Episode 16: I’m Not My Mistakes

Carol Tavris is a social psychologist, writer, and lecturer who has sought to use the contributions of psychological science to dispel some of the harms of pseudoscience. Her book with Elliot Aronson, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me), explains why people don’t change their minds, recognize the harms they inflict, or give up useless practices simply because the evidence says they should. Carol is also author of the classic Anger: The misunderstood emotion and The Mismeasure of Woman:Why women are not the better sex, the inferior sex, or the opposite sex. She has written hundreds of articles, essays, and book reviews on topics in psychological science, and she currently writes a column, “The Gadfly,” for Skeptic. Carol has given lectures, workshops, and keynote addresses to diverse audiences around the world. She is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science; her other awards include an honorary doctorate from Simmons College for her work in promoting critical thinking and gender equity; an award from the Center for Inquiry, Independent Investigations Group, for contributions to skepticism and science; and the Media Achievement Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.

Books

• Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me)

• Anger: The Misunderstood Emotion

Todd Schnick: Alright, welcome back to Full PreFrontal, exposing the mysteries of executive functions. I am here with our host, Sucheta Kamath.

Good morning, my friend, so today promises to be a very intriguing episode, our second conversation with Carol Tavris but we’re going to talk about how to slay this hot potato of cognitive dissonance. We’re going to talk about marching in a white supremacist rally. This is going to be an interesting conversation. Tell us about that.

Sucheta Kamath: Oh, thank you so much, Todd, it’s been a delight to talk to Carol Tavris so far and this is our second conversation as you mentioned, but we humans are mysterious creatures and many a times, when we become aware of our own contradictory behaviors, we are baffled our most often, we get defensive. For example, if I have a notion about myself that I’m a kind and patient person and if my husband, however, points out that during the business dinner with his colleagues, I interrupted them several times, making it hard for others to have a word, and my wounded sense of self is going to step in to rescue myself and say, “I hardly said anything,” or even attack others that are not even there when my husband and I are having this conversation by saying, “And those people just were bumbling fools and didn’t even know how to hold a conversation.” So cognitive dissonance is this discomfort that we are going to talk about what to do with it. Let me illustrate this point another way: recently, in an interview in late August, Nicholas Fuentes, an 18-year old sophomore student from Boston University told the Boston Globe that he chose to leave Boston College after receiving threats because of his beliefs. A few days earlier, Fuentes has participated in the most controversial white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia which was on August 15^th as you know, in 2017. Fuentes said the reason he marched in the rally was to show solidarity and support the issue that no one was talking about which was change in the fundamental composition of our country. An interview that followed, Nicholas Fuentes expressed shock and disappointment towards people who were disapproving of his actions or choice to march and he said, as a commentary on that, that it’s disturbing, the level of hatred that people have been able to express against someone they have never met, referencing to himself. As you can see, Nicholas’ comment here is completely so disjointed or it overlooks his own level of hatred and intolerance for those he has never met, but of course, he’s blind to that, and this is cognitive dissonance at its best, creating a defense or justification for our own actions and having great sense of forgiveness for our own misbehaviors but having no tolerance for others or no perspective on seeing things from others’ point of view. So when we become aware that we have acted in a way that directly contradicts our important self-concept, we experience a pang of hurt or a panic, and that propels us to do something, and researchers call that ‘cognitive dissonance’ and we try to solve the cognitive dissonance by doing or saying, or being a certain way.

On this podcast, as you know, Todd, we are committed to help people become more aware of the invisible forces and unconscious processes that affect our decision-making. Since accepting mistake is hard for all of us and more so for those with a high sense of self, we can unknowingly deflect the criticism by attacking others. We need better emotional and behavioral strategies to handle the pain and discomfort we feel or experience when we screw up.

