Mistakes Were Made (but Not By Me) Third Edition: Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts By Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson (Dedicated to Leon Festinger, creator of the theory of cognitive dissonance, whose ingenuity inspired this book)

We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.—George Orwell, 1946 

I see no reason why I should be consciously wrong today because I was unconsciously wrong yesterday.—Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, 1948

Introduction: Knaves, Fools, Villains, and Hypocrites: How Do They Live with Themselves?

1. It seems like eons since Republican nominee Bob Dole described Bill Clinton as “my opponent, not my enemy,” but in fact he made that civilized remark in 1996. How quaint it now seems in contrast to Donald Trump, who regards his opponents (or people who simply disagree with him) as treasonous, disloyal rats and foes. In our new concluding chapter, therefore, we closely examine the process by which Trump, his administration, and his supporters fostered that view, with devastating consequences for our democracy. We wrote this chapter in the hope that once we understand the slow but pernicious shift in thinking from opponent to enemy, we can begin to find our way back. — Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, 2020

2. When politicians’ backs are against the wall, they may reluctantly acknowledge error but not their responsibility for it. The phrase “Mistakes were made” is such a glaring effort to absolve oneself of culpability that it has become a national joke—what the political journalist Bill Schneider called the “past exonerative” tense. “Oh, all right, mistakes were made, but not by me, by someone else, someone who shall remain nameless.” In the same way, we each draw our own moral lines and justify them.

3. Now, between the conscious lie to fool others and unconscious self-justification to fool ourselves, there’s a fascinating gray area patrolled by an unreliable, self-serving historian—memory. Memories are often pruned and shaped with an ego-enhancing bias that blurs the edges of past events, softens culpability, and distorts what really happened. When researchers ask wives what percentage of the housework they do, they say, “Are you kidding? I do almost everything, at least 90 percent.” And when they ask husbands the same question, the men say, “I do a lot, actually, about 40 percent.” Although the specific numbers differ from couple to couple, the total always exceeds 100 percent by a large margin. It’s tempting to conclude that one spouse is lying, but it is more likely that each is remembering in a way that enhances his or her contribution.

4. Over time, as the self-serving distortions of memory kick in and we forget or misremember past events, we may come to believe our own lies, little by little. We know we did something wrong, but gradually we begin to think it wasn’t all our fault, and after all, the situation was complex. We start underestimating our own responsibility, whittling away at it until it is a mere shadow of its former hulking self. Before long, we have persuaded ourselves to believe privately what we said publicly.

5. John Dean, Richard Nixon’s White House counsel, the man who blew the whistle on the conspiracy to cover up the illegal activities of the Watergate scandal, explained how this process works: 

    INTERVIEWER: You mean those who made up the stories were believing their own lies? 

    DEAN: That’s right. If you said it often enough, it would become true. When the press learned of the wire taps on newsmen and White House staffers, for example, and flat denials failed, it was claimed that this was a national-security matter. I’m sure many people believed that the taps were for national security; they weren’t. That was concocted as a justification after the fact. But when they said it, you understand, they really believed it.

6. Self-justification has costs and benefits. By itself, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. It lets us sleep at night. Without it, we would prolong the awful pangs of embarrassment. We would torture ourselves with regret over the road not taken or over how badly we navigated the road we did take. We would agonize in the aftermath of almost every decision: Did we do the right thing, marry the right person, buy the right house, choose the best car, enter the right career? Yet mindless self-justification, like quicksand, can draw us deeper into disaster. It blocks our ability to even see our errors, let alone correct them. It distorts reality, keeping us from getting all the information we need and assessing issues clearly. It prolongs and widens rifts between lovers, friends, and nations. It keeps us from letting go of unhealthy habits. It permits the guilty to avoid taking responsibility for their deeds. And it keeps many professionals from changing outdated attitudes and procedures that can harm the public. 

7. None of us can avoid making blunders. But we do have the ability to say, “This is not working out here. This is not making sense.” To err is human, but humans then have a choice between covering up and fessing up. The choice we make is crucial to what we do next. We are forever being told that we should learn from our mistakes, but how can we learn unless we first admit that we made those mistakes?

Chapter 1: Cognitive Dissonance: The Engine of Self-Justification

Aggression Begets Self-Justification, Which Begets More Aggression.

This experiment is almost always described as a study of obedience to authority. Indeed it is.

Chapter 2: Pride and Prejudice . . . and Other Blind Spots

1. When you enter the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, you find yourself in a room of interactive exhibits designed to identify the people you can’t tolerate. The familiar targets are there (blacks, women, Jews, gays), but also short people, fat people, blond-female people, disabled people . . . You watch a video on the vast variety of prejudices designed to convince you that all human beings have at least a few, and then you are invited to enter the museum proper through one of two doors, one marked PREJUDICED, the other marked UNPREJUDICED. The latter door is locked, in case anyone misses the point, and occasionally some people do. When we were visiting the museum one afternoon, we were treated to the sight of four Hasidic Jews pounding angrily on the Unprejudiced door, demanding to be let in.

2. The brain is designed with blind spots, optical and psychological, and one of its cleverest tricks is to confer on its owner the comforting delusion that he or she does not have any. In a sense, dissonance theory is a theory of blind spots—of how and why people unintentionally blind themselves so that they fail to notice vital events and information that might make them question their behavior or their convictions. Along with the confirmation bias, the brain comes packaged with other self-serving habits that allow us to justify our own perceptions and beliefs as being accurate, realistic, and unbiased. 

2. Social psychologist Lee Ross named this phenomenon “naive realism,” 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. Ross knows whereof he speaks from both his laboratory experiments and his efforts to reduce the bitter conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Even when each side recognizes that the other side perceives the issues differently, each thinks that the other side is biased while they themselves are objective and that their own perceptions of reality should provide the basis for settlement. 

3. In one experiment, Ross took peace proposals created by Israeli negotiators, labeled them as Palestinian proposals, and asked Israeli citizens to judge them. “The Israelis liked the Palestinian proposal attributed to Israel more than they liked the Israeli proposal attributed to the Palestinians,” he says. “If your own proposal isn’t going to be attractive to you when it comes from the other side, what chance is there that the other side’s proposal is going to be attractive when it actually comes from the other side?” 

3. Closer to home, social psychologist Geoffrey Cohen found that Democrats will endorse an extremely restrictive welfare proposal, one usually associated with Republicans, if they think it has been proposed by the Democratic Party, and Republicans will support a generous welfare policy if they think it comes from the Republican Party. Label the same proposal as coming from the other side, and you might as well be asking people to support a policy proposed by Hitler, Stalin, or Attila the Hun. None of the people in Cohen’s study were aware of their blind spot—that they were being influenced by their party’s position. Instead, they all claimed that their beliefs followed logically from their own careful study of the policy at hand, guided by their general philosophy of government. It’s immensely hard to overcome this blind spot, even when doing so is part of your job description. 

4. Consider the challenge for members of the Supreme Court, whose job, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. observed, is to protect the First Amendment’s guarantee of “freedom for the thought that we hate.” That’s pretty strong dissonance to overcome, although most judges imagine that they are up to the challenge.

5. We believe our own judgments are less biased and more independent than those of others partly because we rely on introspection to tell us what we are thinking and feeling, but we have no way of knowing what others are truly thinking. And when we look into our souls and hearts, the need to avoid dissonance assures us that we have only the best and most honorable of motives. We take our own involvement in an issue as a source of accuracy and enlightenment (“ I’ve felt strongly about gun control for years, therefore I know what I’m talking about”), but we regard such personal feelings on the part of others who hold different views as a source of bias (“ She can’t possibly be impartial about gun control because she’s felt strongly about it for years”).

6. All of us are as unaware of our blind spots as fish are unaware of the water they swim in, but those who swim in the waters of privilege have a particular motivation to remain oblivious.

7. Drivers cannot avoid having blind spots in their field of vision, but good drivers are aware of them; they know they had better be careful backing up and changing lanes if they don’t want to crash into fire hydrants and other cars. Our innate biases are, as two legal scholars put it, “like optical illusions in two important respects—they lead us to wrong conclusions from data, and their apparent rightness persists even when we have been shown the trick.” We cannot avoid our psychological blind spots, but if we are unaware of them, we may become unwittingly reckless, crossing ethical lines and making foolish decisions. Introspection alone will not help our vision, because it will simply confirm our self-justifying beliefs that we, personally, cannot be co-opted or corrupted and that our dislikes or hatreds of other groups are not irrational but reasoned and legitimate. Blind spots enhance our pride and activate our prejudices.

8. The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none. — Thomas Carlyle, historian and essayist 
When New York Times editorial writer Dorothy Samuels learned that Tom DeLay, former leader of the House Republicans, had accepted a trip to the legendary St. Andrews golf course in Scotland from Jack Abramoff, a corrupt lobbyist then under investigation, she expressed her perplexity. “I’ve been writing about the foibles of powerful public officials for more years than I care to reveal without a subpoena,” she wrote, “and I still don’t get it: why would someone risk his or her reputation and career for a lobbyist-bestowed freebie like a vacation at a deluxe resort?” Why? Dissonance theory gives us the answer: one step at a time. Although there are plenty of unashamedly corrupt politicians who sell their votes to the largest campaign contributors, most politicians, thanks to their blind spots, believe they are incorruptible. When they first enter politics, they accept lunch with a lobbyist because, after all, that’s how politics works and it’s an efficient way to get information about a pending bill, isn’t it? “Besides,” the politician says, “lobbyists, like any other citizens, are exercising their right to free speech. I only have to listen; I’ll decide how to vote on the basis of whether my party and constituents support this bill and on whether it is the right thing to do for the American people.” However, once you accept the first small inducement and justify it that way, you have started your slide down the pyramid. If you had lunch with a lobbyist to talk about that pending legislation, why not talk things over on the local golf course? What’s the difference? It’s a nicer place to have a conversation. And if you talked things over on the local course, why not accept a friendly offer to go to a better course to play golf with him or her—to, say, St. Andrews in Scotland? What’s wrong with that? By the time the politician is at the bottom of the pyramid, having accepted and justified ever-larger inducements, the public is screaming, “What’s wrong with that? Are you kidding?” At one level, the politician is not kidding. Dorothy Samuels is right: Who would jeopardize a career and reputation for a trip to Scotland? No one, if that was the first offer, but many of us would if that offer had been preceded by several smaller ones that we had accepted. Pride—when followed by self-justification—paves the road to Scotland.

9. In between the extremes of rare integrity and blatant dishonesty are the great majority who, being human, have all the blind spots the rest of us have. Unfortunately, they are also more likely to think they don’t, which makes them even more vulnerable to being hooked. Once upon a time, most scientists ignored the lure of commerce. When Jonas Salk was questioned in 1954 about whether he would be patenting his polio vaccine, he replied, “Could you patent the sun?” How charming and yet how naive his remark seems today; imagine handing over your discovery to the public interest without keeping a few million bucks for yourself.

10. The greater danger to the public comes from the self-justifications of well-intentioned scientists and physicians who, because of their need to reduce dissonance, truly believe themselves to be above the influence of their corporate funders. Yet, like a plant turning toward the sun, they turn toward the interests of their sponsors without even being aware that they are doing so. How do we know this? One way is through experimental studies that assess an expert’s judgment and determine whether that judgment changes depending on who is paying for it.

11. Physicians, like scientists, want to believe their integrity cannot be compromised. Yet every time physicians accept a fee or other incentive for performing certain tests and procedures, for channeling some of their patients into clinical trials, or for prescribing a new, expensive drug that is not better or safer than an older one, they are balancing their patients’ welfare against their own financial concerns. Their blind spot helps them tip the balance in their own favour, and then justify it: “If a pharmaceutical company wants to give us pens, notepads, calendars, lunches, honoraria, or small consulting fees, why not? We can’t be bought by trinkets and pizzas.” According to surveys, physicians regard small gifts as being ethically more acceptable than large gifts. The American Medical Association agrees, approving of gift-taking from pharmaceutical representatives as long as no single gift is worth much more than a hundred dollars. The evidence shows, however, that most physicians are influenced even more by small gifts than by big ones.

12. The Gift that Keeps on Giving
Robert Cialdini, who has spent many years studying influence and persuasion techniques, systematically observed Hare Krishna advocates raise money at airports. Asking weary travellers for a donation wasn’t working; the requests just made the travellers mad at them. And so the Krishnas came up with a better idea: They would approach a target traveller and press a flower into his hands or pin a flower to his jacket. If the target refused the flower and tried to give it back, the Krishna would demur and say, “It is our gift to you.” Only then would the Krishna ask for a donation. This time the request was likely to be granted because the gift of the flower had established a feeling of indebtedness and obligation in the traveller. How to repay the gift? With a small donation . . . and perhaps the purchase of a charming, overpriced edition of the Bhagavad Gita. Were the travellers aware of the power of reciprocity to affect their behaviour? Not at all. But once reciprocity kicks in, self-justification will follow: “I’ve always wanted a copy of the Bhagavad Gita; what is it, exactly?” The power of the flower is unconscious. “It’s only a flower,” the traveler says. “It’s only a pizza,” the medical resident says. “It’s only a small donation for an educational symposium,” the physician says. Yet the power of the flower is one reason that the amount of contact doctors have with pharmaceutical representatives is positively correlated with the cost of the drugs the doctors later prescribe. “That rep has been awfully persuasive about that new drug; I might as well try it; my patients might do well on it.” Once you take the gift, no matter how small, the process starts. You will feel the urge to give something back, even if it’s only, at first, your attention, your willingness to listen, your sympathy for the giver. Eventually, you will become more willing to give your prescription, your ruling, your vote. Your behavior changes, but, thanks to blind spots and self-justification, your view of your intellectual and professional integrity remains the same. 

13. A friend of ours was given a prescription for a drug that had a long list of cautions. When she sought out an independent website that noted that all the research on this drug was done by the pharmaceutical company that developed it, she pointed this out to her doctor. He said, “What difference does that make?” Carl Elliott, a bioethicist and philosopher who also has an MD, has written extensively about the ways that small gifts entrap their recipients. His brother Hal, a psychiatrist, told him how he ended up on the speakers bureau of a large pharmaceutical company: First they asked him to give a talk about depression to a community group. Why not? he thought; it would be a public service. Next they asked him to speak on the same subject at a hospital. Next they began making suggestions about the content of his talk, urging him to speak not about depression but about antidepressants. Then they told him they could get him on a national speaking circuit, “where the real money is.” Then they asked him to lecture about their own new antidepressant. Looking back, Hal told his brother: It’s kind of like you’re a woman at a party, and your boss says to you, “Look, do me a favor: be nice to this guy over there.” And you see the guy is not bad-looking, and you’re unattached, so you say, “Why not? I can be nice.” Soon you find yourself on the way to a Bangkok brothel in the cargo hold of an unmarked plane. And you say, “Whoa, this is not what I agreed to.” But then you have to ask yourself: “When did the prostitution actually start? Wasn’t it at that party?”

