Some of the examples given in this book range from case studies of marriages falling apart something that had cringe-making moments for me as I saw some of the very much less attractive parts of my own personality displayed before me in vivid Technicolor in relation to both my current relationship and my marriage breakdown all the way up to the long standing problems existing between Iran and the United States.
Rather, it is a book that tries to show that we humans are all too prone to self-justification and this is a terrible danger particularly when we do things that are by any definition not things that we can be proud of.
The road to Hell is paved with good intentions and kept shining after being buffed clean by our rationalisations.
But even if you had the chance to interview Hitler in the bunker just before he popped his pill, it is very unlikely that he would have admitted that he had made many any mistakes. It is also unlikely that he would think that anything he had done was either wrong or bad. I think we or perhaps just I find this hard to accept, because we like to believe that deep down the people we consider to be evil know they are bad. If only the world was so simple. The image that stays with me from the last few years is of Lynndie England and her thumbs-up sign while she was standing beside a pyramid of naked Iraqi men.
It is hard not to think that here is an instance of someone with some sort of moral deficiency, someone who clearly gains enjoyment out of the humiliation of others and therefore she must be someone devoid of some basic human quality — and that lacking is what separates her from us. Unfortunately, even that proves not to be the case.
The most disturbing bit of research quoted in this book and there are lots of disturbing bits of research discussed in this book is that those most likely to become utter monsters are those who have high self-esteem and they are most likely to become monsters towards those who have virtually no power to retaliate.
Because we do not want to think of ourselves as bad people, particularly those of us with high self-esteem. But if we start to do horrible things to our enemies then we need to be able to justify those terrible acts — and we tend to do that by saying that they deserved it, that they are less than human, that they do worse to their enemies, that we are acting in a way that is pure and good and dare we say it humane, and in fact, that they are the ones these powerless victims of ours who are to blame.
The section of this book on police interrogation methods should be made compulsory reading. Years ago I read a book that talked about a psychological experiment that has stayed with me since. People were asked to come to a room in a university to do a memory test involving a series of nonsense syllables.
When they got to the room they were told that the experiment was running a little late, so would they mind sitting in a chair for a few minutes. Directly in front of the chair was a poster — one of those graphic posters that show police at a car accident and warning about drink driving or something of the kind.
The poster was both graphic and directly in front of the people — so not something they were likely to not notice. When they were finally let into the room to do the test half of them were actually given the syllables to learn for half an hour, the other half of them were asked if they had noticed the poster in the waiting room. These people were then quizzed for half an hour on as many details as they could remember from the poster.
You know the sort of thing. Lots and lots of detail. Now for the interesting bit. When I first heard about this experiment remember, we are talking about events that have all taken place in a span of slightly more than half an hour I was shocked at what this experiment implied about our justice system. In short, we are very suggestible creatures and the legal system particularly the police force needs to be very careful not to pollute witnesses to crimes in ways that can destroy any hope of justice for the accused — something that should be of foremost concern.
The need to rethink our justice system so as to take into consideration the latest findings psychology presents us with becomes all rather urgent.
This is, as I said, a deeply troubling book. But this is a very important book and one that demands to be read. I recommend it without hesitation. View all 28 comments. Jung "Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin. That is not to say, however, that it's not worth reading.
The overarching principles being examined are those of cognitive dissonance and self-justification. And, before you get all defensive get it? Confirmation bias and confabulation are just two of the means by which we find evidence for what we're looking for, and causes that aren't there and there are plenty of great research and case studies some of which is in this book that illustrate these ideas.
And the implications of this aren't restricted to the courtroom. I'm not sure I love the choice of case studies of this phenomenon among professionals in this book the recovered memory movement in therapy, and gross miscarriages of justice in, well, the justice system , as they undermine quotidian examples we literally do this all day every day.
However, the finding that was, to me, most chilling was that in these cases "training does not increase accuracy; it increases people's confidence in their accuracy. View 1 comment. Mar 23, Morgan Blackledge rated it it was amazing. This book is relentless. Reading it is an ordeal. A wonderful, fruitful ordeal. But an ordeal none the less. Every page and chapter has been an opportunity for self examination and I hope enhanced self honesty, insight and personal growth.
And just in case that sounds to woo woo for you. It should be noted that the assertions made in the book are backed by decades worth of hard, experimentally derived evidence. It doesn't get much better than that. Both authors are respected researchers in OMFG.
Both authors are respected researchers in the field of social psychology. A field that is no stranger to dramatic overstatement to say the least. But also, a field that produces some of the most denuding, insight producing, and frankly, disturbing findings of all the sub fields of psychology.
The central construct explored in the book is Cognitive Dissonance. Leon Festinger's venerable finding that individuals who hold two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values at the same time, or who behave in ways that contradict there values and beliefs will experience excessive mental stress and discomfort. Furthermore, individuals suffering from said mental stress and discomfort will be motivated to reduce the crappy feeling by lying to themselves and others, and even bending and recasting memories of events, in order justify their hypocritical positions and actions.
