Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me).

Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) is the story of cognitive dissonance, from its origins in the 1950s – one of the authors worked with Dr. Leon Festinger, the man who coined the term – to the modern day, when we routinely hear politicians, police officers, and sportsball figures employ it to avoid blame for their errors. What Dr. Carol Tavris and Dr. Elliot Aronson, the authors of the book, emphasize in Mistakes Were Made, however, is that this is not mere fecklessness, or sociopathy, or evil, but a natural defense mechanism in our brains that protects our sense of self.

Cognitive dissonance refers to the conflict that arises in our brains when an established belief runs into contradictory information. We have the choice: Admit our beliefs were mistaken, and conform our beliefs to the new information; or, explain away the new information, by dismissing it, or interpreting it more favorably (and less accurately), so that our preconceived notions remain intact. You can see this playing out right now on social media, where anti-vaxxers and COVID denialists will refuse to accept the copious amounts of evidence undermining their views, claiming that any contradictory research came from “Pharma shills,” or was in unreliable journals (like JAMA or BMJ, you know, sketchy ones) or offering specious objections, like the possible trollbot account claiming a sample size of 2300 was too small.

The term goes back to the 1950s, however, when a deranged Wisconsin housewife named Dorothy Martin claimed she’d been communicating with an alien race, and a bunch of other morons followed her, in some cases selling their worldly possessions, because the Earth was going to be destroyed and the aliens were coming to pick them up and bring them to … I don’t know where, the fifth dimension or something. Known as the Seekers, they were inevitably disappointed when the aliens didn’t know. The crazy woman at the head of the cult claimed that the aliens had changed their minds, and her followers had somehow saved the planet after all.

What interested Festinger and his colleagues was how the adherents responded to the obvious disconfirmation of their beliefs. The aliens didn’t come, because there were no aliens. Yet many of the believers still believed, despite the absolute failure of the prophecy – giving Festinger et al the name of their publication on the aftermath, When Prophecy Fails. The ways in which these people would contort their thinking to avoid the reality that they’d just fallen for a giant scam, giving up their wealth, their jobs, sometimes even family connections to chase this illusion opened up a new field of study for psychologists.

Tavris and Aronson take this concept and pull it forward into modern contexts so we can identify cognitive dissonance in ourselves and in others, and then figure out what to do about it when it rears its ugly head. They give many examples from politicians, such as the members of the Bush Administration who said it wasn’t torture if we did it – a line of argument that President Obama did not reject when he could have – even though we were torturing people at Guantanamo Bay, and Abu Ghraib, and other so-called “black sites.” They also show how cognitive dissonance works in more commonplace contexts, such as how it can affect married couples’ abilities to solve conflicts between them – how we respond to issues big and small in our marriages (or other long-term relationships) can determine whether these relationships endure, but we may be stymied by our minds’ need to preserve our senses of self. We aren’t bad people, we just made mistakes – or mistakes were made, by someone – and it’s easier to remain believers in our inherent goodness if we deny the mistakes, or ascribe them to an external cause. (You can take this to the extreme, where abusers say that their victims “made” them hit them.)

There are two chapters here that I found especially damning, and very frustrating to read because they underscore how insoluble these problems might be. One looks at wrongful convictions, and how prosecutors and police officers refuse to admit they got the wrong guy even when DNA evidence proves that they got the wrong guy. The forces who put the Central Park Five in prison still insisted those five innocent men were guilty even after someone else admitted he was the sole culprit. The other troubling chapter looked at the awful history of repressed memory therapy, which is bullshit – there are no “repressed memories,” so the whole idea is based on a lie. Memories can be altered by suggestion, however, and we have substantial experimental research showing how easily you can implant a memory into someone’s mind, and have them believe it was real. Yet therapists pushed this nonsense extensively in the 1980s, leading to the day care sex abuse scares (which put many innocent people in jail, sometimes for decades), and some still push it today. I just saw a tweet from someone I don’t know who said he was dealing with the trauma of learning he’d been sexually abused as a child, memories he had repressed and only learned about through therapy. It’s nonsense, and now his life – and probably that of at least one family member – will be destroyed by a possibly well-meaning but definitely wrong therapist. Tavris and Aronson provide numerous examples, often from cases well-covered in the media, of therapists insisting that their “discoveries” were correct, or displaying open hostility to evidence-based methods and even threatening scientists whose research showed that repressed memories aren’t real.

I see this stuff play out pretty much any time I say something negative about a team. I pointed out on a podcast last week that the Mets have overlooked numerous qualified candidates of color, in apparent violation of baseball’s “Selig rule,” while reaching well beyond normal circles and apparently targeting less qualified candidates. The response from some Met fans was bitter acknowledgement, but many Met fans responded by attacking me, claiming I couldn’t possibly know what I know (as if, say, I couldn’t just call or text a reported candidate to see if he’d been contacted), or to otherwise defend the Mets’ bizarre behavior. Many pointed out that they tried to interview the Yankees’ Jean Afterman, yet she has made it clear for years that she has no interest in a GM job, which makes this request – if it happened at all – eyewash, a way to appear to comply with the Selig rule’s letter rather than its intent. Allowing cognitive dissonance to drive an irrational defense of yourself, or your family, or maybe even your company is bad enough, but allowing it to make you an irrational defender of a sportsball team in which you have no stake other than your fandom? I might buy a thousand copies of Craig Calcaterra’s new book and just hand it out at random.

Theauthors updated Mistakes Were Made in 2016, in a third edition that includes a new prologue and updates many parts of the text, with references to more recent events, like the murders of Tamir Rice and Eric Garner, so that the text doesn’t feel as dated with its extensive look at the errors that led us into the Iraq War. I also appreciated the short section on Andrew Wakefield and how his paper has created gravitational waves of cognitive dissonance that we will probably face until our species drives itself extinct. I couldn’t help but wonder, however, how the authors might feel now about Michael Shermer, who appears in a story about people who believe they’ve been abducted by aliens (he had such an experience, but knew it was the result of a bout of sleep paralysis) and who provides a quote for the back of the book … but who was accused of sexual harassment and worse before this last edition was published. Did cognitive dissonance lead them to dismiss the allegations (from multiple women) and leave the story and quote in place? The authors are human, too, and certainly as prone to experiencing cognitive dissonance as anyone else is. Perhaps it only strengthens the arguments in this short and easy-to-read book. Mistakes Were Made should be handed to every high school student in the country, at least until we ban books from schools entirely.

Next up: David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.