Self-deception and the law

This is part of a review of "Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me)" by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson

Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson have made a genuinely illuminating contribution to the study of human nature, one positively brimming with intelligence and insight. It is rare, in the twenty-first century, to be presented with a complete framework of explanation built around so simple an idea. To describe it as a book of a single idea would not be an exaggeration, but it would not be a criticism either: it is a pleasure, for once, to be invited to consider such a bold and confident offering, and a concept able to sustain such explanatory weight.

The authors bring their analysis to bear on anecdotes, history, current affairs and psychological experiments. Throughout, points are illustrated with examples covering foolish and harmful behavior on the scale from the personal to social, in a variety of different contexts and across a range of human activities. Some are just amusing (for the spectator, at least), but many are alarming, some are tragic, and some are horrifying.

In all of these, there are two essential aspects of the process which bring people to do and continue doing harmful things, all the while justifying it to themselves. Firstly, there is the cognitive dissonance which so effectively drives it, leaving them in urgent need of something that will smooth the troubled waters. Then there is the spiral of self-justification, which feeds itself: under its spell they take steps which themselves require further justification.

In addition, the authors identify other mechanisms which contribute to its operation in different contexts. There is the blind-spot of our own prejudices: we not only fail to recognize some important truth about the world, but (more significantly) will never on our own see that our blind spot even exists.

The biggest blind spot of all falls over our own integrity. It is what permitted Dr Andrew Wakefield to accept large sums of money to conduct research on autistic children, from lawyers representing their parents, and then fail to disclose the fact to the Lancet when it published a paper by his team reporting a correlation between autism and childhood vaccination. The paper has been discredited, Wakefield is currently facing a General Medical Council hearing for professional misconduct and dishonest behavior, and his reputation hangs in the balance if it is not already destroyed.

Wakefield continues to maintain his faith in the paper and his actions, resolutely denying that a conflict of interest existed. We do not need to demonize him, or even think him a liar. At some point he needed to reduce the dissonance between his self-image and his actions - how could an researcher of independence and integrity accept a large sum from lawyers? how could he not disclose this to the editors of the journal? -- and justification would have set to work: Of course the money won't affect my judgments - my professional integrity will see to that! Of course I would have disclosed a conflict of interest -- but obviously this wasn't. And he would genuinely and sincerely believe this.

Our intuitions, commonsense and other people warn us to beware of evil people trying to do wrong. They are mistaken. We should be most wary of decent people, people like us, like Andrew Wakefield, who are sure they are doing right. It is this last insight which we can most usefully take to heart. We too believe we are doing the right things, that we are justified in our actions - because we too are driven to justify to ourselves the things we do, and because we too have a blind-spot which hides this from us, and we too will resist being confronted both with the blind-spot and what it hides. Wakefield's blind-spot has left him facing the prospect of disgrace. Few are so unfortunate, but our blind-spots are always ready to lead us into anything from looking corrupt to looking ridiculous....

Wakefield's story is a cautionary one, but others are stranger and more astonishing. The authors trace the work of justification in memory, beginning with mostly harmless personal anecdote and then moving through accounts of confabulists like Bruno Grosjean, whose feted memoir (Fragments) of Holocaust survival as a young boy turned out to have been a work of pure invention. Grosjean was not in fact Jewish, nor had he ever set foot in a concentration camp. But while his story is completely false, he is not a liar, nor mentally ill, and he is not alone in inventing and believing - genuinely and sincerely - an extraordinary personal history.

Over a period of more than twenty years, step by little step, Grosjean's memory, "the self-justifying historian", worked to fill in elusive, troubling gaps in his early past. Anything he came across that could be pressed into service by his memory to assuage his uneasy self-image was made use of. Fragments of the Holocaust and survivors' accounts became his own; imagination brought them to life, in irresistible, veridical, undeniable detail. Every step was a self-confirming one, and each one commissioned the next.

Memory, unreliable and self-serving, gave an unhappy middle-aged man a past which solved neatly the painful riddles of his own life. It caused a publisher, scholarly associations and Jewish organizations a great deal of embarrassment. But these are trifles compared to the havoc it has wreaked in the hands of the "repressed memory" industry, and it is at this point that justification reveals itself as a truly frightening power. The authors describe how the lives of the unhappy and needy are vulnerable to exploitation, not by the unscrupulous and greedy, but by people who are convinced that they are doing right. Therapists, convinced that they can uncover hidden memories of childhood traumas, offer clients a solution to their mysterious unease, and once again, step by step, client and therapist "uncover" increasingly disturbing incidents from the past, implicating family and friends in a history of abuse. The first step, and the feelings of relief and anger that come with it, are small ones, but each leads to the next, until the bottom of the pyramid is reached, and lives are irreparably destroyed by these false and sincerely-held beliefs.

Most terrifying of all are the chapters on clinical investigation into child abuse and on criminal investigation, where a simple, so-easy-to-start process of justification persuades investigators that they are right, swiftly covering over self-doubt or skepticism. Here short-cuts and dubious methods, which not even the perpetrators could condone if they were not engaged in them, are justified because they lead in the direction that justification has already taken them, and this is why investigations into investigations have uncovered an appalling litany of abused process and wrongful conviction.

Again, this is not the work of those bad/lazy/corrupt/incompetent investigators, the ones who aren't a bit like us. It is the work of those of who, like us, believe they are doing the right thing, and what is more, it is embedded into the system. The authors describe how official instruction in these techniques, described in handbooks and training programs, is already infected with dissonance-reducing justification and ways to attain it. One criminal interrogation manual notes that a suspect who denies involvement will subsequently find it harder - because of dissonance - to admit that they are responsible. Interrogators are therefore advised to watch for signs that the suspect is about to make a denial, and take steps to prevent them from doing so

The culture of an endeavor is to a large extent responsible for the tendency of its practitioners to become swallowed up by the voracious appetite of justification. In those endeavors where competent, successful work is marked by the capturing of a prize - the conviction of a suspect, the uncovering of a repressed memory, the bagging of a result in some form or another - the pressure is on to do that. Any setbacks along the way, any obstacles or difficulties, provoke discomfort and dissonance, and the urge to reduce it; the more the culture demands that prize, the greater the chance that the first step off the top of the pyramid will be in a dangerous direction.

Science cherishes its commitment to method, rather than to results. There is no scientific shame in advancing a theory which turns out to be wrong; this is part of the endeavor. The scientist, according to the demands of the discipline, subjects a posited theory to tests designed to expose its weaknesses. (Compare this with therapy, or crime detection, in which failure to attain the result does indeed represent a failure.) Even where an individual scientist, like Wakefield, falls under self-justification's spell, the culture of criticism ensures that this will sooner or later be exposed by the community.

There are no such safeguards built into crime detection or therapy. There is on the contrary an in-built horror of getting things wrong, an aversion which makes it harder for practitioners to see, never mind admit, their errors. One might expect an error-averse culture to produce fewer serious errors, but in fact this is not the case. Once again, dissonance theory predicts the unexpected outcome: the more error-averse the culture, the more likely that dissonance will push practitioners down the wrong side of the pyramid, with error compounding error, and every step making it harder to climb back up again. Medical practice, increasingly, is marked by a fear of litigation; the effect is to make admissions of error or responsibility harder to make, to make clinicians more anxious about scrutiny of their activities, and to make self-justification an automatic response to criticism.

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