Why Is It So Hard to Admit You Were Wrong？
Episode Stats
Summary
The ability to own up to one s mistakes is a foundational element of character. It's also the only way we can grow and get better. But as anyone with any experience being human well understands, man, it can sure be hard to do. My guest, Elliot Aronson, explains why and how you can yet rise to meet this important challenge.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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Personal responsibility, the ability to own up to one's mistakes is a foundational element
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of character. It's also the only way we can grow and get better. But as anyone with any
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experience being human well understands, man, it can sure be hard to do. My guest day explains why
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and how you can yet rise to meet this important challenge. His name is Elliot Aronson. He's a
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social psychologist and the co-author of Mistakes Were Made, but not by me. Why we justify foolish
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beliefs, bad decisions, and hurtful acts. Elliot first explains how and why we engage in self-justification
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to avoid facing our mistakes and how this process is driven by the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance.
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We then discuss how once you make a decision in a certain direction, good or bad, become more
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entrenched in your attitude about it and more likely to continue down that same path and how this
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phenomenon represents what Elliot calls the pyramid of choice. And we end our conversation with how
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we can learn to approach the mistakes of others with more generosity and our own mistakes with more
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honesty. After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash mistakes.
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So you are one of the authors of a book called Mistakes Were Made,
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But Not My Me, Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts. And it's all about
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why it's so hard to admit that we're wrong, we've made a mistake. What got you studying this drain of
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thought in psychology? Well, I've been researching the whole issue of how the human mind works and
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especially how it works to form attitudes and opinions. I've been doing that for more than 65
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years, ever since I started graduate school 65 years ago. And it's an exciting area because it's
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terribly important to know how it works in terms of forming opinions and forming attitudes toward a
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wide variety of things. Some of the opinions and attitudes we form are accurate and useful to
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ourselves and to the people around us. And others are inaccurate or not useful and sometimes even
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destructive. And there are certain tricks that the mind plays on us that we'll get into, I guess,
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in the course of this interview, that with some of the research we've done, we've been able to find
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the conditions under which people can process information in a reasonable way and the conditions
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under which they can't. Now, in the past 15 years or so, I have gotten specifically interested
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on the issue of mistakes and how people handle mistakes, whether they double down and convince
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themselves that they were right all the time and all they have to do is push a little harder or whether
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they can own up to having made a mistake, back off and try a different tack. There's a wonderful parable
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from Eastern philosophy about a wealthy and powerful man from Europe who was terribly unhappy. His marriage of 35
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years was falling apart. His grown children hated him and feared him. His employees were frightened of
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him. And he was just incredibly unhappy. And so he decided to go to India to visit the person that's considered
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the wisest guru in the world. And he went through all these hardships and he climbed a mountain to get to the
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cave where the cave where the guru lives. And the guru was not only the wisest person on earth, but also
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a very quiet guy who hardly ever spoke a word. And he came to the guru who was sitting in front of his
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cave and he said, oh, wise guru, what is the secret to happiness? And the guru said, good judgment.
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And the guy says, wow, good judgment. Okay. Wait a minute. How do you arrive at good judgment? And the guru
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looked down at the ground and looked up at the sky and stroked his beard and said, bad judgment.
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Now, that's very wise advice, except if you're unable to own up to your mistakes, then you will never
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learn from them. And so bad judgment only works as a way to get to good judgment if you can recognize
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your mistakes, change your behavior, and keep monitoring your behavior until you get it right.
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And then bad judgment does indeed lead to good judgment. But unless we can do that,
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unless we can own up and recognize mistakes when we make them, we're in serious trouble.
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Well, and you call this inability to own up mistakes self-justification. And there's varying
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degrees of self-justification. There's small ones we do on a day-to-day basis, and there's ones
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that are even bigger. But just on a day-to-day basis, where do we see self-justification happen?
