Mistakes Were Made (but not by me), Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts, by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson. Harcourt, Inc.
This is a fascinating and terrifying book. In it, two distinguished social psychologists use data and real world examples to illustrate how self-justification and its powerful engine, cognitive dissonance –what happens when two of our beliefs cannot possibly both be true– push us further and further from truth and reality.
It was published in 2007, so their examples use the administration of George Bush, Jr. rather than the administration of Donald Trump or Joe Biden, but it’s not hard to apply its principles to today.
Self-justification, the tendency to cling even more tightly to beliefs once they’re shown to be false, prejudice, blind spots, distortions in memory, bad science for money, bogus theories rapidly circulated on the internet, closed minds in law enforcement and the judiciary… step right up, folks! We’ve got it all.
But we do have brains. We could improve. Here’s a passage from near the end of the book:
“The moral of our story is easy to say, and difficult to execute. When you screw up, try saying this: “I made a mistake. I need to understand what went wrong. I don’t want to make the same mistake again.” Dweck’s research is heartening because it suggests that at all ages, people can learn to see mistakes not as terrible personal failings to be denied or justified, but as inevitable aspects of life that help us grow, and grow up.
Our national pastime of baseball differs from the society that spawned it in one crucial way: The box score of every baseball game, from the Little League to the Major League, consists of three tallies: runs, hits and errors. Errors are not desirable, of course, but everyone understands that they are unavoidable. 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.”