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Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts Paperback – March 1, 2008
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- Print length304 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherMariner Books
- Publication dateMarch 1, 2008
- Dimensions5.3 x 0.9 x 8 inches
- ISBN-100156033909
- ISBN-13978-0156033909
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"By turns entertaining, illuminating and—when you recognize yourself in the stories it tells—mortifying."—The Wall Street Journal
From the Inside Flap
Why do people dodge responsibility when things fall apart? Why the parade of public figures unable to own up when they screw up? Why the endless marital quarrels over who is right? Why can we see hypocrisy in others but not in ourselves? Are we all liars? Or do we really believe the stories we tell?
In this terrifically insightful, engaging new book, renowned social psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson take a compelling look into 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. Turn the page, but be advised: You will never be able to shun blame quite so casually again.
From the Back Cover
“Every page sparkles with sharp insight and keen observation. Mistakes were made—but not in this book!” –Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness
Why do people dodge responsibility when things fall apart? Why the parade of public figures unable to own up when they screw up? Why the endless marital quarrels over who is right? Why can we see hypocrisy in others but not in ourselves? Are we all liars? Or do we really believe the stories we tell?
Backed by years of research and delivered in lively, energetic prose, 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.
"Hypocrisy is hardest to see in oneself. Tavris and Aronson, both social psychologists, demonstrate the whys and hows of this maxim by blending research with anecdotal evidence from celebrities, presidents, and CEOs."--Psychology Today
"Thanks, in part, to the scientific evidence it provides and the charm of its down-to-earth, commonsensical tone, Mistakes Were Made is convincing. Reading it, we recognize the behavior of our leaders, our loved ones, and—if we're honest—ourselves, and some of the more perplexing mysteries of human nature begin to seem a little clearer."—Francine Prose, O, The Oprah Magazine
CAROL TAVRIS is a social psychologist and author of Anger and The Mismeasure of Woman. She has written for the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, Scientific American, and many other publications. She lives in Los Angeles.
ELLIOT ARONSON is a social psychologist and author of The Social Animal. The recipient of many awards for teaching, scientific research, writing, and contributions to society, he is a professor emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Visit www.MistakesWereMadeButNotByMe.com.
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Cognitive Dissonance:
The Engine of Self-justification
Press release date: November 1, 1993
we didn’t make a mistake when we wrote in our previous releases that New York would be destroyed on September 4 and October 14, 1993. We didn’t make a mistake, not even a teeny eeny one!
Press release date: April 4, 1994
All the dates we have given in our past releases are correct dates given by God as contained in Holy Scriptures. Not one of these dates was wrong . . . Ezekiel gives a total of 430 days for the siege of the city . . . [which] brings us exactly to May 2, 1994. By now, all the people have been forewarned. We have done our job. . . .
We are the only ones in the entire world guiding the people to their safety, security, and salvation!
We have a 100 percent track record!1
It’s fascinating, and sometimes funny, to read doomsday predictions, but it’s even more fascinating to watch what happens to the reasoning of true believers when the prediction flops and the world keeps muddling along. Notice that hardly anyone ever says, “I blew it! I can’t believe how stupid I was to believe that nonsense”? On the contrary, most of the time they become even more deeply convinced of their powers of prediction. The people who believe that the Bible’s book of Revelation or the writings of the sixteenth-century self-proclaimed prophet Nostradamus have predicted every disaster from the bubonic plague to 9/11 cling to their convictions, unfazed by the small problem that their vague and murky predictions were intelligible only after the event occurred.