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Any bad habit that we have, if we have a hard time breaking it, we can convince ourselves that
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it might not be such a bad habit. And as a matter of fact, it might really be good for us. If you take
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something like smoking, suppose I smoke two packs of cigarettes, and then I get some information that
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indicates that smoking may cause cancer or heart disease or all kinds of illnesses. But I've tried
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to quit smoking, and I find it difficult to do. I might then try to convince myself that actually,
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when I smoke, I'm not eating dessert, and therefore, I'm not becoming obese. And obesity is a health
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problem as well. And therefore, I'm actually ahead of the game by smoking. Or I can look around and I see
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that my Uncle Charlie, who's 85 years old and smokes a pack a day, is still alive. And therefore, it certainly
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doesn't kill everybody. Therefore, it might not kill me. Or I might even say out loud to myself, I'd rather
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live a slightly shorter life and do the kind of things I want to do than lead a restricted life where
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I can't enjoy a good smoke every now and then. All of those things are good ways to justify the fact
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that we don't want to give up smoking. But it could be very important. It could cost us our lives.
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It sounds like Aesop's fable of the fox and the sour grapes. It sort of is that. It's like,
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well, I didn't want those grapes anyway. They were terrible.
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Yeah. If you can't do something, then it makes you feel better about yourself. Because here's the
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thing. The reason I call it self-justification is that most people consider themselves to be better
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than average on a few basic things like intelligence, like competence, and like morality.
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If you did a survey of 100,000 people, you would find that 85 to 95% of them consider themselves to be
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better than average on all three of those dimensions. Now, as you know, no more than 50 or 55% of the world
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can be better than average. But people do believe they're better than average. So if I, as a better
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than average intelligent person, do something stupid, I'm threatened with the notion that I did something
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stupid. And that means that I may be stupid. And therefore, I will try to convince myself that it's
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not a stupid thing to do. If I do something that's incompetent or immoral, I will try to convince myself
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that it wasn't my fault, that the other person deserved the bad thing I did to him or her. We've seen
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people do this over and over again. And in a way that is forgetting the legal aspects of these things. It is a way
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a person has of maintaining the belief that he or she is smart, capable, and moral, even when they do
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something that might be stupid, incapable, or immoral.
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Well, and so it's going back to this tension between what people think about themselves and then
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the things that they do that go against that idea they have in their head. This tension
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is called cognitive dissonance, and you call it the engine of self-justification. So can you flesh
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out cognitive dissonance more? Is it just tension? Is it just that tension between what you think you
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are and what you do? Well, actually, the way Leon Festinger, who invented the theory
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some 70 years ago, the way he defined it was that any two cognitions, ideas, beliefs, etc.,
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that don't fit together, that where the one implies the opposite of the other, produces cognitive
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dissonance. And cognitive dissonance is an unpleasant drive state, a little bit like extreme
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hunger or extreme thirst, where you need to reduce it, except it takes place in the head.
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And it operates, often dissonance reduction operates at a level just below our level of
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awareness. So we don't say to ourselves, oh, I'm feeling dissonance. I think I'll reduce a little
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dissonance right now. No, we do it reflexively and unconsciously. It's universal. We've done research,
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in all areas of the world. Every country in the world, people experience cognitive dissonance.
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It's unconscious. And it can be, it can cause people a lot of problems. On the surface,
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it can be harmless. And most of the time, it is harmless. It does have one great advantage.
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If we make an error or do an embarrassing thing or do something that's a little bit stupid,
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it helps us sleep at night if we can convince ourselves that it wasn't our fault and that it
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wasn't as stupid as most people think it is, etc. And if we can do that for the small things,
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it does help us sleep at night. And it does reduce embarrassment and reduce feelings of
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that we're not worth much. And to a large extent, that is a good thing. But when it becomes extreme,
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it can cause a great deal of harm to ourselves and the people around us.
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Well, an extreme example that you give, I think it really highlights what cognitive dissonance is,
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and you talk about in the book, are doomsday believers, right? People who belong to groups
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who believe the end of the world is coming at a certain point. And then that day comes and then
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nothing happens. So there's cognitive dissonance there. It's like, well, it didn't happen.
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How do people often adjust to that or resolve the dissonance there?
