As fallible human beings, all of us share the impulse to justify ourselves and avoid taking responsibility for any actions that turn out to be harmful, immoral, or stupid. Most of us will never be in a position to make decisions affecting the lives and deaths of millions of people, but whether the consequences of our mistakes are trivial or tragic, On a small scale or on a national canvas, most of us find it difficult, if not impossible, to say, I was wrong. I made a terrible mistake.
The higher the stakes, emotional, financial, and moral, the greater. The greater the difficulty it goes further than that most people directly confronted by evidence that they are wrong do not change their point of view or course of action but justify it even more anxiously. , even irrefutable evidence is rarely enough to pierce the metal armor of self justification.
That is a taste of what is to come in one of the best books I have read in a very, very long time, and probably the best cover of any book I've ever read. I'm just, make sure I'm holding up the right way there. For those people watching us on YouTube, that's the right way up. It's a great pleasure to welcome the author of this book, Mistakes were made, but not by me, Carol Tavris. Welcome to the show.
Happy to be here, Aidan, thank you.
It's great to finally have you on the show, Carol, and also to understand that you have lots of Irish roots as well, which we shared off air. But I thought we'd get stuck in because I thought it was such an important book, not just for decision makers, but also for parents, for law enforcement, for judges, husbands, wives, parents, children.
Thank you And I thought maybe we can begin with an overarching thesis, and then we can pick up the numerous examples and massive research that you put into this book. Maybe we'll start with that. If you had the elevator pitch of what this book is about, and maybe how things have changed since you wrote it. I'd love you to share that first up.
Nothing has changed since we wrote this book, nothing. That's the nature of human nature, it is annoyingly stubborn, that's the first thing to know. The premise of this book. First of all, it's not news and it's not surprising that people will lie to get off the hook of a mistake they know they've made, right? People will lie to avoid being divorced, to avoid getting fined or arrested, to avoid losing their job. They know they've done wrong. They know they've screwed up.
We lie to excuse ourselves and that's, that's obvious. There's nothing surprising about that. This is a book about how and why. We lie to ourselves to avoid the difficult Realization that we have done something foolish, stupid, incompetent, immoral, unethical, or incompetent. The mechanism that explains this is called cognitive dissonance, which my colleague and co author on this book, Elliot Aronson, really developed as a young student himself.
He advanced this theory into a theory of self justification. Cognitive dissonance, which people have heard about, they've heard the term, it's a common term, and it describes a simple mechanism in the mind. We do not like the discomfort of having two competing ideas or beliefs that are mutually contradictory, or a belief and a behavior. So the classic definition of dissonance is, I'm a heavy smoker, I know it's unhealthy, but I'm smoking. That's the dissonance.
So the smoker will be motivated to reduce that dissonance, the discomfort of the dissonance, by either quitting smoking, or justifying smoking. Yes, I smoke a lot, but it keeps me calm, and that's a good thing, you know. Yes, I smoke a lot, but not as much as my brother in law, Fred, okay.
Now, what Eliot did in his work was to take this mechanism, developed first by Leon Festinger in the 1950s, and say, you know, well, so dissonance exists when say you and your best friend disagree about movies. You know, I love this movie. I hated this movie. How could you, a smart person, love that movie? Those are small examples of dissonance. What Eliot did was say dissonance is most painful.
and is most motivating to be reduced when the dissonance affects our self concept, something about ourselves that is important to us. So, most people who have relatively normal self esteem think of themselves as being smarter than average, kinder than average, more competent than average. Better than average. That's a nice thing for our self esteem. In America, 88 percent of all people think they're better drivers than average. The other 12 percent live here in LA, I'm telling you.
So, what happens then when you tell me that I, a competent person, just screwed up on this assignment and was really dreadful at it. Or when I, who believes something really strongly that is true in my theories of child rearing or politics, and now you tell me that that belief that I've held for so long is wrong and here's the evidence for it? What are my choices?
I can change my mind and admit maybe I was a little silly foolish to believe that French was Or I can tell you where you can go with your study. You know, okay. , my late husband's older brother, who was a priest in Ireland used to say in exasperation. May you go forth into the wilderness and attempt to procreate by yourself. Okay, which was but we of course don't say it quite so elegantly as that. So basically that's the idea.
When we're given evidence of some harm that we've caused another person, you. I'm a kind person. I don't harm other people. Therefore, if you say I've harmed you, it must be because you deserved it. You did something that warranted my reaction. I get to be good, but you're the one who started it. And this, you know, this way of, you know, Self justifying our actions begins in very, very early age as all parents see in their kids. He started it! He started it!
You know, yeah, but you hit him with the bat. No, but he started it by threatening to hit me with his bat. You know, the other kid always starts it. Someone wrote me a charming story of she'd taken her little three year old to the park and had a bunch of stickers, nice stickers, for her little girl to play with and there's another child there and the mother says to her little girl, Sweetie, why don't you go ask this other little girl to have some of your stickers?