14. Nowadays, even professional ethicists are going to the party; the watchdogs are being tamed by the foxes they were trained to catch. Pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries are offering consulting fees, contracts, and honoraria to bioethicists, the very people who write about, among other things, the dangers of conflicts of interest between physicians and drug companies. Carl Elliott described his colleagues’ justifications for taking the money. “Defenders of corporate consultation often bristle at the suggestion that accepting money from industry compromises their impartiality or makes them any less objective a moral critic,” he wrote. “ ‘Objectivity is a myth,’ [bioethicist Evan] DeRenzo told me, marshalling arguments from feminist philosophy to bolster her cause. ‘I don’t think there is a person alive who is engaged in an activity who has absolutely no interest in how it will turn out.’” There’s a clever dissonance-reducing claim for you—“ Perfect objectivity is impossible anyway, so I might as well accept that consulting fee.” Thomas Donaldson, director of the ethics program at the Wharton School, justified this practice by comparing ethics consultants to independent accounting firms that a company might hire to audit their finances. Why not
get past Carl Elliott either. “Ethical analysis does not look anything like a financial audit,” he says. An accountant’s transgression can be detected and verified, but how do you detect the transgressions of an ethics consultant? “How do you tell the difference between an ethics consultant who has changed her mind for legitimate reasons and one who has changed her mind for money? How do you distinguish between a consultant who has been hired for his integrity and one who has been hired because he supports what the company plans to do?” Still, Elliott says wryly, perhaps we can be grateful that the AMA’s Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs designed an initiative to educate doctors about the ethical problems involved in accepting gifts from the drug industry. That initiative was funded by $ 590,092 in gifts from Eli Lilly and Company, GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer, the U.S. Pharmaceutical Group, AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals, the Bayer Corporation, Procter and Gamble, and Wyeth-Ayerst Pharmaceutical.

15. A Slip of the Brain
Who was the real Al Campanis? A bigot or a victim of political correctness? Neither. He was a man who liked and respected the black players he knew, who defended Jackie Robinson when doing so was neither fashionable nor expected, and who had a blind spot: He thought that black men were capable of being great players but weren’t smart enough to be managers. And in his heart of hearts, he told Koppel, he didn’t see what was wrong with that attitude; “I don’t believe it’s prejudice,” he said. Campanis was not lying or being coy. But, as general manager, he was in a position to recommend the hiring of a black manager, and his blind spot kept him from even considering that possibility. 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. Thanks to our ego-preserving blind spots, we cannot possibly have a prejudice, which is an irrational or mean-spirited feeling about all members of another group. Because we are not irrational or mean-spirited, any negative feelings we have about another group are justified; our dislikes are rational and well founded. It’s the other group’s negative feelings we need to suppress. Like the Hasids pounding on the Unprejudiced door at the Museum of Tolerance, we are blind to our own prejudices.

16. As soon as people have created a category called us, however, they invariably perceive everybody who isn’t in it as not-us. The specific content of us can change in a flash: It’s us sensible Midwesterners against you flashy coastal types; it’s us Prius owners against you gas-guzzling-SUV owners; it’s us Boston Red Sox fans against you Los Angeles Angels fans (to pick a random example that happens to describe your two authors during baseball season). Obviously, certain categories of us are more crucial to our identities than the kind of cars we drive or the number of dots we estimate on a slide—gender, sexuality, religion, politics, ethnicity, and nationality, for starters.

17. Evolutionary psychologists argue that ethnocentrism—the belief that your own culture, nation, or religion is superior to all others—aids survival by strengthening your bonds to your primary social groups and thus increasing your willingness to work, fight, and occasionally die for them. When things are going well, most of us feel pretty tolerant of other cultures and religions—and even of the other sex!—but when we are angry, anxious, or threatened, our blind spots are automatically activated. We have the human qualities of intelligence and deep emotions, but they are dumb, they are crybabies, they don’t know the meaning of love, shame, grief, or remorse. The very act of thinking that they are not as smart or reasonable as we are makes us feel closer to others who are like us. But, just as crucially, it allows us to justify how we treat them. 

18. Most people assume that stereotyping causes discrimination; Al Campanis, believing that blacks lack the “necessities” to be managers, refused to hire one. But the theory of cognitive dissonance shows that the path between attitudes and actions runs in both directions. Often it is discrimination that evokes the self-justifying stereotype; Al Campanis, lacking the will or guts to convince the Dodger organisation to hire a black manager, justified his failure to act by telling himself that blacks couldn’t do the job anyway. In the same way, if we have enslaved members of another group, deprived them of decent educations or jobs, kept them from encroaching on our professional turfs, or denied them their human rights, then we invoke stereotypes about them to justify our actions. By persuading ourselves that they are unworthy, unteachable, incompetent, inherently math-challenged, immoral, sinful, stupid, or even subhuman, we avoid feeling guilty or unethical about how we treat them. And we certainly avoid feeling that we are prejudiced. Why, we even like some of those people, as long as they know their place, which, it goes without saying, is not here in our club, our university, our job, our neighbourhood. In short, we use stereotypes to justify behaviour that would otherwise make us feel bad about the kind of people we are or the kind of country we live in. 

19. But given that thinking in categories is a universal feature of the mind, why do only some people hold bitter, passionate prejudices toward other groups? Al Campanis was not prejudiced in terms of his having a strong emotional antipathy toward blacks; we suspect he could have been argued out of his notion that black players could not be good managers. A stereotype might bend or even shatter under the weight of disconfirming information, but the hallmark of prejudice is that it is impervious to reason, experience, and counterexample. In his timeless book The Nature of Prejudice, written in 1954, social psychologist Gordon Allport described the responses characteristic of a prejudiced man when confronted with evidence contradicting his beliefs:

MR. X: The trouble with Jews is that they only take care of their own group. 
MR. Y: But the record of the Community Chest campaign shows that they give more generously, in proportion to their numbers, to the general charities of the community, than do non-Jews. 
MR. X: That shows they are always trying to buy favour and intrude into Christian affairs. They think of nothing but money; that is why there are so many Jewish bankers. 
MR. Y: But a recent study shows that the percentage of Jews in the banking business is negligible, far smaller than the percentage of non-Jews. 
MR. X: That’s just it; they don’t go in for respectable business; they are only in the movie business or run nightclubs.

Allport nailed Mr X’s thought processes perfectly. Mr X doesn’t even try to respond to Mr Y’s evidence; he just slides along to another reason for his dislike of Jews. Once people have a prejudice, just as once they have a political ideology, they do not easily drop it, even if the evidence indisputably contradicts a core justification for it. Rather, they come up with another justification to preserve their belief or rationalise a course of action.

20. Stormfront’s founders have absolutist rules of membership. They will admit only “non-Jewish people of wholly European descent. No exceptions,” and they state that whiteness is determined genetically. But given that they want as many members as they can get, what are they to do with a would-be member whose DNA indicates nonwhite ancestry? They can reduce dissonance in two ways—the strict way and the flexible way. The strict way is to kick them out: POST: Hello, got my DNA results and I learned today I am 61% European. I am very proud of my white race and my European roots. I know many of you are ‘whitter’ [sic] than me, I don’t care, our goal is the same. I would like to do anything possible to protect our white race, our European roots and our white families. RESPONSE: I’ve prepared you a drink. It’s 61% pure water. The rest is potassium cyanide. I assume you have no objections to drinking it. . . . Cyanide isn’t water, and YOU are not White.

21. However, just as it takes mental effort to maintain a prejudice despite conflicting information, it also takes mental effort to suppress those negative feelings. Social psychologists Chris Crandall and Amy Eshelman, reviewing the huge research literature on prejudice, found that whenever people are emotionally depleted—when they are sleepy, frustrated, angry, anxious, drunk, or stressed—they become more willing to express their real prejudices toward another group. When Mel Gibson was arrested for drunk driving and launched into an anti-Semitic tirade, he claimed, in his inevitable statement of apology the next day, that “I said things that I do not believe to be true and which are despicable. I am deeply ashamed of everything I said . . . I apologise for any behaviour unbecoming of me in my inebriated state.” Translation: “It wasn’t me, it was the booze.” Nice try, but the evidence shows clearly that while inebriation makes it easier for people to reveal their prejudices, it doesn’t put those attitudes in their minds. Therefore, when people apologise by saying, “I don’t really believe those things I said; I was [tired/ worried/ angry/ drunk]”—or, as Al Campanis put it, “wiped out”—we can be pretty sure they really do believe it. But most people are unhappy about believing it, and that creates dissonance: “I dislike those people” collides with an equally strong conviction that it is morally or socially wrong to say so. People who feel this dissonance, Crandall and Eshelman suggest, will eagerly reach for any self-justification that allows them to express their true beliefs yet continue to feel that they are moral and good. No wonder it is such a popular dissonance reducer. 

22. Even Donald Trump, with his rants against a long list of groups he dislikes (notably Latinos, Muslims, and disabled people), his promulgation of the “birther” lie that Barack Obama was not born in the United States, and his history of discriminatory treatment of African Americans, felt the need to assure the public via Twitter that “I am the least racist person you have ever met” and that “I don’t have a Racist bone in my body!” “Justification,” Crandall and Eshelman explain, “undoes suppression, it provides cover, and it protects a sense of egalitarianism and a non prejudiced self-image.” 

23. In one typical experiment, white students were told they would be inflicting an electric shock on another student, the learner, ostensibly as part of a study of biofeedback. The students working with a black learner initially gave lower-intensity shocks than students working with a white one, reflecting a desire, perhaps, to show they were not prejudiced. Then the students overheard the learner making derogatory comments about them, which, naturally, made them angry. Now, given another opportunity to inflict electric shock, the students who were working with a black learner administered higher levels of shock than students who were working with a white learner. The same result appears in studies of how English-speaking Canadians behave toward French-speaking Canadians, straights toward homosexuals, non-Jewish students toward Jews, and men toward women. Participants successfully control their negative feelings under normal conditions, but as soon as they become angry or frustrated or when their self-esteem wobbles, they express their prejudice directly because now they can justify it: “I’m not a bad or prejudiced person, but, hey—he insulted me!” In this way, prejudice is the energy of ethnocentrism. It lurks there, napping, until ethnocentrism summons it to do its dirty work, justifying the occasional bad things we good people want to do.

24. By understanding prejudice as our self-justifying servant, we can better see why some prejudices are so hard to eradicate: They allow people to justify and defend their most important social identities—their “white” race, their religion, their gender, their sexuality—while reducing the dissonance between “I am a good person” and “I really don’t like those people.” Fortunately, we can also better understand the conditions under which prejudices diminish: when the economic competition subsides, when the truce is signed, when the profession is integrated, when they become more familiar and comfortable, when we stop seeing them as an undifferentiated mass and realise that they are as diverse a collection of individuals as we are.

Chapter 3: Memory, the Self-Justifying Historian

1.When two people produce entirely different memories of the same event, observers usually assume that one of them is lying. Of course, some people do invent or embellish stories to manipulate or deceive their audiences (or sell books). But most of us, most of the time, are neither telling the whole truth nor intentionally deceiving. We aren’t lying; we are self-justifying. All of us, as we tell our stories, add details and omit inconvenient facts; we give the tale a small, self-enhancing spin. That spin goes over so well that the next time we add a slightly more dramatic embellishment; we justify that little white lie as making the story better and clearer. Eventually, the way we remember the event may bring us a far distance from what actually happened. In this way, our memory becomes our personal, live-in, self-justifying historian. 

2. Social psychologist Anthony Greenwald has described the self as being ruled by a “totalitarian ego” that ruthlessly destroys information it doesn’t want to hear and, like all fascist leaders, rewrites history from the standpoint of the victor. But whereas a totalitarian ruler rewrites history to put one over on future generations, the totalitarian ego rewrites history to put one over on itself. History is written by the victors, and when we write our own histories, we have the same goals as the conquerors of nations have: to justify our actions and make us look and feel good about ourselves and what we did or failed to do. 

3. If mistakes were made, memory helps us remember that they were made by someone else. If we were there, we were just innocent bystanders. At the simplest level, memory smooths out the wrinkles of dissonance by enabling the confirmation bias to hum along, selectively causing us to forget discrepant, disconfirming information about beliefs we hold dear. If we were perfectly rational beings, we would try to remember smart, sensible ideas and not bother taxing our minds by remembering foolish ones. But dissonance theory predicts that we will conveniently forget good arguments made by an opponent, just as we forget foolish arguments made by our own side. A silly argument in favour of our own position arouses dissonance because it raises doubts about the wisdom of that position or the intelligence of the people who agree with it. Likewise, a sensible argument by an opponent arouses dissonance because it raises the possibility that the other side, God forbid, may be right or have a point we should take seriously. Because a silly argument on our side and a good argument on the other guy’s side both arouse dissonance, the theory predicts that we will either not learn these arguments well or forget them quickly. 

4. And that is just what Edward Jones and Rika Kohler showed in a classic 1958 experiment on attitudes toward desegregation in North Carolina. Each side tended to remember the plausible arguments agreeing with their own position and the implausible arguments agreeing with the opposing position; each side forgot the implausible arguments for their view and the plausible arguments for the opposition. Naturally, some memories can be remarkably detailed and accurate. We remember first kisses and favourite teachers. We remember family stories, movies, dates, baseball stats, childhood humiliations and triumphs. We remember the central events of our life stories. But when we do misremember, our mistakes aren’t random. The daily, dissonance-reducing distortions of memory help us make sense of the world and our place in it, protecting our decisions and beliefs. The distortion is even more powerful when it is motivated by the need to keep our self-concept consistent, by the wish to be right, by the need to preserve self-esteem, by the need to excuse failures or bad decisions, or by the need to find an explanation, preferably one safely in the past, of current problems. 

5. Confabulation, distortion, and plain forgetting are the foot soldiers of memory, and they are summoned to the front lines when the totalitarian ego wants to protect us from the pain and embarrassment of actions we took that are dissonant with our core self-images: “I did that?” That is why memory researchers love to quote Nietzsche: “ ‘I have done that,’ says my memory. ‘I cannot have done that,’ says my pride, and remains inexorable. Eventually—memory yields.” 

6. The Biases of Memory One of us (Carol) had a favourite children’s book, James Thurber’s The Wonderful O, that she remembers her father giving her when she was a child. “A band of pirates takes over an island and forbids the locals to speak any word or use any object containing the letter O,” Carol recalls. “I have a vivid memory of my father reading The Wonderful O and our laughing together at the thought of shy Ophelia Oliver saying her name without its Os. I remember trying valiantly, along with the invaded islanders, to guess the fourth O word that must never be lost (after love, hope, and valour), and my father’s teasing guesses: Oregon? Orangutan? Ophthalmologist? And then, not long ago, I found my first edition of The Wonderful O. It had been published in 1957, one year after my father’s death. I stared at that date in disbelief and shock. Obviously, someone else gave me that book, someone else read it to me, someone else laughed with me about: ’Phelia ’Liver, someone else wanted me to understand that the fourth O was freedom. Someone lost to my recollection.” This small story illustrates three important things about memory: how disorienting it is to realise that a vivid memory, one full of emotion and detail, is indisputably wrong; how even being absolutely, positively sure that our memory is accurate does not mean that it is; and how errors in memory support our current feelings and beliefs. “I have a set of beliefs about my father,” Carol observes, “the warm man he was, the funny and devoted dad who loved to read to me and take me rummaging through libraries, the lover of wordplay. So it was logical for me to assume—no, to remember—that he was the one who read me The Wonderful O.”

