Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll, and I have a confession to make.

Namely, I have made mistakes. Over the course of my career as a scientist and a writer, for that matter over the course of my life as a human being, when faced with decisions, I have sometimes made the wrong choice. Maybe you have too.

And happily, we have on today's podcast the perfect person to talk about this idea that people make mistakes.

Dr. Carroll Tavris, who is one of the world's experts not on making mistakes or the ways that we make mistakes, but on what happens after we make mistakes.

In a masterful book that she wrote with her co-author, Elliot Aronson, called Mistakes Were Made But Not By Me, Why We Justify Foolish Believes, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts.

Dr. Tavris talks about the idea of cognitive dissonance and how we are forced by cognitive dissonance to come up with excuses and justifications for the mistakes that we make.

We might like to imagine that we are perfectly rational, reasonable beings, but the psychological truth is very much the opposite of that.

We make up reasons why something was the right choice after all, or why we couldn't have had any other option, but to make it.

Cognitive dissonance theory explains why we do this, and in some sense it's the mother of all cognitive biases.

It helps us understand why we're not the perfect rational, reasonable people that we pretend to be.

And Carol Tavris is a perfect person to talk about this with. She's the author of several popular books, and also a famous textbook on psychology that you might have used in your intro-sight course, Way Back in the Day.

Other books include Psycho Babble and BioBunk, Using Psychology to Think critically about issues in the news.

The mismeasure of women, why women are not the better sex, the inferior sex, or the opposite sex.

And in September she has a new book coming out called Estrogen Matters, why taking hormones in menopause can improve women's well-being and lengthen their lives without raising the risk of breast cancer.

Now I have to confess, I'm not an expert on either estrogen or menopause or hormones, so that's not what we're talking about in this podcast.

But then again, maybe that is a mistake that I'm making. That's what we will be talking about how we make mistakes.

So maybe I should read up on estrogen and hormones that we can bring Dr. Tavris back and have a conversation about that.

Today we're going to be talking about cognitive dissonance and why it makes us think that we never actually really make mistakes.

So let's start.

Carol Tavris, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.

It's very happy to be talking with you.

So you're a social psychologist, right? Is that the correct descriptor?

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