In the illuminating book, Mistakes were Made…But Not by Me, social psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliott Aronson explain “why we justify foolish beliefs, bad decisions and hurtful acts”.  The premise of the book is that “as soon as people make a decision, whether reasoned or impulsive, they will change their attitudes to conform to that choice and start minimizing or dismissing any information suggesting they chose the wrong option”.

In helping us overcome our tendency to justify our foolish behaviors that often cause us and others harm, we often turn to psychologists, psychiatrists, behavior therapists and other health care professionals. Instead of dealing with the root causes of our negative behavior, psychiatrists usually prescribe medications that might help with the symptoms, but do not solve the real problems. Psychologists are trained at helping their clients but Tavris and Aronson are skeptical of their work. The authors believe that, without scientifically testing their recommended treatments, therapists can be ineffective.  Here are some excerpts from the book:

  • “In the past decades, as the number of mental health practioners of all kinds has soared, most counseling-psychology and psycho-therapy training programs have cut themselves off from their scientifically trained cousins in university departments of psychology”.

 

  • “The inherent privacy of the (therapist-client) interaction means that therapists who lack training in science and skepticism have no internal corrections to the self-protecting cognitive biases that afflict us all. What these therapists see confirms what they believe, and what they believe shapes what they see”.

 

  • “Most psychiatrists, who have medical degrees, learn about medicine and medication, but they rarely learn much about basic research in psychology…While psychiatrists learn about the brain, many still learn almost nothing about nonmedical causes of emotional disorders or about the questioning skeptical essence of science”.

 

  • “Our intention is to examine the kinds of mistakes (that medical professionals make) that can result from the closed loop of clinical practice and show how self-justification perpetuates them”.

 

  • “Because of the confirmation bias, the “dependable observation” is not dependable. Clinical intuition – “I know it when I see it” – is the end of the conversation to many psychiatrists and psychotherapists but the start of the conversation to the scientist: “A good observation, but what exactly have you seen, and how do you know you are right?”

 

  • ” Therapists who have not been trained to think scientifically will probably not wonder about the invisible cases – the children they don’t see as clients”. This refers to therapists’ tendency to draw conclusions about the children they see who share common symptoms without comparing the symptoms of children who they don’t see as clients.

 

  • “To date, hundreds of studies have demonstrated the unreliability of clinical predictions. The evidence is dissonance-creating news to the mental-health professionals whose self-confidence rests on the belief that their expert assessments are extremely accurate. When we said that science is a form of arrogance control, that’s what we mean”.

 

At Myelin Leadership, we are constantly updating our potent RENEW coaching program with input from science-based research as well as from neuroscientists, social psychologists, microbiologists, behavioral scientists and other professionals. We facilitate the RENEW process by encouraging clients to get in touch with their real stories using science-based tools to help them retrieve their memories. Tavris and Aronson write, “Many of us intentionally avoid painful memories by distracting ourselves or trying not to think about them, and many of us have had the experience of suddenly recalling an embarrassing memory, one we thought long gone, when we are in a situation that evokes it. The situation provides what memory scientists call retrieval clues, familiar signals that reawaken the memory”.

Mistakes were Made…But Not by Me is a must-read book that explores the concepts of cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias, self-justification, biases, stereotypes and prejudices. The authors certainly believe that most mental health professionals have good intentions but, by not using science to test their therapeutic recommendations, they are at risk of failing their clients.