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Well, they do try. They could say to themselves, oh, I did the math wrong. I got the dates wrong. I added,
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you know, the calendar years minus the square root of pi or something like that. And it didn't come
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out quite right. It's not this month, it's next month that it's going to happen. And indeed, in one
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piece of research that we did, we found that people who were predicting the end of the Earth on midnight
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of a particular night, a spaceship was supposed to come and deliver them to another planet where they
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would be safe because the Earth was supposed to explode. And these people gave away all their
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money because you don't need money on another planet. They sold their houses, gave away the
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money for the houses. They gave away their cars. They gave away everything they owned. And then they
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were waiting out in this particular backyard of Mrs. Keech's house. Mrs. Keech was the leader of this
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group for the spaceship to arrive. And when it didn't arrive, they got increasingly uncomfortable
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until Mrs. Keech had another vision where she heard the people from outer space saying that
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because that band of people were so loyal and were so believing that they decided to spare the Earth
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after all. So they all celebrated rather than saying, oh, damn, we made a terrible mistake. We gave away
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all our money. Instead of cursing themselves for having been duped, they then went out and started
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to proselytize other people to join their cult, their cult that failed. But in their minds, they said,
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we were a great success. We saved the Earth from destruction. And prior to the disconfirmation of
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their belief, prior to the fact that the Earth didn't come to an end when they said it would,
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they never tried to proselytize new members to join their group. But immediately afterwards,
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they went around on street corners. They buttonholed people, tried to convince them to join their group
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because whatever dissonance they might have had would be diminished if they could convince other people
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that their belief was right. And in the book, you talk about how self-justification
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through cognitive dissonance, this doesn't happen overnight. It's often, I mean, it could
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happen overnight, but usually it's a very slow process that you take step by step. Like, I mean,
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have you done the research, like how long does it usually take or is it different for every type of
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circumstance or situation? Sometimes it occurs almost immediately. Sometimes it occurs step by step.
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It depends on how difficult the situation is. For example, in one experiment that I helped design
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by my colleague, Judd Mills, he found that you give people a personality test in which there are
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several questions about misdeeds. And one of the misdeeds is cheating on an exam. These are college
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students and you ask them, how would you rate cheating on a scale of one to 10 in terms of how
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bad it is, okay? And you give that to hundreds of students. And then an exam comes up. I'll give you
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this in hypothetical terms. Suppose an exam comes up and you are a biology major and you want to go to
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medical school and you're in the beginning of your senior year and you know that this particular exam
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is really important and it's going to determine whether you get into medical school or not.
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And you study hard and you think you know the stuff, but when you come into the exam room,
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you completely pull a blank and you can't understand any of the questions, let alone answer them.
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And you're devastated. You break into a cold sweat and your hands are shaking. And then you look up and
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you see that you happen to be sitting behind the person who's the smartest person in class and has
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the clearest, largest handwriting you ever saw. And all you have to do is look over her shoulder and
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copy from her exam. The question is, do you do it or don't you do it? Either way, this is a difficult
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decision. Either way, you're going to experience dissonance. If you cheat, cheating is a bad thing
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to do. You consider yourself an immoral person. You consider yourself a moral person. If you cheat,
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it can be devastating. A lot of dissonance there. If you don't cheat, you really want to go to medical
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school. You want to be a doctor and you have an opportunity to do it. The cognition, I want to go to
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medical school is distant with the cognition. I had a chance to go to medical school if I cheated and I
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didn't do it. Okay, so either way, you experience cognitive dissonance. Now, the interesting question
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is, if you cheat or if you don't cheat, what happens to your attitude toward cheating? And what Mills found
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is, those who cheated on an exam move their attitude tremendously in the direction of saying
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that cheating isn't so bad. If at first they thought, it's a crime, all right, and people
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shouldn't do it, and it's a bad thing to do because you're keeping, you're getting a grade that you don't
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deserve, they move toward saying, ah, it's really nothing. Everybody does it. If I didn't do it,
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it would be, I'd be very foolish. Why not do it? But if you resisted the temptation to cheat,
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then you convince yourself that cheating is a really terrible crime. People who cheat should be
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summarily expelled from the university and should never be allowed to come back again. The attitudes
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shift depending upon which choice they took. And the choice of these two people, their attitudes
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initially could have been a hair's breadth apart. They could have been almost identical,
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but one decided to cheat and the other decided not to cheat. And by within a week or two,
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they have succeeded in convincing themselves that either cheating is the worst thing that you could
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have done or no problem at all. So it sounds like the next time the person who did decide to cheat,
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they were faced with the opportunity to cheat, they'd probably be more likely to cheat again because
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they've realized, oh, it's not that bad. The person who cheated the first time is more apt to cheat the
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second time. The person who resisted the temptation could be standing on street corners telling people
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how terrible cheating is. Everything is done to justify the action that is taken.