Half a century ago, a young social psychologist named Leon Festinger and two associates infiltrated a group of people who believed the world would end on December 21.2 They wanted to know what would happen to the group when (they hoped!) the prophecy failed. The group’s leader, whom the researchers called Marian Keech, promised that the faithful would be picked up by a flying saucer and elevated to safety at midnight on December 20. Many of her followers quit their jobs, gave away their homes, and dispersed their savings, waiting for the end. Who needs money in outer space? Others waited in fear or resignation in their homes. (Mrs. Keech’s own husband, a nonbeliever, went to bed early and slept soundly through the night as his wife and her followers prayed in the living room.) Festinger made his own prediction: The believers who had not made a strong commitment to the prophecy—who awaited the end of the world by themselves at home, hoping they weren’t going to die at midnight—would quietly lose their faith in Mrs. Keech. But those who had given away their possessions and were waiting with the others for the spaceship would increase their belief in her mystical abilities. In fact, they would now do everything they could to get others to join them.
At midnight, with no sign of a spaceship in the yard, the group felt a little nervous. By 2 a.m., they were getting seriously worried. At 4:45 a.m., Mrs. Keech had a new vision: The world had been spared, she said, because of the impressive faith of her little band. “And mighty is the word of God,” she told her followers, “and by his word have ye been saved—for from the mouth of death have ye been delivered and at no time has there been such a force loosed upon the Earth. Not since the beginning of time upon this Earth has there been such a force of Good and light as now floods this room.”
The group’s mood shifted from despair to exhilaration. Many of the group’s members, who had not felt the need to proselytize before December 21, began calling the press to report the miracle, and soon they were out on the streets, buttonholing passersby, trying to convert them. Mrs. Keech’s prediction had failed, but not Leon Festinger’s.
°°°
The engine that drives self-justification, the energy that produces the need to justify our actions and decisions—especially the wrong ones—is an unpleasant feeling that Festinger called “cognitive dissonance.” Cognitive dissonance is a state of tension that occurs whenever a person holds two cognitions (ideas, attitudes, beliefs, opinions) that are psychologically inconsistent, such as “Smoking is a dumb thing to do because it could kill me” and “I smoke two packs a day.” Dissonance produces mental discomfort, ranging from minor pangs to deep anguish; people don’t rest easy until they find a way to reduce it. In this example, the most direct way for a smoker to reduce dissonance is by quitting. But if she has tried to quit and failed, now she must reduce dissonance by convincing herself that smoking isn’t really so harmful, or that smoking is worth the risk because it helps her relax or prevents her from gaining weight (and after all, obesity is a health risk, too), and so on. Most smokers manage to reduce dissonance in many such ingenious, if self-deluding, ways.
Dissonance is disquieting because to hold two ideas that contradict each other is to flirt with absurdity and, as Albert Camus observed, we humans are creatures who spend our lives trying to convince ourselves that our existence is not absurd. At the heart of it, Festinger’s theory is about how people strive to make sense out of contradictory ideas and lead lives that are, at least in their own minds, consistent and meaningful. The theory inspired more than 3,000 experiments that, taken together, have transformed psychologists’ understanding of how the human mind works. Cognitive dissonance has even escaped academia and entered popular culture. The term is everywhere. The two of us have heard it in TV newscasts, political columns, magazine articles, bumper stickers, even on a soap opera. Alex Trebek used it on Jeopardy, Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, and President Bartlet on The West Wing. Although the expression has been thrown around a lot, few people fully understand its meaning or appreciate its enormous motivational power.
In 1956, one of us (Elliot) arrived at Stanford University as a graduate student in psychology. Festinger had arrived that same year as a young professor, and they immediately began working together, designing experiments to test and expand dissonance theory.3 Their thinking challenged many notions that were gospel in psychology and among the general public, such as the behaviorist’s view that people do things primarily for the rewards they bring, the economist’s view that human beings generally make rational decisions, and the psychoanalyst’s view that acting aggressively gets rid of aggressive impulses.
Consider how dissonance theory challenged behaviorism. At the time, most scientific psychologists were convinced that people’s actions are governed by reward and punishment. It is certainly true that if you feed a rat at the end of a maze, he will learn the maze faster than if you don’t feed him; if you give your dog a biscuit when she gives you her paw, she will learn that trick faster than if you sit around hoping she will do it on her own. Conversely, if you punish your pup when you catch her peeing on the carpet, she will soon stop doing it. Behaviorists further argued that anything that was merely associated with reward would become more attractive—your puppy will like you because you give her biscuits—and anything associated with pain would become noxious and undesirable.
