Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me) Third Edition: Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts

I will look at any additional evidence to confirm the opinion to which I have already come. —Lord Molson, twentieth-century British politician

The confirmation bias is especially glaring in matters of political observation; we see only the positive attributes of our side and the negative attributes of theirs.

the need for consonance that when people are forced to look at disconfirming evidence, they will find a way to criticize, distort, or dismiss it so that they can maintain or even strengthen their existing belief. This mental contortion is called the “confirmation bias.”

even reading information that goes against your point of view can make

even reading information that goes against your point of view can make you all the more convinced you are right.

Once we are invested in a belief and have justified its wisdom, changing our minds is literally hard work.

The more costly a decision in terms of time, money, effort, or inconvenience and the more irrevocable its consequences, the greater the dissonance and the greater the need to reduce it by overemphasizing the good things about the choice made.

when you are about to make a big purchase or an important decision—which car or computer to buy, whether to undergo plastic surgery, or whether to sign up for a costly self-help program—don’t ask someone who has just done it. That person will be highly motivated to convince you that it is the right thing to do.

if you want advice on what product to buy, ask someone who is still gathering information and is still open-minded.

People want to believe that, being smart and rational individuals, they know why they make the choices they do, so they are not always happy when you tell them the actual reason for their actions.

No one is immune to the need to reduce dissonance, even those who know the theory inside out.

when people vent their feelings aggressively, they often feel worse, pump up their blood pressure, and make themselves even angrier.

Venting is especially likely to backfire when a person commits an aggressive act against another person directly, and that is exactly what cognitive dissonance theory would predict.

Justifying his first hurtful act sets the stage for more aggression. That’s why the catharsis hypothesis is wrong.

Children learn to justify their aggressive actions early; a child hits his younger sibling, who starts to cry, and immediately the boy claims, “But he started it! He deserved it!”

Aggression begets self-justification, which begets more aggression.

When people do a good deed, particularly when they do it on a whim or by chance, they will come to see the beneficiary of their generosity in a warmer light. Their cognition that they went out of their way to do a favor for this person is dissonant with any negative feelings they might have had about him.

When people do a good deed, particularly when they do it on a whim or by chance, they will come to see the beneficiary of their generosity in a warmer light. Their cognition that they went out of their way to do a favor for this person is dissonant with any negative feelings they might have had about him. In effect, after doing the favor, they ask themselves: “Why would I do something nice for a jerk? Therefore, he’s not as big a jerk as I thought he was—as a matter of fact, he is a pretty decent guy who deserves a break.”

The children who had been allowed to choose to be generous to the sad doggie shared more with Ellie than the children who had been instructed to share. In other words, once children saw themselves as generous kids, they continued to behave generously.

He didn’t do it, he wrote, by “paying any servile respect to him”—that is, by doing the other man a favor—but by inducing his target to do a favor for him. He asked the man to loan him a rare book from his library.