Review by Danielle Procida
There is a vast body of literature on how to do well, how to be happy, what to do and choose for one's own benefit and that of others. This body covers a range from the vulgar to the great moral philosophers. We are not short of such analyses or guidance.
In contrast, the body of work which considers our failure to do well and be good is decidedly smaller, and also, it must be said, rather lamer, particularly in its power to explain why we fall into foolish beliefs, make bad decisions and commit hurtful acts. We remain opaque to others and to ourselves, thinking, acting and responding in ways which are harmful, counter-productive and baffling. Most baffling of all is our propensity to continue in these patterns, to compound error with error and throw good vigorously after bad.
Attempts at explanation tend towards exasperated (and inadequate) conclusions of egoism, stupidity or evil, or contentious structures of historical, social or psychological theory to provide some sort of answer. Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) offers an alternative to these by describing the workings of a simple process, one which by its nature is hidden from our view. This process is self-justification, and it is driven by an engine of cognitive dissonance, the discomfort we feel at the gap between our self-image and the less attractive reality that sometimes confronts us.
It works like this: I do something that I should not have done, and this troubles me, because I'm not the kind of person who does that sort of thing. Redressing the mistake will be even more painful or difficult than not committing it in the first place would have been. So, to salve this nagging complaint of the soul, I declare to myself that the act was the right one all along, and I confirm this by reinforcing it at the earliest possible opportunity.
So, although I hate it when people treat menials rudely, I fail to speak out when the boss I'm very keen to impress humiliates and bullies the waitress. But I'm not the kind of person who is too weak to stand up to injustice! A gulf yawns between self-image and reality, the dissonance is unpleasant and unsettling. Harmony will most easily be restored, the gap most painlessly closed, by retelling the story. "Heh heh," I chuckle at the boss's nasty joke, adding: "She's lucky you're not the kind of guy who'd want to get her in real trouble for that!" And the next time the unfortunate waitress approaches the table I might even try out a little sarcastic remark of my own.
Or: I'm not the kind of person who allows smooth-talking salesmen to get the better of him, but somehow I seem to have ordered 1000 leather business cards; naturally, I'm troubled by the dissonance. There's no way out of this without having to admit to myself and others that in fact I am all too susceptible to basic techniques of persuasion, so instead: the very next time someone presents me with their own card, I am overcome with scorn for the pitiful rectangle of paper I've just been handed.
This simple process, argue the authors, explains a great deal of our ability to make mistakes and continue making them. According to dissonance theory, what we should expect from someone who finds themselves in a hole are not effective efforts to climb out, but energetic digging in the wrong direction. The analysis is counter-intuitive, but this is an entirely appropriate one for human behavior which itself seems to defy commonsense, and to resist explanation along the lines of more straightforward thinking.
Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson have made a genuinely illuminating contribution to the study of human nature, one positively brimming with intelligence and insight. It is rare, in the twenty-first century, to be presented with a complete framework of explanation built around so simple an idea. To describe it as a book of a single idea would not be an exaggeration, but it would not be a criticism either: it is a pleasure, for once, to be invited to consider such a bold and confident offering, and a concept able to sustain such explanatory weight.
The authors bring their analysis to bear on anecdotes, history, current affairs and psychological experiments. Throughout, points are illustrated with examples covering foolish and harmful behavior on the scale from the personal to social, in a variety of different contexts and across a range of human activities. Some are just amusing (for the spectator, at least), but many are alarming, some are tragic, and some are horrifying.
In all of these, there are two essential aspects of the process which bring people to do and continue doing harmful things, all the while justifying it to themselves. Firstly, there is the cognitive dissonance which so effectively drives it, leaving them in urgent need of something that will smooth the troubled waters. Then there is the spiral of self-justification, which feeds itself: under its spell they take steps which themselves require further justification.
In addition, the authors identify other mechanisms which contribute to its operation in different contexts. There is the blind-spot of our own prejudices: we not only fail to recognize some important truth about the world, but (more significantly) will never on our own see that our blind spot even exists.
Read more:
Excerpt:
