10. Dr. Carol Tavris — Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me)
The Michael Shermer Show
Michael Shermer
4.3 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 19 February 2017
⏱️ 64 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Why is it so hard to say "I made a mistake"—and really believe it? Social psychologist Dr. Carol Tavris, one of the most influential thinkers and writers of our time, explores in dialogue with Michael Shermer cognitive dissonance and what happens when we make mistakes, cling to outdated attitudes, or mistreat other people—we must calm the cognitive dissonance that jars our feelings of self-worth. And so, unconsciously, we create fictions that absolve us of responsibility, restoring our belief that we are smart, moral, and right—a belief that often keeps us on a course that is dumb, immoral, and wrong. Backed by years of research, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) offers a fascinating explanation of self-justification—how it works, the damage it can cause, and how we can overcome it. The updated edition of the book features new examples and concludes with an extended discussion of how we can live with dissonance, learn from it, and perhaps, eventually, forgive ourselves.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is your host, Michael Sherman, and you're listening to Science Salon, a series of conversations |
| 0:10.4 | with leading scientists, scholars, and thinkers about the most important issues of our time. |
| 0:17.0 | I guess one place to dive in is my latest column in Scientific American talks about your book referencing cognitive dissonance with regard to this sort of new phenomenon called the backfire effect where have you ever noticed when you're in conversation |
| 0:34.7 | with somebody and you give them the correct facts about showing that their opinion is wrong, |
| 0:40.3 | they almost always changed their mind. |
| 0:41.7 | Right. wrong, they almost always changed their mind. Right, well, yeah, me neither. |
| 0:45.0 | So the question is why, and anyway, there's some studies from some young psychologists |
| 0:51.0 | who called this the backfire effect, the backfire being |
| 0:53.6 | that you would think that they would change their mind. |
| 0:55.9 | But in fact, not only do they not change their mind, they double down on their beliefs. |
| 0:59.7 | But this of course is cognitive dissonance. |
| 1:02.7 | So I guess right off the bat, |
| 1:05.0 | so we kind of talked about this privately, |
| 1:06.6 | but that the calling at the backfire effect |
| 1:08.8 | is really not, it's not very helpful, |
| 1:11.1 | it's just a description of an observation you make. |
| 1:13.2 | People do this when you do that. It's not an internal state of mind. By cognitive dissonance, |
| 1:18.9 | we mean something deeper inside. But is it really a brain attribute or a cognitive process or what would you call |
| 1:27.0 | cognitive dissonance? |
| 1:28.6 | What would I call cognitive dissonance? |
| 1:30.0 | Well, really you should be interviewing Elliot Aronson about this, my wonderful co-author, because |
| 1:36.0 | Elliot was the, who was chosen as one of the top 100 psychologists of the 20th century by his peers. |
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