Mistakes Were Made by Tavris
Ref: Tavris & Aronson (2020). Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts. Mariner Books.
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Summary
We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.-George Orwell (1946).
If every outcome confirms your hypothesis that all men unconsciously suffer from castration anxiety (or that intelligent design, rather than evolution, accounts for the diversity of species, or that your favorite psychic would accurately have predicted 9/11 if only she hadn’t been taking a shower that morning, or that all dolphins are kind to humans), your beliefs are a matter of faith, not science.
Once we are invested in a belief and have justified its wisdom, changing our minds is literally hard work. It’s much easier to slot that new evidence into an existing framework and do the mental justification to keep it there than it is to change the framework.
Just as we can identify hypocrisy in everyone but ourselves, just as it’s obvious that others can be influenced by money but not ourselves, so we can see prejudices in everyone but ourselves. Thanks to our ego-preserving blind spots, we cannot possibly have a prejudice, which is an irrational or mean-spirited feeling about all members of another group. Because we are not irrational or mean-spirited, any negative feelings we have about another group are justified; our dislikes are rational and well founded. It’s the other group’s negative feelings we need to suppress.
Naïve Realism: Presupposes two things: 1) people who are open-minded and fair ought to agree with a reasonable opinion, and 2) any opinion I hold must be reasonable; if it weren’t, I wouldn’t hold it.
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---Cognitive Dissonance---
Cognitive Dissonance: Confirmation Bias + Self Justification; 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.” It is the engine that drives self-justification, the energy that produces the need to justify our actions and decisions—especially the wrong ones.
Confirmation Bias: An understanding of the world that dismisses any evidence to the contrary; confirmation bias kicks in and people with implicit theories stop seeing evidence that doesn’t fit their understanding. Confirmation bias is a powerful need for consonance requisite when people are forced to look at disconfirming evidence, at which they will find a way to criticize, distort, or dismiss it so that they can maintain or even strengthen their existing belief.
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, making the person hold on to the incorrect belief even more firmly.
People will pursue self-destructive courses of action to protect the wisdom of their initial decisions. They will treat those they have hurt even more harshly, because they convince themselves that their victims deserve it. They will cling to outdated and sometimes harmful procedures in their work. They will support torturers and tyrants who are on the right side—that is, their side.
Because of confirmation bias, the “dependable observation” is not dependable. Clinical intuition—“I know it when I see it”—is the end of the conversation to many psychiatrists and psychotherapists, but the start of the conversation to the scientist—“A good observation, but what exactly have you seen, and how do you know you are right?” Observation and intuition without independent verification are unreliable guides.
Self-Justification (‘Dissonance Reduction’): The little lies we tell ourselves that prevent us from acknowledging that we made mistakes or foolish decisions; protects high self-esteem or low self-esteem, whichever is central to a person’s core self-concept. Self-justification works to minimize any bad feelings we have as doers of harm and to maximize any righteous feelings we have as victims.
When we explain our own behavior, self-justification allows us to flatter ourselves: We give ourselves credit for our good actions but let the situation excuse the bad ones. When we do something that hurts another, for example, we rarely say, “I behaved this way because I am a cruel and heartless human being.” We say, “I was provoked; anyone would do what I did” or “I had no choice” or “Yes, I said some awful things, but that wasn’t me—it’s because I was drunk.” Yet when we do something generous, helpful, or brave, we don’t say we did it because we were provoked or drunk or had no choice or because the guy on the phone guilt-induced us into donating to charity. We did it because we are generous and open-hearted.
The reasoning areas of the brain virtually shut down when people are confronted with dissonant information, and the emotion circuits of the brain are activated when consonance is restored.
The more costly a decision in terms of time, money, effort, or inconvenience, and the more irrevocable its consequences, the greater the dissonance and the greater the need to reduce it by overemphasizing the good things about the choice made.
If a person voluntarily goes through a difficult or a painful experience in order to attain some goal or object, that goal or object becomes more attractive. Severe initiations increase a member’s liking for the group.
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Expertise
Dissonance theory predicts that the more self-confident and famous experts are, the less likely they will be to admit mistakes.
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Economics
Behavioral economists have shown how reluctant people are to accept sunk costs—investments of time or money that they’ve sunk into an experience or relationship. Rather than cutting their losses, most people will throw good money after bad in hopes of recouping those losses and justifying their original decision.
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Politics
Once people form a political identity, usually in young adulthood, the identity does their thinking for them. That is, most people do not choose a party because it reflects their views; rather, once they choose a party, its policies become their views.
When rising politicians first enter politics, they accept lunch with a lobbyist because, after all, that’s how politics works and it’s an efficient way to get information about a pending bill, isn’t it? “Besides,” the politician says, “lobbyists, like any other citizens, are exercising their right to free speech. I only have to listen; I’ll decide how to vote on the basis of whether my party and constituents support this bill and on whether it is the right thing to do for the American people.” However, once you accept the first small inducement and justify it that way, you have started your slide down the pyramid. If you had lunch with a lobbyist to talk about that pending legislation, why not talk things over on the local golf course? What’s the difference? It’s a nicer place to have a conversation. And if you talked things over on the local course, why not accept a friendly offer to go to a better course to play golf with him or her—say, St. Andrews in Scotland? What’s wrong with that? By the time the politician is at the bottom of the pyramid, having accepted and justified ever-larger inducements, the public is screaming, “What’s wrong with that? Are you kidding?” At one level, the politician is not kidding. Dorothy Samuels is right: Who would jeopardize a career and reputation for a trip to Scotland? No one, if that was the first offer, but many of us would if that offer had been preceded by several smaller ones that we had accepted. Pride, followed by self-justification, paves the road to Scotland.
When Magruder and others were working to reelect Nixon, G. Gordon Liddy entered the picture, hired by attorney general John Mitchell to be Magruder’s general counsel. Liddy was a wild card, a James Bond wannabe. His first plan to ensure Nixon’s reelection was to spend $1M to hire “mugging squads” to rough up demonstrators, kidnap activists who might disrupt the Republican Convention, sabotage the Democratic Convention, hire “high-class” prostitutes to entice and then blackmail leading Democrats, and break into Democratic offices and install electronic-surveillance devices and wiretaps. Mitchell disapproved of the more extreme aspects of this plan; besides, he said, it was too expensive. So Liddy returned with a proposal merely to break into the DNC offices at the Watergate complex and install wiretaps. This time Mitchell approved, and everyone went along.
Finally, Magruder added, Liddy’s plan was approved because of the paranoid climate in the White House: “Decisions that now seem insane seemed at the time to be rational . . . We were past the point of halfway measures or gentlemanly tactics.”
Without debate, without criticism, no administration and no country can succeed—and no republic can survive.
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Warfare
Idi Amin, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, Mira Markovic (the “Red Witch,” Milosevic’s wife), and Jean-Bédel Bokassa of the Central African Republic (known to his people as the Ogre of Berengo). Every one of them claimed that everything they did—torturing or murdering their opponents, blocking free elections, starving their citizens, looting their nation’s wealth, launching genocidal wars—was done for the good of their country. The alternative, they said, was chaos, anarchy, and bloodshed. Far from seeing themselves as despots, they saw themselves as self-sacrificing patriots.
Success at dehumanizing the victim virtually guarantees a continuation or even an escalation of the cruelty: It sets up an endless chain of violence, followed by self-justification (in the form of dehumanizing and blaming the victim), followed by still more violence and dehumanization.
Combine self-justifying perpetrators and victims who are helpless, and you have a recipe for the escalation of brutality.
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Psychology
Even when an individual scientist is not self-correcting, science eventually is. The mental-health professions are different. Professionals in these fields have an amalgam of credentials, training, and approaches that often bear little connection to one another.
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 as, or even more effective than, medication.
What unites clinical practitioners is their misplaced reliance on their own powers of observation and the closed loop it creates. Everything they see confirms what they believe.
In an experiment with preschool children, Sena Garven and her colleagues used interview techniques that were based on the actual transcripts of interrogations of children in the McMartin case. A young man visited children at their preschool, read them a story, and handed out treats. He did nothing aggressive, inappropriate, or surprising. A week later an experimenter questioned the children about the man’s visit. She asked one group leading questions such as “Did he shove the teacher? Did he throw a crayon at a kid who was talking?” She asked a second group the same questions but added the influence techniques the McMartin interrogators had used; for example, she told the children what other kids had supposedly said, expressed disappointment if their answers were negative, and praised children for making allegations. The children in the first group, who got merely the leading questions, said “Yes, it happened” to about 15% of the false allegations about the man’s visit; not a high percentage, but not a trivial one either. In the second group, however, the one in which influence tactics had been added, the 3yo said “Yes, it happened” to over 80% of the false allegations suggested to them, and the four- to six-year-olds said yes to about half the allegations. And those results occurred after interviews lasting only five to ten minutes; in actual criminal investigations, interviewers often question children repeatedly over weeks and months... In a similar study, this time with 5-7yo, investigators found they could easily influence the children to answer yes to preposterous questions, such as “Did Paco take you flying in an airplane?” What was more troubling was that within a short time, many of the children’s inaccurate statements had crystallized into stable, but false, memories… The scientists have shown that very young children, <5yo, often cannot tell the difference between something they were told and something that actually happened to them.
