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

if you violate your own values, you’ll feel much greater dissonance because, at the end of the day, you have to go on living with yourself.

the great majority of people think they are “better than average”—we might call this the Lake Wobegone effect. They say they are better than average in all kinds of ways—smarter, nicer, more ethical, funnier, more competent, more humble, even better drivers.

dissonance theory applies to people with low self-esteem too, to people who consider themselves to be schnooks, crooks, or incompetents. They are not surprised when their behavior confirms their negative self-image. When they make wrong-headed predictions or go through severe initiations to get into what turns out to be dull groups, they merely say, “Yup, I screwed up again; that’s just like me.”

An appreciation of the power of self-justification helps us understand why people who have low self-esteem or who simply believe that they are incompetent in some domain are not totally overjoyed when they do something well; on the contrary, they often feel like frauds.

How do you get an honest man to lose his ethical compass? You get him to take one step at a time, and self-justification will do the rest.

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.

In one way or another, all of us are blind to whatever privileges life has handed us, even if those privileges are temporary.

The apparent correlation was coincidental, a result of the fact that autism is typically diagnosed in children at the same age they are vaccinated.22 As of 2019, more than a dozen large-scale, peer-reviewed studies, including a Danish project involving more than 650,085 children, had found no relationship between the MMR vaccine and autism.

people often hold on to a belief long after they know rationally that it’s wrong, and this is especially true if they have taken many steps down the pyramid in support of that wrong belief.

getting information that contradicts a strong belief may actually backfire, causing the person to hold on to the incorrect belief even more firmly.

