Interview on August 30, 2007 with Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson
Mistakes were made (but not by ME!): Why we justify foolish beliefs, bad decisions, and hurtful acts

Biographical Sketch

Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson are authors of Mistakes Were Made (But Not by ME): Why we justify foolish beliefs, bad decisions, and hurtful acts.

Carol Tavris is a psychologist, writer, and lecturer. Her other books include Anger: The Misunderstood Emotion; The Mismeasure of Woman; and, with Carole Wade, two leading textbooks in psychology that feature critical and scientific thinking—Psychology and Invitation to Psychology. She has written for The New York Times Book Review, the Los Angeles Times, Scientific American, the Times Literary Supplement, The Skeptical Inquirer, and many magazines. An acclaimed lecturer, she has addressed audiences of all kinds on many topics having to do with psychological science. She is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Association for Psychological Science, and on the editorial board of Psychological Science in the Public Interest.

Elliot Aronson recently won the William James Award from the Association for Psychological Science for his "lifetime of significant intellectual contributions to the basic science of psychology." Chosen by his peers as one of the most eminent psychologists of the twentieth century, Aronson is internationally recognized for his scientific research and his applications of it to social problems, from persuading people to conserve energy to reducing racial conflict in schools. He is the only recipient of all three of the American Psychological Association’s highest awards—for writing, teaching, and research. His many books include The Social Animal; The Jigsaw Classroom, which describes a simple but effective method of structuring classrooms to reduce prejudice and raise minority children's academic confidence; and Nobody Left to Hate, an analysis of the killings at Columbine High School. Aronson began his distinguished career as a professor at Harvard, and later held professorships at the University of Minnesota, the University of Texas, the University of California at Santa Cruz, and Stanford.



Introduction - Initial Interest in Cognitive Dissonance

John:  Given the interest of the Institute, a lot of what you’re writing about resonates with our mission.

Carol:  We’re interested not only in getting people to think critically, but why they don’t.  And cognitive dissonance is a big piece of that.  So, speaking of critical thinking, let’s define our terms: Cognitive dissonance is the unconscious mental conflict that occurs when two attitudes, or an attitude and a behavior, or an attitude and new information, conflict with one another: “Smoking could kill me” and “I smoke” is an example.  So is “I believe that vaccines cause autism” and “Uh oh, here are five huge well-controlled studies showing it doesn’t.”  Being in a state of dissonance is as unsettling, and as motivating, as hunger, and, like hunger, we seek to reduce the discomfort. The smoker will either have to quit—or justify smoking.  The believer will either have to change her belief about the role of vaccines—or disparage the studies. 

Dan:  What was the impetus to write this book?

Elliot:  Well, there were a couple of reasons.  Leon Festinger developed dissonance theory in 1957; at the time I was his graduate research assistant.  Leon was brilliant and a genius, and his theory became one of the most important in psychology—it led to a great many experiments that helped us understand how the human mind works. But Leon didn’t care a fig for application.  He was interested in pure science. He treated experimental research like a chess game: how do you figure things out?  My own career has been mostly a combination of science and application, so I thought this would be perfect time for me to take a major step towards bringing this very powerful theory, and a lot of important research that’s been done in testing it, to the general public and show them clearly the wide variety of areas that it can be applied to—from marital problems and family rifts to the reasons that the criminal justice system is often so unwilling to remedy its mistakes in the procedures that cause wrongful convictions.

Dan:  And for you, Carol?

Carol:  I came to this project from my interest in several of the content areas the book investigates, particularly the recovered-memory therapy and daycare sex-abuse scandals, and from my interest in promoting scientific literacy.  Why, for instance, do we have so many unvalidated and sometimes dangerous fads that suddenly sweep the psychotherapeutic establishment?  They often leave a lot of misery or outright harm in their wake, but their proponents almost never say, when the fad is over or the belief has been disproved, “Oh, sorry, everyone; we were wrong about penis envy.” They either keep going or move on to the next fad without critically evaluating the previous one. 