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And the more difficult the action, the more likely it is that you're going to seek
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to confirm the wisdom of your choice in order to protect your ego, in order to reduce the dissonance.
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Well, let me make sure I understand dissonance theory. Is there two ways to resolve dissonance?
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One way would be to, okay, if you made a mistake, do the thing to correct the mistake. Because then
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you say, well, now I did something that went against my sense of self. I'm going to correct
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it. That'll resolve the dissonance. That's hard, though. No one wants to do that. So the easier way
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to do it is just change your cognition about your behavior. So you're like, well, it's not as bad.
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That's exactly right, Brett. And the interesting thing, though, is you can reduce the dissonance
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for a particular act by changing your attitude toward that action. If you reduce it toward,
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if you're inclined not to do that, but to say, what kind of a person am I that did that?
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There is a way out. And the way out that I offer people, and this may be our, in writing that book,
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may be our most important contribution, to be able to say, you know, I cheated this time.
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And because it was really important, I really needed to get into medical school. But I am not
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a cheater. Cheating, I still think cheating is bad. And I did it. And I feel bad about that.
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But that's not who I am. I did it this time. I will, I promise myself, I'll never do it again.
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Now, that can be done glibly. Hey, I cheated and so what? I'm not going to do that anymore. Or it can
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be done really by staying on the hook for a while, by living with the dissonance, and then making a
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resolution that you really intend to stick to, not to let that happen, not to slide down that pyramid.
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You see, the metaphor we use is of a pyramid, where if you can picture in your mind, a pyramid
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sort of like an isosceles, equilateral triangle, where the person who has an attitude toward cheating
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in this case, or anything, but let's say cheating in this case, is standing at the very tip of that
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pyramid, where he's sort of in between. He thinks cheating is a bad thing, but there are worse things
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in the world, of course. Once he makes the decision to cheat, he starts sliding down the right-hand side
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of that pyramid until he hits the bottom, which is at the floor level, which is far apart from the
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point at the left-hand side. So his attitude toward cheating is shifting to become, if he didn't cheat,
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it's becoming more and more toward seeing cheating as a terrible thing. If he did cheat, he's sliding
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down the left-hand side, and his attitude is becoming more toward seeing cheating as not such a bad
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thing. As a matter of fact, everybody does it. So that metaphor of the pyramid of choice, we call it,
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is what people generally do. However, with a lot of effort, you can say to yourself,
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I did this terrible thing, and it is a terrible thing, and I'm never going to do it again. And you
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actually reduce dissonance by forming in your mind the notion that you're the kind of person
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who can recover from this bad behavior. Yeah, that idea of the pyramid is interesting because
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it really illustrates this idea that distance can create sort of this vicious cycle, right? As soon
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as you make that, like you talk about bowling, kids who bully a kid, well, they start thinking,
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well, I bully the kid because he deserved it. And then it just perpetuates more bowling. I think you
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also talked about people who lose weight, like a lot of weight, tend to be, there's like dissonance
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there. They tend to actually end up being harsher sometimes to overweight people. Yeah, yeah. People
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who almost live in glass houses are the first ones to throw stones because they see what they could
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have been like if they didn't try a little harder. So they're very tough on people who they think
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aren't trying hard enough. But what was the first example you gave? Because the bowling one. So it's
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like, you know, like, yeah, you know, for, for a hundred years, people believed the Freudian notion
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that if you aggress against somebody that has a cathartic outcome. In other words, you get it off
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your chest, you yell and scream, maybe even throw a punch at the person, and that gets it out of your
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system. And then you can go on your merry way. It turns out that what distance theory predicts is
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exactly, exactly the opposite, that hatred breeds aggression, and aggression produces more hatred, which
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leads to more aggression, so that it is a vicious circle. The more we do a thing, if you bully a nerdy kid,
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and, and then you'd say to yourself, you did it because you went along with the gang, and they were all
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doing it, and you didn't want to be a different kind of person, so you went along with it. You bully that
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kid, and then you feel bad about it. You're saying, why did I do that? And you say, ah, that son of a bitch, he
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really deserved it. He is a real jerk, and boy, if the shoe were on the other foot, he would have bullied
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me too, so I don't feel so bad about it. And then you hate him even more than you did before you bullied
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him. And that's a number of experiments, some by my own students, showing exactly that effect. If you get
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a person in trouble, and maybe cost him his job, because we set up an experiment where a person behind
00:25:33.420
the counter said something snide to the people in the experiment, and then they, they either had an
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opportunity to get him in trouble with his boss, which they took, or they didn't have that opportunity.
