If making mistakes makes us human, admitting mistakes and asking for forgiveness should make us divine (as Alexander Pope said). However, we live in a time of apparent infallibility, in which there are many people who do not admit their mistakes, politicians who do not take responsibility for their failures and institutions that do not accept the weight of their mistakes.
Why is it so difficult to take the step to recognize these errors and defects?As curious as it may be, we are more likely to apologize for something determined that we courageously and clearly admit the existence of a mistake or complaint. for example, for a study conducted at Ohio State University.
- Psychologists Roy Lewick and Leah Polin found it’s always easier for them to tell them things like “Sorry if it bothered you?”.
- That “it’s true.
- I was wrong.
- I made a mistake.
- “.
This tries to slightly repair the emotional factor, but does not demonstrate a true sense of responsibility in which someone fully assumes their guilt, expressing it openly, sincerely and courageously.
Therefore, it is not easy to admit to others that someone is fallible. In this classic desire to look impeccable, invulnerable to failure and very effective, we create very rigid and complex scenarios.
One can forget that happiness is not to be divine, because in fact it is enough to be human. Admitting mistakes is, after all, an exceptional opportunity for growth and improvement.
“The only man who is not wrong is the one who never does anything. ” – Goethe-
People who don’t admit their mistakes despair at first, then we try to make them see more calmly the evidence of certain facts, and then we end up abandoning them.
It’s because they’re often personality styles so rigid and lacking in social skills that you realize it’s not worth losing your courage and even health for nothing.
Last year, the New York Times published an interesting article on this subject, Paul Krugman, a professor at Princeton University, noted that the world is experiencing a strange epidemic of infallibility today.
That is, starting from politicians themselves and other social workers, everyone wants to convey an image of absolute effectiveness, admit mistakes, take responsibility for certain failures or bad decisions that have had serious consequences is a red line that no one wants to cross.
This is mainly due to the classic idea that assuming a mistake is showing a weakness. And in a world of constant uncertainty, being weak precipitates a downfall.
However, in addition to this known (and suffered by all) social macro-stage, we are also interested in this increasingly everyday and close behavior, those people who do not admit their mistakes and live with us What is behind these profiles?
Brunel University (UK) has conducted an interesting study to analyze personality styles with the way they interact on social media, we can see that narcissists are people obsessed with the almost constant publication of their achievements, their goals achieved, their apparent virtues, their high skills.
However, this type of personality, characterized by a high vision of itself, never admits its own flaws, which implies a direct violation of your expectations of absolute competition, something you will always prefer is to detect other people’s mistakes to bring them out.
Personal irresponsibility is linked to emotional immaturity and lack of social skills, so it is people who do not admit their mistakes who have serious deficiencies, they are the ones who lack the basic skills to live, respect, create meaningful bonds, know-how. to form a team or even create a project for the future.
If I am not responsible for my mistakes, I suppose they do not exist, that I am infallible, that my actions have no consequences and that, therefore, I am capable of anything. This personal approach desperately leads us to failure and unhappiness.
We all make mistakes, and when we do, we have two options: the first and most reasonable is to admit failure, to take responsibility; the second option is to reject it, block it and build a sophisticated defense mechanism around it.
The most common is undoubtedly cognitive dissonance, in which there are two contradictory situations and someone, at some point, can choose not to see them or not to accept them, so that their identity is not affected.
For example, an article published in the European Journal of Social Psychology proved to be very interesting: people who chose not to take responsibility for their mistakes believed that in doing so they were stronger, had more power over others, and more control over themselves. .
So while they are aware that they made a mistake and that cognitive dissonance was there, they choose to silence it to keep their egos well protected.
In conclusion, as you can see, people who do not admit their mistakes use a series of psychological strategies to brazenly evade responsibility.
Certainly, getting them to reason requires exquisite work and not easy, however, this does not mean that at some point they cannot take a different approach.
It is never too late to leave the pedestal and be human, admit the mistake and have before you a wonderful opportunity for personal growth.