So today, our special guest, Dr. Carol Tavris returns to help us deploy some effective strategies to let cognitive dissonance not become a subconscious blind spot, and here is a few details about my guest: she’s a renowned social psychologist, she’s a co-author of a book called Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me) and she wrote that with Dr. Elliot Aronson. In this book, they both explain why people don’t change their minds, recognize the harm they inflict, or give up useless practices simply because the evidence is that you should or evidence says you have made a mistake.

Dr. Tavris’ another important book is called Anger: The Misunderstood Emotion which is also – I highly recommend that book. She has written hundreds of articles, essays, books reviews, and op-eds on topics in psychological science which have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, and many, many more. Dr. Tavris currently writes a column for Skeptic called Gadfly. She is a charger fellow of the Association of Psychological Science. Her honors and awards include 2014 Media Achievement Award from Society of Personality and Social Psychology, and honorary doctorate from the Simmons College in 2013, and a Distinguished Media Contribution Award from the American Association of Applied and Preventative Psychology.

My person experience with Dr. Tavris is such that I am in awe of her. I consider her work to have inspired and infused my own practice of helping people become better in self-knowledge.

Todd: Well, I’m looking forward to this, Sucheta. I mean, I think listening to you walk us through this idea of cognitive dissonance and the role that it plays in our relationships, I wish I had this benefit of this podcast years ago because it would – it really, really helped me. This is a big problem and most people probably don’t understand why they struggle with these relationships or how to talk to other people, or to respond to what people say about us. So it’s going to be a fascinating conversation. Again, your second conversation with Carol Tavris, so I’m looking forward to it, let’s get to it.

Here is Sucheta’s conversation with Dr. Carol Tavris.

Sucheta: Welcome to the show, Carol, once again, and we are so happy to have you. I’m excited to get into the depth of it. This is our second chance – my second chance to get to ask you more questions related to how can we inculcate this understanding into changing our lives.

So Carol, let’s start with defining cognitive dissonance one more time if you don’t mind.

Dr. Carol Tavris: Absolutely. Cognitive dissonance is the mental discomfort we feel when any two ideas contradict each other or clash with each other, or when our belief or an attitude conflicts with our behavior. Last time, I used the example of smoking since it’s so common, a smoker knows that smoking is bad for you but nonetheless, they’re smoking. That’s practically the definition of dissonance. I remember Jon Steward once defined dissonance as “when an environmentalist buys a giant SUV.” He said, “He might as well be filling his gas tank with cognitive dissonance.” That’s exactly – isn’t that a funny line? And it’s exactly right. I have to either justify having an SUV or decide that, well, so what if it uses a lot of gas? It’s not a big deal. So that’s what we’re motivated to do in a state of dissonance. We have to change the belief or change the behavior so that we’re in a state of consonance, and dissonance operates like hunger or thirst, it’s so uncomfortable that we will resolve it, often without being aware of it. I know this is really relevant for your discussion here because we will resolve dissonance without being aware that that’s what we’re doing but when we understand how the mechanism works, we can bring it into consciousness and whip it into shape.

Sucheta: Great, so cognitive dissonance is deep-seated, deep-rooted – a psychosocial response and you are saying that what needs to take charge of this situation is you’re more higher order thinking skills, and so can you tell us the role of critical thinking in dealing with cognitive dissonance? So going back to this ‘I’m a smart person, I’m competent, I’m kind and thoughtful,’ but then, I discover that I have done something that is stupid, foolish, or even hurtful, and oh, boy, there is a conflict and how do I resolve it? And so one path is to justify and stick by it, and never admit mistakes, but you’re saying there’s another way to do it and I would love to know what kind of thought process can go into it.

Dr. Tavris: Exactly right. What you need to do is separate the two cognitions and look at them clearly. I believe that X causes Y. Now, I do a study and I see that X doesn’t cause Y. Q causes Y. How do I assess what I believe with what the evidence has just shown me is wrong? What critical thinking is designed to help us do is assess the merit of our beliefs based on evidence. In fact, we could say that science itself is a way of correcting for the confirmation bias, our preference for saying things that confirm what we believe, it’s a way of forcing us to put our beliefs to the test with being put in a state of cognitive dissonance and then have to resolve it. Now, how do we do that? In our book, we tell the wonderful story of Shimon Peres. I find this the most –

Sucheta: I love that story.

