Mistakes Were Made - Carol Tavris [49]
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It is painful to admit this, but when the McMartin story first hit the news, the two of us, independently, were inclined to believe that the preschool teachers were guilty. Not knowing the details of the allegations, we mindlessly accepted the “where there’s smoke, there’s fire” cliché; as scientists, we should have known better. When, months after the trial ended, the full story came out—about the emotionally disturbed mother who made the first accusation and whose charges became crazier and crazier until even the prosecutors stopped paying attention to her; about how the children had been coerced over many months to “tell” by zealous social workers on a moral crusade; about how the children’s stories became increasingly outlandish—we felt foolish and embarrassed that we had sacrificed our scientific skepticism on the altar of outrage. Our initial gullibility caused us plenty of dissonance, and it still does. But our dissonance is nothing compared to that of the people who were personally involved or who took a public stand, including the many psychotherapists, psychiatrists, and social workers who considered themselves skilled clinicians and advocates for children’s rights.
None of us likes learning that we were wrong, that our memories are distorted or confabulated, or that we made an embarrassing professional mistake. For people in any of the healing professions, the stakes are especially high. If you hold a set of beliefs that guide your practice and you learn that some of them are mistaken, you must either admit you were wrong and change your approach, or reject the new evidence. If the mistakes are not too threatening to your view of your competence and if you have not taken a public stand defending them, you will probably willingly change your approach, grateful to have a better one. But if some of those mistaken beliefs have made your client’s problems worse, torn up your client’s family, or sent innocent people to prison, then you, like Grace’s therapist, will have serious dissonance to resolve.
It’s the Semmelweiss dilemma that we described in the introduction. Why didn’t his colleagues tell him, “Say, Ignac, thank you so much for finding the reason for the tragic, unnecessary deaths of our patients”? For these physicians to have accepted his simple, life-saving intervention—wash your hands—they would have had to admit that they had been the cause of the deaths of all those women in their care. This was an intolerable realization, for it went straight to the heart of the physicians’ view of themselves as medical experts and wise healers; and so, in essence, they told Semmelweiss to get lost and take his stupid ideas with him. Because their stubborn refusal to accept Semmelweiss’s evidence—the lower death rate among his own patients—happened long before the era of malpractice suits, we can say with assurance that they were acting out of a need to protect their egos, not their income. Medicine has advanced since their day, but the need for self-justification hasn’t budged.
Most occupations are ultimately, if slowly, self-improving and self-correcting. If you are a physician today, you wash your hands and you wear latex gloves, and if you forget, your colleagues, nurses, or patients will remind you. If you run a toy company and make a mistake in predicting that your new doll will outsell Barbie, the market will let you know. If you are a scientist, you can’t fake the data on your cloned sheep and then try to pull the wool over your colleagues’ eyes; the first lab that cannot replicate your results will race to tell the world. If you are an experimental psychologist and make a mistake in the design of your experiment or analysis of results, your colleagues and critics will be eager to inform you, the rest of the scientific