Repressive Memory Therapy (debunked)
In the 1980s and 1990s, the newly emerging evidence of the sexual abuse of children and women set off unintended emotional epidemics, what social scientists call “moral panics.” One was the phenomenon of recovered-memory therapy, in which adults went into therapy with no memory of childhood trauma and came out believing that they had been sexually molested by their parents or tortured in satanic cults, sometimes for many years, without being aware of it at the time and without any corroboration by siblings, friends, or physicians. Under hypnosis, they said, their therapists enabled them to remember the horrifying experiences they had suffered as toddlers, as infants in the crib, and sometimes even in previous lives. Many lives were shattered and countless families have never been reunited. But cases of recovered memories of abuse in childhood still appear in the courts, in the news, in films, and in books. If you look closely at these stories, many involve a therapist who helped the person “recover” his or her memories.
Why would people claim to remember that they had suffered harrowing experiences if they hadn’t, especially when that belief causes rifts with families or friends? By distorting their memories, these people can get what they want by revising what they had, and what they want is to turn their present bleak or merely mundane lives into dazzling victories over adversity. 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.”
While the moral panics of repressive memory therapy have subsided, the assumptions that ignited them remain embedded in popular culture: If you were repeatedly traumatized in childhood, you probably repressed the memory of it. If you repressed the memory of it, hypnosis can retrieve it for you. If you are utterly convinced that your memories are true, they are. If you have no memories but merely suspect that you were abused, you probably were. If you have sudden flashbacks or dreams of abuse, you are uncovering a true memory. Children almost never lie about sexual matters. Watch for signs: if your child has nightmares, wets the bed, wants to sleep with a night-light, or masturbates, he or she may have been molested. These beliefs did not pop up overnight in the cultural landscape, like mushrooms. They came from mental-health professionals who disseminated them at conferences, in clinical journals, in the media, and in best-selling books, and who promoted themselves as experts in diagnosing child sexual abuse and determining the validity of a recovered memory. Their claims were based largely on lingering Freudian (and pseudo-Freudian) ideas about repression, memory, sexual trauma, and the meaning of dreams and on their own confidence in their clinical powers of insight and diagnosis. All of the claims these therapists made have since been scientifically studied. All of them are wrong.
The inherent privacy of the interaction means that therapists who lack training in science and skepticism have no internal corrections to the self-protecting cognitive biases that afflict us all. What these therapists see confirms what they believe, and what they believe shapes what they see. It’s a closed loop. Did my client improve? Excellent; what I did was effective. Did my client remain unchanged or get worse? That’s unfortunate, but she is resistant to therapy and deeply troubled; besides, sometimes the client has to get worse before she can get better. Do I believe that repressed rage causes sexual difficulties? If so, my client’s erection problem must reflect his repressed rage at his mother or his wife. Do I believe that sexual abuse causes eating disorders? If so, my client’s bulimia must mean she was molested as a child.
As evidence accumulated on the fallibility of memory and the many confabulations of recovered-memory cases, the promoters of this notion did not admit error; they simply changed their view of the mechanism by which traumatic memories are allegedly lost. It’s not repression at work anymore, but dissociation; the mind somehow splits off the traumatic memory and banishes it to the suburbs. This shift allowed them to keep testifying, without batting an eye or ruffling a feather, as scientific experts in cases of recovered memories.
In his meticulous review of the experimental research and the clinical evidence, presented in his book Remembering Trauma, clinical psychologist Richard McNally concluded: “The notion that the mind protects itself by repressing or dissociating memories of trauma, rendering them inaccessible to awareness, is a piece of psychiatric folklore devoid of convincing empirical support.” Overwhelmingly, the evidence shows just the opposite. The problem for most people who have suffered traumatic experiences is not that they forget them but that they cannot forget them; the memories keep intruding.