Dr. Tavris: It’s a gorgeous story, isn’t it? Because he nailed it, he just nailed it. It’s a beautiful story and it’s really how you think. Peres was prime minister of Israel when his good friend Ronald Reagan agreed to go to Bitburg, Germany and lay a wreath there at the cemetery of some national event in Germany, and then it turned out that 47 Nazi officers were buried at this cemetery, and you can imagine the hue and cry from Holocaust survivors and from thousands of other people who were outraged that the President of the United States would be laying a wreath at the cemetery where Nazi soldiers were buried, so Peres was very upset but Reagan went anyway, and afterward, a reporter said to Peres, “How do you feel about your friend Ronal Reagan having gone to Bitburg?” and Peres said, “When a friend makes a mistake, the friend remains a friend and the mistake remains a mistake.”

Sucheta: So much grace.

Dr. Tavris: Now, that is because what would normally be the case? What do most of us do in our everyday lives? Your friend makes a mistake or does something wrong or hurtful, your partner is home or somebody in your family does something wrong or hurtful, or thoughtless, what many people do is either they minimize the mistake – “Oh, it wasn’t a mistake. It was no big deal,” or they end a friendship. What Peres was instructing us to understand is that there is a way of doing both: a friend remain a friend and the mistake remains a mistake. This is how we can go about dealing with our own cognitive dissonance. When I make a mistake, when I do something hurtful, when I do something that was a screw up at work, what I did remains something that was hurtful or wrong, and I remain a good kind, competent person who just did the wrong thing on that occasion, so we separate what we did from who we are as human beings. Moreover, if we value being a good, kind, and competent person, then we’re able to say, “I really better learn from what I did that was wrong here so that I really will warrant this self-appraisal.” It’s a skill that can be learned. It’s a muscle that can be exercises, and Peres understood how we do that.

Sucheta: So is it a muscle of humanity? It’s a self-evaluative process but something that you take time and become more mindful? How do we do that? How do we build that muscle?

Dr. Tavris: Well, we do it with mindfulness. I said to you that Elliot Aronson, my co-author on this book and really, this book is based on many decades of his brilliant research on cognitive dissonance and other areas of psychology. He has done a lot of research applying dissonance to issues of everyday life: how you get people to take shorter showers during a drought here in California, for example, so I will call him up and I’ll say, “Elliot, I’m in a state of dissonance about this. What do I do?” He’s so smart about it and he’s so experienced that he really knows how to help people understand how to tease apart these themes: okay, right now, I detect a little plummet in self-esteem because you did something here that you really wish you hadn’t. Am I right here? You know, mmm, yes. You know, it’s not easy because what we feel, if we’ve done something foolish or hurtful, or wrong, the feeling of dissonance is really embarrassing or outright painful. I have had many experiences in my own life of something I deeply believed was so. I wrote a whole chapter in one of my books, The Mismeasure of Woman, that I subsequently learned was wrong.

Sucheta: That’s my favorite book.

Dr. Tavris: Thank you, and you sit there and you’re looking at some data that somebody is showing that says, uh-oh, here’s this thing that I thought was wrong. It’s shocking. It’s actually a kind of a shock, so what we have to learn to do is instead of treating that shocking information as a hot potato – I’ve got it get it out of my hand immediately and throw it at someone else, okay? We have to stop and hold the potato – hey, you know what? I like this metaphor. I’m going to keep it.

Sucheta: I love it. I really do.

Dr. Tavris: It’s good, yup. Hold the potato – I’m going to revise the book with a potato chapter – hold it –

Sucheta: Literally enduing the hotness by desensitizing yourself, to keep the metaphor, it makes perfect sense to me.

