Mistakes Were Made - Carol Tavris [5]
None of us can live without making blunders. But we do have the ability to say: “This is not working out here. This is not making sense.” To err is human, but humans then have a choice between covering up or fessing up. The choice we make is crucial to what we do next. We are forever being told that we should learn from our mistakes, but how can we learn unless we first admit that we made any? To do that, we have to recognize the siren song of self-justification. In the next chapter, we will discuss cognitive dissonance, the hardwired psychological mechanism that creates self-justification and protects our certainties, self-esteem, and tribal affiliations. In the chapters that follow, we will elaborate on the most harmful consequences of self-justification: how it exacerbates prejudice and corruption, distorts memory, turns professional confidence into arrogance, creates and perpetuates injustice, warps love, and generates feuds and rifts.
The good news is that by understanding how this mechanism works, we can defeat the wiring. Accordingly, in the final chapter, we will step back and see what solutions emerge for ourselves as individuals, for our relationships, for society. Understanding is the first step toward finding solutions that will lead to change and redemption. That is why we wrote this book.
Chapter 1
Cognitive Dissonance: The Engine of Self-justification
Press release date: November 1,1993
WE DIDN’T MAKE A MISTAKE when we wrote in our previous releases that New York would be destroyed on September 4 and October 14, 1993. We didn’t make a mistake, not even a teeny eeny one!
Press release date: April 4,1994
All the dates we have given in our past releases are correct dates given by God as contained in Holy Scriptures. Not one of these dates was wrong … Ezekiel gives a total of 430 days for the siege of the city…[which] brings us exactly to May 2,1994. By now, all the people have been forewarned. We have done our job….
We are the only ones in the entire world guiding the people to their safety, security, and salvation!
We have a 100 percent track record!1
IT’S FASCINATING, AND SOMETIMES funny, to read doomsday predictions, but it’s even more fascinating to watch what happens to the reasoning of true believers when the prediction flops and the world keeps muddling along. Notice that hardly anyone ever says, “I blew it! I can’t believe how stupid I was to believe that nonsense”? On the contrary, most of the time they become even more deeply convinced of their powers of prediction. The people who believe that the Bible’s book of Revelation or the writings of the sixteenth-century self-proclaimed prophet Nostradamus have predicted every disaster from the bubonic plague to 9/11 cling to their convictions, unfazed by the small problem that their vague and murky predictions were intelligible only after the event occurred.
Half a century ago, a young social psychologist named Leon Festinger and two associates infiltrated a group of people who believed the world would end on December 21.2 They wanted to know what would happen to the group when (they hoped!) the prophecy failed. The group’s leader, whom the researchers called Marian Keech, promised that the faithful would be picked up by a flying saucer and elevated to safety at midnight on December 20. Many of her followers quit their jobs, gave away their homes, and dispersed their savings, waiting for the end. Who needs money in outer space? Others waited in fear or resignation in their homes. (Mrs. Keech’s own husband, a nonbeliever, went to bed early and slept soundly through the night as his wife and her followers prayed in the living room.) Festinger made his own prediction: The believers