Behavioral laws do apply to human beings, too, of course; no one would stay in a boring job without pay, and if you give your toddler a cookie to stop him from having a tantrum, you have taught him to have another tantrum when he wants a cookie. But, for better or worse, the human mind is more complex than the brain of a rat or a puppy. A dog may appear contrite for having been caught peeing on the carpet, but she will not try to think up justifications for her misbehavior. Humans think; and because we think, dissonance theory demonstrated that our behavior transcends the effects of rewards and punishments and often contradicts them.
For example, Elliot predicted that if people go through a great deal of pain, discomfort, effort, or embarrassment to get something, they will be happier with that “something” than if it came to them easily. For behaviorists, this was a preposterous prediction. Why would people like anything associated with pain? But for Elliot, the answer was obvious: self-justification. The cognition that I am a sensible, competent person is dissonant with the cognition that I went through a painful procedure to achieve something—say, joining a group that turned out to be boring and worthless. Therefore, I would distort my perceptions of the group in a positive direction, trying to find good things about them and ignoring the downside.
Copyright © 2007 by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or ...
Product details
- Publisher : Mariner Books; Reprint edition (March 1, 2008)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 304 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0156033909
- ISBN-13 : 978-0156033909
- Item Weight : 10.1 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.3 x 0.9 x 8 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #787,138 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,460 in Medical Social Psychology & Interactions
- #2,417 in Popular Social Psychology & Interactions
- #2,444 in Cognitive Psychology (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors
Elliot Aronson is currently Professor Emeritus at the University of California in Santa Cruz. He has long-standing research interests in social influence and attitude change, cognitive dissonance, research methodology, and interpersonal attraction. Professor Aronson's experiments are aimed both at testing theory and at improving the human condition by influencing people to change dysfunctional attitudes and behaviors.
Professor Aronson received his B.A. from Brandeis University in 1954, his M.A. from Wesleyan University in 1956, and his Ph.D. in psychology from Stanford University in 1959. He has taught at Harvard University, the University of Minnesota, the University of Texas, and the University of California. In 1999, he won the American Psychological Association's Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award, making him the only psychologist to have won APA's highest awards in all three major academic categories: distinguished writing (1973), distinguished teaching (1980), and distinguished research (1999).
Carol Tavris is a social psychologist, writer, and lecturer whose goal is to promote psychological science and critical thinking in improving our lives. She is coauthor, with Elliot Aronson, of "Mistakes Were Made (But Not by ME): Why we justify foolish beliefs, bad decisions, and hurtful acts" (third edition, 2020) and, with Avrum Bluming, "Estrogen Matters: Why taking hormones in menopause can improve women's well-being and lengthen their lives--without raising the risk of breast cancer." Her other major books include the landmark "Anger: The misunderstood emotion," a book well known for its critical look at unvalidated notions about the inevitability of anger and the need to "ventilate" it, and how anger can best be expressed constructively. She is also author of the award-winning "The Mismeasure of Woman: Why women are not the better sex, the inferior sex, or the opposite sex." She has written hundreds of essays and book reviews on topics in psychological science, writes a column ("The Gadfly") for Skeptic magazine, and is a highly regarded lecturer who has spoken to groups around the world. She is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities.
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Knaves, Fools, Villains, and Hypocrites:
How do they live with themselves?
"We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue,
and then, when we are finally proved wrong, imprudently twisting the facts...
so as to show we were right."
George Orwell 1946
"Mistakes were quite possible made in the administration in which I served."
Henry Kissinger
"If, in hindsight, we also discover that mistakes may have been made...
I am deeply sorry."
