Mistakes Were Made - Carol Tavris [4]
In 1847, Ignac Semmelweiss famously exhorted his fellow physicians to wash their hands before delivering babies. He realized that they must have acquired some kind of “morbid poison” on their hands from doing autopsies on women who had died of childbed fever, then transferred the poison to women in labor. (He didn’t know the exact mechanism, but he had the right idea.) Semmelweiss ordered his own medical students to wash their hands in a chlorine antiseptic solution, and death rates from childbed fever dropped rapidly thereafter. Yet his colleagues refused to accept Semmelweiss’s concrete evidence, the lower death rate among his own patients.8 Why didn’t they embrace Semmelweiss’s discovery immediately, thanking him effusively for finding the reason for so many unnecessary deaths?
After World War II, Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia Farnham published the bestseller Modern Woman: The Lost Sex, in which they claimed that a woman who achieves in “male spheres of action” may seem to be successful in the “big league,” but she pays a big price: “sacrifice of her most fundamental instinctual strivings. She is not, in sober reality, temperamentally suited to this sort of rough and tumble competition, and it damages her, particularly in her own feelings.” And it makes her frigid, besides: “Challenging men on every hand, refusing any longer to play even a relatively submissive role, multitudes of women found their capacity for sexual gratification dwindling.”9 In the ensuing decade, Dr. Farnham, who earned her MD from the University of Minnesota and did postgraduate work at Harvard Medical School, made a career out of telling women not to have careers. Wasn’t she worried about becoming frigid and damaging her fundamental instinctual strivings?
The sheriff’s department in Kern County, California, arrested a retired high-school principal, Patrick Dunn, on suspicion of the murder of his wife. They interviewed two people who told conflicting stories. One was a woman who had no criminal record and no personal incentive to lie about the suspect, and who had calendars and her boss to back up her account of events. The other was a career criminal facing six years in prison, who had offered to incriminate Dunn as part of a deal with prosecutors, and who offered nothing to support his story except his word for it. The detectives had to choose between believing the woman (and in Dunn’s innocence), or the criminal (and in Dunn’s guilt). They chose to believe the criminal.10 Why?
By understanding the inner workings of self-justification, we can answer these questions and make sense of dozens of other things that people do that would otherwise seem unfathomable or crazy. We can answer the question so many people ask when they look at ruthless dictators, greedy corporate CEOs, religious zealots who murder in the name of God, priests who molest children, or people who cheat their siblings out of a family inheritance: How in the world can they live with themselves? The answer is: exactly the way the rest of us do.
Self-justification has costs and benefits. By itself, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. It lets us sleep at night. Without it, we would prolong the awful pangs of embarrassment. We would torture ourselves with regret over the road not taken or over how badly we navigated the road we did take. We would agonize in the aftermath of almost every decision: Did we do the right thing, marry the right person, buy the right house, choose the best car, enter the right career? Yet mindless self-justification, like quicksand, can draw us deeper into disaster. It blocks our ability to even see our errors, let alone correct them. It distorts reality, keeping us from getting all the information