Dr. Tavris: Mm-hmm. First of all, the potato will cool off and then you can decide what you want to do with this potato because as you know, since you’re such a darling fan of our book, the stories that we end each chapter with is a story of someone who could no longer throw away the potato, meaning they had to face the discovery about themselves that was almost intolerable to bear and that realization is something we all want to run from. That’s the first impulse, is to run from it. But we can become such greater human beings if we embrace it. Elliot is always teaching me to embrace pain. The pain is a way to learn, a way we can live. He said many people want to run from pain. I know this feeling when my husband died. I wanted to run from it, fill my days with activity. One of my friends whose husband died filled her days, she made decisions, she was running, running, running – stop. You have to embrace the pain, the pain of loss or the pain of a bad decision, or the pain of hurt that you caused in the world because only by stopping, embracing it, accepting it, do we have any hope of learning from it, living with it, and moving forward?

Sucheta: And that’s such a hopeful message. I think there are some cultural tools that help us accept and come to terms with that. I wanted to bring this conversation in this final direction of religion and spirituality. What role do you think that plays in helping us deal with imperfections that we have within ourselves which is why we make mistakes, but those mistakes then become a burden for us because that, again, is contradiction to our notion of our perfect self? So are there any studies or is there a deeper understanding that you have discovered through your work regarding this relationship between culture, religion, and spirituality?

Dr. Tavris: No, I don’t think there are any hard and best rules on this. It’s obviously, for many people, religion brings them solace and a sense of harmony with the world, of atonement and forgiveness, but there is no one right way to do this, and it depends very much on what this is that a person is suffering from. Elliot and I did a couple of workshops with our book in which people came in with burdens of regret and self-punishment that they couldn’t set down. You know, in the revision of our book Mistakes Were Made, we spent more time in the last chapter on the other side of cognitive dissonance, that is in the first edition, we wanted to talk about how people justify their mistakes and errors, and don’t learn from them, but the other side of it is the people who can’t reduce dissonance, they can’t reduce it. Too many sleepless nights, beating themselves up with regret for roads not taken or mistakes they made, or bad decisions that have tormented them for years, that’s the other side of cognitive dissonance because it shows us in a way how beneficial the ability to justify our mistakes is, right? Because we get to sleep at night. So religion or philosophy, or spirituality, people find solace in many ways. Self-forgiveness for things we did that we can’t undo, mmm, that can be a difficult quest. The resolution to it, I would never propose that there’s one way that everybody must follow to achieve that, but people do find it in different ways. I remember a wonderful psychotherapist Julia Segal who was a survivor of Auschwitz, who said, for him, the remedy was healing through helping. You can’t undo the horrors that you have observed, you can’t undo the horrible things that you might have been forced to do, but by helping others, by taking the self out of self-justification, by looking outward to the world, to doing better for others, that way lies salvation.

Sucheta: Incredible. So the last closing question I have is, are there any particular personality traits that are more amenable to being self-redirection or finding a quicker way to forgiveness or a quicker way to acceptance of mistakes and saying, “Yes, I did it and I’m sort”?

Dr. Tavris: Well, you know what? Elliot makes a fabulous distinction between people who have high self-esteem and people who have high but fragile self-esteem. I should say high secure self-esteem and a high fragile self-esteem. We think that self – you know, people who have high self-esteem should be able to accept information that they were wrong, that they made mistakes, that, you know, look what they did, but it’s actually just the opposite. It’s the people with the highest self-esteem who have the hardest time accepting the evidence that they just did something stupid, foolish, or wrong, because after all, ‘I’m a terrific person,’ and now, you’re telling me I’m not terrific? Well, to hell with you, okay? See? So I’m the best surgeon on the plant, now, you’re telling me that it was my mistake that I cut off this wrong leg? Nonsense. The leg was mislabeled, the charts were wrong, okay? So we have a danger from people who think too much of themselves, if you will, but Elliot makes this lovely distinction: people with high secure self-esteem are secured. You can say to them, “Hey, you know, you did something wrong here,” and the person says, “You know what? You’re right, let me fix this,” but a person with a high fragile self-esteem who we might want to draw a political comment about individuals of this sort, cannot accept any criticism or negative feedback. It produces too much anxiety. It is too threatening to their narcissism and they will dismiss it and you as being wrong and you as being disloyal, and who do you think you are? And I think that’s a very, very interesting distinction that Elliot has drawn. Our goal is people to have high self-esteem but it needs to be secure and understanding that all of us are going to make mistakes and all of us need to be open to correcting them.