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And if they got him into trouble with his boss, and he got fired for it, as part of the scenario that
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we cooked up, they ended up hating him more than they did if they didn't get him into trouble. It's
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a very powerful effect. We're going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.
00:26:05.500
And now back to the show. So another example where you see this dynamic play out is in breakups or
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divorce. In a breakup or divorce, a lot of pain, you're hurting, your spouse is hurting, the kids
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are hurting. So you start thinking to yourself, man, am I doing the right thing? Is this worth it?
00:26:21.100
So there's some cognitive dissonance there. And in order to resolve that dissonance, what a lot of
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people end up doing is they start demonizing their soon to be former partner and start thinking,
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yeah, this person's so terrible. If you look back at our 10 years of marriage, here's all the terrible
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things they did that led up to this divorce. Yeah, this is the right thing to do. So you start sliding
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down that side of the triangle of personal choice where this person who you once loved, who you thought
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had enough redeeming qualities to marry them and be with, spend the rest of your life with them.
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They're now like the spawn of Satan. And so you start thinking, this is the right choice.
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I'm doing the right thing. And this is a big factor in why a lot of breakups or divorce can
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be so acrimonious. And this sort of scenario is related to another part of self-justification,
00:27:03.680
and that's memory. So I think the way we typically think of how memory working is that, okay, when we
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have a memory, it's just a snapshot in time. We see things exactly how it happened. But that's not how
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memory works. How memory really works is that we're weaving together different pieces that are all
00:27:18.740
different parts of our brain. And in that weaving process, we start to slowly change things to suit
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the perspective that we want to hold at this current moment.
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Often they get changed innocently, but you're quite right, Brett. People often think of memory as if
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there's a hidden tape recorder in our brain somewhere that has conversations down exactly,
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and who came to what party, and who gave what Christmas present, etc. It's not true.
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Memory, all memories are constructed, and we piece things together to try to remember them
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accurately. But memory is what we call it our own built-in self-serving historian, because
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memories are distorted in a direction that helps us continue to maintain the self-concept of someone
00:28:11.820
who is smart, competent, and moral. And so, in our memories, we often come out on top. We often come
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out as the injured party who was doing the right thing, and the other person did something terrible
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to us. And the memory, it can be very slight, but the distortion might tip the balance away from
00:28:36.200
reality as God sees it, where both people were a little bit at fault, and it tips it into a sort of
00:28:43.400
a 60-40 or 70-30 fault-finding situation. And that's what memory does for us.
00:28:50.040
Yeah, going back to the marriage, once you're in that divorce mode, you look back at the marriage,
00:28:54.360
and instead of thinking, before you never would have thought about those events in the past as having
00:28:58.880
any negative connotation. But then you look back, like, oh, wait, that thing that she did or he did
00:29:04.680
10 years ago, that foretold what was happening now, and I knew it all along.
