"Sorry Not Sorry" and the Dangers of Self-Justification

Because we are all wired to rationalize our own bad behavior.

Although I consider myself a pretty healthy person, excessive summer heat helps me justify a favorite past time: eating lots of ice cream. Also frozen yogurt. And slushies.

The rationalization of dessert-eating isn’t such a crime, of course. But it is symptomatic of something all humans do. That is, we justify behaviors that don’t line up with how we more generally see ourselves. Consider what often comes up in the first session of couples’ or family therapy as people share their perspectives on what’s brought them in:

• One partner says, “I’m resentful that my partner refuses to help around the house” while the other defensively interjects, “I stopped helping out because every time I tried, you hung over my shoulder criticizing me. I’m not an unhelpful person, I’m just not willing to be your emotional punching bag.” Lack of helpfulness is justified by the harsh criticism that preceded it.

• One partner expresses the shock of discovering the affair. How could their partner have cheated when they had made vows and built a family together? The other explains that their actions did not occur in a vacuum. Before cheating happened, they had strenuously expressed unhappiness and the need to get help only to have concerns dismissed and get told they were being too high maintenance. Yes, the affair-involved partner admits, they have done the unthinkable. But they only did it because there was no way to get through to their partner.

• In family therapy, a brother shares how hurtful it was to be cut out of his sister’s life, to have all his calls blocked—loving ones as well as the call to share that their mother had died. The sister responds by explaining that she simply could not forgive a brother who facilitated their parents cutting her out of their will, and kept secret from her that he knew it was happening. The sister asserts that blocking her brother may have felt bad, but it was nothing compared to the hurt he inflicted on her.

The wiring of tit-for-tat

These stories, variable as they are, reflect a very human tendency to engage in a version of “sorry-not-sorry.” We view our actions as being reasonable given the context, and because, bad as we might have behaved, other people are worse. And let’s face it, when we feel cut, a retaliatory cut seems totally justified. This pattern plays out in personal relationships, and it plays out in horrific global crises.

Rationalizing our thoughtless or harmful actions is a tendency we all have—it’s wired into us. Consider one study in which neurologists recruited six pairs of participants and hooked them up to machines that exerted force on their fingers. Each person was directed to apply the same force they had just experienced onto their partner that they had just felt. But in each case, the participants ended up inflicting more force than they had experienced (an average escalation of 38% on each turn!).

We will always feel like the pain we experience is greater than the pain we inflict. This makes it almost inevitable that we view own actions as justified retaliation, an effort to even the score or let the other side know we aren’t going to take the harm they’ve inflicted lying down.

The trouble is, every time we retaliate, we give the other side ammunition to justify their retaliation even more strongly.

There’s something quite useful about being inclined to justify bad behavior: self-justification allows us to protect ourselves and continue to see ourselves as “good” even when we do things that would otherwise threaten our sense of self. Researchers call the drive to reduce the difference between our moral code and our actions cognitive dissonance.

But though we easily justify our own actions, we struggle to extend that courtesy to others, particularly when they have done thoughtless, silly, or harmful things to us. A well-studied cognitive bias, the fundamental attribution error, explains the tendency to view faults in others as being due to their innate character flaws even as we see our own faults as being due to causes outside of ourselves. As it is written in the Bible (Matthew 7:3): “Why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye, but fail to see the log in your own?”

It may not be obvious at first, but there are tons of everyday examples of this that you’ve probably been a part of, like when your mother failed to send a birthday gift to your child. What was your explanation for their behavior (‘Self-centered! Lazy’) versus the self-justifying reasons you failed to send your mom a card (‘I just have too much on my plate right now,’ or ‘my phone reminder didn’t work.’)?

Mistakes Were Made… just not by any of us.

Mistakes Were Made (but not by me), an absolutely terrific book by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, offers a fascinating exploration of self-justification. I’d argue this book is a must-read for anyone in a close relationship.¹

The authors write:

As fallible human beings, all of us share an impulse to justify ourselves and avoid taking responsibility for any actions that turn out to be harmful, immoral, or stupid.

More troubling still, we rarely recognize our own tendency to self-justify. This cognitive activity takes place in what Nobel Prize winning psychologist, Daniel Kahneman, calls System 1, the automatic thinking processes occurring outside of our awareness that we have little conscious access to. That is, self-justification can be in the driver’s seat without you even being aware of it.

Self-justifying ourselves into never-ending conflict.

That humans have a reflex to self-justify our retaliation lands us into intractable conflict, that is, the kind of conflict that takes on a life of its own, leaving incalculable devastation on both sides and persisting far longer than anyone thinks is wise. We see this playing out in global politics and families with longstanding grudges.

When we feel hurt, we tend to view responses as being self-protective and justified. We may criticize the person who hurt us, refuse to listen to their reasoning, or be unwilling to forgive. Yet the other side might view the actions we’ve determined to be totally justified, as, well, totally unjustifiable. And from that view, our behavior justifies a strong response on their part. Yikes, now you’re in an escalating cycle of behavioral justifications for increasingly bad behavior.

