The Art of Manliness - Why Is It So Hard to Admit You Were Wrong？

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:10.940 Personal responsibility, the ability to own up to one's mistakes is a foundational element

00:00:15.040 of character. It's also the only way we can grow and get better. But as anyone with any

00:00:18.720 experience being human well understands, man, it can sure be hard to do. My guest day explains why

00:00:24.400 and how you can yet rise to meet this important challenge. His name is Elliot Aronson. He's a

00:00:28.340 social psychologist and the co-author of Mistakes Were Made, but not by me. Why we justify foolish 0.97

00:00:32.920 beliefs, bad decisions, and hurtful acts. Elliot first explains how and why we engage in self-justification

00:00:37.900 to avoid facing our mistakes and how this process is driven by the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance.

00:00:43.080 We then discuss how once you make a decision in a certain direction, good or bad, become more

00:00:47.100 entrenched in your attitude about it and more likely to continue down that same path and how this

00:00:51.020 phenomenon represents what Elliot calls the pyramid of choice. And we end our conversation with how

00:00:55.540 we can learn to approach the mistakes of others with more generosity and our own mistakes with more

00:00:59.580 honesty. After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash mistakes.

00:01:12.660 Elliot Aronson, welcome to the show.

00:01:14.980 Thank you. Good to be here.

00:01:16.560 So you are one of the authors of a book called Mistakes Were Made,

00:01:20.100 But Not My Me, Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts. And it's all about

00:01:26.720 why it's so hard to admit that we're wrong, we've made a mistake. What got you studying this drain of

00:01:33.260 thought in psychology? Well, I've been researching the whole issue of how the human mind works and

00:01:43.060 especially how it works to form attitudes and opinions. I've been doing that for more than 65

00:01:51.320 years, ever since I started graduate school 65 years ago. And it's an exciting area because it's

00:01:59.560 terribly important to know how it works in terms of forming opinions and forming attitudes toward a

00:02:08.660 wide variety of things. Some of the opinions and attitudes we form are accurate and useful to

00:02:17.040 ourselves and to the people around us. And others are inaccurate or not useful and sometimes even

00:02:24.480 destructive. And there are certain tricks that the mind plays on us that we'll get into, I guess,

00:02:31.700 in the course of this interview, that with some of the research we've done, we've been able to find

00:02:37.620 the conditions under which people can process information in a reasonable way and the conditions

00:02:45.940 under which they can't. Now, in the past 15 years or so, I have gotten specifically interested

00:02:53.120 on the issue of mistakes and how people handle mistakes, whether they double down and convince

00:03:03.620 themselves that they were right all the time and all they have to do is push a little harder or whether

00:03:09.220 they can own up to having made a mistake, back off and try a different tack. There's a wonderful parable

00:03:18.980 from Eastern philosophy about a wealthy and powerful man from Europe who was terribly unhappy. His marriage of 35

00:03:30.340 years was falling apart. His grown children hated him and feared him. His employees were frightened of

00:03:40.340 him. And he was just incredibly unhappy. And so he decided to go to India to visit the person that's considered

00:03:48.760 the wisest guru in the world. And he went through all these hardships and he climbed a mountain to get to the

00:03:55.200 cave where the cave where the guru lives. And the guru was not only the wisest person on earth, but also

00:04:00.880 a very quiet guy who hardly ever spoke a word. And he came to the guru who was sitting in front of his

00:04:08.260 cave and he said, oh, wise guru, what is the secret to happiness? And the guru said, good judgment.

00:04:17.560 And the guy says, wow, good judgment. Okay. Wait a minute. How do you arrive at good judgment? And the guru

00:04:27.380 looked down at the ground and looked up at the sky and stroked his beard and said, bad judgment.

00:04:35.100 Now, that's very wise advice, except if you're unable to own up to your mistakes, then you will never

00:04:47.580 learn from them. And so bad judgment only works as a way to get to good judgment if you can recognize

00:04:58.560 your mistakes, change your behavior, and keep monitoring your behavior until you get it right.

