Sorry, Bogie, but you were wrong in "Casablanca" when you told Ingrid Bergman she would regret "maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life," if she stayed with you in Morocco instead of leaving with her Nazi-fighting husband.

Quite the contrary: She would have found reasons to justify making that choice and not the other.

		"MISTAKES WE MADE (BUT NOT BY ME)" By Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson Harcourt ($25)

And as Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson explain in their new book, subtitled "Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions and Hurtful Acts," either decision would have suited her in the long run.

We all struggle mightily to prove to ourselves and others that whatever we do is the right thing to have done, even -- or most especially -- when it is not.

This team of social psychologists tackles "the inner workings of self-justification," the mental gymnastics that allow us to bemoan the mote in our brother's eye while remaining blissfully unaware of the beam in our own.

Their prose is lively, their research is admirable, and their examples of our arrogant follies are entertaining and instructive.

Two concepts are central to their study:

Cognitive dissonance: "The hard-wired psychological mechanism that creates self-justification and protects our certainties, self-esteem and tribal affiliations."

Pyramid of choice: When we first deal with a mistake, we are at the top of the pyramid. As we create ever more elaborate fictions that absolve us and restore our sense of self-worth and thereby remove the dissonance, we descend step by step to the base.

The authors follow the trail of self-justification through the areas of family, memory, therapy, law, prejudice and conflict, but some of the juiciest examples come from politics. Think most recently of U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, echoing Ronald Reagan when he used the very words of this book's title -- "mistakes were made." (Politicians are especially fond of the passive voice.)

What's going on is not lying, exactly, except insofar as it is lying to oneself. As Aldous Huxley said, "There is probably no such thing as a conscious hypocrite."

Newt Gingrich surely did not say to himself, "Here I am, condemning Bill Clinton for a sexual affair while I am doing exactly the same thing."

We begin to believe the lies to ourselves. Lyndon Johnson was a master at it. His press secretary, George Reedy, said he had a fantastic capacity to will "what was in his mind to become reality."

This is akin to "naive realism," the conviction that we perceive objects and events "as they really are." If other people don't perceive them the same way, they must be biased.

The authors describe a whole toolbox of mental instruments with which we dig the hole deeper and deeper, among them:

Ethnocentricism: us against them, or us against those not us.

Confirmation bias: finding ways to distort or dismiss evidence that unconfirms our stance.

Internalizing beliefs: assuring ourselves that we have always felt a certain way, even when we make 180-degree turns.

Source confusion: not being able to distinguish what really happened from subsequent information that crept in from elsewhere (particularly characteristic of false memories, a concept they deplore).

Getting what you want by revising what you had: "mis-remembering, for instance, that your childhood was awful, thus distorting how far you have come, to feel better about yourself now."

The authors conclude that we don't change because we aren't aware that we need to, and we are, like many other cultures, mistake-phobic. We see the admission of a mistake not as a sign that something needs to be fixed -- even though such an admission often elicits the plaudits of others -- but that we are weak.

We need more "light," they say, more self-awareness; we need "trusted naysayers" in our lives. Actually, though they don't say as much, it seems as simple as what Robert Burns wrote more than 200 years ago (freely rendered here):

"Oh would some Power the giftie gie us / To see ourselves as others see us! / It would from many a blunder free us."

But then, that never has been as simple as it seems.