7. These metaphors of memory are popular, reassuring, and wrong. Memories are not buried somewhere in the brain like bones at an archaeological site; you can’t dig them up, perfectly preserved. We do not remember everything that happens to us; we select only highlights. If we didn’t forget, our minds could not work efficiently, because they would be cluttered with mental junk—the temperature last Wednesday, a boring conversation on the bus, the price of peaches at the market yesterday. A very few people have a condition that allows them to remember just about everything, from a random fact like the weather on March 12, 1997, to public events to personal experiences, but this talent is not always the blessing it might appear. One woman with this ability described her memory as “non-stop, uncontrollable and totally exhausting” and “a burden.” Judicious pruning of memories is thus adaptive, and even people with extraordinary memories are not “recording” everything that happens to them as if on video. McCarthy concludes, “is that I fused two memories” — When most people write their memoirs or describe their past experiences, however, they don’t do it the way Mary McCarthy did. They do it the way they would tell their stories to a therapist: “Doctor, here’s what happened.” They count on the listener not to say, “Oh, yeah? Are you sure it happened that way? Are you positive your mother hated you? Are you certain your father was such a brute? And while we’re at it, let’s examine those memories you have of your horrible ex. Any chance you have forgotten anything you did that might have been a tad annoying—say, that little affair you justified having with the lawyer from Bugtussle, Oklahoma?” On the contrary, we tell our stories in the confidence that the listener will not dispute them or ask for disconfirming evidence, which means we rarely have the incentive to scrutinise them for accuracy.

8. When we tell a story, we tend to leave ourselves out: My father did thus-and-such because of who he was, not because of the kind of kid I was. That’s the self-justification of memory. And it is why, when we learn that our memory is wrong, we feel stunned, and disoriented, as if the ground under us has shifted. In a sense, it has. It has made us rethink our own role in the story. Every parent has been an unwilling player in the you-can’t-win game. Require your daughter to take piano lessons, and later she will complain that you wrecked her love of the piano. Let your daughter give up lessons because she doesn’t want to practice, and later she will complain that you should have forced her to keep going—why, now she can’t play the piano at all. Require your son to go to Hebrew school in the afternoon, and he will blame you for having kept him from becoming another Hank Greenberg. Allow your son to skip Hebrew school, and he will later blame you for his not feeling more connected to his heritage. Betsy Petersen produced a full-bodied whine in her memoir Dancing with Daddy, blaming her parents for giving her swimming lessons, trampoline lessons, horseback-riding lessons, and tennis lessons but not ballet lessons. “The only thing I wanted, they would not give me,” she wrote. Parent blaming is a popular and convenient form of self-justification because it allows people to live less uncomfortably with their regrets and imperfections. Mistakes were made, but only by my parents. Never mind that I raised hell about those lessons or stubbornly refused to take advantage of them. Memory thus minimises our own responsibility and exaggerates theirs. 

9. By far the most important distortions and confabulations of memory are those that serve to justify and explain our own lives. The mind, the sense-making organ that it is, does not interpret our experiences as if they were separate shards of glass; it assembles them into a mosaic. From the distance of years, we see the mosaic’s pattern. It seems tangible and unchangeable; we can’t imagine how we could reconfigure those pieces into another design. But it is a result of years of telling our story, shaping it into a life narrative that is complete with heroes and villains, an account of how we came to be the way we are. Because that narrative is the way we understand the world and our place in it, it is bigger than the sum of its parts. If one part, one memory, is shown to be wrong, people have to reduce the resulting dissonance and even rethink the basic mental category: You mean Dad [Mom] wasn’t such a bad [good] person after all? You mean Dad [Mom] was a complex human being? The life narrative may be fundamentally true; your father or mother might really have been hateful, or saintly. The problem is that when the narrative becomes a major source of self-justification, one the storyteller relies on to excuse mistakes and failings, our memory becomes warped in its service. The storyteller remembers only the confirming examples of the parent’s malevolence and forgets dissonant instances of the parent’s good qualities. Over time, as the story hardens, it becomes more difficult to see the whole parent—the mixture of good and bad, strengths and flaws, good intentions and unfortunate blunders.

10. To show how memory changes to fit our stories, psychologists study how memories evolve over time: If your memories of the same people change, becoming positive or negative depending on what is happening in your life now, then it’s all about you, not them. This process happens so gradually that it can be a jolt to realise you ever felt differently. “A few years back I found a diary that I wrote as a teen,” a woman wrote to the advice columnist Dear Amy. “It was filled with insecurity and anger. I was shocked to read that I had ever felt that way. I consider my relationship with my mom to be very close, and I don’t remember any major problems, though the diary would suggest otherwise.”

11. The reason this letter writer doesn’t “remember any major problems” was identified in two experiments by Brooke Feeney and Jude Cassidy, who showed how teenagers (mis) remember quarrels with each of their parents. Adolescents and their parents came into the lab and filled out forms listing typical topics of disagreement—personal appearance, curfews, fighting with siblings, the usual. Next, each adolescent had a ten-minute session with each parent separately to discuss and try to resolve their greatest areas of disagreement. Finally, the teenagers rated how they felt about the conflict, how intense their emotions were, what their attitudes toward their parents were, and so on. Six weeks later, they were asked to recall and rate again the conflict and their reactions to it. The teenagers who at that moment felt close to their parents remembered the quarrel as having been less intense and conflicted than they reported at the time. The teenagers who were feeling ambivalent and remote from their parents remembered the conflict as having been angrier and more bitter than they rated it at the time. 

12. Just as our current feelings about our parents shape our memories of how they treated us, our current self-concepts affect memories of our own lives. In 1962, Daniel Offer, a young resident in psychiatry, and his colleagues interviewed seventy-three teenage boys about their home lives, sexuality, religion, parents, parental discipline, and other emotionally charged topics. Offer and his colleagues were able to re-interview almost all these fellows thirty-four years later, when they were forty-eight years old, to ask them what they remembered. “Remarkably,” the researchers concluded, “the men’s ability to guess what they had said about themselves in adolescence was no better than chance.” Most of those who remembered themselves as having been bold, outgoing teenagers had, at age fourteen, described themselves as shy. Having lived through the sexual revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, the men recalled themselves as being much more liberal and adventurous sexually than they had really been. Nearly half remembered that as teenagers, they believed that having sexual intercourse as high-school students was okay, but only 15 percent of them actually felt that way when they were fourteen. The men’s current self-concepts blurred their memories, bringing their past selves into harmony with their present ones. 

13. Memories are distorted in a self-enhancing direction in all sorts of ways. Men and women alike remember having fewer sexual partners than they’ve actually had; they remember having far more sex with those partners than they actually had; and they remember using condoms more often than they actually did. People also remember voting in elections they didn’t vote in; they remember voting for the winning candidate rather than the politician they did vote for; they remember giving more to charity than they really did; they remember that their children walked and talked at an earlier age than they really did . . . you get the idea. 11 An appreciation of how memory works and why it so often makes mistakes can help us better evaluate many cases of he said/ she said conflicts on college campuses and in news stories. We are not referring to encounters that are unambiguously coerced but to the vast majority that occur in a grey zone of human interaction. The public’s typical impulse is to take one party’s side and conclude that the other side is lying. But an understanding of memory and self-justification leads us to a more nuanced perspective: a person doesn’t have to be lying to be wrong. Sexual miscommunications, abuse, and harassment can occur in all couples, of course—gay, straight, bi, trans—with plenty of he said/ he said and she said/ she said disputes. 

14. But straight couples often struggle with an additional layer of misunderstanding caused by different gender rules, norms, and expectations. Sex researchers repeatedly find that many people rarely say what they mean at the start of a sexual encounter, and they often don’t mean what they say. They find it difficult to say what they dislike because they don’t want to hurt the other person’s feelings. They may think they want intercourse and then change their minds. They may think they don’t want intercourse and change their minds. They are, in short, engaging in what social psychologist Deborah Davis calls a “dance of ambiguity.” As sexologists know from research and clinical experience, most straight men and women, even long-term couples, communicate their sexual wishes—including a wish not to have sex—indirectly and ambiguously, through hints, body language, eye contact, “testing the waters,” and mind reading (which is about as accurate as . . . mind reading). This dance of ambiguity benefits both partners; through vagueness and indirection, each party’s ego is protected in case the other says no. Indirection saves a lot of hurt feelings, but it also causes problems: the woman really thinks the man should have known she wanted him to stop, and he really thinks she gave consent. Davis and her colleagues Guillermo Villalobos and Richard Leo have suggested that the primary reason for many he said/ she said disagreements is not that one side is making up an allegation or lying about a denial. Rather, each partner is providing “honest but false testimony” about what happened between them. Both parties believe they are telling the truth, but one or both may be wrong because of the unreliability of memory—which is reconstructive in nature and exquisitely susceptible to suggestion—and because both are motivated to justify their actions. 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. As a result, the woman might falsely remember saying things that she thought about saying but did not say to stop the situation, because she sees herself as an assertive person who would stand up for herself. The man might falsely remember that he tried to verify the woman’s consent (which he did not do), because he sees himself as a decent guy who would never rape a woman. She’s not necessarily lying; she’s misremembering. He’s not necessarily lying; he’s self-justifying. 

15. Add alcohol to this situation, and you’ve got a bonfire. By far, the most well-travelled path from uncomfortable or ambiguous sexual negotiations to honest false testimony is alcohol—especially alcohol in the amounts that make participants blind drunk or cause blackouts, an epidemic problem on college campuses. Alcohol not only reduces inhibitions but also significantly impairs the cognitive interpretation of another person’s behaviour; men who are drunk are less likely to interpret non-consent messages accurately, and women who are drunk convey less emphatic signs of refusal. Most of all, alcohol severely impairs both partners’ memory of what transpired between them. And as they form their memories, self-justification will freeze them in amber.

16. Conway and Ross referred to this self-serving memory distortion as “getting what you want by revising what you had.” On the larger stage of life, many of us do just that: We misremember our history as being worse than it was, thus distorting our perception of how much we have improved so that we’ll feel better about ourselves now. All of us do grow and mature, but generally not as much as we think. This bias in memory explains why each of us feels that we have changed profoundly, but our friends, enemies, and loved ones are the same old friends, enemies, and loved ones they ever were. 

17. We run into Harry at the high-school reunion, and while Harry is busy describing how much he’s learned and grown since graduation, we’re nodding and saying to ourselves, “Same old Harry; a little fatter, a little balder.” Many of our mistaken memories are benign, on the level of those who read us The Wonderful O, but sometimes they have more profound consequences, not only for ourselves but for our families, our friends, and society at large. In fact, they are representative of the many thousands of people who have come to remember accounts of terrible suffering in their childhoods or adulthoods—experiences that were later proved beyond a reasonable doubt to never have happened to them. Psychologists who have tested many of these individuals report that they do not suffer from schizophrenia or other psychotic disorders. Their mental problems, if they have any, fall within the usual range of human miseries: depression, anxiety, eating disorders, loneliness, or existential anomie. So, no, Wilkomirski and Andrews are not crazy or deceitful, but their memories are false, and false for particular, self-justifying reasons. Their stories, so different on the face of it, are linked by common psychological and neurological mechanisms that can create false memories that nonetheless feel vividly, and emotionally real. These memories do not develop overnight, in a blinding flash. They take months, sometimes years, to develop, and the stages by which they emerge are now well-known to psychological scientists.

18. You can live with not knowing why you woke up in a grumpy mood today, but you can’t live with not knowing why you woke up with a goblin sitting on your bed. If you are a scientist or another stripe of sceptic, you will make some inquiries and learn there is a reassuring explanation for this frightening event: During the deepest stage of sleep, when dreaming is most likely to occur, part of the brain shuts down body movements so you won’t go hurling yourself around the bed as you dream of chasing tigers. If you awaken from this stage before your body does, you will actually be momentarily paralysed; if your brain is still generating dream images, you will, for a few seconds, have a waking dream. That’s why those figures on the bed are dreamlike, nightmarish—you are dreaming, but with your eyes open. Sleep paralysis, says Richard J. McNally, a Harvard psychological scientist and clinician who studies memory and trauma, is “no more pathological than a hiccup.” It is quite common, he says, “, especially for people whose sleep patterns have been disrupted by jet lag, shift work, or fatigue.” About 30 percent of the population has had the sensation of sleep paralysis, but only about 5 percent have had the waking hallucinations as well. Just about everyone who has experienced sleep paralysis plus waking dreams reports that the feeling this combination evokes is terror. It is, dare we say, an alien sensation. 

19. Michael Shermer, a skeptic by disposition and profession, understood almost immediately what had happened to him: “My abduction experience was triggered by extreme sleep deprivation and physical exhaustion,” he later wrote. “I had just ridden a bicycle 83 straight hours and 1,259 miles in the opening days of the 3,100-mile nonstop transcontinental Race Across America. I was sleepily weaving down the road when my support motor home flashed its high beams and pulled alongside, and my crew entreated me to take a sleep break. At that moment a distant memory of the 1960s television series The Invaders was inculcated into my waking dream . . . Suddenly the members of my support team were transmogrified into aliens.”

20. 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. An appreciation of the distortions of memory, a realisation that even deeply felt memories might be wrong, might encourage people to hold their memories more lightly, drop the certainty that their memories are always accurate, and let go of the appealing impulse to use the past to justify problems of the present. We’re told to be careful what we wish for because it might come true. But we must also be careful which memories we select to justify our lives, because we will have to live by them. 

21. Certainly, one of the most powerful stories that many people wish to live by is the victim narrative. Nobody has actually been abducted by aliens (though experiencers will argue fiercely with us), but millions have survived cruelties as children: neglect, sexual abuse, parental alcoholism, violence, abandonment, the horrors of war. Many people have come forward to tell their stories: how they coped, how they endured, what they learned, how they moved on. Stories of trauma and transcendence are inspiring examples of human resilience. It is precisely because these accounts are so emotionally powerful that thousands of people have been drawn to construct me-too versions of them. A few have claimed to be Holocaust survivors, thousands have claimed to be survivors of alien abduction, and tens of thousands have claimed to be survivors of incest, rape, and other sexual traumas that allegedly were repressed from memory until they entered therapy in adulthood. Why would people claim to remember that they had suffered harrowing experiences if they hadn’t, especially when that belief causes rifts with families or friends? By distorting their memories, these people can get what they want by revising what they had, and what they want is to turn their present bleak or merely mundane lives into dazzling victories over adversity. Memories of abuse also help them resolve the dissonance between “I am a smart, capable person” and “My life sure is a mess right now” with an explanation that makes them feel better about themselves and removes responsibility: “It’s not my fault my life is a mess and I never became the world-class singer I could have been. Look at the horrible things my father did to me.” Ellen Bass and Laura Davis made this reasoning explicit in The Courage to Heal. They tell readers who have no memory of childhood sexual abuse that “when you first remember your abuse or acknowledge its effects, you may feel tremendous relief. Finally, there is a reason for your problems. There is someone, and something, to blame.” 

22. It is no wonder, then, that most of the people who have created false memories of early suffering, like those who believe they were abducted by aliens, go to great lengths to justify and preserve their new explanations. Consider the story of a young woman named Holly Ramona, who, after a year in college, went into therapy for the treatment of depression and bulimia. The therapist told her that these common problems were usually symptoms of childhood sexual abuse, which Holly denied had ever happened to her. Yet over time, at the urging of the therapist and then at the hands of a psychiatrist who administered sodium amytal (popularly but mistakenly called “truth serum”), Holly came to remember that between the ages of five and sixteen she had been repeatedly raped by her father, who even forced her to have sex with the family dog. Holly’s outraged father sued both therapists for malpractice for “implanting or reinforcing false memories that [he] had molested her as a child.” The jury agreed, exonerating the father and finding the therapists guilty. This ruling put Holly in a state of dissonance that she could resolve in one of two ways: She could accept the verdict, realise that her memories were false, beg her father’s forgiveness, and attempt to reconcile the family that had been torn apart over her accusations. Or she could reject the verdict as a travesty of justice, become more convinced than ever that her father had abused her, and renew her commitment to recovered-memory therapy. The former, changing her mind and apologising, would have been like turning a steamship around in a narrow river—not much room to manoeuvre, and hazards in every direction. The latter was by far the easier choice because of her need to justify the harm she had caused her father and the rest of her family. Much simpler to stay the course. And indeed, Holly Ramona not only vehemently rejected the verdict but went to graduate school . . . to become a psychotherapist.

