“All this has been my fault. I asked more of my men than should have been asked of them.” –Robert E. Lee, after heavy Confederate losses at Pickett’s Charge
“I had the opportunity and the information and I failed to make use of it. I don’t know what an inquest or a court of law would say, but I stand condemned in the court of my own conscience to be guilty of not preventing the Columbia disaster…The bottom line is that I failed to understand what I was being told; I failed to stand up and be counted. Therefore look no further; I am guilty of allowing the Columbia to crash.” –Launch Integration Manager N. Wayne Hale Jr., after the Columbia space shuttle explosion which killed seven astronauts
The stark honesty of these men in taking responsibility for their failures is striking, all the more so because similar statements are so rare. In recent years we have seen the heads of the nation’s corporations and banks testify before Congress as to their role, or rather lack thereof, in the implosion of the economy, and could only shake our heads as they passed the buck, admitted vaguely that “mistakes were made,” and yet failed to name anything specific for which they were personally at fault.
In our day-to-day lives, we all know folks who constantly blame their failures on everything but themselves. They were fired because their supervisor was jealous of them. They got dumped because their girlfriend is nuts. They failed an exam because the questions the professor asked were unfair. The dog hasn’t just eaten their homework – it’s devoured their whole lives.
Plenty of folks decry this shirking of personal responsibility, and declare that “people need to own up to their mistakes!” But what does this vague injunction really mean and how do you start doing it? Unfortunately, most people rarely go beyond the slogans, essentially saying: “You should do this. Okay, now do it.”
Today we’re going to take a look the very real cognitive reasons for the difficulty in owning up to your mistakes. Understanding leads to greater awareness of the blind spots our brains develop as to when we’re at fault, and this awareness is the first step in learning to overcome them. As we explore this topic, we’ll come to see that while it’s awfully satisfying to point out the motes in others’ eyes, we all justify our failures to one degree or another.
Then tomorrow we’ll explore why owning our mistakes is so important and how we can work to counter our natural tendency to shirk responsibility. Taking ownership of our mistakes and shortcomings requires both humility and courage; as such, it is one of the true hallmarks of mature manhood.
Why Is It So Difficult to Take Responsibility for Our Mistakes?
All humans are essentially ego-driven creatures. Starting from a young age we develop an identity — a self-concept and self-image — constructed of our beliefs and how we view ourselves. Most of us think of ourselves as pretty decent people, better than average in certain areas, maybe a little worse than average in a few, but always trying to do our best. We believe we see the world realistically, and act rationally.
When our own thoughts and behaviors, or the accusation of another, challenges our cherished self-concept, we experience what is called cognitive dissonance – a form of mental discomfort and tension. Cognitive dissonance arises when you attempt to hold two conflicting beliefs/attitudes/ideas/opinions at the same time. For example: “I know smoking is bad for me…but I smoke a pack a day anyway.” Because our minds crave consonance and clarity over contradiction and conflict, we immediately seek to dissipate the mental tension created by cognitive dissonance. The smoker can reduce their dissonance either by throwing the cigarettes away and trying to quit, or by thinking to himself as he lights up, “People say that smoking is bad, but my grandfather smoked two packs a day for fifty years and never got cancer. It’s fine.”
When we make mistakes, the gap between our questionable behavior and our sterling self-concept creates cognitive dissonance. We can allay this dissonance either by admitting that we made a mistake and revaluating our self-concept in light of it, or by justifying the behavior as not in conflict with our self-concept after all. Here are some examples:
• You think of yourself as an honest man, but you cheated on your last exam. You can either:
- Admit that cheating is wrong and that maybe you’re not as honest as you thought. Or,
- Justify the cheating by saying that a lot of other students were doing it too, so it really just leveled the playing field.
• You think of yourself as a decent guy and have been casually sleeping with a girl over the course of a few months. You’ve never talked about the relationship, and when she admits she has feelings for you, and you shut her down, she’s pretty crushed. You can either:
- Acknowledge that you should have set clear parameters for the relationship and admit you had a role to play in her hurt feelings and didn’t treat her decently. Or,
- Tell yourself that you never said anything about a relationship and that it was entirely her fault for letting herself get attached.
• You think of yourself as a good friend but one night when you’re out drinking with your buddy you bring up your bitter feelings about something he did in the past, and try to start a fight with him. You can either:
- Admit that you’ve been nursing a grudge and didn’t tell him, which isn’t something a good friend would do. Or,
- Say that you were totally trashed and didn’t know what you were doing.
• You think of yourself as a smart, cutting-edge academic, but when you present a paper you’ve been working on for years, your colleagues point out numerous errors in your conclusions. You can either:
- Acknowledge the mistakes and reevaluate your theory and research methods. Or,
- Accuse your colleagues of jealously, narrow-mindedness, or bias.
