Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me)

The book's title plays on a phrase all too common in the mouths of politicians, bosses, and anyone else who has messed up: mistakes were made. Notice that nobody actually appears in the sentence. The mistake exists, but it has no author. Social psychologists Elliot Aronson and Carol Tavris use this linguistic sleight of hand as a doorway into a serious question: why is it so hard for people, even well-meaning ones, to admit they were wrong?

The answer the book develops is self-justification. After making a decision or acting in a certain way, the mind works nonstop to prove that the choice was right. It is not a conscious lie; it is a mechanism for protecting the image we hold of ourselves as sensible, good people.

The book moves through cases from the justice system, medicine, politics, marriage, and memory to show that the very same process operates in all of them, from small domestic disagreements to public disasters.

Think about everyday life: the driver who runs a red light and explains that he was in a hurry, the coworker who blames the delayed project on a vendor, the sports fan who swears the referee robbed their team. Each one offers an explanation that leaves them at peace with their own conscience, and almost no one realizes they are doing it.

The core concept comes from Leon Festinger, Aronson's mentor: cognitive dissonance. It is the discomfort we feel when two ideas, or an idea and an action, clash. For example, I consider myself an honest person, and at the same time I did something dishonest. That tension is unpleasant, and the brain wants to reduce it.

There are two ways out. One is to admit the mistake and change, which hurts and threatens our self-image. The other is to adjust our interpretation so that the action seems reasonable: everybody does it, it was the other person's fault, it wasn't that big a deal. The second way out is easier and, for that reason, much more common.

The authors insist that dissonance is not a flaw limited to bad people. It hits hardest in people who have a positive image of themselves and who have a lot to lose by admitting a mistake.

A common example is the smoker who knows the risks of cigarettes and comes up with reassuring lines, like the fact that his grandfather smoked his whole life and lived to be ninety. The thought doesn't remove the danger, but it reduces the discomfort of acting against what he himself knows.

A classic story in the book is that of a group that believed in a doomsday prophecy, studied by Festinger and his colleagues in the 1950s. The leader claimed to receive messages from beings from another planet, who warned of a catastrophe and promised to rescue the faithful in a spaceship. Many quit their jobs and gave away their belongings to prepare.

When the date passed and nothing happened, the expected reaction would have been to give up. Instead, part of the group reinterpreted the failure: the world had been spared precisely because of their faith. They began spreading the belief more fervently than before.

The example shows that the greater the investment in a belief, the harder it is to abandon it. Anywhere you look, almost everyone has seen a relative fiercely defend a flawed plan, a bad investment, or a disappointing leader, precisely because they have already spent too much to turn back.