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when a memo surfaced dated August 6, 2001, entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” Reading the memo in hindsight is eerie, with references to hijacked planes, bombing the World Trade Center, and attacks on Washington, D.C., and the Los Angeles International Airport. But if you read it in a pre-9/11 mind-set, and in the context of the hundreds of intel memos tracking the various comings and goings and potential targets of al-Qaeda—an international organization operating in dozens of countries and targeting numerous American embassies, military bases, navy ships, and the like—it is not at all clear when, where, or if such attacks might happen. Think about the hindsight bias in today’s context in which we know with near certainty that al-Qaeda will strike again, but we lack the information to know where and when and how they will attack. This leads us to defend against the last attack.

Self-Justification Bias

This heuristic is related to the hindsight bias. The self-justification bias is the tendency to rationalize decisions after the fact to convince ourselves that what we did was the best thing we could have done. Once we make a decision about something in our lives we carefully screen subsequent data and filter out all contradictory information related to that decision, leaving only evidence in support of the choice we made. This bias applies to everything from career and job choices to mundane purchases. One of the practical benefits of self-justification is that no matter what decision we make—to take this or that job, to marry this or that person, to purchase this or that product—we will almost always be satisfied with the decision, even when the objective evidence is to the contrary.

This process of cherry-picking the data happens at even the highest levels of expert assessment. Political scientist Philip Tetlock, for example, in his book Expert Political Judgment, reviewed the evidence for the ability of professional experts in politics and economics to make accurate predictions and assessments. He found that even though all of them claimed to have data in support of their positions, when analyzed after the fact such expert opinions and predictions turned out to be no better than those of nonexperts—or even chance. Yet, as the self-justification heuristic would predict, experts are significantly less likely to admit that they are wrong than nonexperts.11 Or as I like to say, smart people believe weird things because they are better at rationalizing their beliefs that they hold for nonsmart reasons.

As we saw in the previous chapter, politics is filled with self-justifying rationalizations. Democrats see the world through liberal-tinted glasses, while Republicans filter it through conservative-shaded lenses. When you listen to both “conservative talk radio” and “progressive talk radio” you will hear current events interpreted in ways that are 180 degrees out of phase. So incongruent are the interpretations of even the simplest goings-on in the daily news that you wonder if they can possibly be talking about the same event. Social psychologist Geoffrey Cohen quantified this effect in a study in which he discovered that Democrats are more accepting of a welfare program if they believe it was proposed by a fellow Democrat, even if the proposal came from a Republican and is quite restrictive. Predictably, Cohen found the same effect for Republicans, who were far more likely to approve of a generous welfare program if they thought it was proposed by a fellow Republican.12 In other words, even when examining the exact same data people from both parties arrive at radically different conclusions.

A very disturbing real-world example of the self-justification heuristic can be seen in the criminal justice system. According to Northwestern University law professor Rob Warden,

You get in the system and you become very cynical. People are lying to you all over the place. Then you develop a theory of the crime, and it leads to what we call tunnel vision. Years later overwhelming evidence comes out that the guy was