Unsurprisingly, many people, when push comes to shove, lean towards option #2. When our behavior threatens our self-concept, our ego automatically goes into hyper-defense mode, circles the wagons, and begins issuing self-justifications designed to protect itself. The higher the moral, financial, and emotional stakes, the more our self-concept – our very identity — is threatened, the greater the dissonance that arises, the harder it is to admit a mistake, and the more we seek to justify ourselves to preserve our self-image. Self-justifications are not lies, where we know we’re being dishonest, nor are they excuses; rather, we believe the justifications to be true, and truly think that they show we are not to blame. Self-justifications can take many forms:
- If X had happened, I would have been right. (“My predictions for the economy would have been correct if A had won the election rather than B. No one could have seen that coming.”)
- It really wasn’t wrong. (“The company doesn’t pay me enough anyway, so taking those supplies just evens things out.”)
- It wasn’t that big of a deal in the long run and didn’t have lasting consequences. (“I’m sorry I treated her the way I did, but she’s happily married now and probably doesn’t ever think of me.”)
- I can’t help it, this is just who I am. (“My father has a temper, and my grandfather had a temper, and my great-grandfather too! It’s a family tradition!”)
- I was provoked. (“No one could have heard what he said without punching him out.”)
- The situation was to blame. (“Everyone was yelling and it was total chaos – I couldn’t even think straight and felt paralyzed.”)
- That was the old me and happened in the past. (“I’ve changed a lot since then. I’m not the same person.”)
- It was an isolated incident and is over and done with. (“I’ve never acted that way before, and haven’t since.”)
- My mood/state was to blame. (“I had just gotten over the flu and just wasn’t feeling like myself.” Or, “I was really drunk and don’t remember what happened.” Or, “I had been crazy stressed for weeks and that was just the straw that broke the camel’s back.”)
Regardless of what form self-justification takes, it’s designed to keep your self-concept and self-esteem intact by reducing your responsibility for the mistake or failure.
While I cited more “dramatic” examples of mistakes above, self-justifying happens every day in small ways, and everyone does it. When we cut off someone while speeding to work we tell ourselves that we don’t normally drive this way but have to get to work on time or we’ll get in trouble with the boss. When we’re gruff with our kids when we get home, we tell ourselves that we’ve had a long, hard day and are tired.
Whether self-justifications kick in over big mistakes or small, we don’t really notice it happening, especially if we haven’t been cultivating an awareness of them. They work much like an ego thermostat – making small adjustments throughout the day to keep our self-concept nice and comfortable.
The Tricks Our Memory Play
When it comes to piecing together justifications to mitigate our feelings of responsibility and protect our self-concept, our faulty memory can be our greatest “ally.”
It used to be thought that memory was like a filing cabinet which stored everything that ever happened to us. Sometimes it was hard to find a specific file at a later date, but it was all in there somewhere, waiting for us to pull out nearly whole cloth. Memory was seen as an accurate film strip of past events that would fade over time, but could be replayed whenever we wished.
We now know that our experiences are broken up into pieces, and that these fragments of memory are stored in different parts of the brain. Not every detail of a memory is stored, just the most salient bits. When we later try to remember something, our brains reconstitute the memory, pulling together the pieces it has stored, and filling in the blanks in a way it feels make sense – splicing in background information from other memories, stories our friends have told us, childhood photographs, old home movies, and even Hollywood films and tv shows, along with your own dreams. The memory doesn’t feel like a composite, however; the whole thing feels very accurate and real to us, a feeling which only increases the more we recall that version of the memory and rehearse it to others.
For example, in a study that asked participants to read stories about two roommates, and then to write either a letter of recommendation or of complaint about one of them, they invariably added their own details to the letter that did not appear in the original stories. When they were later asked to recall the original stories as accurately as possible, they remembered the details they had added to the letters as being part of the original, and they forgot details of the original story that conflicted with the kind of letter they had written. The act of telling a story about the past had successfully revised that past. If you’ve ever seen a convicted criminal passionately proclaim his innocence, despite a mountain of evidence against him, he probably isn’t knowingly lying; years of rehearsing a version of events where he isn’t culpable has likely replaced the memory of what really happened, and he himself now believes in his innocence through and through.
While we all firmly believe our memories are accurate, and such things would never happen to us, as Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson report in Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me), studies have shown that “memories are distorted in a self-enhancing direction in all sorts of ways”:
“Men and women alike remember having had fewer sexual partners than they really did…People also remember voting in elections they didn’t vote in, they remember voting for the winning candidate rather than the politician they did vote for, they remember giving more to charity than they really did, they remember that their children walked and talked at an earlier age than they did.”