Thus, people do not repress the memory of being tortured in prison, being in combat, or being the victim of a natural disaster (unless they suffered brain damage at the time), although details of even these horrible experiences are subject to distortion over the years, as are all memories. “Truly traumatic events—terrifying, life-threatening experiences—are never forgotten, let alone if they are repeated,” says McNally. “The basic principle is: if the abuse was traumatic at the time it occurred, it is unlikely to be forgotten. If it was forgotten, then it was unlikely to have been traumatic. And even if it was forgotten, there is no evidence that it was blocked, repressed, sealed behind a mental barrier, inaccessible.”
Ever since Freud there has been a widespread cultural assumption that childhood trauma always, inevitably, produces adult psychopathology. Research has shattered this assumption too. Psychologist Ann Masten has observed that most people assume there is something special and rare about the children who recover from adversity. But “the great surprise” of the research, she concluded, is how ordinary resilience is. Most children are remarkably resilient, eventually overcoming even the effects of war, childhood illness, having abusive or alcoholic parents, early deprivation, or being sexually molested.
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Law Enforcement
Many detectives do just what the rest of us are inclined to do when we first hear about a crime—we impulsively decide we know what happened and then fit the evidence to support our conclusions, ignoring or discounting evidence that contradicts it.
Jurors who jumped to a conclusion early on were the most confident in their decisions and the most likely to justify it by voting for an extreme verdict.
It is absurd to believe that a suspect who knows he did not commit a crime would place greater weight and credibility on alleged evidence than his own knowledge of his innocence. Under this circumstance, the natural human reaction would be one of anger and mistrust toward the investigator. The net effect would be the suspect’s further resolution to maintain his innocence. Wrong. The “natural human reaction” is usually not anger and mistrust but confusion and hopelessness—dissonance—because most innocent suspects trust the investigator not to lie to them.
The interrogator’s presumption of guilt creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. It makes the interrogator more aggressive, which in turn makes innocent suspects behave more suspiciously.
Kassin and Fong asked 44 professional detectives in FL and Ontario, Canada, to watch interrogation tapes. These professionals averaged nearly 14y 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%. Their experience and training did not improve their performance. Their experience and training simply increased their belief that it did.
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Relationships
The vast majority of couples who drift apart do so slowly, over time, in a snowballing pattern of blame and self-justification. Each partner focuses on what the other one is doing wrong while justifying his or her own preferences, attitudes, and ways of doing things. Each side’s intransigence, in turn, makes the other side even more determined not to budge. Before the couple realize 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.
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. Unhappy couples are pulled further apart by angry confrontations. When unhappy couples quarrel, they retreat to their familiar positions, brood, and stop listening to each other. If they do listen, they don’t hear. Their attitude is: “Yeah, yeah, I know how you feel about this, but I’m not going to change because I’m right.”
Misunderstandings, conflicts, personality differences, and even angry quarrels are not the assassins of love; self-justification is. The need for self-justification is preventing them from accepting the other’s position as legitimate. It is motivating each of them to see his or her own way as the better way, indeed the only reasonable way.
If a couple is arguing from the premise that each is a good person who did something wrong but fixable, or who did something blunder-headed because of momentary situational pressures, there is hope of correction and compromise. But, unhappy couples invert this premise: They blame each other’s unwillingness to change on personality flaws,
By the time a couple’s style of argument has escalated into shaming and blaming each other, the very purpose of their quarrels has shifted. It is no longer an effort to solve a problem or even to get the other person to modify his or her behavior; 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. Contemptuous exchanges like this one are devastating because they destroy the one thing that self-justification is designed to protect: our feelings of self-worth, of being loved, of being a good and respected person.
Each partner resolves the dissonance caused by conflicts and irritations by explaining the spouse’s behavior in a particular way. That explanation, in turn, sets them on a path down the pyramid. Those who travel the route of shame and blame will eventually begin rewriting the story of their marriage. As they do, they seek further evidence to justify their growing pessimistic or contemptuous views of each other. They shift from minimizing negative aspects of the marriage to overemphasizing them, seeking every bit of supporting evidence to fit their new story. As the new story takes shape, with husband and wife rehearsing it privately or with sympathetic friends, the partners become blind to each other’s good qualities, the very ones that initially caused them to fall in love.
The tipping point at which a couple starts rewriting their love story, Gottman finds, is when the “magic ratio” dips below 5:1; successful couples have a ratio of 5x as many positive interactions (such as expressions of love, affection, and humor) to negative ones (such as expressions of annoyance and complaints).
