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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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 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.39 This ruling put Holly in a state of dissonance that she could resolve in one of two ways: She could accept the verdict, realize 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 apologizing, would have been like turning a steamship around in a narrow river—not much room to maneuver, 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.

Scientific reasoning is useful to anyone in any job because it makes us face the possibility, even the dire reality, that we were mistaken. It forces us to confront our self-justifications and put them on public display for others to puncture. At its core, therefore, science is a form of arrogance control.

One study of women who had complained of sexual problems found that 41 percent said that their libido returned when they took Viagra. So, however, did 43 percent of the control group who took a sugar pill.23 (This study showed conclusively that the organ most responsible for sexual excitement is the brain.)

This assumption of the cycle of abuse came from observations of confirming cases: abusive parents, in jail or in therapy, reporting that they had been severely beaten or sexually abused by their own parents. What is missing are the disconfirming cases, the abused children who do not grow up to become abusive parents. They are invisible to social workers and other mental-health professionals because, by definition, they don’t end up in prison or treatment.

Research like this has enabled psychologists to improve their methods of interviewing children. Their goal is to help children who have been abused disclose what happened to them but without increasing the suggestibility of children who have not been abused.

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.

police interrogators are trained to get that confession, even if that means lying to the suspect and using, as one detective proudly admitted to a reporter, “trickery and deceit.”28 Most people are surprised to learn that this is entirely legal.

These professionals averaged nearly fourteen years of experience each, and two-thirds had had special training, many in the Reid Technique. Like the students, they did no better than chance, yet they were convinced that their accuracy rate was close to 100 percent. Their experience and training did not improve their performance. Their experience and training simply increased their belief that it did.

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?

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.

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.

“Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, and half shut afterward,”

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 postwedding, eyes-half-shut dissonance reduction, in which partners emphasize the positive and overlook the negative, allows things to hum along in harmony.

Each partner focuses on what the other one is doing wrong while justifying his or her own preferences, attitudes, and ways of doing things.

get angry just as unhappy couples do. But happy couples know how to manage their conflicts. If a problem is annoying them, they talk about and fix the problem, let it go, or learn to live with it.3 Unhappy couples are pulled further apart by angry confrontations.