Mistakes Were Made But Not By Me

His theory asserts people have different views about the world around them; however, when these cognitions clash, an inconsistency arises which results in a state known as cognitive dissonance. People are then motivated to reduce the disharmony by changing their attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors or justify and rationalize them. His theory continues to be essential in psychology, communication, and other areas of theoretical study. Cognitive dissonance addresses the inescapable human propensity to rationalize contradictory thoughts. The theory indicates a state of mind involving an individual’s conflicting attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. Dissonance creates a feeling of disharmony possibly leading to a change in an individual’s attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors in order to decrease the disharmony and restore a balance of harmony. Therefore, people have an internal drive to keep their attitudes, beliefs, and behavior in harmony in order to keep from experiencing

“An appreciation of the power of self-justification helps us understand, therefore, why people who have low self-esteem, or who simply believe that they are incompetent in some domain, are not totally overjoyed when they do something well.” (p..

Self-justification is a human defense mechanism that plays a significant role in our daily lives and may damage our relationships. Most people prefer selecting details that support their beliefs and ignoring evidence that conflicts with their beliefs. This “mental contortion” as the authors call it, is “confirmation bias” (22). They explain how “when people are forced to look at disconfirming evidence, they will find a way to criticize, distort,

Failure is a scary word. It’s a scary topic, and a scary feeling for many of us. We tend to focus more on not failing that we lose track of what were really aiming for; success. In Mistakes Were Made by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, we get an insight on why the gap between Asian and American classroom performance are so wide.

First, the magnitude of dissonance experience, second, the importance of the elements involved in order to restore consistency and third, the level of restructuring one’s cognitive system in an attempt at reducing the dissonance. These authors point out that little research has been conducted in relation to the three elements. Furthermore, going against the majority, the authors indicated sufficient research has been conducted on the basis of attitude and beliefs, and in doing so, suggested that change may occur in the individual after being subjected to dissonance arousing situations, for example deciding whether or not to cheat on a college

In chapter three of Mistakes Were Made But Not By Me, The authors imply that our memory is reconstructive, almost like a puzzle with pieces that we produce ourselves. Our memory is manipulated by self justification to either protect ourselves or our beliefs. Memory is reconstructive in a way that it replaces parts of memories and fills them with what we believe or think occurred. Reconstruction of our memory is a method applying details to a memory that may be beneficial or contrary to others memories. Because we manipulate our memory laboriously, our memories may become contradictory to others memories.

In the introduction, author Joseph T. Hallinan introduces the many ideas of mistakes that he fully covers throughout the book’s chapters. The author begins by describing mistakes and explains that much of the world construction is in such a way, that we expect to see things clearer and remember things better than we actually do. Furthermore, not seeing what is right in front of us is just one of a stunningly large array of shortcomings of the human brain that cause us to error. In Why We Make Mistakes, he provides the reader with an intriguing assortment of such failings. Hallinan explains human beings are partial, overoptimistic, hypercritical, downright irrational creatures of habit who are blissfully unaware of their limitations. All

The idea is applicable in everyday life; we can use cognitive dissonance to help people make better decisions throughout the day. When we finish using the bathroom we often see a sign asking us to wash our hands to prevent disease and infection. When someone thinks to not wash their hands but sees the sign, they will experience cognitive dissonance. To get rid of this discomfort they will probably choose to wash their hands. Small interactions like these help better the world; by placing small changes like these in someone’s environment we can remind people of their morals and values.