In 1998, a team of scientists reported in the distinguished medical journal the Lancet that they had found a positive correlation between autism and the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine. Boom—the announcement generated enormous fear and put scientists, physicians, and parents at the top of the pyramid with this decision: Should we stop vaccinating children? Thousands of parents stepped off in the direction of “yes,” relieved that they now knew the reason for their children’s autism or reassured that they had a way to prevent it. Six years later, ten of the thirteen scientists involved in this study retracted that particular result and revealed that the lead author, Andrew Wakefield, had had a conflict of interest he had failed to disclose to the journal: he was conducting research on behalf of lawyers representing parents of autistic children. Wakefield had been paid more than eight hundred thousand dollars to determine whether there were grounds for pursuing legal action, and he gave the study’s affirmative answer to the lawyers before publication. “We judge that all this information would have been material to our decision-making about the paper’s suitability, credibility, and validity for publication,” wrote Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet.20 Wakefield, however, did not sign the retraction and could not see a problem. “Conflict of interest,” he wrote in his defense, “is created when involvement in one project potentially could, or actively does, interfere with the objective and dispassionate assessment of the processes or outcomes of another project. We cannot accept that the knowledge that affected children were later to pursue litigation, following their clinical referral and investigation, influenced the content or tone of [our earlier] paper . . . We emphasise that this was not a scientific paper but a clinical report.”21 Oh. It wasn’t a scientific paper anyway. No one knows Andrew Wakefield’s real motives or thoughts about his research. But we suspect that he, like Stanley Berent in our opening story, convinced himself that he was acting honorably, that he was doing good work, and that he was uninfluenced by having been paid eight hundred thousand dollars by the lawyers. Unlike truly independent scientists, however, he had no incentive to look for disconfirming evidence of a correlation between vaccines and autism and many incentives to overlook other explanations. In fact, there is no causal relationship between autism and thimerosal, the preservative in the vaccines that was the supposed cause (thimerosal was removed from the vaccines in 2001, with no attendant decrease in autism rates). The apparent correlation was coincidental, a result of the fact that autism is typically diagnosed in children at the same age they are vaccinated.22 As of 2019, more than a dozen large-scale, peer-reviewed studies, including a Danish project involving more than 650,085 children, had found no relationship between the MMR vaccine and autism. And did the thousands of parents who had started their slide down the pyramid by deciding there was a relationship exclaim in relief, “Thank God for this helpful information”? Anyone who has been keeping up with the nationwide effort by some parents to block required vaccinations for their children knows the answer. Having spent six years justifying the belief that thimerosal was the agent responsible for their children’s autism or other diseases, these parents rejected the research showing that it wasn’t. They also rejected statements in favor of vaccination from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Medicine, the World Health Organization, and the American Academy of Pediatrics. Faced with the dissonance between “I’m a good parent and know what’s best for my child” and “Those organizations tell me I made a decision that could harm my child,” what do they choose to believe? It’s a no-brainer. “What do those scientists know, anyway,” they say. And that is how the “vaccinations cause autism” scare created tragic and lingering effects. A major epidemiological study found that vaccination programs for children have prevented more than a hundred million cases of serious contagious diseases since 1924 and saved between three and four million lives. But when some parents stopped vaccinating their children, rates of measles and whooping cough began to rise. The worst whooping cough epidemic since 1959 occurred in 2012, with 38,086 cases reported nationwide, and 2019 saw the greatest number of measles cases in twenty-five years—more than 1,250. This number represented a huge setback for public health, given that measles was declared eliminated in the United States in 2086. “Americans have witnessed an increase in hospitalizations and deaths from diseases like whooping cough, measles, mumps, and bacterial meningitis,” writes Paul Offit, chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases and director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, “because some parents have become more frightened by vaccines than by the diseases they prevent.”23 We noted in chapter 1 that people often hold on to a belief long after they know rationally that it’s wrong, and this is especially true if they have taken many steps down the pyramid in support of that wrong belief. By then, getting information that contradicts a strong belief may actually backfire, causing the person to hold on to the incorrect belief even more firmly. Brendan Nyhan and his colleagues gave a nationally representative sample of parents various kinds of scientific information assuaging their worries about vaccines: information about disease risks, a dramatic story of what can happen if a child is not vaccinated, even tragic images of sick children. The parents who had had mixed or negative feelings toward vaccines actually became less likely to say they would vaccinate their children. They were persuaded that vaccines didn’t cause autism, but they came up with other concerns or vague discomforts to justify their reluctance to vaccinate.24 (Nyhan got the same results with people who didn’t get flu shots because they wrongly believed the vaccine gave you the flu.) That is the lingering legacy of self-justification, because most of the anti-vaccine alarmists have never said, “We were wrong, and look at the harm we caused.” Andrew Wakefield, whose license was revoked by British medical authorities, stands by his view that vaccines cause autism. “I will not be deterred,” he said in a press release. “This issue is far too important.”25 In 2015, following an extensive outbreak of measles that started at Disneyland, Barbara Loe Fisher, president of an anti-vaccine organization that spreads misinformation and combats efforts to ensure that children are vaccinated, said that all the concern was simply “hype,” designed to cover up vaccine failures. Her group is located, we assume, in Fantasyland.26

As of 2019, more than a dozen large-scale, peer-reviewed studies, including a Danish project involving more than 650,085 children, had found no relationship between the MMR vaccine and autism.

And that is how the “vaccinations cause autism” scare created tragic and lingering effects. A major epidemiological study found that vaccination programs for children have prevented more than a hundred million cases of serious contagious diseases since 1924 and saved between three and four million lives.

“because some parents have become more frightened by vaccines than by the diseases they prevent.”23 We noted in chapter 1 that people often hold on to a belief long after they know rationally that it’s wrong, and this is especially true if they have taken many steps down the pyramid in support of that wrong belief. By then, getting information that contradicts a strong belief may actually backfire, causing the person to hold on to the incorrect belief even more firmly. Brendan Nyhan and his colleagues gave a nationally representative sample of parents various kinds of scientific information assuaging their worries about vaccines: information about disease risks, a dramatic story of what can happen if a child is not vaccinated, even tragic images of sick children. The parents who had had mixed or negative feelings toward vaccines actually became less likely to say they would vaccinate their children. They

“because some parents have become more frightened by vaccines than by the diseases they prevent.”23

By then, getting information that contradicts a strong belief may actually backfire, causing the person to hold on to the incorrect belief even more firmly.

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.

being given a gift evokes an implicit desire to reciprocate.

Give a housewife a little brush as a gift, and she won’t slam the door in your face. And once she hasn’t slammed the door in your face, she will be more inclined to invite you in, and eventually to buy your expensive brushes.