Another interesting fact: 73% of college students surveyed remember seeing the first plane crash into the World Trade Center on 9/11…even though footage of that event was in fact not aired until the next day.
If you’ve ever been sure that you remembered an episode of your past correctly, only to later find evidence that your version of events couldn’t possibly have been true, you know how disturbing it is, and how much dissonance arises when you realize your memory isn’t as reliable as you once thought.
The Role Memory Plays in Our Self-Justifications
“‘I have done that,’ says my memory. ‘I cannot have done that,’ says my pride, and remains inexorable. Eventually–memory yields.” -Friedrich Nietzsche
The pieces the brain chooses to compose our memories are those that best preserve and protect our self-concept. We have all had experiences where our memory of an event differed from that of another person. While the ensuing argument often presumes that one person is remembering it accurately, and one is not, what is more likely is that each is remembering it from their own angle – one that highlights their innocence as opposed to culpability.
Memories also change over time, as our present experiences and attitudes alter and shape how we see the past. This bears reiteration: Our memory of the past doesn’t simply shape who we are today, we also shape the memory according to how we’re doing in the present.
For example, a study asked teenagers and parents to come into a lab and list their areas of disagreement, then spend ten minutes discussing the conflict together and trying to resolve it. The teenagers would then rate how they felt about the conflict and their parents. Six weeks later, the teenagers were asked to remember how they felt about the conflict at the time of their first visit to the lab; those who were currently feeling close to their parents remembered the rating they had given as lower than it was, while those whose relationships to their parents were more strained remembered their rating as being worse than it was. Their current feelings altered the memory of how they had felt in the past.
This distortion can be magnified as we think over the sweep of our lives. Every person feels the need to fit their personal history into a narrative. The lead-up, the turning points, the bad guys and good guys, our triumphs over obstacles that made us who we are. For instance, “I grew up in a very religious family with uber-strict parents. I never questioned what they taught me until I got to college in New York. And then I became an atheist, and my family disowned me. And I’ve had to make it on my own but it’s made me stronger.”
We explain our lives through the filter of this narrative. And if we’re currently in a chapter of the story where we feel more down-and-out than triumphant, we’re inclined to remember episodes of the past that we believe led to our current struggles and confirm our narrative, and forget details that are dissonant with it. This is often the case for those who blame their parents for how they’ve turned out. As Tavris and Aronson explain:
“We tell our stories with the confidence that the listener will not dispute them or ask for contradictory evidence, which means we rarely have an incentive to scrutinize them for accuracy. You have memories about your father that are salient to you and that represent the man he was and the relationship you had with him. What have you forgotten? You remember that time when you were disobedient and he swatted you, and you are still angry that he didn’t explain why he was disciplining you. But could you have been the kind of kid a father couldn’t explain things to, because you were impatient and impulsive and didn’t listen? When we tell a story, we tend to leave ourselves out: My father did thus-and-such because of who he was, not because of the kind of kid I was. That’s the self-justification of memory.”
The problem with our memory is it invariably paints us in the best possible light, and confirms our chosen narrative, while leaving out the details that threaten our self-concept and contradict that narrative — the mitigating factors, the strengths of others that balanced their flaws, our own role in a situation. Those we blame for our current woes, like our parents, become not complex human beings but one-dimensional symbols for why we’ve turned out the way we have and everything that’s gone wrong in our lives.
Confirmation Bias & Sunk Cost Fallacy
Two other cognitive distortions that keep us from owning up to our mistakes bear mentioning: confirmation bias and sunk cost fallacy.
Confirmation bias explains the way in which our brains seek information that ratifies our preexisting beliefs, and spurns that which contradicts them. When we come across information that aligns with our own opinions, we readily believe it to be true (“This is brilliant!), but when we’re confronted with information that challenges our opinions, cognitive dissonance rears its head, and researchers have actually found that the reasoning parts of our brain shut down. We seek out flaws, however small, in the conflicting information that enables us to summarily dismiss it (“This is utter garbage!”). Once we do, consonance is restored, and the emotional parts of our brain light up with happiness. The result is that being confronted with information that contradicts our ideas can actually leave us more sure of them than before. Confirmation bias explains how a Republican and Democrat can watch the same debate, and both walk away feeling confident that their candidate scored big points, while the opponent was smarmy and dishonest-looking. We look for and latch onto the things that confirm what we already believe, while that which contradicts us flies under the radar – as if one is made of velcro and the other teflon. The confirmation bias explains why it is difficult to change our minds once we’ve made them up.
