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did it”s: “As angry as I may be about activities undertaken without my knowledge, I am still accountable for those activities. As disappointed as I may be in some who served me, I’m still the one who must answer to the American people for this behavior. And as personally distasteful as I find secret bank accounts and diverted funds—well, as the Navy would say, this happened on my watch.” And this is how he took “full responsibility” for breaking the law: “A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.”

4 Daniel Yankelovich and Isabella Furth (2005, September 16), “The Role of Colleges in an Era of Mistrust,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, pp. B8—B11. Quote on p. B11.

5 Posted on the Web site of an advocacy group called The Sorry Works!, a coalition of physicians, hospital administrators, insurers, patients, and others concerned with the medical malpractice crisis. At Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York and several other medical schools, residents are learning how to acknowledge mistakes and apologize for them, as well as how to distinguish a bad outcome that is not their fault from one that is. See Katherine Mangan, “Acting Sick,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 15, 2006.

6 Richard A. Friedman, “Learning Words They Rarely Teach in Medical School: ‘I’m Sorry,’” The New York Times Science section, July 26, 2005.

7 Harmful Error: Investigating America’s Local Prosecutors, published by the Center for Public Integrity, Summer 2003. http://www.publicintegrity.org.

8 Faced with a wave of verified wrongful convictions, Great Britain has adopted a number of reforms. For example, the government established the Criminal Cases Review Commission, an independent council to investigate allegations of misconduct and suppression or falsification of evidence. In 1984, in response to several high-profile wrongful convictions that proved to have been based on coerced confessions, England and Wales passed the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, which made it illegal for police interrogators to lie about evidence to induce confessions and required all interrogations to be recorded. According to Richard Leo, although British interrogation today is more conversational and designed to get information rather than confession, the confession rate has not declined since passage of this act. See Richard Leo (2007), Police Interrogation and American Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

9 Warren G. Bennis and Burt Nanus (1995), Leaders: Strategies for Taking Charge (rev. ed.). New York: HarperCollins, p. 70.

10 Quote from Shimon Peres in Dennis Prager’s Ultimate Issues, Summer 1985, p. 11.

11 This message was posted on the listserv Teaching in the Psychological Sciences, May 1, 2003.

12 Quoted in Charles Baxter (1997), “Dysfunctional Narratives: or: ‘Mistakes Were Made,’” in Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction. Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, p. 5. There is some dispute about the second sentence of Lee’s remarks, but not about his assuming responsibility for his disastrous actions.

13 Anthony Pratkanis and Doug Shadel (2005), Weapons of Fraud: A Source Book for Fraud Fighters. This book is available free from the AARP; for more information, go to www.aarp.org/wa.

14 Stigler recalled this story in an obituary for Harold Stevenson, the Los Angeles Times, July 22, 2005. For their research, see Harold W. Stevenson and James W. Stigler (1992), The Learning Gap, New York: Summit; and Harold W. Stevenson, Chuansheng Chen, and Shin-ying Lee (1993, January 1), “Mathematics Achievement of Chinese, Japanese, and American Schoolchildren: Ten Years Later,” Science, 259, pp. 53–58.

15 Carol S. Dweck (1992), “The Study of Goals in Psychology,” Psychological Science, 3, pp. 165–167; Carol S. Dweck and Lisa Sorich (1999), “Mastery-Oriented Thinking,” in C. R. Snyder (ed.), Coping: The Psychology of What Works. New York: Oxford University Press; Claudia M. Mueller and Carol S. Dweck