes truly horrible.


The book is not all gloom and doom. For me, the high point of the book is captured in this quote:

The last American president to tell the country he had made a terrible mistake was John F. Kennedy in 1961. He had believed the claims and faulty intelligence reports of his top military advisors, who assured him that once Americans invaded Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, the people would rise up in relief and joy and overthrow Castro. The invasion was a disaster, but Kennedy learned from it. He reorganized his intelligence systems and determined that he would no longer accept uncritically the claims of his military advisers, a change that helped him steer the country successfully through the subsequent Cuban missile crisis. After the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy spoke to newspaper publishers and said: "This administration intends to be candid about its errors. For as a Wise man once said, 'An error does not become a mistake until you refuse to correct it.' ... Without debate without criticism, no administration and no country can succeed -- an no republic can survive." The final responsibility for the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion was, he said "mine, and mine alone." Kennedy's popularity soared.

We want to hear, we long to hear, "I screwed up. I will do my best to ensure that it will not happen again." Most of us are not impressed when a leader offers the form of Kennedy's admission without its essence, as in Ronald Reagan's response to the Iran-Contra scandal, which may be summarized as "I didn't do anything worng myself, but it happened on my watch, so, well, I guess I'll take responsibility." That doesn't cut it.

This book is not focused on politics, but of course it has discussions of George Bush as a classic example of a person who resolves cognitive dissonance by refusing to admit mistakes and, instead, blaming things and people around him for any problems. These authors explain just how a person falls prey to the self-justificiations required to resolve cognitive dissonance. They show just how the refusal to admit mistakes reinforce and deepen the mistakes and errors and problems.

One of the discoveries of research is that once you do something that is dissonant with your image of yourself (e.g. as a "good guy" or a "smart guy" or whatever) then rather than admit a mistake, we dig ourself into a hole by refusing to admit to not be good or smart or whatever. Instead we find excuses. And as we do this, we become ever more committed to our justification or rationalization. The authors show how this lead cults to take bizarre stands. For example, if they predict the "end of days" and it doesn't come to pass. They don't admit an error. Instead they seize on this as "proof" that, for example, their prayers of intercession have worked and deepens their commitment to the cult. This is an example of "confirmation bias", a mental trick we use to reinterpret evidence in a way to justify and confirm our image of ourselves as good or smart or whatever.

There is an excellent section on the "recovered memories" movement and how it destroyed lives. Our memories are patchy and fade over time, other memories, other stories, and even suggestions by others can help "fill in" our memories. If we are confronted about their authenticity, we can either admit to fallibility or cover over the cognitive dissonance by seizing a story, no matter how incredible, and running with it. That's how many "victims" of the recovered memory movement came to accuse fathers and mothers of incest and torture. And the courts went along. Despite the fact that we know that memories are fallible and that really horrible events haunt us and are not usually "repressed". This movement grew on the myth of "recovered memories" that had been repressed. Court cases ensued. Families were torn apart. All on the basis of a faddish idea that swept the US in the 1980s.

Similarly the idea that "children cannot lie" and that sex therapists can work with a child an elicit stories of sex abuse that "must be true" because they come from the mouths of innocent babes. In reality, experiments can show how easy it is to plant an idea in a young child's mind.

The book is full of little psychological insights and delightful little tales of foibles and the mechanisms we use to dig ourselves deeper into the holes of self-deception that we've created to cover up our mistakes, to cover up those errors that we refuse to admit and instead find ways to rationalize away. In the late 1980s and early 1990s a number daycare operators were accused of satanic cult child abuse based on therapists eliciting "evidence" from the kids. No matter how absurd these stories were, once parents, police, and prosecutors became committed to this view, they could not admit mistakes and followed the "leads" despite more and more unreal "revelations". Sadly people were imprisoned over this modern day Salem witchhunt. As the authors of this book point out, these supposely responsible adults were driven by cognitive dissonance to cling more tenaciously to these absurd tales of satanic acts even as the details became more absurd. The book explains the mechanism. And it documents many tragedies committed because authorities were ignorant of this basic pscyohological predisposition to which we all fall prey.

The book is full of tradegies that our faulty psychology leads us into. The one that strikes me hardest is the fact that prosecutors will do almost anything to avoid ever admiting to participating in convicting an innocent person. Similarly cops will justify lies and horrible abuse in an interrogation because they will interpret any and all behaviour by a suspect as confirmation of their guilt. All this is completely irrational, but it lies at the heart of our justice system but little or nothing is done to identify and rectify it. Similarly the medical community has a long history of refusing to admitting that their practices can lead to harm rather than healing. People blind themselves to their failings because of our quirky psychological make-up. You would think that those in responsible positions would strive hard to eliminate these errors. But as the authors point out, it is those who are low on the pecking order who find it easiest to admit mistakes and change course when evidence is presented. The higher your social standing the more likely you will persist in an error and rationalize it away. It creates a tragedy for society because it means that the worst outrages are committed and covered up at the very top of society!

There is an excellent section in the book dealing with marriage and relationships. The advice is really simple. Fighting doesn't cause breakups and divorces. No. It is when you no longer can separate the issue/problem from the person. Once a couple starts to see the problem as the other person and not an act of the other person, the split becomes irreconcilable. Healthy couples find a way to find a way to fault the issue/problem while giving credit to the other person as not intending the issue/problem. So long as both can retain this distinction, the relationship is healthy. The book is full of wonderful examples that put flesh on these ideas. Just this section alone makes the book worthwhile because this section gets down to where we all live and the problems we all face.

In good marriages, a confrontation, difference of opinion, clashing habits, and even angry quarrels can bring the couple closer, by helping each partner learn something new and by forcing them to examine their assumptions about their abilities or limitations. It isn't always easy to do this. Letting go of the self-justifications that cover up our mistakes, that protect our desires to do things just the way we want to, and that minimize the hurts we inflict on those we love can be embarrassing and painful. Without self-justification, we might be left standing emotionally naked, unprotected, in a pool or regrets and losses.

Yet, in the final analysis, we believe it is worth it, because no matter how painful it can be to let go of self-justification, the result teaches us something deeply important about ourselves and can bring the peace of insight and self-acceptance.

The book is an excellent antidote to cynicism because it gives hope through using science to understand our human situation, the dilemmas we create for ourselves, and the muddles we make worse through the simple -- but dangerous -- mechanism of self-justification in covering up cognitive dissonance.

Errors are inherent in baseball, as they are in medicine, business, science, law, love, and life. In the final analysis, the test of a nation's character, and of an individual's integrity, does not depend on being error free. It depends on what we do after making the error.