The sunk cost fallacy explains how the more we invest in something, the more we fear losing that investment, and will thus continue doing it even we don’t really want to, in order to avoid knowing we wasted our time, money, and/or effort. The law student who decides halfway through his three years that he definitely doesn’t want to be a lawyer, will feel he’s invested too much to drop out now. The man who knows his girlfriend of nine years isn’t right for him can’t bring himself to break up with her and face feeling like that near-decade was a waste. The man who’s been devoting all his free time to serving his church can’t bring himself to leave even when a sordid scandal involving the minister blows up. Each is suffering from the sunk-cost fallacy. Each will tell themselves sensible-sounding justifications for why they should continue in their path, when at the heart of it, they really fear losing their investment and feeling like they made a mistake and wasted time, money, and effort. If they continue on, they may come to waste much more, but that’s in the future and the abstract, and is much easier to deal with.
Related to the sunk cost fallacy is the fact that studies have shown that the more pain, effort, and embarrassment you go through to get something, the happier you will be with your choice. Your mind doesn’t want to believe you went through all that for nothing, so it keeps telling you that the reward is truly worthwhile and you made the right decision. This is why hazing rituals are so effective. It would create too much dissonance to think that the painful and embarrassing hazing you went through to get into a group was all for naught, so your brain says, “I am so glad I did this. This group is awesome.” If it’s really not so awesome, and not right for you, and you’ve made a mistake in joining, it becomes very hard to admit.
But Not Everything My Brains Tells Me Isn’t True!
We’ve now established the way in which your mind works overtime to shield your cherished self-concept from any threats. Self-justifications and distorted memories create veritable blind spots in our brains that keep us from seeing a completely accurate picture of how we operate in the world and to what degree we are responsible for what happens to us.
You may be thinking, “Well, I guess I do come up with justifications to wriggle out of responsibility sometimes, but there’s often plenty of truth to them too! A lot of other students were cheating! My friend deserved that grudge I had against him! I was stressed out when I snapped at her! I was unduly provoked when I got in that fight! My parents were distant when I was growing up! I am happy with my fraternity!
Self-justifications distort reality, but they typically do not supplant it. There often are indeed kernels of truth to them. Yet the whole truth of the matter tends to lie somewhere in-between what we tell ourselves happened, and what really happened. Taking ownership of your mistakes means being able to reflect on, and sift through, what our role and responsibility in a situation was. Does the number of students who cheat have a bearing on the moral rightness or wrongness of the decision? What could have been your friend’s motivations for doing what he did? Is it possible to control your temper even when you’re stressed? Did you do anything to provoke the other person’s provocations? Are you forgetting some of the good things your parents did for you too?
Conclusion
Our brain’s blind spots are actually not entirely bad – they do serve a purpose. Without these ego defense systems, we wouldn’t be able to function and would endlessly ruminate about things we did wrong, embarrassments we experienced, and hurts we caused others. We would agonize over whether we made the right decisions and become paralyzed by regret. Self-justifications preserve our confidence and self-esteem and help keep us plunging ahead.
However, too much self-justification can lead to truly deleterious effects on our lives. Tomorrow we will talk about the importance of owning up to your mistakes as much as possible, and also offer strategies on how you can fight the self-justification beast, take ownership of your life, and mature into manhood.
PS-As you were reading this article, did your brain think at certain parts, “That totally reminds me of ____. She always does that.” That’s your responsibility-shirking brain in action again! We readily think of how admonitions apply to others rather than ourselves. Try to think of how this applies to you too!
Read Part II: The Importance of Owning Up to Your Mistakes and How to Do It
________________
Source:
Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson
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{ 46 comments… read them below or add one }
Great article, a rare few must also be careful to not do the exact opposite – blame themselves for things that weren’t actually their fault.
Very interesting post! This really made me stop and think. I would say we can all benefit from a little self check and put forth some effort to realize and own up to our mistakes.
Owning up to the petty passive-aggressive thoughts and tendencies in my head took a very long time to get a handle on!
I still haven’t quite figured out how to handle the people who will purposely try to use my admission of mistakes as “permission to dump on me” but I guess that’s a standard boundary issue.
Great post, thanks from a new fan.
Boyd
Welp, definitively caught myself thinking that the part about rationalizing decisions reminded of one friend…
Another truly stimulating AoM article. This is rather timely for me. I’ve been trying to dig deep to find out my faults and correct them. Thanks for the satisfying food for thought!
Good article. Reminds me of an expression I had to learn at the police academy which one would have to recite after giving any other answer for a problem other than “sir, no excuse, sir”. The saying is: excuses are monuments of nothingness and they build bridges to nowhere. People who use these tools of incompetence are masters of nothingness! It has served me well over the years.
I wonder if it’s possible for some people to do the exact opposite of this. I went through a period when I was depressed, and I assumed everything I did was wrong and worthless and that everyone else had to be correct. I was suffering from Nice Guy Syndrome as well, but I think most Nice Guys would have the problems described in this article. Of course, that state of mind was equally destructive and equally false. It’s probably rare and weird though.