00:29:09.900
You dredge up the memories, and you put a little extra twist on it to make it a little bit worse
00:29:17.000
Yeah. Yeah, and I think we do that, too. I mean, I think we've all encountered that,
00:29:20.460
where you retell a story to some friends, and then your wife's like, wait a minute,
00:29:27.040
Exactly. Exactly right. And sometimes it's, you know, often, most often, it's purely innocent.
00:29:32.600
It's just forgetting. But often, it's motivated. I mean, it's still, it's obviously below the level
00:29:40.500
of consciousness. You're not intentionally distorting your memory, but it's self-serving in some way.
00:29:46.640
Or you see this, too, when people have, like, big life changes, right? And so, then they're
00:29:51.880
retelling their story, and they may tell the story in a way where, like, the before them
00:29:57.180
was that you could already see the seeds of their change happening. I mean, I've seen this happen
00:30:02.320
with people who, you know, decide to not go to church anymore, lose their faith, or whatever.
00:30:07.060
And when I knew them, they were, like, really into it. Like, really, really into it.
00:30:11.700
But then, when they tell the story, they start telling the story, well, you know, all along,
00:30:16.140
I knew I wasn't into this, and this wasn't right, and I was on my way out.
00:30:19.700
And then you're like, well, I don't know. It seems like you're pretty into it. What changed?
00:30:25.340
That happens a lot. And we've got good data on that. For example, you know, when George W. Bush
00:30:32.400
decided to go to war in Iraq, and he did it because he really did believe, I'm sure, that Saddam Hussein
00:30:40.400
had weapons of mass destruction, and he needed to be taken down. Almost everybody in this country
00:30:47.540
was in favor of the war, 80% or so. And even Democrats, I think 70%, somewhere around 70% of
00:30:57.140
Democrats were in favor of the war. After the war turned out to be a disaster, and there turned out
00:31:04.980
to be no weapons of mass destruction, and it sort of went on and on and on.
00:31:12.060
And if you ask Democrats, they said, oh, no, only 30% said they believed they were in favor
00:31:20.660
of the war at the time that Bush went to war. But in reality, it was a good deal more than
00:31:26.920
that, more than twice as many. And I don't think they were lying to the interviewer. I think
00:31:34.160
Right. It's trying to resolve the dissonance, because it's uncomfortable.
00:31:37.060
Well, so we're talking about sort of small level dissonance, like on our personal lives
00:31:41.960
and our marriages. But you also talk about how dissonance can show up in our justice system.
00:31:47.660
And this interests me, because I remember in law school, learning about this idea that
00:31:51.440
with the prosecutors who wrongfully convict somebody, or really go hard to try to convict
00:31:57.200
somebody, when it turns out that this person who was wrongfully convicted is exonerated through
00:32:02.680
DNA evidence, or something like that, oftentimes the prosecutor's like, no, no, still guilty,
00:32:07.680
definitely guilty. And you're like, what is going on there? Like, the DNA says, did not
00:32:12.120
Yeah. And the same prosecutor who would have accepted the DNA evidence as being exonerative,
00:32:21.780
in other words, somebody gets raped, a guy rapes a woman, and DNA evidence shows up. And if
00:32:30.080
there's evidence that shows that somebody else did it, not the one that they are accusing,
00:32:35.000
the prosecutor will accept that evidence and will not go to trial. But once he's convicted the guy,
00:32:43.320
the same DNA evidence can show up, and he will not accept it. Now, why is that? And, you know,
00:32:52.420
here's the interesting thing in my own mind, for me. I'm convinced that he does it not because he's an
00:33:02.940
evil guy who simply wants to get a conviction and wants to keep that conviction. I think it's because
00:33:10.280
he believes himself to be a good guy, and a competent guy, and a moral guy. And let's say
00:33:18.380
that this guy, who is supposed to have committed a rape and a murder, has been languishing in prison
00:33:26.880
for 15 years. The prosecuting attorney, then some evidence shows up, DNA evidence that indicates that
00:33:35.020
it wasn't, didn't belong to that guy. And the guy has been, has been protesting his innocence for 15
00:33:41.900
years. Many prosecutors will refuse to accept that evidence because they think they're a good guy.