Cardinal Edward Egan... of New York Parish
Self justification is not the same as lying or making excuses.
"Cognitive Dissonance is a state of tension that occurs whenever a person holds two ideas, attitudes, beliefs, opinions that are psychologically inconsistent."
People become more certain they are right about something they just did...
...if they can't undo it.
Don't rely on testimonials.
"He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another
...than he whom yourself have obliged."
Benjamin Franklin
Dissonance reduction operates like a thermostat,
keeping our self esteem bubbling on high.
That is why we are usually oblivious to the self-justifications,
...the little lies to ourselves that prevent us from even acknowledging
that we have made mistakes or foolish decisions.
All of us, to preserve our belief that we are smart, will occasionally do dumb things.
We can't help it. We are wired that way.
The brain is designed with blind spots, optical and psychological.
Blind spots can enhance our pride and activate our prejudices.
Just as we can identify hypocrisy in everyone but ourselves,...
...so we can see prejudices in everyone but ourselves.
"Trying to educate a bigot is like shining light into the pupil of the eye --it contracts."
Oliver Wendell Homes Jr.
Abraham Lincoln was one of those rare Presidents
who understood the importance of surrounding himself
with people willing to disagree with him.
What we...refer to as memory... is really a form of story telling
that goes on continually in the mind...
...and often change with the telling.
William Maxwell
When two people produce entirely different memories of the same event,
observers usually assume that one of them is lying.
But most of us, most of the time,
...are neither telling the whole truth nor intentionally deceiving.
We aren't lying; we are self-justifying.
Confabulation, distortion, and plain forgetting are the foot soldiers of memory.
...and they are summoned when the totalitarian ego wants to protect us
from the pain and embarrassment of actions we took
that are dissonant with our core self images.
Eventually memory yields.
Because memory is so reconstructive, it is subject to confabulation
--confusing and event that happened to someone else
with one that happened to you,
...or coming to believe something that never happened at all.
If your memories of the same people change, becoming positive or negative
depending on what is happening in your life now, then it's all about You, not them.
Remarkably, the (men's) ability to guess what they had said about themselves...
in adolescence , was no better than chance.
It doesn't matter how beautiful the guess is...
...if the experiment disagrees with the guess,
then the guess is wrong.
That's all there is to it.
Richard Feynman
For example, cognitive and behavioral methods are the psychological treatments of choice for panic attacks, depression, eating disorders, insomnia, chronic anger and other emotional disorders. These methods are often as effective or more effective than medication.
The problem for most people who have suffered traumatic experiences is not that they forget them....
--but that they cannot forget them
Recovered Memory is: "the worst catastrophe to befall the mental health field...
--since the lobotomy era."
Richard McNally
Once that door closes... --so does the mind.
Many states do absolutely nothing for people who have been exonerated.
They provide no compensation for the many years of life and earnings lost.
They do not even offer an official apology.
Cruelly, they often do not expunge the exonerated person's record.
"Keep your eyes wide open before the marriage, and half shut afterward."
Benjamin Franklin
Before the couple realizes it, they have taken up polarized positions,
...each feeling right and righteous.
Self justification will then cause their hearts...
--to harden against the entreaties of empathy.
...misunderstandings, conflicts, personality difference,
and even angry quarrels are not the assassins of love;
Self-justification is.
...self-justification allows us to flatter ourselves:
We give ourselves credit for our good actions...
...but let 'the situation' excuse the bad ones.
Successful partners extend to each other the same self forgiving ways....
of the thinking we extend to ourselves...
The forgive each others missteps...
as being due to the situation,
...but give each other credit for the thoughtful and loving things they do.
While happy partners are giving one another the benefit of the doubt,
...unhappy partners are doing just the opposite.
Implicit theories have powerful consequences.
Because each partner is expert in self-justification...
...they each blame the other's unwillingness to change one's personality flaws,
--but excuse their own unwillingness to change on the basis of their personality virtues.
