Personal responsibility, the ability to own up to one’s mistakes, is a foundational element of character. It’s also the only way we can grow and get better. But as anyone with any experience being human well understands, dang, it sure can be hard to do.

My guest today explains why, and how you can yet rise to meet this important challenge. His name is Elliot Aronson, and he’s a social psychologist and the co-author of Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts. Elliot first explains how and why we engage in self-justification to avoid facing our mistakes, and how this process is driven by the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance. We then discuss how once you make a decision in a certain direction, good or bad, you become more entrenched in your attitude about it and more likely to continue down that same path, and how this phenomenon represents what Elliot calls “the pyramid of choice.” We end our conversation with how we can learn to approach the mistakes of others with more generosity, and our own mistakes with more honesty.

If reading this in an email, click the title of the post to listen to the show.

Show Highlights

• Why being unable to own up to your mistakes is so insidious 


• How to live with cognitive dissonance (and how people often do it poorly)  


• How cheating (or not cheating) changes your future attitudes towards cheating 


• What’s the way “out” of cheating? How do you own up to it?


• The vicious cycle of unwanted behavior 


• Why we end up demonizing people in the midst of big changes 


• Why we’re so intent on not changing our mind about something


• How dissonance shows up in our criminal justice system 


• The stories we tell ourselves to justify holding on to our wrong beliefs 


• What can you do today to start avoiding self-justifications 


• The power of forgiveness — towards yourself and others 

Resources/Articles/People Mentioned in Podcast

• Why Is It So Hard to Own Up to Our Mistakes?


• The Importance of Owning Up to Your Mistakes and How to Do It


• Ride the Dissonance


• How to Develop Greater Self-Awareness


• Just Mercy


• “For Peres, Pullout Has Moral Value”


• Is Forgiveness Manly?


• Cooperation in the Classroom

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness Podcast. Personal responsibility, the ability to own up to one’s mistakes, is a foundational element of character. It’s also the only way we can grow and get better. But as anyone with any experience being human well understands, man, it can sure be hard to do.

My guest today explains why, and how you can yet rise to meet this important challenge. His name is Elliot Aronson, he’s a social psychologist and the co-author of Mistakes Were Made, But Not By Me: Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts. Elliot first explains how and why we engage in self-justification to avoid facing our mistakes, and how this process is driven by the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance. We then discuss how once you make a decision in a certain direction, good or bad, become more entrenched in your attitude about it and more likely to continue down that same path, and how this phenomenon represents what Elliot calls “the pyramid of choice.” And we end our conversation with how we can learn to approach the mistakes of others with more generosity, and our own mistakes with more honesty. After the show is over, check out our show notes at aom.is/mistakes.

Elliot Aronson, welcome to the show.

Elliot Aronson: Thank you. Good to be here.

Brett McKay: So you are one of the authors of a book called Mistakes Were Made But Not By Me: Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts, and it’s all about why it’s so hard to admit that we’re wrong, we made a mistake. What got you studying this train of thought in psychology?

Elliot Aronson: Well, I’ve been researching the whole issue of how the human mind works, and especially how it works to form attitudes and opinions. I’ve been doing that for more than 65 years, ever since I started graduate school 65 years ago, and it’s an exciting area because it’s terribly important to know how it works in terms of forming opinions and forming attitudes toward a wide variety of things. Some of the opinions and attitudes we form are accurate and useful to ourselves and to the people around us, and others are inaccurate or not useful, and sometimes even destructive. And there are certain tricks that the mind plays on us that we’ll get into, I guess in the course of this interview, that, with some of the research we’ve done, we’ve been able to find the conditions under which people can process information in a reasonable way and the conditions under which they can’t. Now, in the past 15 years or so, I have gotten specifically interested on the issue of mistakes and how people handle mistakes, whether they double down and convince themselves that they were right all the time, and all they have to do is push a little harder, or whether they can own up to having made a mistake, back off and try a different tack.

There’s a wonderful parable from Eastern philosophy, about a wealthy and powerful man from Europe, who was terribly unhappy, his marriage of 35 years was falling apart, his grown children hated him and feared him, his employees were frightened of him, and he was just incredibly unhappy, and so he decided to go to India to visit the person that’