As someone who has been writing about psychological science for years, I have also long been interested in why it is, when you bring fascinating, useful and relevant psychological research to bear on a problem, people rarely say, “Oh, thank you so much for showing me this wonderful research that shows me that I’m wrong!  This is great—now I can improve my thinking/research/professional work!”  After all, the essence of critical thinking is that you’re supposed to say “Ah, new evidence. Look how it debunks a belief I hold dear! Isn’t that nice?”  Why don’t we do it more often, then? Elliot’s lifelong research supplied an important answer.  He took dissonance theory and transformed it into a theory of self-justification, the mental mechanism that blinds us to the possibility of our own biases and mistakes.

Elliot:  One of the major precipitating events for our book was the war in Iraq. Carol and I were talking and the question arose, “How did we get into this quagmire and why can’t George Bush get us out of it?”  Clearly, cognitive dissonance played a major role in the way our leaders made that initial decision—including how they selectively read the CIA reports to confirm their decision to begin the war, ignoring information that was dissonant with what they wanted to do—as well as in their enormous difficulty in getting out.

Carol:  The drumbeat of criticism, from left and right, was getting noisier. There were no weapons of mass destruction and Iraqis didn’t greet us by dancing in the streets and they weren’t throwing flowers at our feet and it wasn’t over in three months.  I said to Elliot, “Why can’t Bush admit what the public wants to hear, and say “We made a tragic mistake here. What can we do to fix this?”  Elliot looked at me calmly and said, “Any student of cognitive dissonance knows why.”

Elliot:  My own work over the years has shown that dissonance is greatest and most painful when the self is involved: when people who see themselves as good, worthy, decent, ethical, capable, and kind are confronted with evidence that they did something wrong, harmful, foolish, unethical, or cruel.  At the end of our conversation, Carol and I  sat there and said, “This is a book!

Deceptive Blinders

Dan:  One of the things that you demonstrate in many contexts is the way that people blind themselves to unwanted information. Given that process, how do people respond to information about dissonance? Don’t they reject it?   

Elliot:  I think it’s easy if you’re talking in general terms, as in the chapter on marital disputes and how, for the most part, they boil down to “I’m right” and “You’re wrong.”  People recognize themselves in those general situations.  Law professors understand and recognize the problem of prosecutorial error, not because the prosecuting attorney who sent the wrong person to prison is a bad guy, but because he believes he’s a good guy and couldn’t possibly have done such a terrible thing as keeping an innocent man in prison rather than admit that he made a mistake.  Likewise, psychotherapists who are well trained in research understand how clinical fads can come and go.  But when you ask people to consider whether they, individually, might have put an innocent man in prison or they, personally, might have wrecked a family in therapy—then you get a lot of resistance.  Once a person has become deeply committed to a belief system and a professional practice, such as recovered-memory therapy, that has been responsible for an awful lot of damage, it’s very hard for them to accept data indicating that they are absolutely wrong and might possibly have broken up their client’s family.

Carol:  But let’s emphasize that some people can and do face their mistakes and change direction. Each chapter in our book ends with a story of someone who did just that, and these stories show, better than we could describe, how emotionally difficult it can be to break out of the cocoon of self-justification. These rare individuals were willing to face the harm they had caused—as prosecutors, as therapists, as lovers.

In addition, we have gotten some amazing responses from readers and reviewers who tell us, as one did, “Boy, reading this book was like looking into a mirror. There are some things I understand now that I had never thought of before.”  For example, one man said, “You know, your chapter on memory made me realize that my memories of how bad my father was to me were self-justifying memories.  I wrote myself out of them.  I’ve begun to rethink our relationship and my own part in creating it.”  In that sense, a deep understanding of dissonance theory is enormously helpful to people. 

