sliding down a spiral

I have been reading a book -- Mistakes were made (but not by me) by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson. Though both are highly-respected psychologists, the book is written in a delightful, entertaining manner, without sacrificing evidence of academic research.

The book tells why people make mistakes, but refuse to own up to them. Often, it is not that they are outright liars, but that they are self-justifying; i.e., they believe the "reason" that they cook up. Why do people self-justify? Well, the authors propose that when a person takes on a course of action that is controversial (or dissonant) to what they originally believe, it creates a source of tension or anxiety within them. This is called "cognitive dissonance". The only way to damp down the dissonance is to justify the action. So, for example, you smoke, but you know that smoking's bad for your health. So you justify it by saying," well, it's only five sticks a day" or "only when I've had a really bad day".

Come to think of it, this happens to us a lot of times. A husband might give the new girl at the office a lift home every night, and think to himself that it's ok because " it's on the way home for me anyway, it would be selfish to let her wait at the bus stop!" Which, of course, is a perfectly good, understandable reason, cos it shows he is a caring colleague, and makes him feel better about doing it.

The trouble comes when we start to buy into our self-justifications; because we are wired to believe more deeply in things we want to believe -- this the authors call "confirmation bias". So, when we take the next step of self-justification, it often goes further and further along the direction that we set out for ourselves.

The reason why this book resonated with me was that I recognized many of the self-justifications that my husband put up in our quarrelling over his work spouse, and also, quite shamefully, I admit, I found many of these in the way I thought and acted over the past six months. Believing that she must have a crush on him, or vice versa, I discounted evidence to the contrary (eg., he would take time to go swimming with the kids and I, tell me about his day -- with her included), and started looking for clues to bolster my belief (e.g., he's only having lunch with me cos she's not free today, he would only tell me an edited version of what he did that day). Soon I found myself falling down a spiral of suspicion -- and became increasingly disbelieving of everything he said or did.

It's not easy to climb out of the spiral. I think identifying that I was falling down a spiral was one step -- but getting out of it is quite another. I try and tell myself to have a balanced view -- but I can feel myself sliding down the darn spiral again as soon as some dissonant information comes to light -- like, why does she keep texting him after work, even though she's rotated out of their office? (Official reason -- she's having a bad time adjusting and her parent was ill at the same time. Voice of the devil on my shoulder -- cos she can't let go and he's feeding her dependency by returning her messages!)


I wonder if anyone out there has identified going through this in their lives?