Sucheta: That’s terrific and this reminds me of the work Carol Dweck has done, for example, in the mindset with children with the fixed and the growth mindset. Those with the fixed mindset tend to have much more fragile sense of self and they are very dependent on the outcome which needs to be positive for them in order to feel that they are successful or they are worthy of that challenge. Any closing remarks, Carol?

Dr. Tavris: I think we’ve pretty much covered the territory here and I want to thank you for your wonderful and thoughtful questions and your enthusiasm for our book and for our work.

Sucheta: Thank you so much for being a guest on our podcast. You are an incredible person, a great, great mentor, and you are a joy to talk to and I am so grateful to have you.

In closing, if people want to find out more about your work or reach you, what should they do? Where should they look for?

Dr. Tavris: Okay, well, they can go to the Social Psychology Network, SPN.org to contact me. They can find my books on Amazon, and they can find information about my past and present on my Wikipedia page as well.

Sucheta: Once again, thank you so much, Carol.

Dr. Tavris: It’s been a pleasure for me too. Thank you so much.

Todd: Alright. So that was Dr. Tavris. Gosh, Sucheta, I enjoyed that second conversation with her as much as the first conversation. Today, Dr. Tavris went over about what we should do with this idea of cognitive dissonance, but I guess it’s important to start and understand how the brain wants to be in consonance, right?

Sucheta: You’re absolutely right, Todd. It was truly amazing conversation. I really enjoyed it as well. So for our mental stability and equilibrium, we need to be in a state of consonance, that’s what she was saying, and any sort of dissonance motivates us to step into action to resolve the internal unsettling feeling or embarrassment we feel. Carol could not have been more clearer that cognitive dissonance refers to the mental and psychological discomfort we feel when two ideas clash. The first idea is our strong and deeply rooted high notion of our self-competence, our intelligence, or our goodness, and the second idea is the mistake that completely contradicts our strong belief about our own selves. So when we realize that we have made a mistake, our self-esteem begins to sag like a deflated balloon and we are enveloped by a devastating realization that we are not all that we thought we were, and then self-justification kicks in and self-justification, Carol has described, is the air that comes into the sagging self-esteem to prop it back up so that it can stand upright.

Todd: Well, as you said, one of the things I thought I had a good grip on, I mean, listening to Dr. Tavris’ conversation with you, I thought I knew myself pretty well. I thought I had a group on things. I thought I had a handle on my thoughts and my feeling but clearly, there are hidden parts to me that I still need to understand and figure out, right?

Sucheta: You’re right, Todd, this is a very important takeaway as well: we don’t know ourselves as much as we think we know. We suffer from many, many subconscious processes that are in charge of our decision-making, one of the reasons I wanted to have Carol on this podcast was to begin the conversation about brain’s blind spots. We have many of them. She, of course, talked about two such blind spots. One was cognitive dissonance and second is self-justification. What was clear to me is that none of us are immune from them and most of us would like to think that we are impervious to them. Of recent, the self-esteem movement and the self-help books have made a strong case for personal development. It makes it sound that reading these books will give us the strength to stop ourselves from self-justifying, but I think that is just a small part of knowing thyself. Because of our brain being wired to be social, with cognitive dissonance and other blind spots including moral licensing, in-group or out-group thinking, and even prejudices, things like that are other set of blind spots that we didn’t get a chance to discuss or this was not the place, but those are the ones that trip us over. We didn’t get a chance to get into their book or the book that Carol and Elliot Aronson wrote but in that book, they talk a lot about prejudice as well. They say that when dealing with the other, we are wired within an innate desire to maintain and preserve our social position of privilege and power as it relates to others, and this can be the reason we are unwilling to give up that notion that we are decent, we are good, and we can do no wrong, but if we heard other people’s feeling or say something inappropriate, that mistake doesn’t go well with us.

