Mistakes Were Made (but not by Me), by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson

Recommended by Alexei Sayle on A Good Read. About the way we avoid cognitive dissonance by refusing to accept that we might done things wrong. I really got into this book and made tons of notes when reading this:

Cognitive dissonance : the more pain you go through to be admitted to an activity, the more valuable you'll rate that activity as being. Many experiments carried out show this. E.g. activity is listening to boring talk. People who completed simple task before listening to talk thought talk was boring. People who had to do embarrassing exam before talk thought it was very interesting and insightful.

After the experiment above "I explained the study I detail and went over the theory carefully. Although everyone who went through the severe initiation said they found the hypothesis intriguing and they could see how most people would be affected in the way I predicted, they all took pains to assure me that their preference for the group had nothing to do with the severity of the initiation. They each claimed that they liked the group because that's the way they really felt. Yet almost all of them liked the group more than any of the people in the mild initiation condition did."

"When you are about to make a big purchase or an important decision ... don't ask someone who has just done it. That person will be highly motivated to convince you that it is the right thing to do...behavioural economists have shown how reluctant people are to accept these sunk costs - investments of time or money that they've sunk into an experience it teationship"

Pyramid of choice: you choose either to cheat or not cheat. Depending on which choice you make you then reconfirm your behaviour to yourself as the "right thing" and end up being a very different person with different sets of beliefs based on a choice which was very evenly split

In an experiment "people were asked to remember when their school nurse took a skin sample from their little finger to carry out a national health test (no such test existed). Simply imagining this unlikely scenario caused the participants to become more confident that it had happened. And the more confident they became the more sensory details they added to their false memories (the place smelled horrible)"

Clinical psychologist Susan Clancy, who interviewed hundreds of believers, found that the process moves along steadily as the possibility of alien abduction comes to seek more and more believable "all of the subjects i interviewed," she writes, "follow the same trajectory :once they started to suspect they'd been abducted by aliens, there was no going back... once the seed of belief was planted, once alien abduction was even suspected, the abductees began to search for confirmatory evidence. And once the search had begun, the evidence almost always turned up"

Book suggests that a reason *why* people believe (against evidence) that they're victims of alien abduction/sexual abuse/holocaust survival is because it gives a reason for other problems in their lives. "Ellen Bass and Laura Davis make this reasoning explicit in 'The courage to heal'. They tell readers who have no memory of childhood sexual abuse that 'when you first remember your abuse or acknowledge its effects, you may feel tremendous relief. Finally their is a reason for your problems. There is someone , and something to blame' It is no wonder, then, that most of the people who have created false memories..go to great lengths to justify and preserve their new explanations"

Quite a lot of examples of cases where psychotherapists gave evidence of repressed memories of abuse etc. Which later have been shown to be completely wrong. They are a bit "down" of psychodynamic therapy

"Law and disorder" chapter details several cases where wrongful convictions were made and innocent people sent to prison. When evidence later turns up proving they didn't do it, original prosecutors tend to reject it "either this overwhelming evidence is wrong or I was wrong - and I couldn't have been wrong because I'm a good guy" the cognitive dissonance caused by having to face up to the fact that you are not the good guy you consider yourself to be is too much and so instead you reject the evidence somehow

Reconstructions of trials show that jurors form an impression of "what happened" fairly early in the case and then fit subsequent evidence and testimony to that narrative. They didn't wait until hearing all the evidence before making a decision. "Those who jumped to a conclusion early on were most confident in their decisions and the most likely to justify it by voting for an extreme verdict"

Police interrogators (in the states at least) are allowed to lie to suspects eg "your dna was found on the murder weapon". And to say "maybe you just blanked out the memory of it". Suspect faced with choice between "I don't believe I would have done that " vs "a police officer tells me that my dna is on murder weapon and maybe I blanked out the memory" might reduce dissonance by confessing

Per Tony if I ever get taken for questioning by the police, I'm not going to say anything without a lawyer

Need to justify your own behaviour is very powerful. Experiment where they asked people to provide autobiographical accounts of a "victim story" when they'd been hurt or angered by someone else and a "perpetrator story" where they'd hurt or angered someone... perpetrator narratives would either claim they did nothing wrong, or that their behaviour was justified, or that what they did wasn't so bad, or that there were mitigating circumstances or that it was an isolated unrepresentative incident. "only one of the sixty three victim stories described the perpetrator as being justified in behaving as he did, and none thought the perpetrators' actions "could not be helped"". "Whereas Perpetrators thought their behaviour made sense at the time, many victims said they were unable to make sense of the perpetrators intentions, even long after the event"

Over time victims can nurse feelings of resentment which may eventually boil into the open to the puzzlement of "perpetrator" who sees this as overreaction. "Perpetrators, whether individuals or nations, write versions of history in which their behaviour was justified and provoked by the other side: their behaviour was sensible and meaningful; if they made mistakes or went too far, at least everything turned out for the best in the long run; it's all in the past now anyway. Victims tend to write accounts of the same history in which they describe the perpetrators actions as arbitrary and meaningless, or else intentionally malicious and brutal; in which their own retaliation was impeccably appropriate and morally justified; and in which nothing turned out for the best"

"As general William Westmorland famously said of the high number of civilian casualties during the Vietnam war 'The oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does a westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient'" footnote "yes he really said it"

Last chapter they recommend that people who've made mistakes own up and take responsibility rather than trying to weasel out or self-justify the behaviour. Good for you and for others. "A friend returning from a day in traffic school told us that as participants went round the room reporting the violations that had brought them there, a miraculous coincidence occurred: not one of them had broken the law! They all had justifications for speeding, ignoring a stop sign, running a red light, or making an illegal u turn. He became so dismayed (and amused) by the litany if flimsy ex uses that, when his turn came, he was embarrassed to give in to the same impulse. He said "I didn't stop at a stop sign. I was entirely wrong and I got caught " there was a moments silence and then the room erupted in cheers for his candour"

If we all recognise the benefits to us and others of owning up "why don't we do it more often?..because we aren't even aware that we need to. Self-justification purrs song automatically, just beneath the consciousness, protecting us from the dissonant realisation that we did anything wrong"

Completed : 02-Jun-2018

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