May’s book club pick was a book I’d vaguely intended to read back when it was published when I was in college and I simply have never gotten around to: Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson’s Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts. I remember when this book came out and I’m pretty sure I read excerpts in magazines or interviews with the authors or such other press coverage at the time it was published, although now that I think about it I also think it was a hot enough subject in the years immediately following its publication that I read some excerpts or summaries or something multiple times when I was reviewing various social science textbooks for Pearson in 2011-2013 or so.

As a result, the main ideas in this book weren’t brand new to me–I was already familiar with basic psychological concepts like the fundamental attribution error, and terms like “cognitive dissonance.” It was probably a good refresher to go over what they mean, and there was a lot of interesting stuff in the details. I was also at least sort of familiar with some of the problems with police interrogation and general magical thinking in the criminal justice system, though I think that going over the specifics was quite valuable. The scandals around “recovered memories” I knew less about, although I am pretty sure I have read a little bit about it before (I read a lot of psych 101 textbooks when I was working for Pearson, OK?) and knew that “recovered memories” were hokum (dangerous hokum).

This is not all to say that I am so smart or the book is soooo basic or whatever but this is a longstanding area of at least some measure of interest; I’ve always been interested in questions of perception and self-perception and why otherwise apparently normal people are Like That, and the past almost-decade of time spent in activist spaces laboriously trying to establish halfway decent social norms in the face of people who are always super gung-ho for other people to Take Accountability but are all special pleading when it comes to their own behavior has not exactly made the subject any less relevant.

The chapter about conflicts of interest in science funding seems uhh very important and relevant to the various scandals and such contributing to our current “crisis of authority” and general anti-intellectualism/epistemological fuckery going on in society at large. Let us, in fact, compromise the science! This will surely have no bad downstream effects in terms of how much the public trusts science and scientists! Hey, why are all these people rejecting science? Don’t they know we are smart and objective? It’s bad news.

If I have one critique of the book it’s that by the end of it, the examples get so wide-ranging that it starts to feel a little One Weird Trick About All of Human Existence-y, even though the authors are careful not to actually say that and are in fact doing exactly what they set out to do, which is to look at this specific facet of human psychology at work in a range of situations that, you know, humans find themselves in. It’s not that I think they are wrong it’s just that it feels fundamentally weird to read like “This thing that is why these two people’s marriage fell apart is also what was going on in the Iran hostage crisis”; like, this is just an insane set of things put next to each other, even though I suppose it is in fact true that nobody saw themselves as the bad guys in the Iran hostage crisis either. It’s not that the book is necessarily weak when discussing politics–it’s pretty strong in many parts–so much as it is weak when it is zooming around too much instead of making a sober case study of, for example, George W. Bush’s inability to admit that the war in Iraq was a) going poorly and b) based on lies, or the idiotic things the Western imperial powers say when they do torture while also seeing themselves as great defenders of human rights.

A good chunk of the book examines self-justification in family dramas, especially marriages, which is probably more immediately relevant to the average reader than self-justification around doing war crimes. I hope. At any rate, it effectively conveys that this is a basic part of everyday psychology that we could all benefit from developing more self-awareness about. As some of my comrades once said in a training about using the chapter Slack: If you think this isn’t about you, then it’s definitely about you.

In conclusion, it is important to Know Thyself, and also don’t talk to cops–they’re legally allowed to lie to you.