23. Yet once in a while, someone steps forward to speak up for the truth, even when the truth gets in the way of a good, self-justifying story. It’s not easy, because it means taking a fresh, sceptical look at the comforting memory one has lived by, scrutinising it from every angle for its plausibility, and, no matter how great the ensuing dissonance, letting go of it. For her entire adult life, writer Mary Karr had harboured the memory of how, as an innocent teenager, she had been abandoned by her father. That memory allowed her to feel like a heroic survivor of her father’s neglect. But when she sat down to write her memoirs, she faced the realisation that the story could not have been true. “Only by studying actual events and questioning your own motives will the complex inner truths ever emerge from the darkness,” she wrote.

Chapter 4: Good Intentions, Bad Science: The Closed Loop of Clinical Judgment

1. None of us likes learning that we were wrong, that our memories are distorted or confabulated, or that we made an embarrassing professional mistake. For people in any of the healing professions, the stakes are especially high. If you hold a set of beliefs that guide your practice and you learn that some of them are incorrect, you must either admit you were wrong and change your approach or reject the new evidence. If the mistakes are not too threatening to your view of your own competence and if you have not taken a public stand defending them, you will probably willingly change your approach, grateful to have a better one. But if some of those mistaken beliefs have made your clients’ problems worse, torn up your clients’ families, or sent innocent people to prison, then you, like Grace’s therapist, will have serious dissonance to resolve.

2. Moreover, by its very nature, psychotherapy is a private interaction between the therapist and the client. No one is looking over the therapist’s shoulder in the intimacy of the consulting room, eager to pounce if he or she does something wrong. Yet the inherent privacy of the interaction means that therapists who lack training in science and skepticism have no internal corrections to the self-protecting cognitive biases that afflict us all. What these therapists see confirms what they believe, and what they believe shapes what they see. It’s a closed loop. Did my client improve? Excellent; what I did was effective. Did my client remain unchanged or get worse? That’s unfortunate, but she is resistant to therapy and deeply troubled; besides, sometimes the client has to get worse before she can get better. Do I believe that repressed rage causes sexual difficulties? If so, my client’s erection problem must reflect his repressed rage at his mother or his wife. Do I believe that sexual abuse causes eating disorders? If so, my client’s bulimia must mean she was molested as a child. We want to be clear that some clients are resistant to therapy and are deeply troubled. 

3. This chapter is not an indictment of therapy, any more than pointing out the mistakes of memory means that all memory is unreliable or that the conflicts of interest among scientists means that all scientists do tainted research. Our intention is to examine the kinds of mistakes that can result from the closed loop of clinical practice and show how self-justification perpetuates them. For anyone in private practice, scepticism and science are ways out of the closed loop. Scepticism teaches therapists to be cautious about taking what their clients tell them at face value. If a woman says her mother put spiders in her vagina when she was three, the sceptical therapist can feel empathy without believing that this event literally happened. If a child says his teachers took him flying in a plane full of clowns and frogs, the sceptical therapist might be charmed by the story without believing that teachers actually chartered a private jet (on their salary, no less). Scientific research provides therapists with ways of improving their clinical practice and of avoiding mistakes. If you are going to use hypnosis, you had better know that while hypnosis can help clients learn to relax, manage pain, and quit smoking, you should never use it to help your client retrieve memories, because your willing, suggestible client will often make up a memory that is unreliable.

4. Clinicians who believe in repression see it everywhere, even where no one else does. But if everything you observe in your clinical experience is evidence to support your beliefs, what would you consider counter-evidence? What if your client has no memory of abuse not because she is repressing, but because it never happened? What could ever break you out of the closed loop? To guard against the bias of our own direct observations, scientists invented the control group: the group that isn’t getting the new therapeutic method, the patients who aren’t getting the new drug. Most people understand the importance of control groups in a study of a new drug’s effectiveness because without a control group, you can’t say if people’s positive response is due to the drug or to the placebo effect—the general expectation that the drug will help them. One study of women who had complained of sexual problems found that 41 per cent said that their libido returned when they took Viagra. So, however, did 43 per cent of the control group who took a sugar pill. (This study showed conclusively that the organ most responsible for sexual excitement is the brain.)

5. To date, hundreds of studies have demonstrated the unreliability of clinical predictions. This evidence is dissonance-creating news to mental-health professionals whose self-confidence rests on the belief that their expert assessments are extremely accurate. When we said that science is a form of arrogance control, that’s what we mean.

6. What is the status today of recovered-memory therapy and its fundamental assumption that traumatic experiences are usually repressed? As sensational cases have faded from public attention, it might seem that the issues have been resolved, and sanity and science has prevailed. But as dissonance theory predicts, once an incorrect idea has achieved prominence, and especially if that idea has caused widespread harm, it rarely fades away. It lies in wait, like the false belief that vaccines cause autism, reemerging at any opportunity that might allow its promoters to claim they were right all along. Lawsuits are still being filed, and families are still being broken apart by people who, in therapy, came to remember having been sexually molested or otherwise abused. The American Psychiatric Association changed the name multiple personality disorder to dissociative identity disorder. A professional association of trauma psychiatrists and psychotherapists who have promoted this diagnosis for years, under both of its labels, still gives its Cornelia Wilbur Award for “outstanding clinical contributions to the treatment of dissociative disorders.” 

7. A 2014 study reported that “although there are indications of more scepticism today than in the 1990s,” the scientist-practitioner gap remains “a serious divide.” The researchers sampled many groups of professional psychologists and psychotherapists and found that the more scientifically trained they were, the more accurate their beliefs about memory and trauma. Among members of the Society for a Science of Clinical Psychology, only 17.7 per cent believed that “traumatic memories are often repressed.” Among general psychotherapists, it was 60 per cent; among psychoanalysts, 69 per cent; among neuro-linguistic programming therapists and hypnotherapists, 81 per cent — which is about the same percentage found in the general public. 

8. “The memory wars have not vanished,” wrote a team of memory scientists in 2019. “They have continued to endure and contribute to potentially damaging consequences in clinical, legal, and academic contexts.” No wonder this gap persists, given what it would take for all those psychotherapists and psychiatrists who generated the epidemic of recovered memory and multiple-personality cases to climb back up the pyramid. Some continue to do what they have been doing for years, helping clients uncover “repressed” memories. Others have quietly dropped their focus on repressed memories of incest as the leading explanation of their clients’ problems; for them, it has gone out of fashion, just as penis envy, frigidity, and masturbatory insanity did decades ago. They drop one fad when it loses steam and signs on for the next, rarely pausing to question where all the repressed incest cases went. They might be vaguely aware that there is controversy, but it’s easier to stay with what they have always done and maybe add a newer technique to go along with it. Some therapists have forgotten how enthusiastically they once believed in recovered-memory assumptions and methods and now see themselves as moderates in the whole debate.

9. Today, standing at the bottom of the pyramid, miles away professionally from their scientific colleagues and having devoted more than two decades to promote a form of therapy that Richard McNally calls “the worst catastrophe to befall the mental health field since the lobotomy era,” most recovered-memory clinicians remain as committed as ever to their beliefs, continuing to preach what they have long practised. How have they reduced their dissonance? One popular method is by minimising the extent of the problem and the damage it caused. Clinical psychologist John Briere, one of the earliest supporters of recovered-memory therapy, finally admitted at a conference that the large number of recovered-memory cases reported in the 1980s may have been caused, at least in part, by “overenthusiastic” therapists who had inappropriately tried to “liposuction memories out of their [clients’] brains.” Mistakes were made—by them. But only a few of them, he hastened to add. Recovered false memories are rare, he said; repressed true memories are far more common. Others reduce dissonance by blaming the victim. Colin Ross, a psychiatrist who rose to fame and fortune by claiming that repressed memories of abuse cause multiple personality disorder, eventually agreed that “suggestible individuals can have memories elaborated within their minds because of poor therapeutic technique.” But because “normal human memory is highly error-prone,” he concluded that “false memories are biologically normal and, therefore, not necessarily the therapist’s fault.” Therapists don’t create false memories in their clients, because therapists are mere “consultants.” Therefore, if a client comes up with a mistaken memory, it’s the client’s fault. (Colin Ross won the Cornelia Wilbur Award in 2016.) The most ideologically committed clinicians reduced dissonance by killing the messenger. In the late 1990s, when psychiatrists and psychotherapists were being convicted of malpractice for their use of coercive methods to generate false recovered memories and multiple personalities, D. Corydon Hammond advised his clinical colleagues at a convention thus: “I think it’s time somebody called for an open season on academicians and researchers. In the United States and Canada in particular, things have become so extreme with academics supporting extreme false memory positions, so I think it’s time for clinicians to begin bringing ethics charges for scientific malpractice against researchers, and journal editors—most of whom, I would point out, don’t have malpractice coverage.” Some psychiatrists and clinical psychologists took Hammond’s advice and sent harassing letters to researchers and journal editors, made spurious claims of ethics violations against scientists studying memory and children’s testimony, and filed nuisance lawsuits aimed at blocking the publication of critical articles and books. None of these efforts was successful at silencing the scientists. 

10. There is one final way they can reduce dissonance: Dismiss all of that scientific research as being part of a backlash against child victims and incest survivors. The concluding section of the third edition of The Courage to Heal is called “Honouring the Truth: A Response to the Backlash.” There was no section called “Honoring the Truth: We Made Some Big Mistakes.” … There are almost no psychotherapists who practised recovered-memory therapy, no child experts who sent the dozens of Bernard Barans to prison, who have admitted that they were wrong. From those few who have publicly admitted their errors, though, we can see what it took to shake them out of their protective cocoons of self-justification. For Linda Ross, it was taking herself out of the closed loop of private therapy sessions and forcing herself to confront, in person, parents whose lives had been destroyed by their grown children’s accusations. One of her clients brought her to a meeting of accused parents. Ross suddenly realized that a story that had seemed bizarre but possible when her client told it in therapy now seemed fantastical when multiplied by a roomful of similar tales. “I had been so supportive of women and their repressed memories,” she said, “but I had never once considered what that experience was like for the parents. Now I heard how absolutely ludicrous it sounded. One elderly couple introduced themselves, and the wife told me that their daughter had accused her husband of murdering three people . . . The pain in these parents’ faces was so obvious. And the unique thread was that their daughters had gone to [recovered-memory] therapy. I didn’t feel very proud of myself or my profession that day.” After that meeting, Ross said, she would frequently wake up in the middle of the night “in terror and anguish” as the cocoon began to crack open. She worried about being sued, but most of the time she “just thought about those mothers and fathers who wanted their children back.” She called her former clients in an attempt to undo the damage she had caused, and she changed the way she practised therapy. In an interview on National Public Radio’s This American Life with Alix Spiegel, Ross told of accompanying one of her clients to a meeting with the woman’s parents, whose home had been dismantled by police trying to find evidence of a dead body that their daughter had claimed to remember in therapy. There was no dead body, any more than there were underground torture chambers at the McMartin Preschool. “So I had a chance to tell them the part that I played,” said Ross. “And to tell them that I completely understood that they would find it difficult for the rest of their lives to be able to find a place to forgive me, but that I was certainly aware that I was in need of their forgiveness.”  At the end of the interview, Alix Spiegel said: “There are almost no people like Linda Ross, practising therapists who have come forward to talk publicly about their experience, to admit culpability, or try to figure out how this happened. The experts, for once, are strangely silent.”

Chapter 5: Law and Disorder

1. Ever since 1989, the first year DNA testing resulted in the release of an innocent prisoner, the public has been repeatedly confronted with evidence that, far from being an impossibility, convicting the innocent is much more common than we feared. The Innocence Project, founded by Barry Scheck and Peter J. Neufeld, keeps a running record on its website of the hundreds of people imprisoned for murder or rape who have been cleared by DNA testing; by 2019, the number was 365.5

2. Suppose that you are presented with evidence that you did the legal equivalent of amputating the wrong arm: you helped send the wrong person to prison. What do you do? Your first impulse will be to deny your mistake for the obvious reason of protecting your job, reputation, and colleagues. Besides, if you release someone who later commits a serious crime or even if you free someone who is innocent but who was erroneously imprisoned for a heinous crime such as child molesting, an outraged public may nail you for it. 

3. You have plenty of external incentives for denying that you made a mistake, but you have an even greater internal one: You want to think of yourself as an honourable, competent person who would never help convict the wrong guy. But how can you possibly think you got the right guy in the face of the new evidence to the contrary? Because, you assure yourself, the evidence is lousy, and look, he’s a bad guy; even if he didn’t commit this particular crime, he undoubtedly committed another one. The alternative, that you sent an innocent man to prison for fifteen years, is so antithetical to your view of your competence that you will jump through multiple mental hoops to convince yourself that you couldn’t possibly have made such a blunder.

4. Rob Warden has observed dissonance at work among prosecutors whom he considers “fundamentally good” and honourable people who want to do the right thing. When one exoneration took place, Jack O’Malley, the prosecutor on the case, kept saying to Warden, “How could this be? How could this happen?” Warden told a reporter, “He didn’t get it. He didn’t understand. He really didn’t. And Jack O’Malley was a good man.” Yet prosecutors cannot get beyond seeing themselves and the cops as good guys and the defendants as bad guys. “You get in the system,” Warden said, “and you become very cynical. People are lying to you all over the place. Then you develop a theory of the crime, and it leads to what we call tunnel vision. Years later overwhelming evidence comes out that the guy was innocent. And you’re sitting there thinking, ‘Wait a minute. Either this overwhelming evidence is wrong or I was wrong—and I couldn’t have been wrong because I’m a good guy.’ That’s a psychological phenomenon I have seen over and over.” That phenomenon is self-justification. 