00:33:50.500
And a good guy like me and a competent prosecutor like me would not send the wrong guy to prison.
00:33:58.280
And because he doesn't want to, he doesn't want to believe that he could have sent the wrong guy to
00:34:02.880
prison for 15 years, he keeps him in prison for another 15 years. And that's the irony and the
00:34:10.240
tragedy of that kind of situation. There are exceptions to this. And in our book, we talk about
00:34:16.380
a guy named Thomas Baines, who was so sure that this guy, this guy that he convicted,
00:34:26.000
who was in prison for 15 years, and Baines, and he kept, the guy kept begging for them to look at the
00:34:32.860
DNA evidence. And Baines was so sure that this guy was just a pain in the neck. And he said, okay,
00:34:38.980
let's look this over, and found it. And the guy was right. And Baines apologized, released him. And that
00:34:49.040
took an awful lot of moral courage on his part. Because for the most part, the people, if the
00:34:56.880
prosecutor who is presented with the DNA evidence 15 years later is the same prosecutor who convicted
00:35:05.740
the guy, that prosecutor will be very resistant to owning up to the fact that he sent the wrong
00:35:14.580
So how do you, I think we've kind of talked about a little bit, some ways to get out of this
00:35:18.520
dissonance. But I mean, what have, can we maybe articulate this at the end? Like, what can people do to
00:35:23.780
start avoiding self-justification and actually learning from their bad, bad judgment?
00:35:29.640
I think what you have, I mean, it's hard to talk in generalities here. I can just give you an example
00:35:38.540
from my own life. When I was the chairman of a psychology department, we used to have these
00:35:44.800
meetings, the problem-solving meetings with the faculty. And there was one guy, a member of my
00:35:51.660
faculty, who I really thought was an idiot. And I didn't like him very much for a number of reasons.
00:35:56.880
And we were trying to solve this problem. And he came up with an idea. And I saw some flaws in the
00:36:02.700
idea. And I was about to shoot it down. And I remember this so vividly, I stopped myself, I opened
00:36:09.400
my mouth. And I said, Oh, never mind. And then I thought about it. I said, I said to myself, in effect,
00:36:16.580
are you, are you going to shoot his idea down because you don't like the guy or because the idea is
00:36:21.320
really lousy? What if, and I thought about another person in the room, what if he came up with that
00:36:27.840
idea? Would you treat it more gently? And I had to come to the conclusion that I was going to shoot
00:36:34.940
down a pretty good idea that could be, it wasn't perfect, but it could be used as a model. We could
00:36:41.020
build on it. I had to come to the conclusion that even this idiot could have come up with a good idea.
00:36:47.380
And I better stop judging the idea as bad because I don't like the guy who gave it. And I remember
00:36:55.440
the feeling of huge exhilaration when I was able to separate these two things. And then later,
00:37:04.200
when I was researching the book, I found a beautiful example of someone who did this.
00:37:11.000
When Shimon Peres was prime minister of Israel, he and Ronald Reagan, who was president of the United
00:37:18.380
States at that time, had a very close personal relationship, as well as very, very good connection
00:37:25.180
of the two countries. And at one point, Ronald Reagan accepted an invitation to go to the Bitburg
00:37:32.040
Cemetery in Germany to lay wreaths on the graves of some of the soldiers who died in World War II.
00:37:39.100
But buried in that cemetery were members of the Waffen SS, which was an incredibly vicious
00:37:47.300
anti-Semitic group of soldiers who committed really horrendous crimes against innocent civilians.
00:37:58.620
And Perez pleaded with Reagan not to go to that cemetery. But Reagan had already committed himself
00:38:06.980
to go, and so he went. And then reporters asked Perez, well, how do you feel about what Reagan just did?
00:38:17.160
And Perez said, when a friend makes a mistake, the friend remains a friend, and the mistake remains a mistake.
