Mistakes Were Made - Carol Tavris [106]
These courageous individuals take us straight into the heart of dissonance and its innermost irony: The mind wants to protect itself from the pain of dissonance with the balm of self-justification; but the soul wants to confess. To reduce dissonance, most of us put an enormous amount of mental and physical energy into protecting ourselves and propping up our self-esteem when it sags under the realization that we have been foolish, gullible, mistaken, corrupted, or otherwise human. And yet, much of the time, all this investment of energy is surprisingly unnecessary. Linda Ross is still a psychotherapist; a better one. Thomas Vanes is still a successful prosecutor. Grace got her parents back. Wayne Hale was promoted to manager of the Space Shuttle program for NASA at the Johnson Space Center.
Imagine with us, for a moment, how you would feel if your partner, your grown child, or your parent said: “I want to take responsibility for that mistake I made; we have been quarreling about it all this time, and now I realize that you were right, and I was wrong.” Or if your employer started a meeting by saying, “I want to hear every possible objection to this proposal before we go ahead with it—every mistake we might be making.” Or if a district attorney held a press conference and said, “I made a horrendous mistake. I failed to reopen a case in which new evidence showed that I and my office sent an innocent man to prison. I will apologize, but being sorry is not enough. I will also reassess our procedures to reduce the likelihood of ever convicting an innocent person again.”
How would you feel about these people? Would you lose respect for them? Chances are that if they are friends or relatives, you will feel relieved and delighted. “My God, Harry actually admitted he made a mistake! What a generous guy!” And if they are professionals or political leaders, you will probably feel reassured that you are in the capable hands of someone big enough to do the right thing, which is to learn from the wrong thing. The last American president to tell the country he had made a terrible mistake was John F. Kennedy in 1961. He had believed the claims and faulty intelligence reports of his top military advisers, who assured him that once Americans invaded Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, the people would rise up in relief and joy and overthrow Castro. The invasion was a disaster, but Kennedy learned from it. He reorganized his intelligence system and determined that he would no longer accept uncritically the claims of his military advisers, a change that helped him steer the country successfully through the subsequent Cuban missile crisis. After the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy spoke to newspaper publishers and said: “This administration intends to be candid about its errors. For as a wise man once said, ‘An error does not become a mistake until you refuse to correct it.’…Without debate, without criticism, no administration and no country can succeed—and no republic can survive.” The final responsibility for the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion was, he said, “mine, and mine alone.” Kennedy’s popularity soared.
We want to hear, we long to hear, “I screwed up. I will do my best to ensure that it will not happen again.” Most of us are not impressed when a leader offers the form of Kennedy’s admission without its essence, as in Ronald Reagan’s response to the Iran-Contra scandal, which may be summarized as “I didn’t do anything wrong myself, but it happened on my watch, so, well, I guess I’ll take responsibility.”3 That doesn’t cut it. Daniel Yankelovich, the highly regarded survey researcher, reports that although polls find that the public has an abiding mistrust of our major institutions, right below that cynicism is a “genuine hunger” for honesty and integrity. “People want organizations to operate transparently,” he says, “to show a human face to the outside