5. Over and over, as the two of us read the research on wrongful convictions in American history, we saw how self-justification can escalate the likelihood of injustice at every step of the process, from capture to conviction. The police and prosecutors use methods gleaned from a lifetime of experience to identify a suspect and build a case for conviction. Usually, they are right. Unfortunately, those same methods increase their risks of pursuing the wrong suspect, ignoring evidence that might implicate another, reinforcing their commitment to a wrong decision, and, later, refusing to admit their error. As the process rolls along, those who are caught up in the effort to convict the original suspect often become more certain that they have the perpetrator and are more committed to getting a conviction. Once that person goes to jail, they think, that fact alone justifies what they did to put him there. Besides, the judge and jury agreed, didn’t they? Self-justification not only puts innocent people in prison, therefore but sees to it that they stay there. And, in fact, the 1992 Mollen Commission, reporting on patterns of corruption in the New York Police Department, concluded that the practice of police falsification of evidence is “so common in certain precincts that it has spawned its own word: ‘testifying.’ ”In such police cultures, police routinely lie to justify searching anyone they suspect of having drugs or guns, swearing in court that they stopped a suspect because his car ran a red light because they saw drugs changing hands, or because the suspect dropped the drugs as the officer approached, giving him probable cause to arrest and search the guy." Norm Stamper, a police officer for thirty-four years and former chief of the Seattle Police Department, has written that there isn’t a major police force in the country “that has escaped the problem: cops, sworn to uphold the law, [are] seizing and converting drugs to their own use [and] planting dope on suspects.” The most common justification for lying and planting evidence is that the end justifies the means. One officer told the Mollen Commission investigators that he was “doing God’s work.” Another said, “If we’re going to catch these guys, fuck the Constitution.” When one officer was arrested on charges of perjury, he asked in disbelief, “What’s wrong with that? They’re guilty.” What’s wrong with that is that there is nothing to prevent the police from planting evidence and committing perjury to convict someone they believe is guilty—but who is innocent. Corrupt cops are certainly a danger to the public, but so are many of the well-intentioned ones who would never dream of railroading an innocent person into prison. In a sense, honest cops are even more dangerous than corrupt cops, because they are far more numerous and harder to detect. The problem is that once they have decided on a likely suspect, they don’t think it’s possible that he or she is innocent. Therefore, once they have a suspect, they behave in ways to confirm that initial judgment of guilt, justifying the techniques they use in the belief that only guilty people will be vulnerable to them.

6. It is our clear position that merely introducing fictitious evidence during an interrogation would not cause an innocent person to confess. It is absurd to believe that a suspect who knows he did not commit a crime would place greater weight and credibility on alleged evidence than on his own knowledge of his innocence. Under this circumstance, the natural human reaction would be one of anger and mistrust toward the investigator. The net effect would be the suspect’s further resolution to maintain his innocence. Wrong. The “natural human reaction” is usually not anger and mistrust but confusion and hopelessness—dissonance—because most innocent suspects trust the investigator not to lie to them. The interrogator, however, is biased from the start. Whereas an interview is a conversation designed to get general information from a person, an interrogation is designed to get a suspect to admit guilt. (The suspect is often unaware of the difference.) The manual states this explicitly: “An interrogation is conducted only when the investigator is reasonably certain of the suspect’s guilt.” The danger of that attitude is that once the investigator is “reasonably certain,” the suspect cannot dislodge that certainty. On the contrary, anything the suspect does will be interpreted as evidence of lying, denial, or evading the truth, including repeated claims of innocence. Interrogators are explicitly instructed to think this way. They are taught to adopt the attitude “Don’t lie; we know you are guilty” and to reject the suspect’s denials. We’ve seen this self-justifying loop before, in the way some therapists and social workers interview children they believe have been molested. Once an interrogation like this has begun, there is no such thing as disconfirming evidence. 

7. Promulgators of the Reid Technique have an intuitive understanding of how dissonance works (at least in other people). They realise that if a suspect is given the chance to protest his innocence, he will have made a public commitment and it will be harder for him to back down later and admit guilt. “The more the suspect denies his involvement,” writes Louis Senese, vice president of Reid and Associates, “the more difficult it becomes for him to admit that he committed the crime.” Precisely—because of dissonance. Therefore, Senese advises interrogators to be prepared for the suspect’s denials and head them off at the pass. Interrogators, he says, should watch for nonverbal signs that the suspect is about to deny culpability (“holding his hand up or shaking his head no or making eye contact”), and if the suspect says straight out, “Could I say something?,” interrogators should respond with a command, using the suspect’s first name (“Jim, hold on for just a minute”) and then return to their questioning. The interrogator’s presumption of guilt creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. It makes the interrogator more aggressive, which in turn makes innocent suspects behave more suspiciously. 

8. In one experiment, social psychologist Saul Kassin and his colleagues paired individuals who were either guilty or innocent of a mock theft with interrogators who were told that the suspects were guilty or that they were innocent. There were therefore four possible combinations of suspect and interrogator: You’re innocent and he thinks you’re innocent; you’re innocent and he thinks you’re guilty; you’re guilty and he thinks you’re innocent; and you’re guilty and he thinks you’re guilty. The deadliest combination, the one that produced the greatest degree of pressure and coercion by the interviewer, was the one that paired an interrogator convinced of a suspect’s guilt with a suspect who was actually innocent. In such circumstances, the more the suspect denied guilt, the more certain the interrogator became that the suspect was lying, and he upped the pressure accordingly. Kassin lectures widely to detectives and police officers to show them how their techniques of interrogation can backfire. They always nod knowingly, he says, and agree with him that false confessions are to be avoided. but then they immediately add that they themselves have never coerced anyone into a false confession. “How do you know?” Kassin asked one cop. “Because I never interrogate innocent people,” he said. Kassin found that this certainty of infallibility starts at the top. “I was at an International Police Interviewing conference in Quebec, on a debate panel with Joe Buckley, president of the Reid School,” he told us. “After his presentation, someone from the audience asked whether he was concerned that innocent people might confess in response to his techniques. Son of a gun if he didn’t say it, word for word; I was so surprised at his overt display of such arrogance that I wrote down the quote and the date on which he said it: ‘No, because we don’t interrogate innocent people.’” (In this he echoes the remarks of Ronald Reagan’s attorney general Edwin Meese, who said in 1986, “But the thing is, you don’t have many suspects who are innocent of a crime. That’s contradictory. If a person is innocent of a crime, then he is not a suspect.”) 

9. In the next phase of training, detectives become confident in their ability to read the suspect’s nonverbal cues: eye contact, body language, posture, hand gestures, and vehemence of denials. If the person won’t look you in the eye, the manual explains, that’s a sign of lying. If the person slouches (or sits rigidly), those are signs of lying. If the person denies guilt, that’s a sign of lying. Yet the Reid Technique advises interrogators to “deny suspect eye contact.” Deny a suspect the direct eye contact that they themselves regard as evidence of innocence? The Reid Technique is thus a closed loop: How do I know a suspect is guilty? Because he’s nervous and sweating (or too controlled) and because he won’t look me in the eye (and I wouldn’t let him if he wanted to). So my partners and I interrogate him for twelve hours using the Reid Technique, and he confesses. Therefore, because innocent people never confess, his confession confirms my belief that his being nervous and sweating (or too controlled) and looking me in the eye (or not) is a sign of guilt. By the logic of this system, the only error the detective can make is failing to get a confession. The manual is written in an authoritative tone as if it were the voice of God revealing indisputable truths, but in fact it fails to teach its readers a core principle of scientific thinking: the importance of examining and ruling out other possible explanations for a person’s behaviour before deciding which one is the most likely.

10. Nonetheless, why doesn’t an innocent suspect just keep denying guilt? Why doesn’t the target get angry at the interrogator, as the manual says any innocent person would do? Let’s say you are an innocent person who is called in for questioning, perhaps to “help the police in their investigation.” You have no idea that you are a prime suspect. You trust the police and want to be helpful. Yet here is a detective telling you that your fingerprints are on the murder weapon. That you failed a lie-detector test. That your blood was found on the victim or the victim’s blood was on your clothes. These claims will create considerable cognitive dissonance: COGNITION 1: I was not there. I didn’t commit the crime. I have no memory of it. COGNITION 2: Reliable and trustworthy people in authority tell me that my fingerprints are on the murder weapon, the victim’s blood was on my shirt, and an eyewitness saw me in a place where I am sure I’ve never been. How will you resolve this dissonance? If you are strong enough, wealthy enough, or have had enough experience with the police to know that you are being set up, you will say the four magic words: “I want a lawyer.” But many people believe they don’t need a lawyer if they are innocent. Believing as they do (wrongly) that the police are not allowed to lie to them, they are astonished to hear that there is evidence against them. And what damning evidence at that—their fingerprints! The manual claims that the “self-preservation instincts of an innocent person during an interrogation” will override anything an interrogator does, but for vulnerable people, the need to make sense of what is happening to them trumps even the need for self-preservation. 

BRADLEY PAGE: Is it possible that I could have done this terrible thing and blanked it out? 
LIEUTENANT LACER: Oh, yes. It happens all the time.

The Prosecutors 

11. In the splendid film The Bridge on the River Kwai, Alec Guinness and his soldiers, prisoners of the Japanese in World War II, construct a railway bridge that will aid the enemy’s war effort. Guinness agrees to this demand by his captors as a way of creating unity and restoring morale among his men, but once he builds it, it becomes his — a source of pride and satisfaction. When, at the end of the film, Guinness finds the wires revealing that the bridge has been mined and realises that Allied commandos are planning to blow it up, his first reaction is, in effect: “You can’t! It’s my bridge. How dare you destroy it!” To the horror of the watching commandos, he tries to cut the wires to protect the bridge. Only at the very last moment does Guinness cry, “What have I done?,” realising that he was about to sabotage his own side’s goal of victory to preserve his magnificent creation. In the same way, many prosecutors end up prepared to sabotage their own side’s goal of justice to preserve their convictions, in both meanings of the word. By the time prosecutors go to trial, they often find themselves in the real-world equivalent of a justification-of-effort experiment. They have selected this case out of many because they are convinced the suspect is guilty and that they have the evidence to convict. They have often invested many months preparing for it. They have worked intensely with police, witnesses, and the victim’s shattered, often vengeful family. If the crime has roused public emotions, they are under enormous pressure to get a conviction quickly. Any doubts they might have are drowned in the satisfaction of feeling that they are representing the forces of good against a vile criminal. And so, with a clear conscience, prosecutors end up saying to a jury: “This defendant is subhuman, a monster. Do the right thing. Convict.” Occasionally they so thoroughly convince themselves that they have caught a monster that they, like the police, go too far: coaching witnesses, offering deals to jailhouse informants, or failing to give the defence all the information they are legally obliged to hand over. 

12. How, then, will most prosecutors react when, years later, the convicted rapist or murderer, still maintaining innocence (as, let’s keep in mind, plenty of guilty felons do), demands a DNA test? Or claims that his or her confession was coerced? Or produces evidence suggesting that the eyewitness testimony that led to conviction was wrong? (About three-fourths of all DNA exonerations are cases that involved mistaken identification on the part of eyewitnesses.) What if the defendant is not a monster, after all that hard work the legal team put in to convince themselves and the jury that he is? The response of prosecutors in Florida is typical. After more than 130 prisoners had been freed by DNA testing in the space of fifteen years, prosecutors decided they would respond by mounting a vigorous challenge to similar new cases. Convicted rapist Wilton Dedge had to sue the state to have the evidence in his case retested, over the fierce objections of prosecutors who said that the state’s interest in finality and the victim’s feelings should supersede concerns about Dedge’s possible innocence. Dedge was ultimately exonerated and released. 

13. That finality and the victim’s feelings should preclude justice seems an appalling argument by those we trust to provide justice, but that’s the power of self-justification. Besides, wouldn’t the victims feel better if the real perpetrators were caught and punished? DNA testing has freed hundreds of prisoners, and news accounts across the country often include a quote or two from the prosecutors who originally tried them. In Philadelphia, then district attorney Bruce L. Castor Jr. refused to accept the results of a DNA test that exonerated a man who had been in prison for fifteen years. When reporters asked him what scientific basis he had for rejecting the test, he replied, “I have no scientific basis. I know because I trust my detective and my tape-recorded confession.” How do we know that this casual dismissal of DNA testing is a sign of self-justification and not simply an honest assessment of the evidence? It’s like the horse race study we described in chapter 1: Once you have placed your bets, you don’t want to entertain any ideas that cast doubt on that decision. That is why prosecutors interpret the same evidence in one of two ways, depending on when it is discovered. Early in an investigation, the police use DNA to confirm a suspect’s guilt or rule the person out. But when DNA tests are conducted after a defendant has been indicted and convicted, the prosecutors typically dismiss DNA results as irrelevant, not important enough to reopen the case. Texas prosecutor Michael McDougal said that the fact that the DNA found in a young rape-murder victim did not match that of Roy Criner, the man convicted of the crime, did not mean Criner was innocent. “It means that the sperm found in her was not his,” he said. “It doesn’t mean he didn’t rape her, doesn’t mean he didn’t kill her.”

14. Junping to Convictions: But from our vantage point, the greatest impediment to admitting and correcting mistakes in the criminal justice system is that most of its members reduce dissonance by denying that there is a problem. “Our system has to create this aura of close to perfection, of certainty that we don’t convict innocent people,” said former prosecutor Bennett Gershman. Ralph Lacer, one of the interrogators of Bradley Page, justified the police position against videos on the grounds that a recording “is inhibiting” and makes it “hard to get at the truth.” Suppose, he complained, the interview goes on for ten hours. The defence attorney will make the jury listen to all ten hours instead of just the fifteen-minute confession, and the jury will be confused and overwhelmed. Yet in the Page case, the prosecution’s argument rested heavily on a segment of the audiotaped interview that was missing. Lacer admitted that he had turned off the cassette player just before he said the words that convinced Page to confess. According to Page, during that missing segment, Lacer had asked him to imagine how he might have killed his girlfriend. (This is another manoeuvre recommended by the creators of the Reid Technique.) Page thought he was being asked to construct an imaginary scenario to help the police; he was stunned when Lacer used it as a legitimate confession. The jury did not hear the full context — the question that elicited the alleged confession. 

Chapter 6: Love’s Assassin: Self-Justification in Marriage

Love . . . is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.— Iris Murdoch, novelist 

1. When William Butler Yeats got married in 1917, his father wrote him a warm letter of congratulations. “I think it will help you in your poetic development,” he said. “No one really knows human nature, men as well as women, who have not lived in the bondage of marriage, that is to say, the enforced study of a fellow creature.” With no one else, not even with our children or parents, do we learn so much about another human being’s adorable and irritating habits, ways of handling frustrations and crises, and private, passionate desires. Yet, as John Butler Yeats knew, marriage also forces couples to face themselves, to learn more about themselves and how they behave with an intimate partner than they ever expected (or perhaps wanted) to know. No other relationship so profoundly tests the extent of our own willingness to be flexible and forgiving, to learn and change — if we can resist the allure of self-justification. Benjamin Franklin, who advised, “Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, and half shut afterwards,” understood the power of dissonance in relationships. Couples first justify their decision to be together and then their decision to stay together. 

2. When you buy a house, you start reducing dissonance immediately. You tell your friends the wonderful things you love about it (the view of the trees, the space, the original old windows) and minimise the things that are wrong with it (the view of the parking lot, the cramped kitchen, the drafty old windows). In this case, self-justification will keep you feeling happy about your beautiful new home. If, before you fell in love with it, a geologist had told you that the cliff above you was unstable and might give way at any moment, you would have welcomed the information and walked away, sad but not heartbroken. But once you have fallen in love with your house, spent more than you could really afford to buy it, and moved in with your unwilling cat, you have too much invested, emotionally and financially, to walk away easily. If, after you are in the house, someone tells you that the cliff above you is precarious, that same impulse to justify your decision may keep you there far too long. 

3. The people who live in houses along the beach in La Conchita, California, in the shadow of cliffs that have a habit of crashing down on them during heavy winter rains, live with constant dissonance, which they resolve by saying: “It won’t happen again.” This allows them to remain until it does happen again. 