00:38:29.380
And I read that, and I said, oh my God, this guy has found the way to do it. You keep those cognitions
00:38:39.500
separate. The friend and the mistake. See, the easy way to reduce dissonance is to either say, well,
00:38:47.760
that son of a bitch is no friend of mine. Or to say, well, you know, Ron is a really nice guy.
00:38:55.280
I really like him. Maybe it's not such a bad thing to lay wreaths on the graves of these people.
00:39:00.880
No. Perez chose to live with the dissonance. The friend remains a friend. The mistake remains a
00:39:09.800
mistake. And I think that is the way that, one way that each of us has to live with it. We have to
00:39:17.700
allow ourselves to experience the dissonance that a really good friend can do an awful thing.
00:39:23.520
And even I can do an awful thing. I mean, here's dissonance between two things. But most of the
00:39:31.860
most powerful dissonance is when I do something bad. So if I do something really terrible, can I
00:39:38.840
forgive myself? Yes. But the statement I make in the book is, it should not come too easily. We can't
00:39:47.540
be glib about it. We can't simply say, oh yeah, I cheated on an exam and so what, everybody does it.
00:39:52.900
No. You have to say, it was an awful thing I did. And I really don't ever want to do that again. I'm
00:39:59.080
going to try hard not to do it again. But I did it. And I did it for a reason. And here's the key
00:40:06.140
thing. Just because I cheated, that's not necessarily make me a cheater. The thing that keeps us reducing
00:40:15.460
dissonance is to come up with a false belief that if you lie once, you're a liar. If you cheat once,
00:40:24.280
you're a cheater. No. A perfectly reasonable person, a perfectly honest person can once in 10 years tell
00:40:34.440
a serious lie. It doesn't make him a liar. Yeah. So if you think that one mistake makes you a bad
00:40:40.420
person, you don't want to bring that verdict upon yourself. So what you're going to try to do to
00:40:44.500
reduce the dissonance is say, oh, it wasn't a mistake or I was justified in doing what I did.
00:40:50.120
But instead of doing that, what you can do instead is say, yes, I made a mistake. Doesn't mean I'm a bad
00:40:55.280
person, but I do need to own up to this mistake. I got to try to correct it. Got to try to do things to
00:41:00.220
avoid it in the future. That's hard to do. It's easier said than done, but it's possible.
00:41:05.080
It is possible. And if I were 20 years younger, I'd be leading workshops trying to help people find
00:41:12.480
ways to do that because I think that is a key to productive interpersonal relations, good marriages,
00:41:20.520
good relationships with your kids, all of that. We have to learn to stop reducing dissonance at the
00:41:28.000
drop of a hat. Well, this has been a great conversation. Is there someplace people can go
00:41:32.220
to learn more about the book and your work? Well, our book is called Mistakes Were Made But Not By Me
00:41:37.420
is available on Amazon. And we have a new edition that just came out a couple of months ago.
00:41:42.720
I also have another book out called The Jigsaw Classroom, which is about how people can learn
00:41:49.780
through cooperating with each other, can have what I call a virtuous circle where people learn to
00:41:57.920
reduce their prejudice against each other across racial lines because they cooperate like a really
00:42:04.920
well-functioning basketball team, which really learns to trust one another. And that is just the
00:42:11.760
opposite of the vicious circle that I described earlier, where hatred and aggression can lead to
00:42:17.880
more hatred and aggression. This is doing favors for one another by cooperating in the learning process
00:42:26.080
can really lead people to begin to look for the beauty in one another. And that's an interesting
00:42:33.100
book. If anyone is interested in classroom teaching, this is a technique for producing
00:42:38.780
cooperation among young kids. Well, Elliot Aronson, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.
00:42:44.160
I've really enjoyed it, Brett. Thank you. You're a very good interviewer.
00:42:47.920
Well, thank you so much. My guest today was Elliot Aronson. He's the co-author of the book,
00:42:52.940
Mistakes Were Made But Not By Me. It's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. Be sure
00:42:57.020
to check our show notes at aom.is slash mistakes, where you can find links to resources where you
00:43:01.040
delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Check out
00:43:12.340
our website at artofmanless.com, where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of
00:43:15.920
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00:43:42.120
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