...shaming and blaming each other, the very purpose of the quarrel has shifted.
It is no longer an effort to solve a problem...;
it's just to wound, to insult, to score.
That is why shaming leads to fierce renewed efforts at self-justification,
a refusal to compromise,
...and the most destructive emotion a relationship can evoke: contempt.
..it is one of the strongest signs the relationship is in free fall.
Anger reflects the hope that problem can be corrected.
When it burns out, it leaves the ashes of resentment and contempt.
And contempt is the handmaiden of hopelessness.
...self-justification is the prime suspect in the murder of marriage.
" I have found that nothing foretells a marriage's future
as accurately as how a couple retells their past." John Gottman
Thanks to the revisionist power of memory to justify our decisions, by the time many couples divorce, they can't remember why they married."
...dissonance, and the way people choose to resolve it, is one of the major reasons for post divorce vindictiveness."
Self-justification is the route by which ambivalence morphs into certainty, guilt into rage.
The love story has become the hate book.
...the couples who grow together over the years have figured out a way to live with a minimum of self-justification.
Like all couples, they have small differences that could easily flare into irritation, but they have come to accept them as facts of life, not worth sulking about. Charlie says: "I like to eat at five, my wife like to eat at eight; we compromise --we eat at five to eight."
"The reality was that I was not alone not because of my politics but because I did not know how to live in a decent way with another human being. In the name of equality I tormented every man who ever loved me until he left me; I called them on everything, never let any thing go, held them up to accountability in ways that wearied us both. There was, of course, more than a grain of truth in everything I said, but in those grains, no matter how numerous, need not have become the sandpile that crushed the life out of love."
Vivian Gornick, Feminist Writer and Activist
"In a rift, no one is going to admit they lied or stole or cheated without provocation; only a bad person would do that, ...
Therefore, each side justifies its own position by claiming the other side is to blame...
The remarkable thing about self-justification is that it allows us to shift from one role to another and back again in the blink of an eye without applying what we have learned from one role to the other. It's as if there is a brick wall between those two sets of experiences, blocking our ability to see the other side.
Victims have long memories.
History is written by the victors, but it's the victims who write the memoirs.
"Every successful revolution, puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed."
Barbara Tuchman, Historian
The mind wants to protect itself from the pain of dissonance with the balm of self-justification;
but the soul wants to confess.
An error does not become a mistake until you refuse to correct it.
The ultimate correction for the tunnel vision that effects all of us mortals is more light.
"When a friend makes a mistake, the friend remains a friend, and the mistake remains a mistake."
Shimon Peres commenting on Ronald Reagan
A great nation is like a great man:
When he makes a mistake he realizes it.
Having realized it, he admits it.
Having admitted it he corrects it.
He considers those who point out our faults
as his most benevolent teachers.
Lao Tzu (Old Master)
Many if not most people are reluctant to change their beliefs – in matters large and small. They will find some reasons to reject the new information rather than re-examine what they currently hold to be true and valid.
This is true as well for courses of action that people have chosen. Rather than re-examine their reasons for deciding to go in a certain direction, people will justify and argue for their initial choices in what they are going to do – even if this may appear far-fetched to outside observers.
Those who understand the intricacies of cognitive dissonance may generate this state of mind deliberately in order to manipulate people into doing their bidding. Tavris and Aronson illustrate this with the interactions of lobbyists and politicians.
Politicians as a group are infamous for being corrupt. We may well ask, “Is it is just corrupt people who run for elections or are they normal, honest people who get corrupted in the processes of being elected and serving their terms of duty?”
An extreme example is that of Jeb Stuart Magruder, who had started out an honest man when he came to work for Richard Nixon. Magruder played a key role in setting up and executing the Watergate break-in. He then further compromised himself by lying under oath in defense of his and other people’s actions.