Great article, and the post script was a real zinger. Very well done. :)
When you wrote about how the more pain, effort, and time devoted to a challenge is correlated to how much you value the decision to take the challenge, it caused me to wonder about how one can assess the value of a challenge. I have held the secular view that a challenge is an opportunity for personal growth, but perhaps not every challenge is so. I would find it extremely difficult to admit a challenge I succeeded in was a mistake. I suppose I would have to evaluate the challenge in hindsight.
It is uncanny how often these posts are directly relevant to what is going on in my current life. It is really helpful and encouraging to read this. It is so hard to take responsibility for my true self, which is never as successful or put together as I think. It’s harder still to own my faults outright and truly avoid making some diverting excuse.
Took a long while for me to own up to my problems. If I screw up, today I typically admit it.
I am human of course, so I do catch myself looking for the fault in another sometimes, but less than usual. I always say, “you — and only you — are responsible for your life” as a mantra of sorts.
This made me ponder past memories and how honest those memories really are. Great stuff.
Thank you. Well said. It’s time to look at our own behavior first. Have a good day!
@Preston-
Something we’ll touch on tomorrow is that the more confident you are, the more dissonance you experience when you do something wrong, and the more likely you are to justify yourself, since you think you’re so awesome you couldn’t possibly be to blame. People with low self-esteem, and I would think depression too, on the other hand, don’t experience dissonance when they do something wrong, or when something bad happens to them, because they think, “Of course I did that, or of course that bad thing happened, because I suck.” But people with low self-esteem do experience dissonance when something good happens to them…they don’t understand why it’s happened since they suck so much, and tend to rationalize it away or even sabotage it to make the dissonance go away. So of course they can’t ask for good things either, since they don’t think they deserve them.
@Christopher-
That’s a really interesting issue. In some ways this information is disturbing and can tie you up in knots and lead you to deep philosophical questions about what is reality. I don’t think it’s ever possible to totally unravel whether we think a challenge was worth it because of its true worth, or because we’re rationalizing it was worth it because it was so hard. Perhaps the best way to judge is simply by its fruits — did it make you a better man or not?
One interesting thing that’s oddly comforting about this information is that while we often stress out over big decisions, fearing that if we make the wrong choice, we’ll be unhappy, in reality, whatever choice we make, our minds will almost always justify it as the right choice. We’ll think of the cons of the other choice, and focus on the positives of the choice we made, and be satisfied we did the right thing….
But, my grandfather really did smoke most oh his life, and made it to a decent 83 years of age. Which is when he died of prostate & bone cancer.
So, mixed signals on that one.
Great article. I tend to flip the other way, and take responsibility or blame for situations that aren’t my fault. It’s been the case since I was around 8, and it’s something I have to fight quite hard against.
You are right. It is often hard to accept responsibility for our mistakes. I know there have been times when I have used the old “it’s not my fault”, or tried to rationalize my actions.
I am getting better at accepting responsibility and owning up to my mistakes.
This does not mean we have to beat ourselves up over every little thing we do wrong. We are all human, and therefore imperfect. Just do the best you can. If we are prepared to take responsibility for our actions, I would hope that would help us act more responsibly.
Thank you! This is important stuff and I loved the scientific angle.
Personal responsibility is rarely discussed in such rigorous terms. We often hear that the world would be a better place with more of it, but hardly ever do people explore what it really means and what it actually takes to man up when we’ve done something wrong.
Owning up to our mistakes is a way of getting back to a baseline of integrity with ourselves, which I guess comes back to this idea of self concept and self image.
This is why My Name Is Earl was such a great sitcom (at least for the first couple of seasons). Who could resist the idea of being able to clear up all past mistakes? There’s something inherently noble (and manly!) about it.
Looking forward to the next instalment. In the meantime, I’d better start work on my list…
An interesting article to be sure, but perhaps equally as interesting, is the subtext. This is an article decrying the very common practice of shifting blame away from oneself. 3/4 of this article is a listing of tricks our brain plays. It details psychological principles and effects that are justifications of blame shifting. Knowing that our brains trick us into shifting blame does not change the fact. Telling people that it is natural, acceptable, or universal to resist responsiblity is probably not the best way to teach the acceptance of responsibility. The men quoted in this article suffered from the effects of these pyschological principles, undoubtedly without the knowledge that they even existed. When studying the extremely common problem of lack of responsibility, shifting the responsibility from your actions onto thought patterns that are beyond your control may not be the best route. It is, to some extent at least, shifting the blame for shifting the blame.