00:05:06.120 And then bad judgment does indeed lead to good judgment. But unless we can do that,

00:05:12.640 unless we can own up and recognize mistakes when we make them, we're in serious trouble.

00:05:19.720 Well, and you call this inability to own up mistakes self-justification. And there's varying

00:05:24.240 degrees of self-justification. There's small ones we do on a day-to-day basis, and there's ones

00:05:28.500 that are even bigger. But just on a day-to-day basis, where do we see self-justification happen?

00:05:33.800 Any bad habit that we have, if we have a hard time breaking it, we can convince ourselves that

00:05:41.860 it might not be such a bad habit. And as a matter of fact, it might really be good for us. If you take

00:05:47.680 something like smoking, suppose I smoke two packs of cigarettes, and then I get some information that

00:05:55.100 indicates that smoking may cause cancer or heart disease or all kinds of illnesses. But I've tried

00:06:02.320 to quit smoking, and I find it difficult to do. I might then try to convince myself that actually,

00:06:10.380 when I smoke, I'm not eating dessert, and therefore, I'm not becoming obese. And obesity is a health

00:06:18.380 problem as well. And therefore, I'm actually ahead of the game by smoking. Or I can look around and I see

00:06:26.940 that my Uncle Charlie, who's 85 years old and smokes a pack a day, is still alive. And therefore, it certainly

00:06:35.640 doesn't kill everybody. Therefore, it might not kill me. Or I might even say out loud to myself, I'd rather

00:06:43.340 live a slightly shorter life and do the kind of things I want to do than lead a restricted life where

00:06:51.540 I can't enjoy a good smoke every now and then. All of those things are good ways to justify the fact

00:07:01.420 that we don't want to give up smoking. But it could be very important. It could cost us our lives.

00:07:08.920 It sounds like Aesop's fable of the fox and the sour grapes. It sort of is that. It's like,

00:07:14.800 well, I didn't want those grapes anyway. They were terrible.

00:07:17.580 Yeah. If you can't do something, then it makes you feel better about yourself. Because here's the

00:07:24.420 thing. The reason I call it self-justification is that most people consider themselves to be better

00:07:34.080 than average on a few basic things like intelligence, like competence, and like morality.

00:07:45.180 If you did a survey of 100,000 people, you would find that 85 to 95% of them consider themselves to be

00:07:56.440 better than average on all three of those dimensions. Now, as you know, no more than 50 or 55% of the world

00:08:06.240 can be better than average. But people do believe they're better than average. So if I, as a better

00:08:14.060 than average intelligent person, do something stupid, I'm threatened with the notion that I did something 1.00

00:08:21.960 stupid. And that means that I may be stupid. And therefore, I will try to convince myself that it's 1.00

00:08:28.960 not a stupid thing to do. If I do something that's incompetent or immoral, I will try to convince myself 0.87

00:08:36.840 that it wasn't my fault, that the other person deserved the bad thing I did to him or her. We've seen

00:08:44.280 people do this over and over again. And in a way that is forgetting the legal aspects of these things. It is a way

00:08:54.320 a person has of maintaining the belief that he or she is smart, capable, and moral, even when they do 1.00

00:09:05.560 something that might be stupid, incapable, or immoral. 0.97

00:09:09.180 Well, and so it's going back to this tension between what people think about themselves and then 0.99

00:09:14.240 the things that they do that go against that idea they have in their head. This tension

00:09:18.980 is called cognitive dissonance, and you call it the engine of self-justification. So can you flesh

00:09:24.880 out cognitive dissonance more? Is it just tension? Is it just that tension between what you think you

00:09:28.960 are and what you do? Well, actually, the way Leon Festinger, who invented the theory

00:09:34.900 some 70 years ago, the way he defined it was that any two cognitions, ideas, beliefs, etc.,

00:09:45.220 that don't fit together, that where the one implies the opposite of the other, produces cognitive

00:09:52.480 dissonance. And cognitive dissonance is an unpleasant drive state, a little bit like extreme

00:10:00.020 hunger or extreme thirst, where you need to reduce it, except it takes place in the head.