It’s pretty easy to see how this plays out in global wars, and I’m sure most of you can pull up tragic world events as examples. But we can see it play out in close relationships, too. The authors of Mistakes Were Made (but not by me) explain how this can happen in marriage:

Some couples separate because of a cataclysmic revelation, an act of betrayal, or violence that one partner can no longer tolerate or ignore. But the vast majority of couples who drift apart do so slowly, over time, in a snowballing pattern of blame and self-justification. Each partner focuses on what the other is doing wrong, while justifying his or her own preferences, attitudes, and ways of doing things. Each side’s intransigence, in turn, makes the other side even more determined not to budge. Before the couple realizes it, they have taken up polarized positions, each feeling right and righteous. Self-justifications will then cause their hearts to harden against entreaties of empathy.

It’s also worth mentioning that these kinds of automatic attack-counterattack cycles breed one of the stickiest human emotions: hatred. When we hate people or groups, we tend to believe they are fundamentally evil and lacking in humanity, and that those fundamental characteristics are unchangeable. Hatred is an emotion that underlies dehumanization. And guess what? Hatred is powerful foodstuff for self-justification.

So Is It Possible to Defuse Self-Justification? And Should We?

The short answer: Yes.

We can do better than to lean into base impulses of justifying responding to bad behavior with bad behavior of our own. But it isn’t easy. The impulse to self-justify is everywhere. Just think of politicians doing their thing and you’ll come up with lots of cringey examples. Like the recent train wreck of a presidential debate in which two powerful politicians offered a show of self-justification.² Responding to concerns about his fitness (which probably stung), Trump points to his golf prowess and then quickly pivots to attack Biden’s fitness, pointing at him and saying, “He can’t hit a ball fifty yards.” Biden, now stung, challenges Trump to a game and notes that Trump probably couldn’t carry his own bag. To which Trump responds, “Let’s not act like children.” To which Biden retorts, “You are a child.” Eek.

None of want to be like these politicians. Yet we are all susceptible to doing exactly this. I love this line from Daniel B. Wile, the couples therapist and author of After the Fight, because it so perfectly captures the instinct to justify:

It is impossible to make ‘I-statements’ when you are in the ‘hating-my-partner, wanting revenge, feeling-stung-and-needing-to-sting-back’ state of mind. At such a moment you cannot remember what an ‘I-statement’ is, and frankly, you do not care.

We need concrete steps to manage the impulse to self-justify. Here are a few:

1. Engage your observing self. It’s a cringey thing to watch people unaware of how much they are justifying lame or harmful behavior. It can help to become more aware of your own if you connect with what psychologists call your “observing self.” Get reflective about how someone else—like your wise self, for example—might view your knee jerk response.

2. Clarify your values. We all know what it’s like to show up to a tough situation in a way we are proud of. Like staying calm during a toddler tantrum, persisting in a long run even though we’re tired, or not taking the bait when a partner seems to be looking for a fight. In these cases, we use our values, rather than emotions or behavioral instincts, to guide our actions. We can apply to same strategy for self-justifications. To clarify our values, we might ask ourselves questions like:

• Instead of justifying cringey behavior, what’s a way I can respond that would make me proud?

• How would I want my children (or other impressionable person) to see me behaving in this situation?

• How would a person I deeply admire respond in this situation? How would I describe their qualities of action? How can I emulate that way of being?

3. Remember the joint contributory system. I mentioned joint contributory systems in a newsletter a few weeks ago. This is the idea that anyone in a social system contributes to that social system. Self-justification lets us off the hook for our contributions while remembering the joint contributory system presses us to recognize how our behaviors might impact others.

4. Go high, even if you think others are going low. Hurtful actions tend to reflexively perpetuate more hurtful actions. But, as Michelle Obama has been know to say, you can be someone who “when they go low, we go high.” As she explained in an interview: “Responding to a dog whistle with a dog whistle is the exact opposite of what you’d teach your child to do.” Going high, even when others go low, doesn’t mean you get to escape the feelings that arise when you feel harmed. But it does mean that you won’t allow those feelings to guide what comes next. Instead, you have the opportunity to consider what kind of person you’d most like to be in those kinds of moments.

You are human. Your reflexes will guide you towards striking back when you feel struck. But, you also have the option to make a more intentional choice, a choice to behave in a way that doesn’t perpetuate an escalating situation of back and forth swats.

When you notice actions attached to thoughts like “the other side is worse” or “they started it,” pause and get curious about whether self-justification has snuck in. Reflect for a moment in how you want to contribute to this social dynamic, what ways of showing up would reflect your better self, which actions on your part might help to make the world a little smarter, more thoughtful, and more moral.

We all have the potential to do better when we work to recognize and manage our tendencies toward self-justification.

---

¹ We’ll be reading Mistakes Were Made (but not by me) in an upcoming book club meeting, so stay tuned for that! If you’re interested in becoming a member, but aren’t in a position to become a paid subscriber, please message me.

² I’m well aware that discussing the presidential debate that happened a few weeks ago is old, old news. But it’s just such a good example of the cringey-ness of self-justification!