I enjoyed this article, as I have read things in the past about how our brain changes our memories, but I had never linked it with honesty. I have seen it in action for myself, as well. I have this one memory of my friend saying something, which is interesting, because I know I was not at his house when he said it, i had only heard stories after. One interesting (perhaps scary?) idea is when I got to the end and realized how much of that ruminating on the past I do, as well.
I don’t mean to wax philosophical but I’m going to for a minute – Perusing this article brings up a lot of emotion. Not because I feel guilty but because of some of the things I’ve seen and studied over the last three years on the topic of ego… Being a rational actor requires much more than logic because a simple logical analysis is usually a waste of time for people whom fail to understand motivators as they distort their facts to suit the outcome they prefer. I’m sure that people would be terrified at how simple so many of life’s challenges can become with a bit of true objectivity when they discard ego. No one’s perfect but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.
@Christopher on challenges it’s all about WHAT you take away from the challenge, measuring the outcomes of challenges won’t always provide fodder for improvement but digesting the process of tackling a challenge will ALWAYS give you something. Trying to define what is, is, as a result of a challenge is probably not nearly as productive.
Good article Brett. The term “Personal Responsibility” is bandied around a lot these days but it always in reference to someone else. The person with whom the speaker disagrees.
HE needs to take personal responsibility. It’s HER fault. THEY are to blame.
The people who shout the loudest about personal responsibility never seem to think it applies to them.
In the modern corporate culture, this type of frankness is discouraged. When I have been prepped for meetings with top management and asked what will you tell him/her happened, I responded, “I screwed up”. I was strongly discouraged form saying anything of the sort, in fact, I was encouraged to create a fabricated story. We have a broken culture.
In advance, english is not my first language and I’m not that great at expressing myself. I also realize that this post is somewhat muddled, but I hope it’s vaguely relevant to the topic of personal responsibility.
Anyway…
I think there are several reasons for this, but one point I think is worth examining is how USA loves a “winner”. Once you’ve become a “winner”, you become nigh untouchable and the methods you used to get to the top doesn’t anymore. All that matters is that you are a CEO, Senator, famous athlete, etc…
In the first paragraph it is mentioned how representatives of banks and corporations would evade and avoid blame. That is an example of what I mean with winners are untouchable. Once you are a winner the rules doesn’t seem to aply to you anymore. Perhaps due to the secularization of America or the rise of todays “Capitalism” has changed our virtues and values, but in a society that encourages success at any cost and never holds a winner acountable honesty and personal acountability is at a low premium.
In a culture that adores its “golden idols” their methods becomes inspiration for others behaviour. Honesty, humility, love for your fellow man and do unto others as you would have others do unto you doesn’t really catapult you to the top. When money and power are the new virtues “old fashioned” virtues gets pushed to the back.
Small time criminals go to jail big time criminals go to Wall Street?
Well… This article went way deeper and way more interesting than I’d anticipated.
“Owning up to Mistakes” hardly seems a befitting title… It’s… not grand enough.
Nice work.
I just began re-reading Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” yesterday. Nice timing concerning the concept of Memory.
Damn, Brett. This article is depressing. The article was undoubtedly very informative, but for me a lot of it was “people’s lives are all messed up and they are even more messed up because they walk around lying to themselves.” Maybe I’m just not used to facing the music like this.
But for me, accepting responsibility for something bad you did gives you the freedom to learn from that mistake/misjudgment and push forward. For instance, in the cheating example the person can do some soul searching, talk to God about it, talk to a friend and eventually come around and commit to not cheating anymore. That person can reconcile their bad decision with the fact he is a fallible human being vulnerable to temptation but this instance allows him to prepare his mind for the future and stand strong in the face of the temptation to cheat. You can make the right decision even after you’ve made the wrong one.
As a Communication Studies major, I loved this article. I am really glad to see communication theories being implemented in real life.
More disappointing was Congress and the Fed’s denial of any part in the 2008 crisis.
Great article (I’m a long-time fan), but one interesting aspect I think you missed is the religious dimension. I think there is a prevailing belief (mostly in Western religions) that to admit mistakes makes you somehow a bad person in the religious sense (especially if you’ve done some of the things you mention in your article). And depending on your belief system, this can trigger a spiral of guilt and feelings of unworthiness.
Not that religion teaches us that we are infallible (indeed, true religion teaches the opposite), but people’s impression may be that they are expected to be perfect. Just an interesting angle I thought you might want to explore further.
Thanks again for the great article and insight as always!
So True!
Owning up to our mistakes exposes us to pain, in our ego or otherwise. So it’s natural that we would avoid it as much as possible.
I especially love your discussion of confirmation bias and sunk cost fallacy. In the past, I would get the dumb idea of buying shares in the stock market just because they were going up, without looking at the merits of the company itself. These shares would – more often than not – tank shortly after. I then tell myself that I’ve invested too much money to sell at a loss (sunk cost fallacy). Besides, people loved the stock before so this is just temporary, right (confirmation bias)?
