Key insights from
Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts
By Carol Tavris, Elliot Aronson
Audio available
13 minute read
Published Aug 4, 2020
What you'll learn
Now in its third edition, Mistakes Were Made has become a classic exploration of cognitive dissonance and the humorous and disconcerting lengths humans go to resolve incongruities.
Key insights
- • What you'll learn
- 1 Good cult leaders are masters at resolving cognitive dissonance in their followers.
- 2 Cognitive dissonance theory challenged the idea that we are rational, reward-seeking creatures at our most basic level.
- 3 In politics, moments of cognitive dissonance can be extreme, but so can our efforts to resolve them.
- 4 Memories are fluid and tend to drift in the direction of self-justification.
- 5 Marriages thrive when couples resist the temptation to self-justify.
- 6 Reflexively self-justifying can be problematic, but so can the inability to self-justify at all.
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