A wonderful book. It should be a companion volume to "How to Win Friends and Influence People". It could be retitled "How to screw people over, including yourself".

The excerpts listed below do not appear very connected. But they are. The book is chock-full of anecdotal evidence of people exhibiting hypocritical self-justifying behavior and and research evidence of why they do. But that's not the point. We know people do this and we know we're somewhat guilty of it our own selves - just not as bad as others.

But the point of the book is that you and I are as bad as the others. Every chapter explains in simple terms why you and I are just as hypocritical as the crooked politicians, the corrupt CEOs, the bad cops. The causes and steps we follow to rationalize wrongness, and how the process feeds on itself are laid out very simply. It's frightening.

All of us recognize variation within our own gender, party, ethnicity, or nation, but we are inclined to generalize from a few encounters with people of other categories and lump them all together as *them*. This habit starts awfully early. Social psychologist Marilynn Brewer, who has been studying the nature of stereotypes for many years, once reported that her daughter returned from kindergarten complaining that "boys are crybabies." The child's evidence was that she had seen two boys crying on their first day away from home. Brewer, ever the scientist, asked whether there hadn't also been little girls who cried. "Oh yes," said her daughter. "But only some girls cry. I didn't cry."

By convincing ourselves that they are unworthy, unteachable, incompetent, inherently math-challenged, immoral, sinful, stupid, or even subhuman, we avoid feeling guilty or unethical about how we treat them...in short, we invoke stereotypes to justify behavior that would otherwise make us feel bad about the kind of person we are or the kind of country we live in. Why, though, given that everyone thinks in categories, do only some people hold bitter, passionate prejudices toward other groups?

A stereotype might bend or even shatter under the weight of disconfirming information, but the hallmark of prejudice is that it is impervious to reason, experience, and counterexample. In his brilliant book The Nature of Prejudice, written more than fifty years ago, social psychologist Gordon Allport described the responses characteristic of a prejudiced man when confronted with evidence contradicting his beliefs:

Mr X: The trouble with Jews is that they only take care of their own group.

Mr Y: But the record of the Community Chest campaign shows that they give more generously, in proportion to their numbers, to the general charities of the community, than do non-Jews.

Mr. X: That shows they are always trying to buy favor and intrude into Christian affairs. They think of nothing but money; that is why there are so many Jewish bankers.

Mr. Y: But a recent study shows that the percentage of Jews in the banking business is negligible, far smaller than the percentage of non-Jews.

Mr. X: That's just it; they don't go in for respectable business; they are only in the movie business or run night clubs.

Allport nailed Mr. X's reasoning perfectly. He doesn't even try to respond to Mr. Y's evidence; he just slides along to another reason for his dislike of Jews. Once people have a prejudice, just as once they have a political ideology, they do not easily drop it. Rather, they come up with another justification to preserve their belief or course of action.

The scientific method consists of the use of procedures designed to show not that our predictions and hypotheses are right, but that they might be wrong. Scientific reasoning is useful to anyone in any job because it makes us face the possibility, even the dire reality, that we were mistaken. It forces us to confront our self-justifications and put them on public display for others to puncture. At its core, therefore, science is a form of arrogance control.

For any theory to be scientific, it must be stated in such a way that it can be shown to be false as well as true. If every outcome confirms your hypothesis, your beliefs are a matter of faith, not science.

Let's say you're a cop serving a search warrant where at a house where crack cocaine is sold. You chase one guy to the bathroom, hoping to catch him before he flushes the drugs, and your case, down the drain. You're too late. You've put yourself in harm's way, and this bastard is going to get away. With no evidence, he will be out in a heartbeat. Why not take a little cocaine out of your pocket and drop it on the floor of the bathroom? All you'd have to say is "Some of that crack fell out of his pocket before he could flush it all."

It's easy to understand why you would do this, under the circumstances. It's because you want to do your job. You know it's illegal to plant evidence, but it seems do justifiable. The first time you do it, you tell yourself, "The guy is guilty!" This experience will make it easier for you to do the same thing again; in fact, you will be strongly motivated to repeat the behavior, because to do otherwise is to admit, if only to yourself, that it was wrong the first time you did it.

In his investigation of documented cases of abuse of prisoners, Conroy found that almost every military or police official he interviewed, whether British, South African, Israeli, or American, justified their practices by saying, in effect, our torture is never as severe and deadly as their torture.

Bruce Moore-King [of South Africa] told me that when he administered electrical torture he never attacked the genitals, as torturers elsewhere are wont to do...Hugo Garcia told me the Argentine torturers are far worse thatn the Uruguayan. Omri Kochva assured me that the men of the Natal battalion had not descended to the level of the Americans in vietnam...The British comforted themselves with the rationalization that their methods were nothing compared to the suffering created by the IRA. The Israelis regularly argue that their methods pale in comparison to the torture employed by Arab states.

Once torture is justified in rare cases, it is easier to justify it in others. Let's torture not only this bastard we are sure knows where the bomb is, but this other bastard who *might* know where the bomb is, and also this bastard who might have some general information that could be useful in five years, and also this other guy who might be a bastard only we aren't sure.