If you are the one being left, you may suffer the ego-crushing dissonance of “I’m a good person and I’ve been a terrific partner” and “My partner is leaving me. How could this be?” You could conclude that you’re not as good a person as you thought, or that you are a good person but you were a pretty bad partner, but few of us choose to reduce dissonance by plunging darts into our self-esteem. It’s far easier to reduce dissonance by plunging darts into the partner, so to speak—say, by concluding that your partner is a difficult, selfish person, only you hadn’t realized it fully until now.
Observers of divorcing couples are often baffled by what seems like unreasonable vindictiveness on the part of the person who initiated the separation; what they are observing is dissonance reduction in action. The reason they do is that once a couple starts reducing dissonance by taking the ego-preserving route of vilifying the former partner, they need to keep justifying their position. Thus they fight over every nickel and dime that one party is “entitled to” and the other “doesn’t deserve,” furiously denying or controlling custody matters and the ex’s visitation rights because, look, the ex is a terrible person. Neither party pauses in mid-rant to consider if the ex’s terribleness might be a result of the terrible situation, much less to consider if the ex’s terribleness might be a response to their own terrible behavior. Each action that one partner takes evokes a self-justified retaliation from the other, and voilà, they are on a course of reciprocal, escalating animosity. Each partner, having induced the other to behave badly, uses that bad behavior both to justify his or her own retaliation and to marshal support for the ex’s inherently “evil” qualities.
The couples who grow together over the years have figured out a way to live with a minimum of self-justification, which is another way of saying that they are able to put empathy for the partner ahead of defending their own territory. Successful, stable couples are able to listen to each other’s criticisms, concerns, and suggestions undefensively. In our terms, they are able to yield, just enough, on the self-justifying excuse “That’s the kind of person I am.” They reduce the dissonance caused by small irritations by overlooking them, and they reduce the dissonance caused by their mistakes and major problems by solving them.
In good marriages, a confrontation, difference of opinion, clashing habits, and even angry quarrels can bring the couple closer, by helping each partner learn something new and by forcing them to examine their assumptions about their abilities or limitations.
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Parenting
Once children see themselves as generous, they continue to behave generously.
Parent blaming is a popular and convenient form of self-justification because it allows people to live less uncomfortably with their regrets and imperfections.
Researchers found that American parents, teachers, and children were far more likely than their Japanese and Chinese counterparts to believe that mathematical ability is innate; if you have it, you don’t have to work hard, and if you don’t have it, there’s no point in trying. In contrast, most Asians regard math success like achievement in any other domain; it’s a matter of persistence and plain hard work. Of course, you will make mistakes as you go along; that’s how you learn and improve.
Children who, like their Asian counterparts, are praised for their efforts, even when they don’t get it at first, eventually perform better and like what they are learning more than children praised for their natural abilities. They are also more likely to regard mistakes and criticism as useful information that will help them improve. In contrast, children praised for their natural ability learn to care more about how competent they look to others than about what they are actually learning. They become defensive about not doing well or about making mistakes, and this sets them up for a self-defeating cycle: If they don’t do well, then to resolve the ensuing dissonance (“I’m smart and yet I screwed up”), they simply lose interest in what they are learning or studying (“I could do it if I wanted to, but I don’t want to”). When these kids grow up, they will be the kind of adults who are afraid of making mistakes or taking responsibility for them, because that would be evidence that they are not naturally smart after all.
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Friends
“Can’t you see the guy is a thief and the offer is a scam? You’re being ripped off!” “Ironically, this natural tendency to lecture may be one of the worst things a family member or friend can do,” Pratkanis says. “A lecture just makes the victim feel more defensive and pushes him or her further into the clutches of the fraud criminal.” Instead of irritably asking “How could you possibly have listened to that creep?” you say, “Tell me what appealed to you about the guy that made you trust him.” Con artists take advantage of people’s best qualities—their kindness, politeness, and desire to honor their commitments, reciprocate a gift, or help a friend. Praising the victim for having these worthy values, says Pratkanis, even if they got the person into hot water in this particular situation, will offset feelings of insecurity and incompetence.
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Misc Quotes
“It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is. It does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is—if it disagrees with [the] experiment it is wrong. That is all there is to it.”-Richard Feynman.
“The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.”-Thomas Carlyle.
“Doubt is not the enemy of justice; overconfidence is.”
“For most people, the self-concept is based on a belief in change, improvement, and growth.”
“One of the most powerful stories that many people wish to live by is the victim narrative.”
“Being criticized for who you are rather than for what you did evokes a deep sense of shame and helplessness; it makes a person want to hide, disappear.”-Social Psychologist June Tangney.
