Why We Lie to Ourselves When We Make Mistakes

TIME:

It’s a no-brainer to understand why we lie to others when we’ve been caught making a mistake or doing something wrong: to avoid losing a job, a spouse, a reputation; to avoid a fight, a fine, a prison term; to pass responsibility to someone else. But self-justification occurs when people lie to themselves to avoid the realization they did anything wrong in the first place. It’s the reason that many people justify sticking with a mistaken belief or a disastrous course of action even when evidence shows they are dead wrong.

The motivational mechanism that underlies the reluctance to be wrong, or to change our ways of doing things, is called cognitive dissonance: the discomfort we feel when two beliefs or actions contradict each other. Like hunger, dissonance is uncomfortable, and like hunger, we are motivated to reduce it. For example, the awareness that “smoking is bad for me” is dissonant with “I’m a heavy smoker,” so smokers have all kinds of dissonance-reducing rationalizations for persisting in that unhealthy practice (“it reduces stress”; “it keeps me thin”). The brain likes consonance, and provides a number of biases in perception that foster it: One is the “confirmation bias,” which sees to it that we notice and remember information that confirms what we believe, and ignore, forget, or minimize information that disconfirms it.

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