00:10:07.820 And it operates, often dissonance reduction operates at a level just below our level of

00:10:16.500 awareness. So we don't say to ourselves, oh, I'm feeling dissonance. I think I'll reduce a little

00:10:21.740 dissonance right now. No, we do it reflexively and unconsciously. It's universal. We've done research,

00:10:29.960 in all areas of the world. Every country in the world, people experience cognitive dissonance.

00:10:37.700 It's unconscious. And it can be, it can cause people a lot of problems. On the surface,

00:10:46.680 it can be harmless. And most of the time, it is harmless. It does have one great advantage.

00:10:52.800 If we make an error or do an embarrassing thing or do something that's a little bit stupid, 0.85

00:11:01.220 it helps us sleep at night if we can convince ourselves that it wasn't our fault and that it 1.00

00:11:07.760 wasn't as stupid as most people think it is, etc. And if we can do that for the small things, 0.93

00:11:15.280 it does help us sleep at night. And it does reduce embarrassment and reduce feelings of

00:11:23.220 that we're not worth much. And to a large extent, that is a good thing. But when it becomes extreme,

00:11:32.580 it can cause a great deal of harm to ourselves and the people around us.

00:11:37.820 Well, an extreme example that you give, I think it really highlights what cognitive dissonance is,

00:11:41.420 and you talk about in the book, are doomsday believers, right? People who belong to groups

00:11:45.160 who believe the end of the world is coming at a certain point. And then that day comes and then

00:11:50.700 nothing happens. So there's cognitive dissonance there. It's like, well, it didn't happen.

00:11:55.140 How do people often adjust to that or resolve the dissonance there?

00:11:59.220 Well, they do try. They could say to themselves, oh, I did the math wrong. I got the dates wrong. I added,

00:12:07.060 you know, the calendar years minus the square root of pi or something like that. And it didn't come

00:12:13.880 out quite right. It's not this month, it's next month that it's going to happen. And indeed, in one

00:12:20.500 piece of research that we did, we found that people who were predicting the end of the Earth on midnight

00:12:26.800 of a particular night, a spaceship was supposed to come and deliver them to another planet where they

00:12:33.940 would be safe because the Earth was supposed to explode. And these people gave away all their

00:12:39.380 money because you don't need money on another planet. They sold their houses, gave away the

00:12:45.520 money for the houses. They gave away their cars. They gave away everything they owned. And then they

00:12:50.120 were waiting out in this particular backyard of Mrs. Keech's house. Mrs. Keech was the leader of this

00:12:57.260 group for the spaceship to arrive. And when it didn't arrive, they got increasingly uncomfortable

00:13:03.040 until Mrs. Keech had another vision where she heard the people from outer space saying that

00:13:11.100 because that band of people were so loyal and were so believing that they decided to spare the Earth

00:13:20.320 after all. So they all celebrated rather than saying, oh, damn, we made a terrible mistake. We gave away 0.99

00:13:26.620 all our money. Instead of cursing themselves for having been duped, they then went out and started

00:13:34.920 to proselytize other people to join their cult, their cult that failed. But in their minds, they said,

00:13:43.480 we were a great success. We saved the Earth from destruction. And prior to the disconfirmation of

00:13:51.480 their belief, prior to the fact that the Earth didn't come to an end when they said it would,

00:13:58.440 they never tried to proselytize new members to join their group. But immediately afterwards,

00:14:04.580 they went around on street corners. They buttonholed people, tried to convince them to join their group

00:14:11.460 because whatever dissonance they might have had would be diminished if they could convince other people

00:14:18.380 that their belief was right. And in the book, you talk about how self-justification

00:14:25.440 through cognitive dissonance, this doesn't happen overnight. It's often, I mean, it could

00:14:29.880 happen overnight, but usually it's a very slow process that you take step by step. Like, I mean,

00:14:37.140 have you done the research, like how long does it usually take or is it different for every type of

00:14:40.820 circumstance or situation? Sometimes it occurs almost immediately. Sometimes it occurs step by step.