4. A relationship with a house is simpler than a relationship with another human being. For one thing, it’s only one way. The house can’t blame you for being a bad owner or for not keeping it clean, though it also can’t give you a nice back rub after a hard day. Marriage, though, is the greatest two-way decision of most people’s lives, and couples are enormously invested in making it work. A moderate amount of post-wedding, eyes-half-shut dissonance reduction, in which partners emphasise the positive and overlook the negative, allows things to hum along in harmony. But the identical mechanism allows some people to remain in marriages that are the psychological equivalent of La Conchita, on the brink of constant disaster. What do deliriously happy newlyweds have in common with unhappy couples who have remained together, in bitterness or weariness, for many years? An unwillingness to heed dissonant information. Many newlyweds, seeking confirmation that they have married the perfect person, overlook or dismiss any evidence that might be a warning sign of trouble or conflict ahead: “He goes into a sulk if I even chat with another man; how cute, it means he loves me.” “She’s so casual and relaxed about household matters; how charming, it means she’ll make me less compulsive.” Unhappy spouses who have long tolerated each other’s cruelty, jealousy, or humiliation are also busy reducing dissonance. To avoid facing the devastating possibility that they have invested so many years, so much energy, so many arguments, in a failed effort to achieve even peaceful coexistence, they say something like “All marriages are like this. Nothing can be done about it, anyway. There are enough good things about it. Better to stay in a difficult marriage than be alone.” Self-justification doesn’t care whether it reaps benefits or wreaks havoc. It keeps many marriages together (for better or worse) and tears others asunder (for better or worse). Couples start off blissfully optimistic, and over the years some will move in the direction of greater closeness and affection, others in the direction of greater distance and hostility. Some couples find in marriage a source of solace and joy, a place to replenish the soul, a relationship that allows them to flourish as individuals and as a couple. For others, marriage becomes a source of bickering and discord, a place of stagnation, a relationship that squashes their individuality and dissipates their bond. Our goal in this chapter is not to imply that all relationships can and should be saved, but rather to show how self-justification contributes to these two different outcomes. 

5. Some couples separate because of a cataclysmic revelation, or ongoing violence that one partner can no longer tolerate or ignore. But the vast majority of couples who drift apart do so slowly, over time, in a snowballing pattern of blame and self-justification. Each partner focuses on what the other one is doing wrong while justifying his or her own preferences, attitudes, and ways of doing things. Each side’s intransigence, in turn, makes the other side even more determined not to budge. Before the couple realise it, they have taken up polarised positions, each feeling right and righteous. Self-justification will then cause their hearts to harden against the entreaties of empathy. And what is their major problem — that they are temperamentally incompatible, that they don’t understand each other, that they are angry? All couples have differences. Even identical twins have differences. 

6. For Frank and Debra, like most couples, the differences are precisely why they fell in love: He thought she was terrific because she was sociable and outgoing, a perfect antidote to his reserve; she was drawn to his calmness and unflappability in a storm. All couples have conflicts too, small irritants that are amusing to observers but worthy of warfare to the participants (she wants dirty dishes washed immediately, and he lets them pile up so there’s only one cleanup a day, or a week) or larger disagreements about money, sex, in-laws, or any of countless other issues. Differences need not cause rifts. But once there is a rift, the couple explains it as being an inevitable result of their differences. From our standpoint, therefore, misunderstandings, conflicts, personality differences, and even angry quarrels are not the assassins of love; self-justification is. Frank and Debra’s evening with the new couple might have ended very differently if both of them had not been so busy spinning their own self-justifications and blaming the other, and if they had thought about the other’s feelings first. Each of them understands the other’s point of view perfectly, but the need for self-justification is preventing them from accepting the other’s position as legitimate. It is motivating each of them to see his or her own way as the better way, indeed the only reasonable way.

7. The kind that can erode a marriage, however, reflects a more serious effort to protect not what we did but who we are, and it comes in two versions: “I’m right and you’re wrong” and “Even if I’m wrong, too bad; that’s the way I am.” Frank and Debra are in trouble because they have begun to justify their fundamental self-concepts, the qualities about themselves that they value and do not wish to alter or that they believe are inherent in their nature. They are not saying to each other, “I’m right and you’re wrong about that memory.” They are saying, “I am the right kind of person and you are the wrong kind of person. And because you are the wrong kind of person, you cannot appreciate my virtues; foolishly, you even think some of my virtues are flaws.”

8. Thus, Frank justifies himself by seeing his actions as those of a good, loyal, steady husband—that’s who he is—and so he thinks their marriage would be fine if Debra quit pestering him to talk, if she would forgive his imperfections as he forgives hers. Notice his language: “What have I done that’s wrong?” asks Frank. “I’m an okay human being.” Frank justifies his unwillingness to discuss difficult or painful topics in the name of his “tolerance” and his ability to “just let things ride.” For her part, Debra thinks her emotional expressiveness “just shows I’m human” — that’s who she is—and that their marriage would be fine if Frank weren’t so “passive and bored.” Debra got it right when she observed that Frank justifies ignoring her demands to communicate by attributing them to her irrational nature. But she doesn’t see that she is doing the same thing, that she justifies ignoring his wishes not to talk by attributing them to his stubborn nature. 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.

9. As Debra and Frank’s problems accumulated, each developed an implicit theory of how the other person was wrecking the marriage. (These theories are called “implicit” because people are often unaware that they hold them.) Debra’s implicit theory is that Frank is socially awkward and passive; his theory is that Debra is insecure and cannot accept herself or him as they are. The trouble is that once people develop an implicit theory, the confirmation bias kicks in and they stop seeing evidence that doesn’t fit it. As Frank and Debra’s therapist observed, Debra now ignores or plays down all the times that Frank isn’t awkward and passive with her or others — the times he’s been funny and charming, the many times he has gone out of his way to be helpful. For his part, Frank now ignores or plays down evidence of Debra’s psychological security, such as her persistence and optimism in the face of disappointment. “They each think the other is at fault,” their therapists observed, “and thus they selectively remember parts of their life, focusing on those parts that support their own points of view.” While happy partners are giving each other the benefit of the doubt, unhappy partners are doing just the opposite.

10. Implicit theories have powerful consequences because they affect, among other things, how couples argue, and even the very purpose of an argument. If a couple is arguing from the premise that each is a good person who did something wrong but fixable, or who did something blunder-headed because of momentary situational pressures, there is hope of correction and compromise. But, once again, unhappy couples invert this premise. Because each partner is expert at self-justification, each blames the other’s unwillingness to change on personality flaws but excuses his or her own unwillingness to change as personality virtues. If they don’t want to admit they were wrong or modify a habit that annoys or distresses their partner, they say, “I can’t help it. It’s natural to raise your voice when you’re angry. That’s the way I am.” You can hear the self-justification in these words because, of course, they can help it. They help it every time they don’t raise their voice with a police officer, their employer, or a three-hundred-pound irritating stranger on the street.

11. Social psychologist June Tangney has found that being criticised for who you are rather than for what you did evokes a deep sense of shame and helplessness; it makes a person want to hide, disappear. Because the shamed person has nowhere to go to escape the desolate feeling of humiliation, Tangney found, shamed spouses tend to strike back in anger: “You make me feel that I did an awful thing because I’m reprehensible and incompetent. Since I don’t think I am reprehensible and incompetent, you must be reprehensible to humiliate me this way.” 

12. By the time a couple’s style of argument has escalated into shaming and blaming each other, the fundamental purpose of their quarrels has shifted. It is no longer an effort to solve a problem or even to get the other person to modify his or her behaviour; it’s just to wound, to insult, to score. That is why shaming leads to fierce, renewed efforts at self-justification, a refusal to compromise, and the most destructive emotion a relationship can evoke: contempt. In his groundbreaking study of more than seven hundred couples whom he followed over a period of years, psychologist John Gottman found that contempt—criticism laced with sarcasm, name calling, and mockery—is one of the strongest signs that a relationship is in free fall. Gottman offered this example: "FRED: Did you pick up my dry cleaning? INGRID (mocking): Did you pick up my dry cleaning? Pick up your own damn dry cleaning. What am I, your maid? FRED: Hardly. If you were a maid, at least you’d know how to clean."

12. Contemptuous exchanges like this one are devastating because they destroy the one thing that self-justification is designed to protect: our feelings of self-worth, of being loved, of being a good and respected person. Contempt is the final revelation to the partner that “I don’t value the ‘who’ that you are.” We believe that contempt is a predictor of divorce not because it causes the wish to separate but because it reflects the couple’s feelings of psychological separation. Contempt emerges only after years of squabbles and quarrels that keep resulting, as for Frank and Debra, in yet another unsuccessful effort to get the other person to behave differently. It is an indication that the partner is throwing in the towel, thinking, “There’s no point hoping that you will ever change; you are just like your mother after all.” Anger reflects the hope that a problem can be corrected. When it burns out, it leaves the ashes of resentment and contempt. And contempt is the handmaiden of hopelessness.

13. Which comes first, a couple’s unhappiness with each other or their negative ways of thinking about each other? Am I unhappy with you because of your personality flaws, or does my belief that you have personality flaws (rather than forgivable quirks or external pressures) eventually make me unhappy with you? Obviously, it works in both directions. But because most new partners do not start out in a mood of complaining and blaming, psychologists have been able to follow couples over time to see what sets some of them, but not others, on a downward spiral. They have learned that negative ways of thinking and blaming usually come first and are unrelated to the couple’s frequency of anger or either party’s feelings of depression. Happy and unhappy partners simply think differently about each other’s behaviour, even when they are responding to identical situations and actions. That is why we think that self-justification is the prime suspect in the murder of a marriage. Each partner resolves the dissonance caused by conflicts and irritations by explaining the spouse’s behaviour in a particular way. That explanation, in turn, sets them on a path down the pyramid. Those who travel the route of shame and blame will eventually begin rewriting the story of their marriage. As they do, they seek further evidence to justify their growing pessimistic or contemptuous views of each other. They shift from minimising negative aspects of the marriage to over emphasising them, seeking any bit of supporting evidence to fit their new story. As the new story takes shape, with husband and wife rehearsing it privately or with sympathetic friends, the partners become blind to each other’s good qualities, the ones that initially caused them to fall in love. The tipping point at which a couple starts rewriting their love story, Gottman finds, is when the “magic ratio” dips below five to one: Successful couples have a ratio of five times as many positive interactions (such as expressions of love, affection, and humour) to negative ones (such as expressions of annoyance and complaints). It doesn’t matter if the couple is emotionally volatile, quarrelling eleven times a day, or emotionally placid, quarrelling once a decade; it is the ratio that matters. “Volatile couples may yell and scream a lot, but they spend five times as much of their marriage being loving and making up,” Gottman found. “Quieter, avoidant couples may not display as much passion as the other types, but they display far less criticism and contempt as well—the ratio is still 5 to 1.”

14. But when the divorce is wrenching, momentous, and costly, and especially when one partner wants the separation and the other does not, both sides will feel an amalgam of painful emotions. In addition to the anger, anguish, hurt, and grief that almost invariably accompany divorce, these couples will also feel the pain of dissonance. That dissonance, and the way many people choose to resolve it, is one of the major reasons for post divorce vindictiveness. If you are the one who is leaving, you also have dissonance to reduce, to justify the pain you are inflicting on someone you once loved. Because you are a good person, and a good person doesn’t hurt another, your partner must have deserved your rejection, perhaps even more than you realised. Observers of divorcing couples are often baffled by what seems like unreasonable vindictiveness on the part of the person who initiated the separation; what they are observing is dissonance reduction in action. A friend of ours, lamenting her son’s divorce, said: “I don’t understand my daughter-in-law. She left my son for another man who adores her, but she won’t marry him or work full-time just so that my son has to keep paying her alimony. My son has had to take a job he doesn’t like, to afford her demands. Given that she’s the one who left and that she has another relationship, the way she treats my son seems inexplicably cruel and vengeful.” From the daughter-in-law’s standpoint, however, her behaviour toward her ex is perfectly justifiable. If he were such a good guy, she’d still be with him, wouldn’t she? Therefore, since he hadn’t been a good enough person to take a job he didn’t like so she could live in the style she wanted, she’ll make him do that now. Serves him right.

15. 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 minimise 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 of regrets and losses.

Chapter 7: Wounds, Rifts, and Wars

1. Thus far we have been talking about situations in which mistakes were definitely made—memory distortions, wrongful convictions, misguided therapeutic practices. We move now to the far more brambly territory of betrayals, rifts, and violent hostilities. Our examples will range from family quarrels to the Crusades, from routine meanness to systematic torture, from misdemeanours in marriage to the escalations of war. These conflicts between friends, cousins, and countries may differ profoundly in cause and form, but they are woven together with the single, tenacious thread of self-justification. In pulling out that common thread, we do not mean to overlook the complexity of the fabric or imply that all garments are the same.

2. In most rifts each side accuses the other of being inherently selfish, stubborn, mean, and aggressive, but the need for self-justification trumps personality traits. Who started the final confrontation over control of Terri’s death? Each says the other. What made it intractable? Self-justification. Who started the hostage crisis? Each says the other. What made it intractable? Self-justification. Of all the stories that people construct to justify their lives, loves, and losses, the ones they weave to account for being the instigator or recipient of injustice or harm are the most compelling and have the most far-reaching consequences. In such cases, the hallmarks of self-justification transcend the specific antagonists (lovers, parents and children, friends, neighbours, or nations) and their specific quarrels (a sexual infidelity, a family inheritance, a betrayal of a confidence, a property line, or a military invasion). 

3. We have all done something that made others angry at us, and we have all been spurred to anger by what others have done to us. We all have, intentionally or unintentionally, hurt another person who will forever regard us as the villain, the betrayer, the scoundrel. And we have all felt the sting of being on the receiving end of an act of injustice, nursing a wound that never seems to fully heal. The remarkable thing about self-justification is that it allows us to shift from one role to the other and back again in the blink of an eye without applying what we have learned from one role to the other. Feeling like a victim of injustice in one situation does not make us less likely to commit an injustice against someone else, nor does it make us more sympathetic to victims. It’s as if there is a brick wall between those two sets of experiences, blocking our ability to see the other side. One of the reasons for that brick wall is that pain felt is always more intense than pain inflicted, even when the actual amount of pain is identical. The old joke—the other guy’s broken leg is trivial; our broken fingernail is serious—turns out to be an accurate description of our neurological wiring. 

4. English neurologists paired people in a tit-for-tat experiment. Each pair was hooked up to a mechanism that exerted pressure on their index fingers, and the participants were instructed to apply the same force on their partner’s finger that they had just felt. They could not do it fairly, although they tried hard. Every time one partner felt the pressure, he retaliated with considerably greater force, thinking he was giving what he had gotten. The researchers concluded that the escalation of pain is “a natural by-product of neural processing.” It helps explain why two boys who start out exchanging punches on the arm as a game soon find themselves in a furious fistfight. And it explains why two nations find themselves in a spiral of retaliation: “They didn’t take an eye for an eye, they took an eye for a tooth. We must get even—let’s take a leg.” Each side justifies what it does as merely evening the score.