Magruder’s first step down the slippery slope of cognitive dissonance was when Bob Haldeman, the Nixon advisor who had just interviewed him for the job of Presidential Special Assistant, viciously chewed out an aide over the minor oversight of not having Haldeman’s golf cart waiting and ready for local transportation when they left the building. Magruder dismissed this inappropriate behaviour, justifying it as okay in the context of “the sheer perfection of life there… After you have been spoiled for a while, something as minor as a missing golf cart can seem a major affront.”
&&[Magruder, Jeb Stuart. An American Life: One Many’s Road to Watergate. New York: Athenum, 1974, p. 7. (from Tavris & Aronson, 2007, p. 36-7.)]
This was his first moral compromise, followed by many more in the course of his work under Nixon. By the time it came to the Watergate break-in, this crime was actually a much lesser one that Magruder agreed to, after vetoing a proposal by Nixon staff involving entrapments, muggings, sabotage, blackmailings and more.
The Watergate affair was a rather extreme example of cognitive dissonance. Many novice political candidates are innocent and honest in wanting to serve their electorate when they make their debuts in their political arenas. But very soon they are approached by people with vested interests who want to solicit their support for various causes. Some of these are wanting support for organizations that will serve the common good of their constituency. But many others primarily stand to garner profits mostly for the people who are seeking their candidate’s or office-holder’s help.
Professional lobbyists have honed their skills to a fine art. They start out by offering candidates small gifts that are of negligible, insignificant value: perhaps just a cup of coffee to start their day, or a cold drink on a hot day, or a good quality company pen. These are hardly something most people refuse. Then the lobbyists take it up a notch, inviting them to a business lunch, where food and drinks are on the lobbyist. Next it could be a lunch or dinner on the golf course, or a dinner preceded by a baseball game or followed by a theater performance. And then there will be a quantum step forward into their pockets – with plane tickets to a golf resort or an event to the liking of the politician in a resort city.
Had the lobbyist started with something substantial, the candidate would have immediately rejected it.
But who can be faulted for accepting a cup of coffee? The business lunch is a bit of a question mark, with a teeny weeny bit of cognitive dissonance between “I shouldn’t accept even a little bribe” and “But hey, this is a nice person whom I’ve met over a cup of coffee, and it’s not like I’m being paid a fee to do anything for him more than to listen about his company’s project, which we could do in my office,
but we both have to eat lunch anyway, so why not eat together and I’ll have more time back at the office to work on my speech?”
The research on dealing with cognitive dissonance is absolutely fascinating. Once people overcome their hesitations and decide to take a new position on an issue they would not have considered accepting previously, they will find very creative reasons to explain and justify it. Then they will often develop further explanations, many of which are totally contrary to their openly declared previous opinions, to prove to themselves they have made a right and justified decision. Then, feeling awkward about their further steps, they will develop ever more layers of arguments to justify these new steps.
They end up going to extraordinary lengths and mental contortions to justify their series of decisions.
And they hold onto them with a tenacity and rigidity that defies questioning, much less allowing for any changes.
The extremes to which people may go in service of resolving their cognitive dissonance is illustrated by people who predict the world is ending.
Tavris and Aronson summarize the classic study of fundamentalists, followers of a self-styled seer called Marian Keech, who predicted that on December 21 the world would end. She told them that believers who prepared for this apocalypse would be picked up by aliens in a spaceship and taken to safety. The faithful abandoned all they owned and awaited their rescuers on that day. When the earth did not end and no aliens arrived, logic would seem to dictate that these people who had made such strong statements of belief would abandon their leader and their beliefs in these predictions.
In contradiction to this common-sense prediction, those who had made these major statements of faith accepted Keech’s explanation that the world had been saved by the steadfast beliefs of this group. The group’s members proceeded to proselytize with even greater fervor than before.
&&[Festinger, Leon, Riecken, Henry W. and Schachter, Stanley. When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of A Modern Group that Predicted the Destruction of the World. Harper Torchbooks 1956.]
