Sometimes it's your spouse. Sometimes it's your mother. Other times it's your kids or even the clerk at the store. Then it's your boss. Your pastor. Sometimes it's the President (hard to believe). And sometimes, on those rare but special occasions, it's you.
Some people just won't admit to being wrong. Doesn't it drive you crazy? If you've shared responsibility or resources with one of these people you may have even prayed for someone to intervene and give them special medication-the kind of special medication that would help them see that you are right.
But just when we might start to feel entitled to complain about "those other people," somebody goes and does research and writes a book, lest we forget that we are those very same obstinate people.
Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson are the authors of Mistakes Were Made (but not by me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts. Aronson is a professor emeritus of social psychology at University of California Santa Cruz.
Fifty years ago he began conducting experiments to figure out why people act in highly self-justifying ways. He started with two groups of people who were signing up for an activity. One group was subjected to a vigorous amount of "initiation" and hassle in order to join, and the other had very minimal initiation. Then both groups listened to the same recording of a meeting with the people involved in the activity they just joined. Both groups rated their experience of the membership meeting. Despite the fact that the researchers made the meeting as objectively boring as possible, the group that went though "hell and high water" to join rated the activity as enjoyable. The group that exerted little effort to join rated the activity as boring, accurately matching the objective ratings.
Aronson was studying something called cognitive dissonance, and he was one of the first to do it. That was fifty years ago. Since then more than 3,000 studies have looked at why we distort our own opinion about something if we experience too much cognitive dissonance (ie, mental discomfort) by thinking about the truth. In fact, many self-destructive behaviors and habits will persist despite a clear lack of reward (or even painful consequences for them) if we perceive that it's more painful to change our mind and live with a contradiction.
Remember that sales pitch for time-share condos you sat through at the beach last year in order to get a free dinner? According to the studies on cognitive dissonance, you'll be more likely to think positively about time-shares if it's a real hassle to get your dinner verses if they just handed out free dinners. After sacrificing a sunny afternoon to hear a boring sales pitch, your brain will naturally try to develop an interpretation of your behavior that makes you feel better; it is an instinctual and self-preserving way of making sense of the world and feel good.
What does this mean about relationships?
This research hits all of us close to home. We may prefer to think that a person who won't admit to being wrong has serious problems. But while judging that person allows you to distance yourself and feel better, it also prevents you from seeing evidence of the same trait alive and well in you: Our judgments conveniently show us the way to our blind spots.
Remember that self-justification (in yourself and others) happens to protect a way of thinking and avoid cognitive dissonance. If you are bothered by someone who seems ready to self-justify, see if you can make yourself a source of safety for that person and then look for ways that the self-justification softens or disappears. Becoming a source of safety is complex (see my article on Safety and the Reptilian Brain) but involves repeating behaviors that send the message, essentially, "I have your best interest in mind and I won't take control away from you."
If you want to work on being less prone to self-justification yourself, try to find ways to increase the diversity and number of people who may challenge you while respectfully having your best interest in mind. Don't always cut yourself off from people who may disagree with you, even though this might make life more difficult. According to Tavris and Aronson, this is especially important if you are a leader, manager, or CEO, since it's natural for people in these positions to gravitate toward people that agree with them.
Try to remember this the next time a fight has you tied up in knots: The best argument has no winner and nobody gets blamed, for the best argument is a dialogue--heated perhaps, needled with anger no doubt, difficult always-between two people whose positions on a given issue are passionately different.