5. When we construct narratives that “make sense,” however, we do so in a self-serving way. Perpetrators are motivated to reduce their moral culpability; victims are motivated to maximise their moral blamelessness. Depending on which side of the wall we are on, we systematically distort our memories and account of the event to produce the maximum consonance between what happened and how we see ourselves. By identifying these systematic distortions, the researchers showed how the two antagonists misperceive and misunderstand each other’s actions. One reason he doesn’t understand and she can’t admit it is that perpetrators are preoccupied with justifying what they did, but another reason is that they really do not know how the victim feels. Many victims initially stifle their anger, nursing their wounds and brooding about what to do. They ruminate about their pain or grievances for months, sometimes for years, and sometimes for decades. One man we know told us that after eighteen years of marriage, his wife announced “out of the blue, at breakfast,” that she wanted a divorce. “I tried to find out what I’d done wrong,” he said, “and I told her I wanted to make amends, but there were eighteen years of dust balls under the bed.” That wife brooded for eighteen years; the Iranians brooded for twenty-six years. By the time many victims get around to expressing their pain and anger, especially over events that the perpetrators have wrapped up and forgotten, perpetrators are baffled. No wonder most thought their victims’ anger was an overreaction, though few victims felt that way. The victims are thinking, “Overreaction? But I thought about it for months before I spoke. I consider that an under reaction!” Some victims justify their continued feelings of anger and their unwillingness to let it go because rage itself is retribution, a way to punish the offender, even when the offender wants to make peace, is long gone from the scene, or has died. In Great Expectations, Charles Dickens gave us the haunting figure of Miss Havisham, who, having been jilted on her wedding day, sacrifices the rest of her life to become a professional victim, clothed in self-righteous wrath and her yellowing bridal gown, raising her ward Estella to exact her revenge on men. Many victims are unable to resolve their feelings because they keep picking at the scab on the wound, asking themselves repeatedly, “How could such a bad thing have happened to me, a good person?” This is perhaps the most painful dissonance-arousing question that we confront in our lives. It is the reason for the countless books offering spiritual or psychological advice to help victims find closure—and consonance.

6. Slavery may be gone with the wind, but grudges aren’t. That is why history is written by the victors, but it is victims who write the memoirs.
Who Started This? One of the most eternally popular dissonance reducers, practiced by everyone from toddlers to tyrants, is “The other guy started it.” Even Hitler said they started it, “they” being the victorious nations of World War I who humiliated Germany with the Treaty of Versailles and the Jewish “vermin” who were undermining Germany from within. The problem is, how far back do you want to go to show that the other guy started it? As our opening example of the Iran hostage crisis suggests, victims have long memories, and they can call on real or imagined episodes from the recent or distant past to justify their desire to retaliate now. In the centuries of war between Muslims and Christians, sometimes simmering and sometimes erupting, who are the perpetrators and who are the victims? There is no simple answer, but let’s examine how each side has justified its actions.

7. Once people commit themselves to an opinion about “who started this?,” whatever the “this” may be—a family quarrel or an international conflict—they become less able to accept information that is dissonant with their positions. Once they have decided who the perpetrator is and who the victim is, their ability to empathise with the other side is weakened, even destroyed. How many arguments have you been in that sputtered out with an unanswerable “But what about . . . ?” As soon as you describe the atrocities that one side has committed, someone will protest: “But what about the other side’s atrocities?” We can all understand why victims would want to retaliate. But retaliation often makes the original perpetrators minimise the severity and harm of their side’s actions and claim the mantle of victim themselves, thereby setting in motion a cycle of oppression and revenge. “Every successful revolution,” observed the historian Barbara Tuchman, “puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.” Why not? The victors, former victims, feel justified.

8. Indeed, the small percentage of people who cannot or will not reduce dissonance this way pay a large psychological price in guilt, anguish, anxiety, nightmares, and sleepless nights, as we will discuss further in the next chapter. The pain of living with horrors you have committed but cannot morally accept is searing, which is why most people will reach for any justification available to assuage the dissonance. Every one of them claimed that anything they did—torturing or murdering their opponents, blocking free elections, starving their citizens, looting their nation’s wealth, launching genocidal wars—was done for the good of their country. The alternative, they said, was chaos, anarchy, and bloodshed. Far from seeing themselves as despots, they saw themselves as self-sacrificing patriots. “The degree of cognitive dissonance involved in being a person who oppresses people out of love for them,” wrote Louis Menand, “is summed up in a poster that Baby Doc Duvalier had put up in Haiti. It read, ‘I should like to stand before the tribunal of history as the person who irreversibly founded democracy in Haiti.’ And it was signed, ‘Jean-Claude Duvalier, president-for-life.’”

9. Dissonance theory would therefore predict that when victims are armed and able to strike back, perpetrators will feel less need to reduce dissonance by belittling them than they do when their victims are helpless. In an experiment by Ellen Berscheid and her associates, participants were led to believe that they would be delivering a painful electric shock to another person as part of a test of learning. Half were told that later they would be reversing roles, so the victim would be in a position to retaliate. As predicted, the only participants who denigrated their victims were those who believed the victims were helpless and would not be able to respond in kind. This was precisely the situation of the people who took part in Stanley Milgram’s 1963 obedience experiment, described in chapter 1. Many of those who obeyed the experimenter’s orders to deliver what they thought were dangerous amounts of shock to a learner justified their actions by blaming the victim. As Milgram himself put it, “Many subjects harshly devalue the victim as a consequence of acting against him. Such comments as, ‘He was so stupid and stubborn he deserved to get shocked,’ were common. Once having acted against the victim, these subjects found it necessary to view him as an unworthy individual, whose punishment was made inevitable by his own deficiencies of intellect and character.” 

10. The implications of these studies are ominous, for they show that people do not perform acts of cruelty and come out unscathed. Success at dehumanising the victim virtually guarantees a continuation or even an escalation of the cruelty: It sets up an endless chain of violence, followed by self-justification (in the form of dehumanising and blaming the victim), followed by still more violence and dehumanisation. Combine self-justifying perpetrators and victims who are helpless, and you have a recipe for the escalation of brutality. This brutality is not confined to brutes—that is, sadists or psychopaths. It can be, and usually is, committed by ordinary individuals, people who have children and lovers, “civilised” people who enjoy music and food and making love and gossiping as much as anyone else. This is one of the most thoroughly documented findings in social psychology, but it is also the most difficult for many people to accept because of the enormous dissonance it produces: “What can I possibly have in common with perpetrators of murder and torture?” It is much more reassuring to believe that they are evil and be done with them. We dare not let a glimmer of their humanity in the door, because it might force us to face the haunting truth of cartoonist Walt Kelly’s great character Pogo, who famously said: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

11. Once torture is justified in one case, it is easier to justify it in others: “Let’s torture not only this bastard who we are pretty sure knows where the bomb is but this other bastard who might know where the bomb is, and also this bastard who might have some general information that could be useful in five years, and also this other guy who might be a bastard only we aren’t sure.” The debate about torture has properly focused on its legality, its morality, and its utility. As social psychologists, we want to add one additional concern: what torture does to the individual perpetrator and the ordinary citizens who go along with it. Most people want to believe that their government is working on their behalf, that it knows what it’s doing, and that it’s doing the right thing. Therefore, if the government decides that torture is necessary in the war against terrorism, most citizens, to avoid dissonance, will agree. Yet, over time, that is how the moral conscience of a nation deteriorates. Once people take that first small step off the pyramid in the direction of justifying abuse and torture, they are on their way to hardening their hearts and minds in ways that might never be undone. Uncritical patriotism, the kind that reduces the dissonance caused by information that their government—and especially their political party—has done something immoral and illegal, greases the slide down the pyramid. [The use of torture] was shameful and unnecessary . . . But in the end, torture’s failure to serve its intended purpose isn’t the main reason to oppose its use. I have often said, and will always maintain, that this question isn’t about our enemies; it’s about us. It’s about who we were, who we are and who we aspire to be. It’s about how we represent ourselves to the world.

12. In our favourite version of an ancient Buddhist parable, several monks are returning to their monastery after a long pilgrimage. Over high mountains and across low valleys they trek, honouring their vow of silence outside the monastery. One day they come to a raging river where a beautiful young woman stands. She approaches the eldest monk and says, “Forgive me, Roshi, but would you be so kind as to carry me across the river? I cannot swim, and if I remain here or attempt to cross on my own, I shall surely perish.” The old monk smiles at her warmly and says, “Of course I will help you.” With that, he picks her up and carries her across the river. On the other side, he gently sets her down. She thanks him, departs, and the monks continue their wordless journey. After five more days of arduous travel, the monks arrive at their monastery, and the moment they do, they turn on the elder in a fury. “How could you do that?” they admonish him. “You broke your vows! You not only spoke to that woman, you touched her! You not only touched her, you picked her up!” The elder replies, “I only carried her across the river. You have been carrying her for five days.” The monks carried the woman in their hearts for days; some perpetrators and victims carry their burdens of guilt, grief, anger, and revenge for years. What does it take to set those burdens down? 

13. Anyone who has tried to intervene between warring couples or nations knows how painfully difficult it is for both sides to let go of self-justification, especially after years of fighting, defending their position, and moving farther down the pyramid away from compromise and common ground. Mediators and negotiators therefore have two challenges: to persuade perpetrators to acknowledge and atone for the harm they caused, and to persuade victims to relinquish the impulse for revenge while recognising and sympathising with the harm they have suffered. Understanding without vengeance, reparation without retaliation, are possible only if we are willing to stop justifying our own position. Many years after the Vietnam War, veteran William Broyles Jr. traveled back to Vietnam to try to resolve his feelings about the horrors he had seen there and those he had committed. He went because, he said, he wanted to meet his former enemies “as people, not abstractions.” In a small village that had been a Marine base camp, he met a woman who had been with the Viet Cong. As they talked, Broyles realised that her husband had been killed at exactly the time that he and his men had been patrolling. “My men and I might have killed your husband,” he said. She looked at him steadily and said, “But that was during the war. The war is over now. Life goes on.” Later, Broyles reflected on his healing visit to Vietnam: I used to have nightmares. Since I’ve been back from that trip, I haven’t had any. Maybe that sounds too personal to support any larger conclusions, but it tells me that to end a war you have to return to the same personal relationships you would have had with people before it. You do make peace. Nothing is constant in history.

Chapter 8: Letting Go and Owning Up

1. A man travels many miles to consult the wisest guru in the land. When he arrives, he asks the great man: “O wise guru, what is the secret of a happy life?” 

“Good judgment,” says the guru. 
“But, O wise guru,” says the man, “how do I achieve good judgment?” 
“Bad judgment,” says the guru.

2. As we follow the trail of self-justification through the territories of family, memory, therapy, law, prejudice, conflict, and war, two fundamental lessons from dissonance theory emerge: First, the ability to reduce dissonance helps us in countless ways, preserving our beliefs, confidence, decisions, self-esteem, and well-being. Second, this ability can get us into big trouble.

3. People will pursue self-destructive courses of action to protect the wisdom of their initial decisions. They will treat those they have hurt even more harshly because they convince themselves that their victims deserve it. They will cling to outdated and sometimes harmful procedures in their work. They will support torturers and tyrants who are on the right side—that is, theirs. People who are insecure in their religious beliefs may feel the impulse to silence and harass those who disagree with them because the mere existence of those naysayers arouses the painful dissonance of doubt. But there is another side to dissonance: the pain that people feel when they cannot allow self-justification to erase the memory of the harm they caused, the mistakes they made, and the decisions that backfired. That inability to let go can leave an indelible mark of regret and guilt, in extreme cases leading to despair, depression, or alcoholism. 

4. In soldiers, we call those symptoms PTSD. “How does a soldier justify his taking of life in the face of the powerful sanctions against this act that likely informed his upbringing?” asked psychologist Wayne Klug and his colleagues in their study of Iraq veterans. “Does his subsequent struggle with guilt, grief, and cognitive dissonance suggest a moral indictment of war?” Psychiatrist Jonathan Shay, who advises the military on post-traumatic stress disorders, observed that some veterans suffer continued “moral pain” over killings that they feel violated their ethical code, even if the killing was an inevitable part of war: “It occurs when you’ve done something in the moment that you were told by your superiors that you had to do, and believed, truthfully and honourably, that you had to do, but which nonetheless violated your own ethical commitments,” he says. “There is a bright line between murder and legitimate killing that means everything to them . . . They hate it when they have killed somebody they didn’t need to kill. It’s a scar on the soul.” 

5. The art of living with dissonance is as much about coping with the scars on the soul as it is about avoiding them. Just as Odysseus had to steer his ship between Homer’s mythical sea monsters Scylla and Charybdis—embodiments of rocky shoals and a whirlpool in the Strait of Messina, both perilous to sailors—so we must find a path between the Scylla of blind self-justification on one side and the Charybdis of merciless self-flagellation on the other. That middle course is more complex than letting ourselves off the hook right away with a quick defence—“ What else could I have done?” or “It’s the other guy’s fault” or “I was just following orders” or “I wasn’t wrong on the main point; just on a few details” or “Can we put this behind us and get back to business?” This tactic won’t cut it, not with others and not with ourselves. It is important to stay on the hook for a while, to suffer some anguish, confusion, and discomfort on the road to understanding what went wrong. Only then can we gain an appreciation of what we have to do to make it right. That process was certainly hard for Linda Ross, the psychotherapist who had practised recovered-memory therapy until she realised how misguided she had been; for Grace, whose false recovered memories tore her family apart for years; for Thomas Vanes, the district attorney who learned that a man he had convicted of rape and who had spent twenty years in prison was innocent; for Vivian Gornick, who belatedly acknowledged her part in her history of failed relationships; for the couples and political leaders who eventually manage to break free of the spirals of rage and retaliation. And it is surely hardest of all for those whose professional mistakes cost the lives of friends and coworkers. N. Wayne Hale Jr. was the launch integration manager at NASA in 2003, when seven astronauts died in the explosion of the space shuttle Columbia. In a public e-mail to the members of the space-shuttle program, Hale took full responsibility for the disaster: I had the opportunity and the information and I failed to make use of it. I don’t know what an inquest or a court of law would say, but I stand condemned in the court of my own conscience to be guilty of not preventing the Columbia disaster. We could discuss the particulars: inattention, incompetence, distraction, lack of conviction, lack of understanding, a lack of backbone, laziness. The bottom line is that I failed to understand what I was being told; I failed to stand up and be counted. Therefore look no further; I am guilty of allowing Columbia to crash.

6. These courageous individuals take us straight into the heart of dissonance and its innermost irony: the mind wants to protect itself from the pain of dissonance with the balm of self-justification, but the soul wants to confess. To reduce dissonance, most of us put an enormous amount of mental and physical energy into protecting ourselves and propping up our self-esteem when it sags under the realisation that we have been foolish, gullible, mistaken, corrupt, or otherwise human. And yet, much of the time, all this investment of energy is surprisingly unnecessary. Linda Ross is still a psychotherapist—a better one. Thomas Vanes is still a practicing attorney, perhaps a more thoughtful one. Grace got her parents back. William Broyles found peace. N. Wayne Hale was promoted to manager of NASA’s space-shuttle program at the Johnson Space Center, a position he held until his retirement. 

7. The need to reduce dissonance is a universal mental mechanism, but, as these stories illustrate, that doesn’t mean we are doomed to be controlled by it. Human beings may not be eager to change, but we have the ability to change, and the fact that many of our self-protective delusions and blind spots are built into the way the brain works is no justification for not trying. Is the brain designed to defend our beliefs and convictions? Fine—the brain also wants us to stock up on sugar, but most of us learn to eat vegetables. Is the brain designed to make us flare in anger when we think we are being attacked? Fine—but most of us learn to count to ten and find alternatives to beating the other guy with a cudgel. An appreciation of how dissonance works, in ourselves and others, gives us some ways to override our wiring. And protects us from those who can’t. Or won’t.

Mistakes Were Made - By Them

1. After the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy 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—and no republic can survive.” The final responsibility for the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion was, he said, “mine, and mine alone.” As a result of that admission, Kennedy’s popularity soared.