Understanding Self-Justification

Elliot:  I agree, and I think that understanding occurs at two stages.  One, it helps us make better decisions to begin with. George Bush, and the people surrounding him, were hell bent on invading Iraq.  Because they were hell bent on invading Iraq, they focused on the information that supported the invasion, and downplayed any information that would have gone against that decision.  So for the first step we would say: Be careful when making a decision. Make sure you gather as much information as you can for all options, and make sure you are reading that information in a fair and unbiased way.  That will help you make the right decision. 

The second phase occurs after the decision is made, because now you will be motivated to reduce dissonance by gathering all kinds of information to justify it.  We start seeing all the good things about the decision that we made, and we start ignoring evidence that suggests we might have been wrong.  For example, if you supported the war in Iraq and weapons of mass destruction don’t turn up, then you find yourself saying,  “Saddam was a bad guy anyway,” or “it’s important to bring democracy to this part of the world.”  Examine those post-hoc justifications very carefully, forever asking yourself,  “Do I really believe this?  Or am I simply justifying a bad decision that I’ve already made and compounding it and refusing to learn from that awful mistake?” 

Another technique for leaders, corporate executives, government officials—or anyone else—is to surround yourself with people who don’t necessarily agree with you.  All of us are inclined to surround ourselves with people who agree with us. But if your group’s decisions affect your employees, your country, or God forbid the lives of other people, then it is crucial to go out of your way to find close advisors who differ in their way of thinking and listen closely to them.  The best example of someone who did this is Abraham Lincoln.  Doris Kearns Goodwin, in her remarkable book Team Of Rivals, shows how Lincoln appointed a cabinet consisting largely of political rivals who disagreed with him; some of whom were disrespectful of him.  One of them, Stanton, had actually called him a stupid ape to his face. Lincoln made him Secretary of War.  The Bush Administration has had the greatest proportion of yea-sayers in recent memory and as a result I think it will go down as one of the worst in American history.

Carol:  As we know from the many memoirs by people who were in Bush’s inner circle, Bush confuses agreement with loyalty, and loyalty and ideology have been litmus tests for employment in the Bush Administration at every level—including for scientists. That is a recipe for disaster, in terms of being able to change direction when you are headed into quicksand and for publishing scientific evidence that disputes some ideological wish. 

Elliot:  Another way to learn from an understanding of dissonance is that it is possible to separate the cognitions “I did something wrong” or “I made a mistake” from “That means I’m stupid.”  The need to reduce dissonance may be hard wired, but how we think about mistakes is not. The equation between “making a mistake” and “being stupid” is culturally determined and learned.  We see this false equation being made even in very young children, who then become afraid to try something new or learn a new skill because they might make a mistake or fail—and that would mean they’re stupid, which is, of course, not what it means at all.  And that implicit connection, which our culture fosters, can be unlearned.

Corrupting the Good, One Step at a Time

John:  Another powerful part of the book is when you talk about the breakdown of the former firewall between science and industry; between university or government funding and corporate funding for research.  You make a strong case that there are inherent dangers involved when scientists accept money from industry, even when they have the best of motives to do good research.

Elliot:  I think what’s important about our book is that we’re not talking about good people and evil people.  We’re talking about how easy it is for a good person to become unwittingly corrupted, one step at a time, without realizing it.  We’re not saying that all or even most of the scientists who are working for the big drug companies are faking the data or being blatantly unscientific.  Because of the nature of dissonance and dissonance reduction, however, they simply become less attentive to negative information than they would otherwise be.

Carol:   Scientific reasoning is hard enough when you have no vested interest in the outcome of your research; but when you do, it is easy to justify the small decisions you make to squeeze the findings to show what you’d like them to show.  We can all easily tell when someone else is likely to be biased, but because of our cognitive blind spots, we think that we ourselves are above corruption.