And the authors of this book are by no means free, themselves, of the tangles of reasoning of cognitive dissonance, when it comes to evidence for therapies that lie outside their range of training and experience as social psychologists. They disparage and dismiss the possibility that trauma memories could be valid and destructive to people who have suffered extreme stresses. They relegate such memories to their preferred, familiar category of post hypnotic suggestions that have produced false memories through the questioning of the therapists (p. 106-108). In the same manner, they disparage clinical judgment, suggesting that only evidence from replicated research can provide valid and useful clinical information for therapists.
Despite these criticisms, I believe you will come away enriched by this book, as I did.
Top reviews from other countries


Although marketed as a kind of self-help book, and written in a breezy, anecdotal fashion, the book contains many cases that are deeply disturbing, and have major social and even political implications. You may have heard about the unreliability of eyewitness evidence, but you will be surprised to find just how useless and easily manipulated it is. Stories of police inventing or hiding evidence to convict those they had already decided to be guilty will not improve your opinion of the forces of law and order. And the discussion of cases of "recovered memory" where parents and teachers were sent to prison for abuse of children which the children "remembered" under hypnosis or drugs, is quite horrifying, especially when you realise that some of the "therapists" responsible have never apologised or retracted.
This is an American book, and so must include a compulsory discussion of how to overcome the problems described. But in practice, these problems seem to be very deeply rooted in the human psyche, and, even if we know that they exist in theory, it's not clear that we can - or would want - to avoid them in practice. The real issues raised are quite fundamental ones about, for example, how criminal justice systems work, and the book does not really explore them. It would also help if the authors had included a few more examples from outside the US - it would be interesting to know how, if at all, cultural factors affect psychological problems of this kind.

1. It explained 'dissonance' as a difference between a self view and any external evidance to the contrary, which will be dismissed. I have witnessed first hand this effect where someone invested a lot of time and effort choosing software which turned out to be causing apparently unrelated problems with the computer in question. In spite of demonstrating to the person that the new software caused the problem, they rejected the evidence forcefully. As if 'the problem is the software' was heard as 'the problem is you got the software choice wrong, it's your fault'. I now have a hook to hang these behavoiurs on so to speak.
2. The description of memory as reconstructive has helped me enormously. Believing in something that I vividly remember is not the same as it being actually true. I always give others with conflicting memories to mine more consideration now.
This book should be read with an open mind. I thing everyone could learn something from it.

In a broader sense this book deals with the way how people reduce personal dissonance, how we lie to ourselves, in order to increase our comfort level in life. Self justification seems to be the reason why it is so hard to accept mistakes. Major historical conflicts which ended up in war are examples how far the involved parties go to justify their actions. Other examples go from simple matters like people at work doing private stuff by justifying it that they deserved it since they worked so hard anyway. There seemed to be a whole generation of psychotherapists who engaged in the field of memory recovery and destroyed families due to their wrong believes and lack of proper scientific research. Furthermore, it goes on by comparing whole societies, for example Japanese children seem to have less fear of making mistakes compared to their American peers which in turn leads to better qualifications. In Japan, mistakes are encouraged instead of punished as they are seen as a natural way to improve.
The last section of the book includes tons of references to literature for further reading.
Overall, the book really helped to reflect on my own behaviour and better understand people around me.

this book discusses the research which indicates that she was right!
I ordered this after reading irationality, bad science and mumbo jumbo. I really enjoy books like this, so I'm probably biased. This was another great book about (mainly) self-justification and cognitive dissonance. The overwhelming feeling I had after reading this book was one of dispair. You realize a couple of things about our flawed human brains.
1. Your brain works not rationally but in order to make you feel comfortable. we are not rational creatures but selfish self justifying creatures.
2. It matters little what decisions you make (in terms of happiness) as your mind will work hard to make you feel you made the right decision.
3. People who believe things which you personally find ridiculous and clearly non-sensical (easily disprovable) hold those beliefs with complete conviction.