The disclosure of fallibility humanises doctors and builds trust, Friedman concluded. “In the end, most patients will forgive their doctor for an error of the head, but rarely for one of the heart.” 

Kardon’s exercise illuminates just how difficult it is to say, “Boy, did I mess up,” without the protective postscript of self-justification—to say “I dropped a routine fly ball with the bases loaded” rather than “I dropped the ball because the sun was in my eyes” or “because a bird flew by” or “because it was windy” or “because a fan called me a jerk.” A friend returning from a day in traffic school told us that as participants went around the room, reporting the violations that had brought them there, a miraculous coincidence had occurred: Not one of them had broken the law! They all had justifications for speeding, ignoring a stop sign, running a red light, or making an illegal U-turn. He became so dismayed (and amused) by the litany of flimsy excuses that, when his turn came, he was embarrassed to give in to the same impulse. He said, “I didn’t stop at a stop sign. I was entirely wrong and I got caught.” There was a moment’s silence, and then the room erupted in cheers for his candour. There are plenty of good reasons for admitting mistakes, starting with the simple fact that you will probably be found out anyway—by your family, your company, your colleagues, your enemies, your biographer. But there are more positive reasons for owning up. Other people will like you more. Someone else may be able to pick up your fumble and run with it; your error might inspire someone else’s solution. Children will realise that everyone screws up on occasion and that even adults have to say “I’m sorry.” And if you can admit a mistake when it is the size of an acorn, it will be easier to repair than if you wait until it becomes the size of a tree, with deep, wide-ranging roots. At work, institutions can be designed to reward admissions of mistakes as part of the organisational culture rather than making it uncomfortable or professionally risky for people to come forward. This design, naturally, must come from the top. Organisational consultants Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus offer a story about the legendary Tom Watson Sr., IBM’s founder and its guiding inspiration for over forty years. “A promising junior executive of IBM was involved in a risky venture for the company and managed to lose over $ 10 million in the gamble,” they wrote. “It was a disaster. When Watson called the nervous executive into his office, the young man blurted out, ‘I guess you want my resignation?’ Watson said, ‘You can’t be serious. We’ve just spent $ 10 million educating you!’”

Mistakes Were Made - By Me

It is considered unhealthy in America to remember mistakes, neurotic to think about them, and psychotic to dwell upon them. —Lillian Hellman, playwright

If letting go of self-justification and admitting mistakes is so beneficial to the mind and to relationships, why aren’t more of us doing it? If we are so grateful to others when they do it, why don’t we do it more often? Most of the time we don’t do it because, as we have seen, we aren’t even aware that we need to. Self-justification purrs along automatically, just beneath consciousness, protecting us from the dissonant realisation that we did anything wrong. “Mistake? What mistake? I didn’t make a mistake . . . The tree jumped in front of my car . . . And what do I have to be sorry about, anyway? Not my fault.”

Consider the bias we discussed in the first chapter, naive realism: the bias to believe that we see things clearly and therefore have no bias. This bias is the central impediment to negotiations between any two individuals or groups in conflict who see things entirely differently.

Instead, Peres took a third course. “When a friend makes a mistake,” he said, “the friend remains a friend, and the mistake remains a mistake.”

Suppose your unpleasant, aggressive coworker has just made an innovative suggestion at a group meeting. You could say to yourself, “An ignorant jerk like her could not possibly have a good idea about anything,” and shoot her suggestion down in flames because you dislike the woman so much (and, you admit it, you feel competitive with her for your manager’s approval). Or you could give yourself some breathing room and ask yourself: “Could the idea be a smart one? How would I feel about it if it came from my ally on this project?” If it is a good idea, you might support your coworker’s proposal even if you continue to dislike her as a person. You keep the message separate from the messenger. In this way, we might learn how to change our minds before our brains freeze our thoughts into consistent patterns.

Mindful awareness of how dissonance operates is therefore the first step toward controlling its effects. But two psychological impediments remain. One is the belief that mistakes are evidence of incompetence and stupidity; the other is the belief that our personality traits, including self-esteem, are embedded and unchangeable. People who hold both of these ideas are often afraid to admit error because they take it as evidence that they are blithering idiots; they cannot separate the mistake from their identity and self-esteem. Although most Americans know they are supposed to say “We learn from our mistakes,” deep down they don’t believe it for a minute. They think that making mistakes means they are stupid. That belief is precisely what keeps them from learning from their mistakes.

So embedded is the link between mistakes and stupidity in American culture that it can be shocking to learn that not all cultures share it. In the 1970s, psychologists Harold Stevenson and James Stigler became interested in the math gap in performance between Asian and American schoolchildren: by the fifth grade, the lowest-scoring Japanese classroom was outperforming the highest-scoring American classroom. To find out why, Stevenson and Stigler spent the next decade comparing elementary classrooms in the United States, China, and Japan. Their epiphany occurred as they watched a Japanese boy struggle with the assignment of drawing cubes in three dimensions on the blackboard. The boy kept at it for forty-five minutes, making repeated mistakes, as Stevenson and Stigler became increasingly anxious and embarrassed for him. Yet the boy himself was utterly unself-conscious, and the American observers wondered why they felt worse than he did. “Our culture exacts a great cost psychologically for making a mistake,” Stigler recalled, “whereas in Japan, it doesn’t seem to be that way. In Japan, mistakes, error, confusion [are] all just a natural part of the learning process.” (The boy eventually mastered the problem, to the cheers of his classmates.) The researchers also found that American parents, teachers, and children were far more likely than their Japanese and Chinese counterparts to believe that mathematical ability is innate; if you have it, you don’t have to work hard, and if you don’t have it, there’s no point in trying. In contrast, most Asians regard math success as achievement in any other domain; it’s a matter of persistence and plain hard work. Of course, you will make mistakes as you go along; that’s how you learn and improve. 

Making mistakes is central to the education of budding scientists and artists of all kinds; they must have the freedom to experiment, try this idea, flop, try another idea, take a risk, be willing to get the wrong answer. One classic example, once taught to American schoolchildren and still on many inspirational websites in various versions, is Thomas Edison’s reply to his assistant (or a reporter), who asked Edison about his ten thousand experimental failures in his effort to create the first incandescent light bulb. “I have not failed,” he told the assistant (or reporter). “I successfully discovered ten thousand elements that don’t work.” Most American children, however, are denied the freedom to noodle around, experiment, and be wrong in ten ways, let alone ten thousand. The focus on constant testing, which grew out of the reasonable desire to measure and standardise children’s accomplishments, has intensified their fear of failure. It is certainly important for children to learn to succeed, but it is just as important for them to learn not to fear failure. When children or adults fear failure, they fear risk. They can’t afford to be wrong. Research by psychologist Carol Dweck suggests one reason for the cultural differences that Stevenson and Stigler observed: American children typically believe that making mistakes reflects poorly on their inherent abilities. In Dweck’s experiments, some children were praised for their efforts in mastering a new challenge; others were praised for their intelligence and ability (“ You’re a natural math whiz, Johnny”). Many of the children who were praised for their efforts even when they didn’t get it right eventually performed better and liked what they were learning more than children who were praised for their natural abilities did. They were also more likely to regard mistakes and criticism as useful information that would help them improve. In contrast, children praised for their natural ability were more likely to care more about how competent they looked than about what they were actually learning. They became defensive if they did not do well or if they made mistakes, and this reaction set them up for a self-defeating cycle: If they didn’t do well, then, to resolve the ensuing dissonance (“ I’m smart and yet I screwed up”), they simply lost interest in what they were learning (“ I could do it if I wanted to, but I don’t want to”). It is a lesson for all ages: the importance of seeing mistakes not as personal failings to be denied or justified but as inevitable aspects of life that help us improve our work, make better decisions, grow, and grow up.

Understanding how the mind yearns for consonance and rejects information that questions our beliefs, decisions, or preferences not only teaches us to be open to the possibility of error but also helps us let go of the need to be right. Confidence is a fine and useful quality; none of us would want a physician who was forever wallowing in uncertainty and couldn’t decide how to treat our illness, but we do want one who is open-minded and willing to learn. Nor would most of us wish to live without passions or convictions, which give our lives meaning and colour, energy and hope. But an unbending need to be right inevitably produces self-righteousness. When confidence and convictions are unleavened by humility, by an acceptance of fallibility, people can easily cross the line from healthy self-assurance to arrogance. In this book, we have met many who crossed that line: the psychiatrists who are certain that they can tell if a recovered memory is valid; the physicians and judges who are certain that they are above conflicts of interest; the police officers who are certain that they can tell if a suspect is lying; the prosecutors who are certain that they convicted the guilty party; the husbands and wives who are certain that their interpretation of events is the right one; the nations that are certain that their version of history is the only one. All of us will have hard decisions to make at times in our lives; not all of them will be right, and not all of them will be wise. Some are complicated, with consequences we could never have foreseen. If we can resist the temptation to justify our actions in a rigid, overconfident way, we can leave the door open to empathy and an appreciation of life’s complexity, including the possibility that what was right for us might not have been right for others. “I know what hard decisions look like,” says a woman we will call Janine. When I decided to leave my husband of twenty years, that decision was right for one of my daughters—who said, “What took you so long?”—but a disaster for the other; she was angry at me for years. I worked hard in my mind and brain to resolve that conflict and to justify what I did. I blamed my daughter for not accepting it and understanding my reasons. By the end of my mental gymnastics, I had turned myself into Mother Teresa and my daughter into a selfish, ungrateful brat. But over time, I couldn’t keep it up. I missed her. I remembered her sweetness and understanding, and realized she wasn’t a brat but a child who had been devastated by the divorce. And so finally I sat down with her. I told her that although I am still convinced that the divorce was the right decision for me, I understood now how much it had hurt her. I told her I was ready to listen. “Mom,” she said, “let’s go to Central Park for a picnic and talk, the way we did when I was a kid.” And we did, and that was the beginning of our reconciliation. Nowadays, when I feel passionate that I am 100 percent right about a decision that others question, I look at it again; that’s all. Janine did not have to admit that she made a mistake; she didn’t make a mistake in terms of her own life. But she did have to let go of her need to insist that her decision was the right one for her children. And she needed to have compassion for the daughter who was hurt by her action.

Act 2: The Arduous Journey to Self-Compassion 

There are no second acts in American lives. —F. Scott Fitzgerald

When Elliot started teaching, in 1960, he used Fitzgerald’s observation to make a point that the two of us now regard as the centrepiece of our views about living with dissonance. Act 1 is the setup: the problem, the conflict the hero faces. Act 2 is the struggle, in which the hero wrestles with betrayals, losses, or dangers. Act 3 is the redemption, the resolution, in which the hero either emerges victorious or goes down in defeat.

Exactly: maturity means an active, self-reflective struggle to accept the dissonance we feel about hopes we did not realise, opportunities we let slide by, mistakes we made, and challenges we could not meet, all of which changed our lives in ways we could not anticipate.

His own words illuminate how he might get there: “I tortured,” he says. He does not say “I am a torturer.” In this way he separates his behavior from his identity, and that ability is what ultimately allows people to live with behavior they now condemn. His son may not be proud of what his father did in Iraq, but he can certainly be proud of his father’s courageous honesty and determination to make amends—starting with teaching his family, his students, and his fellow citizens the lesson he suffered to learn. All of us can carry this understanding into our private lives: something we did can be separated from who we are and who we want to be. Our past selves need not be a blueprint for our future selves. The road to redemption starts with the understanding that who we are including what we have done but also transcends it, and the vehicle for transcending it is self-compassion. Getting to true self-compassion is a process; it does not happen overnight. It does not mean forgetting the harm or error, as in “Ah, well, I’m basically a good, kind person, so I’ll treat myself gently and move on.” No; you might be a good, kind person but you are one who committed a grievously harmful act. That’s part of you now, of who you are. But it need not be all of you. It need not define you—unless you keep justifying that act mindlessly.

We can’t keep fighting the past war, let alone the lost war. What is needed is a deep understanding not only of what went wrong then but also of what is going wrong right now, the better to prepare for what could go wrong with current decisions. We need an Eisenhower strategy.

In the final analysis, a nation’s character, and an individual’s integrity, do not depend on being error free. It depends on what we do after making the error. The poet Stephen Mitchell, in his poetic rendering of Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, writes: 

A great nation is like a great man: 
When he makes a mistake, he realises it. 
Having realized it, he admits it. 
Having admitted it, he corrects it. 
He considers those who point out his faults as his most benevolent teachers.

Chapter 9: Dissonance, Democracy, and the Demagogue

The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love, and in order to occupy and distract himself without love he gives way to passions and coarse pleasures, and sinks to bestiality in his vices, all from continual lying to other men and to himself.—Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov December 24, 2019

The Pyramid of Choice, Once Again: The guiding metaphor of this book has been the pyramid of choice: As soon as people make a decision, whether reasoned or impulsive, they will change their attitudes to conform to that choice and start minimising or dismissing any information suggesting they chose the wrong option. Typically, in politics, people let their party identity make the decisions for them, which is why most voters feel little dissonance in supporting the candidate who heads their own party — “I’m a Republican [or Democrat]; that’s who I am and who I vote for.” But what happens when that candidate holds beliefs or behaves in ways that formerly would have been anathema to those voters?

Most people who get caught in a lie, mistake, or hypocritical dance feel sharp dissonance and are motivated to squirm out of it with a flurry of self-justifications. But Trump has always been unfazed precisely because he feels no dissonance when caught. Feeling dissonance requires the ability to feel shame, guilt, empathy, and remorse, and he lacks that capacity. The only justification he feels is the need to make our claims that he can do anything he wants because he is “a very stable genius” and knows more than anyone about everything. He can never learn from his mistakes because he convinces himself that he never makes any — he cuts dissonance off at the pass, never allowing it into his brain. He is the quintessential con man, someone for whom lying is second nature. It’s just what you do. If the chumps believe you, that’s their problem. 

It is not coincidental that in 2016, the year that Donald Trump was elected, Oxford Dictionaries anointed as its word of the year post-truth, which it defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief” — another tactic of the demagogue, and the Trump administration began implementing it immediately.

Indeed, as dissonance theory predicts, the stronger and more persuasive the criticism, the stronger and more entrenched the need to ignore it. Trump’s critics “throw shit at him every day, all day long,” a sixty-nine-year-old real estate agent told a reporter, and then—unintentionally nailing the final step in reducing dissonance—she added: “It makes us want to support him more.”

This has been a book about how difficult it is to own our mistakes and the crucial importance of doing so if we ever hope to learn and improve. Millions of citizens made a monumental mistake in electing, and then supporting, Donald Trump. Once he is gone from the scene, the self-forgiving distortions of memory will lead many of his former supporters to say, “I never voted for him anyway” or “I always had misgivings about him.” Many of his former opponents will breathe a sigh of relief and say, “Thank God that’s over.” But we can never be complacent again. We all need to stand back and ask: What have we learned? We have learned how precarious democracy is, how easily fear and anger can be invoked to manipulate a population. We have learned about the importance of voting, even if it means choosing a candidate we regard as the lesser of two evils rather than our number - one purely pristine perfect preference. We have learned that democracy rests not only on its laws and institutions but also on its norms and values—and on the consensus of its citizenry that those norms and values are worth upholding. We have learned that heeding the rules of civility, decency, and diplomacy is a sign not of a nation’s weakness but of its strength.