Elliot:  Not unlike Justice Scalia, who could not understand why people were upset that he was going on a government-paid fishing trip with vice-president Cheney when an issue involving Cheney was pending at the Supreme Court. “I do not think my impartiality could reasonably be questioned,” he said.  How come we can question it and he can’t?  That’s his blind spot.  That claim that many people make ― that they are invulnerable to any kind of influence in the reduction of cognitive dissonance ― is as amazing as it is pathetic.  We are all vulnerable to it.  Even those of us who have worked closely with the theory for 50 years are vulnerable to dissonance reduction.



Relinquishing Self-Justification

Dan:  And so, how can we break the need to reduce dissonance by justifying our decisions and actions?

Elliot:  First of all, the reason dissonance reduction has survived millions of years of evolution is that it serves a useful purpose.  We don’t want to eliminate all of it because sometimes—if I do something embarrassing or foolish—I want to be able to say to myself afterwards that nobody noticed.  That ability will allow me to sleep at night.  For most decisions, like buying a car, dissonance reduction works beautifully to keep us from worrying about the car that got away.   

But when people have made a decision that turned out to be wrong, they can learn to stop self-justification in its tracks before that decision takes them too far afield.  Take Oprah Winfrey, who promoted James Frey for writing a book that was supposedly autobiographical.  Then it turned out that much of his story was made up. At first Oprah defended him—and her own prior endorsement of him: OK, so he lied, but even so his book was helpful to a lot of people, blah, blah, therefore, the truth doesn’t really matter. And then she had the courage to repudiate that self-justification.  She brought him back on her show and apologized to the audience, saying, “I was wrong, I made a mistake. The truth does matter.”  And you know, her popularity did not suffer. 

Carol:  The burden of self-justification is a heavy one.  When people let it go they are often surprised at how much better they feel.  Admitting the mistake is not the devastating act that they had imagined it would be. Certainly our friends and loved ones are happy when we do it!

John:  I was struck by another example where you talked about doctors who admitted they made a mistake and the different response that engenders in terms of  people being less inclined to sue.

Carol:  When people sue physicians, they not only want compensation for their pain, suffering, and medical costs. They also want accountability and honesty, and they want to know that the error that caused their suffering will not be repeated.  It is often not as much about money as, “Will somebody listen to me?  Will somebody acknowledge the horrible experience I’ve had? You left a sponge in my stomach and could you just please admit it and not do it again?”  People don’t want to feel that they’re crazy, which is what happens when you get an institution stonewalling and failing to admit that they had made a devastating mistake. 



Competing Theories

Dan:  One of the things you do with dissonance theory is show how to apply it to many situations.  I wonder if you also noticed any competing explanations that you could’ve used but didn’t.

Elliot:  Nope, absolutely not.  [Laughter]

Carol:  Cognitive dissonance theory has turned out to be a far broader theory than  initially conceptualized, and some of those “competing explanations” can be subsumed under it. For example, there has been an explosion of research in the last 50 years in cognitive science regarding the brain’s blind spots, the distortions of perception, and the many kinds of biases in the way we process information and make decisions. These findings, in our view, all support the mechanism of cognitive dissonance as a perceptual and motivational phenomenon. 

Elliot:  Let me also add there are other reasons why people do what they do. Some people lie, cheat, and cling to harmful ideas for their own greed and advancement; they know exactly what they are doing and don’t even try to justify their actions.  Our interest is not so much with bad people who do bad things, but with good people who do bad things precisely to preserve their belief that they are good people. Dissonance reduction is not the only explanation for their behavior, but it is a powerful explanation for a great many of the apparently self-defeating behaviors that human beings do.

John:  I think what you are talking about has the potential to enhance our empathy towards others and help to develop more patience in listening to how somebody else sees the world.  It isn’t that they’re a bad person. This is really how they’re seeing things. 

Carol:  Thank you.  That’s one of our goals.  Along with helping all of us to be more patient with our own failings, foibles, and mistakes.

Learn more about the authors and the book at
www.mistakesweremadebutnotbyme.com

To contact Elliot Aronson:  http://Aronson.socialpsychology.org/
To contact Carol Tavris:     http://Tavris.socialpsychology.org/