“Nothing predicts future behavior as much as past impunity. Impunity, in turn, rewards self-justification, not only in the perpetrators but also in the nation that exonerates them.”-Darius Rejali.
“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.”-Magruder (at his sentencing).
A man travels many miles to consult the wisest guru in the land. When he arrives, he asks the great man: “O wise guru, what is the secret of a happy life?” “Good judgment,” says the guru. “But, O wise guru,” says the man, “how do I achieve good judgment?” “Bad judgment,” says the guru.
“An error does not become a mistake until you refuse to correct it.”
“We want to hear, we long to hear, I screwed up. I will do my best to ensure that it will not happen again.”
“Institutions can be designed to reward admissions of mistakes as part of the organizational culture rather than making it uncomfortable or professionally risky for people to come forward. This design, naturally, must come from the top.”
“The ultimate correction for the tunnel vision that afflicts all of us mortals is more light.”
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Terminology
Cognitive Dissonance: Confirmation Bias + Self Justification; 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.” It is the engine that drives self-justification, the energy that produces the need to justify our actions and decisions—especially the wrong ones.
Confirmation Bias: An understanding of the world that dismisses any evidence to the contrary; confirmation bias kicks in and people with implicit theories stop seeing evidence that doesn’t fit their understanding. Confirmation bias is a powerful need for consonance requisite when people are forced to look at disconfirming evidence, at which they will find a way to criticize, distort, or dismiss it so that they can maintain or even strengthen their existing belief.
Moral Panic: An unintended emotional epidemic.
Nine-Step Reid Technique: Interrogation Technique Commonly used by Law Enforcement.
Prejudice: An irrational or mean-spirited feeling about all members of another group. Prejudice is impervious to reason, experience, and counterexample.
Prejudices emerge from the disposition of the human mind to perceive and process information in categories. Categories is a nicer, more neutral word than stereotypes, but it’s the same thing. Cognitive psychologists view stereotypes as energy-saving devices that allow us to make efficient decisions on the basis of past experiences; they help us quickly process new information, retrieve memories, identify real differences between groups, and predict, often with considerable accuracy, how others will behave or think. We wisely rely on stereotypes and the quick information they give us to avoid danger, approach possible new friends, choose one school or job over another, or decide that that person across this crowded room will be the love of our lives.
Recovered-Memory Therapy: A debunked form of therapy in which adults with no memory of childhood trauma are made to believe that that their present problems are the result of past traumas.
Self-Justification (‘Dissonance Reduction’): The little lies we tell ourselves that prevent us from acknowledging that we made mistakes or foolish decisions; protects high self-esteem or low self-esteem, whichever is central to a person’s core self-concept. Self-justification works to minimize any bad feelings we have as doers of harm and to maximize any righteous feelings we have as victims.
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Chronology
2003: Impartial investigations by the Red Cross, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch reveal that US interrogators and their allies had been using sleep deprivation, prolonged isolation, waterboarding, sexual humiliation, induced hypothermia, beatings, and other cruel methods on terrorist suspects, not only at Abu Ghraib but also at Guantánamo Bay and at “black sites” in other countries.-Mistakes by Tavris.
1998: A team of scientists report in the distinguished medical journal ‘The Lancet’ that they had found a positive correlation between autism and childhood vaccines, generating enormous alarm among parents and causing many to stop vaccinating their children. Within 6y, 10 of the 13 scientists involved in the study had retracted that 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 $800K to determine whether there were grounds for pursuing legal action, and he gave the study’s affirmative answer to the lawyers before publication.-Mistakes by Tavris.
1994: South Africa’s establishes the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), chaired by Archbishop Desmon Tutu, along with 3 others commissions on human rights violations, amnesty, and reparation and rehabilitation. The goal of the TRC was to give victims of brutality a forum where their accounts would be heard and validated, where their dignity and sense of justice could be restored, and where they could express their grievances in front of the perpetrator themselves. In exchange for amnesty, the perpetrators had to admit to the harm they had done, including torture and murder. The commission emphasized the "need for understanding but not for vengeance, a need for reparation but not for retaliation, a need for ubuntu [humanity toward others] but not for victimization."-Mistakes by Tavris.
1980: SCOTUS rules that patents can be issued on genetically modified bacteria independent of the process of development; one could get a patent for discovering a virus, altering a plant, isolating a gene, or modifying any other living organism as a “product of manufacture.”-Mistakes by Tavris.
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