In case your wondering who those blind, tortured souls are who think and behave in such insane, self delusional and amoral ways. It's you, me and everyone else we know. In other words, everyone. Imagine just imagine living in a degree wrap around lie in which we falsely perceive ourselves as heroic victims to our own needless and profound detriment let the finger pointing begin.
Sounds pretty bad right. That is what's at stake here. As I mentioned. Encountering the material in this book is very growth engendering. The book is literally a partial antidote to the poison it describes. But be warned, the antidote burns as it goes down. The cost that the reader pays for the afore mentioned rewards enhanced self honesty, growth, insight etc , is the very experience of painful dissonance the book so expertly describes.
The cost incurred to exit the matrix is minor in hindsight. But paying that cost is aversive enough to prevent all of us at one time or another to run and hide from the truth. The cost that I'm referring to, is the naked experience of the pain of realizing that we are in fact human after all. Ironically, the unwillingness to face and experience these feelings is the active ingredient.
And the crazy webs we weave in order to maintain said experiential avoidance is the aforementioned poison. This is a circuitous way of saying that you can't help but recognize and feel the pain of the human condition when you read this fantastically well executed, educational and therapeutic book. For an equally eye opening, and decidedly more fun exploration of analogous territory, read Robert Kurzban's Why Everyone else Is a Hypocrite.
Someone in my FB feed shared that their therapist recommended that she not read Nietzsche or Camus while she was experiencing a bout of depression see if you can count the pretentious statements masquerading as self deprecating humor in that statement. I'd have to include this little gem in that list. You definitely want to be on stable footing when you read this thing. If not, than hide the sharp objects and designate a trusted friend to be at the ready to talk you down when it hits you how hopelessly self delusional all us humans actually is.
That being said. I call this absolutely essential reading. It's as necessary as Khanaman's Thinking Fast and Slow. So go ahead. Read the book, eat the red pill, embrace the painful glare of the light of day, and live a life of more freedom. This is psychology at its most potent best. View all 3 comments.
Feb 01, Alyssa rated it it was ok. Ultimately, I think that Tavris's conclusions about self-justification are probably correct, but her argument was flawed. There were a number of things that put me off from this book. Here's my list of gripes: 1 The book relied much too heavily on anecdotal evidence to prove its points. Tavris did back up her claims about self-justification with some psychological research that sounded like it was peer-reviewed, I guess , but it was pretty sparse like 1 study per chapter if thatas opposed t Ultimately, I think that Tavris's conclusions about self-justification are probably correct, but her argument was flawed.
Tavris did back up her claims about self-justification with some psychological research that sounded like it was peer-reviewed, I guess , but it was pretty sparse like 1 study per chapter if thatas opposed to anecdote after anecdote after anecdote.
Plus, she never really discussed the full context of the studies she cited, nor did she ever give any qualifications for the research or her own conclusions.
For the most part, I felt that it really condemned the people in the examples of self-justification that Tavris wrote about. Even though she had a good point, I feel that most of the situations are more complex than she made them out to be. Her pet metaphor of the "pyramid" is just another version of the slippery slope fallacy. And she heavily relied on either-or logic to support her claims. I think that is far from the truth.
My contention is that evolution created the human brain the way it is for a reason. If it didn't serve a purpose, self-justification would have been discarded long, long ago because it would have caused humans to make disastrously bad decisions. But the truth is, self-justification and other illusions we create about ourselves and our world are extremely important to our ability to function in the world.
I don't have time to go through all of the useful purposes that these cognitive processes serve, but here's a few: seeing ourselves as good people allows us to achieve more than people who are depressed and who have a more realistic perception of themselvesand applying patterns from old situations to new ones helps us to adapt to novelty and change more effectively.
In short, a more nuanced acknowledgement of the complexity of the human brain would have been betterand more informative. I'd read Invisible Gorilla instead. It says the same basic thing at this book, but in a much more compelling and informative way.
View all 9 comments. Apr 15, Tami rated it it was amazing. Sometimes, I think that the world is full of hypocrites. The news is full of politicians who preach family values and then are caught in an affair. Everyday we see religious advocates who call for peace and in the same breath state that their God is the only true God.
Then, there's the business world where lying and cheating seem to be part of the game. Sometimes, I wonder how these people live with themselves. Mistake Were Made but not by me addresses that exact question. It would seem that t Sometimes, I think that the world is full of hypocrites.
It would seem that the human mind is designed to selectively remember and process information. Thus, the politician, religious leader, business person, or even ourselves often don't realize that we are being hypocritical.
Moreover, as our actions and logic become further and further separated, we tend to hold tighter onto our original notions. Instead of admitting that we were wrong, we justify our actions even more strongly. Mistake Were Made but not by me was a huge eye opener. People don't justify stupid decisions because they are bad people.
On the contrary, no one wants to admit they are a fool. Look within, what beliefs do you fight the most adamantly about? Feb 06, Clumsy Storyteller marked it as on-hold Shelves: non-fiction , reading-assignment , re-reading , psychology-selfhelp. Apr 17, Ryan rated it liked it Recommended to Ryan by: class text. Shelves: owned-books , non-fiction , politics , psychology. This is yet another wonderful book written by social psychologists, although it is probably unlikely to make the New York Times best seller list for a couple of reasons.