I have since developed systematic investing rules to guide against such distorted thinking. The system isn’t perfect, but it has saved me money. Money I certainly would have lost if I had continued to fool myself.
Without owning up to our mistakes, change can’t possibly happen. And it’s pretty hard to grow up into a mature man (or woman) if we aren’t willing to accept change.
Very deep and engaging article. One thing I would like to hear your opinion on is how the sunk cost fallacy works on my fitness. Example as much as I enjoy the benefits of hitting the gym five times a week and being fit it really takes motivation to go there and just keep going. Does this mean I continue doing it even if I dont really want to, even if I just enjoy the benefits and not the whole process? Thanks in advance.
Appoaching 50 years old I have found that experiencing cognitive dissonance is life. I seek it out as it affirms that I am still alive. you know… facing the fire and all. Avoiding it appears to be the norm for a lot of people these days. It’s painful and difficult. Watching a football game involves very little dissonance while playing in a local golf tournament involves a lot. I am not sure whether our capacity can increase for it. I feel the same about it as I did at 13 years old. I have not seen it increase in other people close to me either. I am now objectifying more and more in my life, and I find that this helps and may lead to more success. Maybe, choosing to experience dissonance IS learning?
Well done, Brett. Your series recently have been excellently done, I commend you.
@Dan – I think he’s trying to explain what self-awareness is in this article. Without it, one doesn’t even have a shot of becoming responsible, exactly because one’s mind is working to keep him from feeling responsible naturally. That’s a different concept than “justifying blame-shifting”.
@Anders – I’m going stand pat and straight up disagree with you. Certainly there are millionaire criminals. Absolutely. I won’t say that they don’t exist. But I’ve known a good number of millionaires in my life, and on average they are more responsible and kind than the “salt of the earth” crowd that gets praised so much. And by “on average”, I mean “by an enormous amount”.
It makes me pretty sick hearing about this all the time. “Golden idol” nothing. Americans spend more time tearing down successful people than they do studying their wisdom. Romney, that paragon of the uber-elite, not only spent more of his millions on charity than magnanimous Obama, he spent a larger percentage of his income than did Obama, our saviour. Where was Romney’s praise? Where was that grand idolatry that everyone keeps telling me exists in this country? Andrew Carnegie and Andrew Mellon essentially saved my hometown of Pittsburgh from inside their graves by investing so much of their wealth in public works, universities, libraries, and culture, that the city is enjoying a cultural and economic renewal even after the death of the steel industry smashed its economy to pieces. They should be gods in that town–but they’re not. I went to Carnegie Mellon University, and they spent zero time talking about either of those two millionaires in the very institution they founded. Some idols.
This idea that there’s some crime ring leading up to the top of the success ladder is dumb. Here’s an idea–go to your work tomorrow, start stealing from your company and your customers, don’t pay your taxes, and watch what happens. See how much your bank account starts rising! Pretty soon you’ll be in an institution with a lot of like-minded individuals, but it won’t be the Greenwich Yacht Club, buddy.
@Dan-
I disagree with your assessment of the subtext here. I can understand that humans crave carbs and sugar without blaming carbs and sugar for my weight. The information just helps me create a more effective diet for optimal health. Understanding how my body works doesn’t make me blame my body for my fitness, rather it helps me create better workouts to obtain optimal fitness. Understanding something doesn’t mean blaming it. Whenever going after an “enemy,” you first seek to understand him, not so you can blame him, but that you know his weaknesses and can thus know the best strategies for overcoming him. This post was merely a prelude to today’s which offers strategies for taking responsibility and overcoming these cognitive weaknesses.
@Mitja-
The sunk cost fallacy is a fallacy in thinking because it refers to decisions where it would be better to quit because you’re not going to gain anything from continuing, and/or will lose more down the road, but continue anyway because you’re afraid of losing what you’ve already invested. You keep on putting resources into something that cannot be recovered. The key is not whether you enjoy something or not, but whether you will gain or lose from continuing with it. There are plenty of things we do that we don’t enjoy, but we keep at because they’re beneficial in other areas beyond pure pleasure. The sunk cost fallacy doesn’t apply to such things. So it wouldn’t really apply to something like working out, as keeping at it will continue to reap benefits to your health indefinitely.
It’s not really that hard to own up to one’s mistakes when there are no consequences other than internal ones: a bit of shame and humiliation and then a resolve to learn from one’s mistakes and hopefully not repeat them so as to injure oneself or others.
Did General Lee or Mr. Hale say to the families, “If you want my life in recompense for my mistake that cost your loved ones their lives, you may have it?” General Lee may have. Perhaps Mr. Hale did. But a true owning up means offering, to those who suffered from one’s mistakes, the willingness to accept their judgment even when their judgment may be excessive and unfair.
