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Why It’s Hard to Admit to Being Wrong

The engine that drives self-justification, the energy that produces the need to justify our actions and decisions — especially the wrong ones — is an unpleasant feeling that Festinger called “cognitive dissonance.” Cognitive dissonance is a state of tension that occurs whenever a person holds two cognitions (ideas, attitudes, beliefs, opinions) that are psychologically inconsistent, such as “Smoking is a dumb thing to do because it could kill me” and “I smoke two packs a day.” Dissonance produces mental discomfort, ranging from minor pangs to deep anguish; people don’t rest easy until they find a way to reduce it. In this example, the most direct way for a smoker to reduce dissonance is by quitting. But if she has tried to quit and failed, now she must reduce dissonance by convincing herself that smoking isn’t really so harmful, or that smoking is worth the risk because it helps her relax or prevents her from gaining weight (and after all, obesity is a health risk, too), and so on. Most smokers manage to reduce dissonance in many such ingenious, if self-deluding, ways.

The short version is that often times people invest so much emotionally into something or someone that when the end result doesn’t come out the way they think it should they find some kind of rationalization. That rationalization may even include delusions about reality. In the film The Big Chill (1983) Jeff Goldblum’s character says that people can’t through a day without a rationalization. Probably true. If rationalizations are inevitable then what to do. Maybe we would use fewer excuses if we tried not to lie to ourselves as often.

This would be a worse case scenario of not being able to face the truth and admit wrong, The Genocide Generals: secret recordings explode the myth they knew nothing about the Holocaust

After the publication of this extraordinary, horrific but compelling collection of secretly-recorded conversations, the alibi of the German High Command - that they did not know what the SS were up to, and anyhow they were, as Heim put it, “only carrying out orders” - is shown to be demonstrably false.

To make it all the more powerful, the evidence for this comes not from the prosecution, or from “victors’ justice” as it is sometimes accused of being.

Instead, out of their own mouths, they are condemned before the bar of history.

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