No one wants to know that WE are the cause of the problem, just like no one really wants to know that I made a mistake, not someone else. This book is about cogn This is yet another wonderful book written by social psychologists, although it is probably unlikely to make the New York Times best seller list for a couple of reasons. This book is about cognitive dissonance and the power of rationalization in many domains of life. The problem with this topic as I have found after many quarters of teaching it to college students , is that even after learning the concept, literally no one likes to think that they actually engage in these mental gymnastics.
Biases in perception, even the automatic activation of stereotypes are easier to get people to believe than trying to show them how every decision or experience we have is colored by the process of making ourselves appear consistent.
In reality, we are all highly hypocritical in countless ways, but as the authors show over and over again, this is much easier to detect in others than in ourselves. Only suggestion I would make is to try to use more examples from across the political spectrum to arrest any rationalization ammo for critics of the book.
May 25, David rated it it was amazing Shelves: science. As someone interested in the psychology of religion, it's always interesting to me how cognitive weaknesses play a role in establishing and maintaining religious beliefs. Some atheists are wont to believe that religion is a kind of mental illness, but this book and others make it clear that's really not so.
The vast majority of religious people are cognitively normal. It's just that normal human cognition is very prone to making certain kinds of errors, and religious memes propagate very easil As someone interested in the psychology of religion, it's always interesting to me how cognitive weaknesses play a role in establishing and maintaining religious beliefs.
It's just that normal human cognition is very prone to making certain kinds of errors, and religious memes propagate very easily on this substrate. As an example, for a religious person to admit that there are no gods, they have to confront the enormous cognitive dissonance that they think of themselves as smart, well-educated, pragmatic - but have, for many years, been putting vast amounts of effort, emotion, thought, and perhaps money into something that hasn't the slightest basis in reality.
For someone who was devoutly religious, this is the granddaddy of all cognitive dissonance. That so many people manage to confront this and deal with it is quite impressive. One of the things I like about this book is that for every section on various instantiations of cognitive dissonance and self-justification, they close by talking about someone who has overcome this natural propensity, and done right.
The therapist who confronts the fact that she helped people "recover" false memories of abuse, and meets with the affected families to try to set things right. The prosecutor who accepts that he had an innocent man incarcerated for years, and comes back to the case.
One of the best examples in my opinion is Edzard Ernst , who is not in this book, as they don't discuss "alternative" medicine. He confronted the fact that he had been giving people useless medical treatments for years, as a homeopathic doctor, and has since become a crusader for science-based medicine. One of the most disappointing realizations for me, as an educator, is that clear explanation with ample evidence generally will not change people's minds.
Many people who think they've been abducted by aliens are well aware of the phenomenon of sleep paralysis, but - for no justifiable reason - reject it as an explanation of their experiences. I've spoken with a climate change denialist who swore up and down that they understood the greenhouse effect just fine - and then immediately turned around and said something clearly contradicting this theory.
Education isn't entirely futile, though. First, if we can educate people before they've formed their opinions on the subject, that will have a dramatic difference. Second, a large-scale, concerted education effort can change some minds. This can lead to changes of the intellectual environment that can persuade others via non-rational means. Smokers in the s didn't understand the link between smoking and lung cancer.
Almost every smoker today does understand this link although they smoke anyway, exercising ample self-justification. But we've managed to convince enough people that the society in the US has changed, and smoking is much less accepted and as a result much less common. Science was developed to counteract all the problems mentioned in this book. Nobody likes to be wrong, and scientists are no exception, but they are professionally forced to be.
To be sure, being too wrong can cost them prestige, money, or jobs, but they're expected to be wrong fairly frequently. And the whole endeavor of science is set up to make it clear when someone is wrong. That is why self-justification is more powerful and more dangerous than the explicit lie.
It allows people to convince themselves that what they did was the best thing they could have done. In fact, come to think of it, it was the right thing. Books Best Sellers. Award Winners. New Releases. Coming Soon. Buy Paperback Now. Also available in:. Available Resources Download Images. She is a fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Association for Psychological Science, and a member of the editorial board of Psychological Science in the Public Interest.
She lives in Los Angeles. Chosen by his peers as one of the hundred most influential psychologists of the twentieth century, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is the only psychologist to have won all three of the American Psychological Association's top awards—for writing, teaching, and research. He lives in Santa Cruz, California. Mistakes were quite possibly made by the administrations in which I served.
The press goes after him. Want the latest In this terrifically insightful and engaging audiobook, renowned social psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson take a compelling look at how the brain is wired for self-justification. When we make mistakes, we must calm the cognitive dissonance that jars our feelings of self-worth. And so we create fictions that absolve us of responsibility, restoring our belief that we are smart, moral, and right--a belief that often keeps us on a course that is dumb, immoral, and wrong.
Backed by years of research, Mistakes Were Made But Not by Me offers a fascinating explanation of self-deception--how it works, the harm it can cause, and how we can overcome it. Be advised: You will never be able to shun blame quite so casually again.
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