00:14:48.380 It depends on how difficult the situation is. For example, in one experiment that I helped design

00:14:55.840 by my colleague, Judd Mills, he found that you give people a personality test in which there are

00:15:04.220 several questions about misdeeds. And one of the misdeeds is cheating on an exam. These are college

00:15:12.840 students and you ask them, how would you rate cheating on a scale of one to 10 in terms of how

00:15:20.640 bad it is, okay? And you give that to hundreds of students. And then an exam comes up. I'll give you

00:15:29.260 this in hypothetical terms. Suppose an exam comes up and you are a biology major and you want to go to

00:15:36.340 medical school and you're in the beginning of your senior year and you know that this particular exam

00:15:42.460 is really important and it's going to determine whether you get into medical school or not.

00:15:49.240 And you study hard and you think you know the stuff, but when you come into the exam room,

00:15:53.840 you completely pull a blank and you can't understand any of the questions, let alone answer them.

00:16:01.100 And you're devastated. You break into a cold sweat and your hands are shaking. And then you look up and

00:16:07.760 you see that you happen to be sitting behind the person who's the smartest person in class and has

00:16:14.880 the clearest, largest handwriting you ever saw. And all you have to do is look over her shoulder and

00:16:22.340 copy from her exam. The question is, do you do it or don't you do it? Either way, this is a difficult

00:16:29.380 decision. Either way, you're going to experience dissonance. If you cheat, cheating is a bad thing

00:16:37.560 to do. You consider yourself an immoral person. You consider yourself a moral person. If you cheat,

00:16:44.200 it can be devastating. A lot of dissonance there. If you don't cheat, you really want to go to medical

00:16:51.420 school. You want to be a doctor and you have an opportunity to do it. The cognition, I want to go to

00:16:57.620 medical school is distant with the cognition. I had a chance to go to medical school if I cheated and I

00:17:03.200 didn't do it. Okay, so either way, you experience cognitive dissonance. Now, the interesting question

00:17:09.600 is, if you cheat or if you don't cheat, what happens to your attitude toward cheating? And what Mills found

00:17:20.300 is, those who cheated on an exam move their attitude tremendously in the direction of saying

00:17:29.240 that cheating isn't so bad. If at first they thought, it's a crime, all right, and people

00:17:36.920 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

00:17:42.060 deserve, they move toward saying, ah, it's really nothing. Everybody does it. If I didn't do it,

00:17:47.980 it would be, I'd be very foolish. Why not do it? But if you resisted the temptation to cheat,

00:17:55.780 then you convince yourself that cheating is a really terrible crime. People who cheat should be

00:18:02.580 summarily expelled from the university and should never be allowed to come back again. The attitudes

00:18:09.740 shift depending upon which choice they took. And the choice of these two people, their attitudes

00:18:19.360 initially could have been a hair's breadth apart. They could have been almost identical,

00:18:25.020 but one decided to cheat and the other decided not to cheat. And by within a week or two,

00:18:32.380 they have succeeded in convincing themselves that either cheating is the worst thing that you could

00:18:37.500 have done or no problem at all. So it sounds like the next time the person who did decide to cheat,

00:18:43.640 they were faced with the opportunity to cheat, they'd probably be more likely to cheat again because

00:18:47.860 they've realized, oh, it's not that bad. The person who cheated the first time is more apt to cheat the

00:18:53.040 second time. The person who resisted the temptation could be standing on street corners telling people

00:19:01.520 how terrible cheating is. Everything is done to justify the action that is taken.

00:19:07.980 And the more difficult the action, the more likely it is that you're going to seek

00:19:13.220 to confirm the wisdom of your choice in order to protect your ego, in order to reduce the dissonance.

