The book Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts, written by psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson came to my attention quite recently, but it was recommended by one the investors and persons that I most admire, Howard Marks. He mentioned that he read the book in one of his famous memos entitled The Illusion of Knowledge (text here, podcast here). He also mentioned it in the What’s Oaktree Reading? 2022 Year-End Book Recommendations.

So I decided to pick up a copy of the book at a local public library and give it a try.

This post is part of the series Learnings from books where my goal is to share what I learned from the book that I read. It is a mixture of review and summary with a bit of my opinion and point of view. But, as reviews, these learnings can say more about me than the book itself, so I trust that you the smart reader will take it with a grain of salt.

Learnings from Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me)

The book is really good, it talks about self-justification (the need to justify our actions and decisions) and cognitive dissonance (we will see more later) in many daily situations. “As fallible human beings, all of us share the impulse to justify ourselves and avoid taking responsibility for actions that turn out to be harmful, immoral, or stupid.”

One of the main ideas of the book is that when we are confronted by evidence that we are wrong, we do not change our point of view or plan of action but justify our decisions or minimize the actions by blaming someone else. “Self-justification minimizes our mistakes and bad decisions; it also explains why everyone can recognize a hypocrite in action except the hypocrite.”

One important thing is that “Self-justification is not the same as lying or making excuses”. As when you lie, you know that is it a lie, but when you are self-justifying, you really believe what you are saying. “That is why self-justification is more powerful and dangerous than an explicit lie.”

Cognitive Dissonance

Self-justification is driven by our cognitive dissonance. “Cognitive dissonance is a state of tension that occurs when a person holds two cognitions (ideas, attitudes, beliefs, opinions) that are psychologically inconsistent with each other, such as “Smoking is a dumb thing to do because it could kill me” and “I smoke two packs a day?”. Dissonance produces mental discomfort that ranges from minor pangs to deep anguish; people don’t rest easy until they find a way to reduce it.”

So, the brain’s main goal is to reduce the dissonance between these two conflicting thoughts and we do this in many ways, we can blame others, minimize the effects of what we did, or find any excuses that make us live with ourselves.

This happens when we make a decision. After we make it, we will find any reasons to support that decision. So we look for confirmation of our decision (confirmation bias). “So powerful is the need for consonance that when people are forced to look at disconfirming evidence, they will find a way to criticize, distort, or dismiss it so that they can maintain or even strengthen their existing belief.”

The greater the cost of a decision, either being time, money, effort, or even inconvenience, and the more irreversible the result and consequences, the greater the dissonance and the greater the need to reduce the dissonance by minimizing the bad things and overemphasizing the good things.

“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.”

One interesting thing is that even a random choice, one that you did not feel so strongly about in the beginning will make you in a way convince yourself that you made the best decision, so you will probably feel stronger about the decision after making it than before.

With each step that we take, self-justification will make us believe in what we are doing and we can go even further to the next step, getting to extremes. A small difference, in the beginning, can put people in polar opposition after many small steps of self-justification.

But self-justification is not always bad, we make ourselves do the right thing because we are compelled by our self-image.

Blind Spots, biases, and prejudice

The dangerous thing about blind spots is that we have blind spots of our blind spots, so we think we don’t have any.

Partially it is due to us thinking we see reality as it truly is, a phenomenon called naive realism. It is “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. Naive realism creates a logical labyrinth because it presupposes two things: One, people who are open-minded and fair ought to agree with a reasonable opinion, and, two, any opinion I hold must be reasonable; if it weren’t, I wouldn’t hold it. Therefore, if I can just get my opponents to sit down here and listen to me explain how things really are, they will agree with me. And if they don’t, it must be because they are biased.”

That lets us think: I am reasonable, if people don’t agree with me it means that they are biased and not acting rationally.

We believe we are less biased because we know what is going on in our heads, and introspection tells us what we are thinking and feeling, but we can’t do the same with other people, we only see their actions.

We all have biases, prejudices, and blind spots. Like fishes are unaware of water, we are unaware of our biases, prejudices, and blind spots.

“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.”

Is it really my memory?

Memory is another important subject in the book. One important thing is that memory is not like a video recorder, where you see things are they really are. When we remember (retrieve memories), we are gathering the details that we remember to reconstruct them, so we may mix (unintentionally) much other information that was not part of what actually happened.

“Self-justification causes individuals to distort or rewrite their memories to conform to their views of themselves, which is why they can “remember” saying things that they only thought about saying or intended to say at the time.”

So, most memories do not represent what really happened, they could be distorted, we could have forgotten something, and we can even confabulate (create erroneous or false memories) all in service of protecting our self-image and avoiding dissonance.

And here we can link with traumatic events, the book talks a lot about the power of fake memories, where people can create a new memory that was “repressed” to justify why they are the way they are right now. Like if I am a good person and my current situation is screwed, it must be because I suffered some trauma.

People who suffered trauma usually tend not to forget the trauma and we have to be careful as much of psychiatry can try to get “hidden memories” that are actually fake memories created to justify some other problem that they have in their life.

Self-justification in action

The book also cites the self-justification effect in many areas of our daily life, from marriage to police and law, to psychotherapists, war, etc.

Usually, most of the effect follows the basic self-justification pyramid mentioned in the book, where we start with a small and maybe insignificant decision, and step by step the need to justify will take us farther and farther away from the other side.

This always happens slowly, in a snowballing pattern of blame and self-justification where each person “focuses on what the other one is doing wrong while justifying his or her own preferences, attitudes, and ways of doing things”.

And the need to “always be right” (because we are good people, so our decision must be good), let very little space for doubt, and “Doubt is not the enemy of justice; overconfidence is.”

Minimizing the bad effects

Not everything is lost, just being aware of self-justification and cognitive dissonance can help us make better decisions.

Another way is self-acceptance. “A richer understanding of how and why our minds work as they do is the first step toward breaking the self-justification habit. And that, in turn, requires us to be more mindful of our behavior and the reasons for our choices. It takes time, self-reflection, and willingness.”

One good practice is when critiquing someone, never point to what people are, but what people did. If we evoke what they are, they will take it as part of their personality and will self justify and the discussion will turn out to be just arguments, but no one will ever change but pointing out what they did, can allow they to disassociate and don’t fall in the self-justifying mechanism.

And mainly, extend to others the same self-forgiving ways of thinking we extend to ourselves. Forgive each other’s faults and focus on their good side.

Favorite quotes

These are my 5 favorite quotes from the book.

  • “As fallible human beings, all of us share the impulse to justify ourselves and avoid taking responsibility for actions that turn out to be harmful, immoral, or stupid.”

  • “Memories create our stories, but our stories also create our memories. Once we have a narrative, we shape our memories to fit into it.”

  • “If good guys justify the bad things they do, bad guys persuade themselves they are the good guys.”

  • “False memories allow people to forgive themselves and justify their mistakes, but sometimes at a high price: an inability to take responsibility for their lives”

  • “Every marriage is a story, and like all stories, it is subject to its participants’ distorted perceptions and memories that preserve the narrative as each side sees it.

Other resources

This section is extra and here I compliment the post with content from other sources that resonate with the book.

These are my learnings from the book Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts, written by psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson. A special thanks to Howard Marks who recommended it to me and to Vancouver Public Library (VPL) for allowing access to the book for free.

Cheers.