Two different but similar forms of writing are able to be tied down into one general but specific category. In the book, Mistakes Were Made (but not by me), by Elliot Aronson and Carol Tavris, Aronson and Tavris commentates on events that people go through. The book is mainly about Elliot Aronson’s and Carol Tavris’ opinion on how people behave and should behave when caught in tough situations. Instead of focusing on one main character in the book, each section of the book illustrates a different person 's’ situation and that situation would correspond with a specific theme in the chapter. Throughout the book, Aronson and Tavris give us a broad idea of how some psychological thinking/processes comes into play, each psychological concept corresponds to a chapter or section in the book, these ideas are: confirmation bias, revision of memories, self-justification, pyramid of choice, cognitive dissonance, blind spots, closed loops, reducing cognitive dissonance, blaming, self-justification (for the greater good), and (sunk costs). Another form of writing, “Wrong Answer”, by Rachel Aviv, is an article focusing on the main idea of a school going through tough times and the outcome of the actions taken by the staff. The article revolves around Parks Middle School in Atlanta. The teachers and staff in Parks Middle School were caught cheating and changing the answers students submitted for standardized tests, and this little mess resulted in hundreds of teachers being laid off and

In the Introduction, author Joseph T. Hallinan introduces the concept of what types of mistakes there are and then with each chapter, breaks down these mistakes to the root causes by describing the mistake and how, we as individuals made these mistakes. As the author describes each mistake, it is apparent the constructed world that we live in, has the ability of covering these mistakes, even when, these mistakes are in plain view. This oversight, although, is not so uncommon, as our brain seems to make things clearer and we are able to remember things that never happened, or forget things that did happen, even though they occurred right in front of us. As he progresses through the book, Hallinan describes human beings as partial, overoptimistic, hypercritical, downright irrational creatures of habit who are blissfully unaware of their limitations, which leads people to make many simple and horrible errors.

Cognitive dissonance impacts attitudes and behavior negatively in the workplace in a variety of ways depending on the position you are employed. Being in management as an administrator you are faced with many challenges and situations that cause cognitive dissonance. For example, if my director asks me to perform a task and the way in which he wants me to perform the task, goes against my beliefs, I am forced to decide whether to follow his directives or risk termination for insubordination. The stress factor is making the correct decision. I can remember an instructor sending a student to me for conduct issues and wanted the student terminated from her program. The documentation that she provided to me was not sufficient to suspend the student,

Leon Festinger’s cognitive dissonance theory fixates itself on how humans strive for internal consistency. Cognitive dissonance means to describe the feelings of discomfort which is a result of two conflicting beliefs or behaviour. The theory claims that people seek internal balance by changing something in belief or behaviour in order to reduce the imbalance. There are different forms of cognitive dissonance. For example, when someone makes one of the dissonant factors less important: “Oh, one small bite doesn’t matter”.

In psychology, we are learning about the human mind and how we respond to situations, as well as other people in our environment. One concept psychologists are still trying to understand is why do we feel the need to justify actions, thoughts, or ideas that we have that are different from others’? Why are we afraid of failure and not very accepting of being wrong? The class was previously assigned to read an article of two psychologists’ views on these issues and try to explain what strives these behaviors.

The principal assumption of the theory regarding to Hogg and Vaughan (2011, p.214) “is that cognitive dissonance is an unpleasant state of psychological tension generated when a person has two or more cognitions (bits of information) that are inconsistent or do not fit together. So if people at the same time hold those two cognitions (thoughts, attitudes, beliefs, states of awareness of behaviour), which are psychologically inconsistent, then we experience dissonance. The theory also accounts for discrepancies between behaviour and attitudes. For instance, when people act in a manner that is inconsistent with their attitudes, then they experience tension. And how people can reduce this tension? Festinger (1957) suggested people have to do it by changing their attitudes so that they are in line with their behavior. The main way of reducing dissonance is attitude change. The theory propose that when we are dealing with two conflicting beliefs then we experience tension or an aversive state and a good example is military training. The military teaches and telling soldiers that when they kill the enemy its nothing wrong and killing them is a good thing but those same soldiers have a deeply natural and inborn belief that “thou shalt not kill”(Sturman, 2012) . Another example is about person who smokes cigarettes. Regarding to Stone and Cooper (2001) most people

I was a mistake, an accident, I never should have been born. I’m Brian King fifteen years old and my brother James King is seventeen. My family used to live in the rebuilt part of town in Cedar Springs Michigan but we moved towards the more rural part of Cedar Springs. During that time my mom and dad argued a lot, I was curious about what they were arguing about so one night I snuck into their closet and waited knowing they would eventually start arguing.