00:19:23.560 Well, let me make sure I understand dissonance theory. Is there two ways to resolve dissonance?

00:19:27.920 One way would be to, okay, if you made a mistake, do the thing to correct the mistake. Because then

00:19:33.860 you say, well, now I did something that went against my sense of self. I'm going to correct

00:19:39.900 it. That'll resolve the dissonance. That's hard, though. No one wants to do that. So the easier way

00:19:44.700 to do it is just change your cognition about your behavior. So you're like, well, it's not as bad.

00:19:50.660 That's exactly right, Brett. And the interesting thing, though, is you can reduce the dissonance

00:19:57.480 for a particular act by changing your attitude toward that action. If you reduce it toward,

00:20:06.040 if you're inclined not to do that, but to say, what kind of a person am I that did that?

00:20:14.020 There is a way out. And the way out that I offer people, and this may be our, in writing that book,

00:20:23.220 may be our most important contribution, to be able to say, you know, I cheated this time.

00:20:32.060 And because it was really important, I really needed to get into medical school. But I am not

00:20:37.480 a cheater. Cheating, I still think cheating is bad. And I did it. And I feel bad about that.

00:20:44.600 But that's not who I am. I did it this time. I will, I promise myself, I'll never do it again.

00:20:53.740 Now, that can be done glibly. Hey, I cheated and so what? I'm not going to do that anymore. Or it can

00:21:02.620 be done really by staying on the hook for a while, by living with the dissonance, and then making a

00:21:11.380 resolution that you really intend to stick to, not to let that happen, not to slide down that pyramid.

00:21:20.400 You see, the metaphor we use is of a pyramid, where if you can picture in your mind, a pyramid

00:21:28.380 sort of like an isosceles, equilateral triangle, where the person who has an attitude toward cheating

00:21:36.400 in this case, or anything, but let's say cheating in this case, is standing at the very tip of that

00:21:42.420 pyramid, where he's sort of in between. He thinks cheating is a bad thing, but there are worse things

00:21:46.960 in the world, of course. Once he makes the decision to cheat, he starts sliding down the right-hand side

00:21:55.000 of that pyramid until he hits the bottom, which is at the floor level, which is far apart from the

00:22:04.600 point at the left-hand side. So his attitude toward cheating is shifting to become, if he didn't cheat,

00:22:12.920 it's becoming more and more toward seeing cheating as a terrible thing. If he did cheat, he's sliding

00:22:21.880 down the left-hand side, and his attitude is becoming more toward seeing cheating as not such a bad

00:22:28.960 thing. As a matter of fact, everybody does it. So that metaphor of the pyramid of choice, we call it,

00:22:36.580 is what people generally do. However, with a lot of effort, you can say to yourself,

00:22:45.820 I did this terrible thing, and it is a terrible thing, and I'm never going to do it again. And you

00:22:52.360 actually reduce dissonance by forming in your mind the notion that you're the kind of person

00:22:58.520 who can recover from this bad behavior. Yeah, that idea of the pyramid is interesting because

00:23:05.120 it really illustrates this idea that distance can create sort of this vicious cycle, right? As soon

00:23:11.380 as you make that, like you talk about bowling, kids who bully a kid, well, they start thinking,

00:23:17.120 well, I bully the kid because he deserved it. And then it just perpetuates more bowling. I think you

00:23:21.980 also talked about people who lose weight, like a lot of weight, tend to be, there's like dissonance

00:23:28.640 there. They tend to actually end up being harsher sometimes to overweight people. Yeah, yeah. People

00:23:34.540 who almost live in glass houses are the first ones to throw stones because they see what they could

00:23:41.920 have been like if they didn't try a little harder. So they're very tough on people who they think

00:23:48.900 aren't trying hard enough. But what was the first example you gave? Because the bowling one. So it's

00:23:54.820 like, you know, like, yeah, you know, for, for a hundred years, people believed the Freudian notion

00:24:02.280 that if you aggress against somebody that has a cathartic outcome. In other words, you get it off