And it needs to be personal. How easy it is to say, for example, “We white folks have wronged people of color. Therefore, you, white person over there, should make reparations in terms of forfeiting your opportunities while I hold myself exempt.”
When you’ve wronged yourself, a different dynamic comes into play. Maybe that’s what this article is really about. I see there’s a sequel that may take this discussion a step further.
1. as I always tell me children, only by admitting your mistakes can you learn from them
2. in my business, it is not those who make mistakes that get in trouble, it is those who refuse to recognize, and correct their mistakes. I am a surgeon.
I work in a litigious environment where any admission of the slightest fault would result in my being charged with every crime since the Lincoln Assassination. I maintain a Lawyer on Retainer just to deal with the false accusations. Admitting any faults would mean that I would have to hire my own law firm.
The prevalence of this particular problem in my daily life has been escalating over the past few months, thank you for such a clear and sensible elucidation of it’s facets.
I would appreciate if you could write a consolidated article about the human ego, it’s deleterious and beneficial effects, to what extent it may be advisable to nullify it, and what exercises we may put into effect to do so.
A very helpful website,
It seems that not everyone has lost their common sense after all.
It has EVERYTHING to do with the people around you. The way it is done in my family is: “The first person to give up the argument loses and will be loudly mocked by all the people in attendance”. Even if people might own up to their mistake eventually, it won’t be until the next time you meet. Even if you genuinely want to be honest and humble, such an environment makes it impossible, because you will be punished for fessing up.
Then I became a classical musician and, contrary to popular belief, classical musicians (and singers) can be the most humble people in the world, and even the ones that are proud and diva-like will own up to a mistake in a heartbeat. Often they might instantly shout it out so that everybody hears it (“WAIT, STOP, I MADE A MISTAKE, YOU ARE RIGHT!”). It is also the easiest thing to go to someone and tell them: “I think the way you play the Andante is a bit tasteless” without any animosity or anyone taking it personally. In an environment like that, it is impossible to be anything BUT humble and honest.
And it can’t just be because musicians are sensitive people. I have not seen this behavior in any other art form. It is like coming to a strange, isolated zen island.
But it is very contagious. I think it takes seeing such an environment once, before you can even grasp the concept and uncomplicated manliness of owning up to mistakes. Before I saw it, I thought having to own up to mistakes was the worst possible situation to be in. And it prevents you from trying anything that might possibly fail.
Excellent post. I was glad to see the quote from Robert E. Lee. We would all do well to emulate him.
Thank you for this. I love to see this in writing, I am a VP of a software company and find that most of the time you sit and spin your wheels waiting for everyone to stop playing the CYA game. In my opinion, the faster you recognize the point of failure the faster you can correct and move on. Divide and conquer – seperate that from what is working from that which is not and polish those things that are not yet great. ……Kypuros Wisdom
Excellent article, excellent timing. Lent is just beginning. ‘Tis the season for owning up. I did have trouble with one sentence:
“Yet the whole truth of the matter tends to lie somewhere in-between what we tell ourselves happened, and what really happened.”
How much space is there between the “whole truth of the matter” and “what really happened?”
I love your articles, I’ve been reading them for some time now!
I completely agree with the problem that rarely are people prepared to take responsibility (and thus blame). I think that this problem is also made worse by the fact that because no one admits their mistakes the few who want to feel that they will be seen as someone who makes too many mistakes because they can actually be blamed for something and accept it. This creates a vicious circle where no one feels able to take responsibility expect a few confident men! What also doesn’t help the situation is when people use the passive voice in their explanation so that they remove the blame from themselves but don’t even try to attribute any cause to an incident; they are effectively saying,”I don’t know, it must have just happened!” In these cases people are just trying to kid themselves that they aren’t responsible.
In sum, great piece. Let’s hope that some more people can stand by what they do!
Great Articles , i absolutely enjoy every one of them
“That totally reminds me of ____. She always does that.”
Me.
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this is one of the important things life has taught me and i have realized that we reduce our chances of improving or rectifying our mistakes unless we own them .Hence guys i suggest you one thing: Try your best not to commit a mistake and if one occurs be responsible and accept them .
Complex stuff but this segment caught my attention in particular:
While the ensuing argument often presumes that one person is remembering it accurately, and one is not, what is more likely is that each is remembering it from their own angle – one that highlights their innocence as opposed to culpability.
I think we remember it from our own perspective because of either extreme pleasure or extreme pain. Spot welded experiences are usually generated by high emotions. I find it interesting how in these experiences we remember what we were wearing and our surroundings, but cannot recollect the truth and realize we may have been at fault.