Now, to tie these concepts back to my work, I deal with executive dysfunction and developing executive function requires the individual to develop self-modulation, control their impulses, engage in goal-directed behaviors, but in order to do that, one must also keep the self in check. One must become self-aware and this, what we just discussed, you don’t need to have executive dysfunction to have difficulty in keeping your cognitive dissonance in check, so the poor decision made by us are not simply reflective of our inattention to detail or failure at multi-tasking, or disorganization in thinking but they could be linked more to primal subconscious wiring. Research shows that when we get stressed out, sleepy, anxious, frustrated, or even drunk, our emotional regulation kind of goes down the tube. That’s when our descent begins, so we begin to act poorly, treat people poorly, and unleash our prejudices which otherwise are under wrap, and then we end up self-justifying and explaining why other deserved it. So that’s why cognitive dissonance plays such an important role in our understanding of self.

Todd: Okay, I got that. So what should we do about these natural wired tendencies that just seem to have that death grip on us and certainly on our self-preserving thoughts? Help me understand, what should we do about those tendencies?

Sucheta: Well, I don’t know if I can help you because I’m barely grasping it myself based on Carol’s talk, but that’s the last but the most important takeaway from our conversation with her. The mechanism of cognitive dissonance or the trap of self-justification works in a way that in spite of being a rational person, we become rationalizing person, and we will rationalize even when the evidence or the proof says that we were wrong, and the proof is glaring at us. We have made a mistake but we don’t want to accept it. No one is immune it, literally no one. Carol’s research reveals that even skeptics or researchers, or scientists are not spared from the clutches or self-preserving, mechanism of dissonance. The risk if we don’t treat it or don’t keep it under careful watch is that the risk of not addressing our frequent self-justification because self-justification creates this protective shell and it’s hard to break that shell, we run a risk of getting stuck on a bad idea or get married to an action that was inappropriate, or we may accidentally, or be unwilling to stand, unwilling to give up while we stand next to an idea that we feel represents us. So during one of her presentations, in fact, I heard Carol say and I quote, “Over time, our attitudes can morph from uncertainty and ambiguity into rigid points of view, and the way consonance works is that we want to not associate ourselves with people who don’t agree with us, so we look for company of like-minded people and hence, we try to avoid conflicts, and then all these steps that we take to protect our sense of self leads to bad decision-making.

So it’s clearer, I hope, to all of us that this kind of attitude and engagement can be harmful to us and our future. Now, so we have learned from Carol that no one is spared, but everyone falls prey to cognitive dissonance equally, so those with the high but fragile self-esteem are more likely to be victims of the long-lasting grip of cognitive dissonance. So what really needs to happen is, we need to not run away from mistakes. The realization of having made mistake is painful and pain fuels the impulse to run, so the bottom line is we must learn to handle the pain, the discomfort, or the blow to the ego, and keep saying to ourselves that, “I am a lot more than my mistake,” or you can say to yourself, “Me admitting my mistake is not the same as me admitting that I’m worthless.” So I hope this really helps us all to have a great inward journey to preserve our sense of self, yet be gracious and graceful when we deal with mistakes.

Todd: Good stuff. Lots of important material to think about there and learn from Dr. Carol Tavris. Two great conversations with her.

Alright, well, that concludes today’s episode and on behalf of our host Sucheta Kamath and all of us at Cerebral Matters, thank you for tuning in and we look forward to seeing you next week on Full PreFrontal.