00:24:10.740 your chest, you yell and scream, maybe even throw a punch at the person, and that gets it out of your

00:24:16.820 system. And then you can go on your merry way. It turns out that what distance theory predicts is

00:24:23.740 exactly, exactly the opposite, that hatred breeds aggression, and aggression produces more hatred, which

00:24:35.100 leads to more aggression, so that it is a vicious circle. The more we do a thing, if you bully a nerdy kid,

00:24:46.600 and, and then you'd say to yourself, you did it because you went along with the gang, and they were all

00:24:52.020 doing it, and you didn't want to be a different kind of person, so you went along with it. You bully that

00:24:58.100 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 1.00

00:25:05.040 really deserved it. He is a real jerk, and boy, if the shoe were on the other foot, he would have bullied 1.00

00:25:10.560 me too, so I don't feel so bad about it. And then you hate him even more than you did before you bullied 1.00

00:25:16.560 him. And that's a number of experiments, some by my own students, showing exactly that effect. If you get

00:25:24.680 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

00:25:39.740 opportunity to get him in trouble with his boss, which they took, or they didn't have that opportunity.

00:25:45.360 And if they got him into trouble with his boss, and he got fired for it, as part of the scenario that

00:25:51.940 we cooked up, they ended up hating him more than they did if they didn't get him into trouble. It's

00:25:59.040 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

00:26:10.820 divorce. In a breakup or divorce, a lot of pain, you're hurting, your spouse is hurting, the kids

00:26:16.600 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

00:26:25.100 people end up doing is they start demonizing their soon to be former partner and start thinking,

00:26:29.880 yeah, this person's so terrible. If you look back at our 10 years of marriage, here's all the terrible

00:26:33.320 things they did that led up to this divorce. Yeah, this is the right thing to do. So you start sliding

00:26:37.960 down that side of the triangle of personal choice where this person who you once loved, who you thought

00:26:44.340 had enough redeeming qualities to marry them and be with, spend the rest of your life with them. 0.99

00:26:48.280 They're now like the spawn of Satan. And so you start thinking, this is the right choice. 0.87

00:26:52.380 I'm doing the right thing. And this is a big factor in why a lot of breakups or divorce can

00:26:57.820 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

00:27:08.380 have a memory, it's just a snapshot in time. We see things exactly how it happened. But that's not how

00:27:14.180 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

00:27:24.860 the perspective that we want to hold at this current moment.

00:27:28.120 Often they get changed innocently, but you're quite right, Brett. People often think of memory as if

00:27:35.100 there's a hidden tape recorder in our brain somewhere that has conversations down exactly,

00:27:40.680 and who came to what party, and who gave what Christmas present, etc. It's not true.

00:27:46.100 Memory, all memories are constructed, and we piece things together to try to remember them

00:27:52.900 accurately. But memory is what we call it our own built-in self-serving historian, because

00:28:02.900 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

00:28:21.220 out as the injured party who was doing the right thing, and the other person did something terrible

00:28:29.100 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

00:29:15.320 than it actually was.

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, 0.99

00:29:24.400 that's not what happened. And you're like...

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 0.70

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 0.54

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

00:31:32.580 they were lying to themselves.

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

00:32:11.460 happen.

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

00:35:12.640 person to prison.

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. 1.00

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. 1.00

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 0.98

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. 0.99

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, 0.69

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 articles written over the years about pretty much anything you could think of. And if you like to

00:43:18.740 enjoy ad-free episodes of the AOM podcast, you can do so on Stitcher Premium. Head over to

00:43:22.080 stitcherpremium.com, sign up, use code manliness at checkout for a free month trial. Once you're

00:43:26.000 signed up, download the Stitcher app on Android or iOS. You can start enjoying ad-free episodes of

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00:43:42.120 it's Brett McKay. Remind you not only listen to the AOM podcast, but put what you've heard into action.

00:43:52.080 you

The Art of Manliness - March 17, 2021

Why Is It So Hard to Admit You Were Wrong？

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