So the child thinks about this and says, That little girl doesn't like stickers, Mommy. Really? I get to be a good little girl and keep my stickers. That is the fundamental way that cognitive dissonance reduction works. That's a funny small example, but now imagine when it's a major example, when your harms have led to a, social policy of opposing vaccinations, or when it's led to a war, or when it's led to any major decision with huge consequences.
And then the need to justify rather than admit is even more powerful.
Brilliant. Beautiful job as well. And we'll talk a little bit, maybe about some of the many case studies you're talking about the book. You even talk about Watergate and the lies that were told to justify, et cetera, et cetera. But I wanted to point to one thing, because you talk about the fact that a lie is in some ways, not as bad as this self justification and I'm quoting a little piece here. Now you say between the conscious lie to fool others.
And unconscious self justification to fool ourselves lies a fascinating gray area, and it is patrolled by that unreliable, self serving historian, memory. And memories are often pruned and shaped by ego enhancing bias that blurs edges.
Of past events softens culpability and distorts what really happened the whole piece about memory that you shared carol got right into me and made me doubt memories that i held so , tightly and made me grip them so much less and even things you talked about there the child that later on in life you might hold grudges towards your own parents. but actually find out that they didn't even exist and you found this yourself with that story that you were read many many times or so you thought.
The Wonderful O the Wonderful O. So this is one of my favorite books in the entire world, The Wonderful O by James Thurber. Just a delicious, delicious witty, lovely little book. And I have a, had a profound memory of my beloved father reading me this book when I was a little girl because he read books to me and he was a great storyteller and he would have been the one read this book to me. And so I got down the book one day to read it again and I see that it was published.
One year after my father died. My father couldn't have read me this book, but my memory of him reading it was just as vivid as my talking to you right now. So, heh, who read me this book? I don't know, maybe my older half brother. Somebody gave me this book, and I linked it to my dad. The more we learn about memory, heh, heh, heh, heh. We have two choices. We can become humble about the fallibilities of our memories, or we can cling to them with even more tenacity.
Those are two ways of reducing dissonance. You guess which one is easier? Memory allows us to keep our views of ourselves and our beliefs in consonance in harmony. One of the most charming lines of research in this respect is that our memories of our parents conform to what we think of our parents now and not to what they actually did earlier on.
So if you're in a good relationship with your parents you remember your adolescent experiences with them as being fun and terrific and they were supportive and they loved you and da, da, da. But if you're conflicted about your parents now, your memories of how they were when you were a teenager or a child will be much more critical. Oh, we were fighting all the time. We were fighting all the time. How do we know this? We know this because researchers have interviewed teenagers.
What's your relationship with your mom and dad like now? Describe your latest fight with them and describe how you felt about that fight. And now we come back 10 years later and we ask them what they remember. And they don't remember! I never was angry at my mother. I was never angry at my mother. Except that at the time, you were ready to kill her. You know? So, so, What a, what a stunning, stunning realization that is. Now, what does it tell us? What does it mean for us?
In our book, we, we tell the story of Mary Carr's memoir in which she remembered her father being abusive and distant and unhelpful and unsupportive and, you know, a whole bunch of negative things about him. And she left home in a huff and dah, dah, dah. When she went back to read her journals at the time. What she found was that she was the angry, conflicted one. She was the one who wanted to leave home. She was the one who used his behavior as an excuse to get out of there.
And he was in fact as loving a dad as he could have been. So we rewrite our histories to conform to our beliefs now. And this really ought to be the door to, A warmer and more human understanding of our own faults and our parents' faults. Than it is, than it is. But, you know, you asked in your question about the way that memory is, is our, is our historian. Of course we are all our memories and that's why. It's so dissonant. It's so painful when we learn a memory is wrong.
It goes right to the heart of who we think we are. To the story we've created to explain our lives. What? It didn't happen that way? That is so hard to accept. So you need a sense of humor. And a sense of humility, too.
i brought my dad for breakfast for his birthday the other day and i told him about this chapter and i told my mom as well i told him about the stories we tell ourselves about our childhoods good and bad. And how the way i kind of the way i understood it was that you. You have a memory and then you tell that story and then the story becomes the memory. And over time you tell the story and story. And of course, you're always the hero of your story. You couldn't be bad in any way.
You couldn't have been the one that was causing that problem. You couldn't have been the one that didn't do a great job and got let go inside a company, et cetera, et cetera. But there's so many literally incredible confabulations in chapter three, including alien abductions. But the most remarkable was that of Benjamin. I'm going to try and pronounce his name right. Will Kaminsky aka Bruno Grosjean.
And maybe you'd share, maybe the alien abductions which people will find incredible, but also this gentleman, Benjamin.
Well, the story of Bernard Han, that's an extreme example, of someone creating an entire identity and coming to believe it and remember it. You know that everything about his confabulation. I mean, that is truly at the abnormal end of how memory works, but, but many people do that and they do it at a smaller level. I mean, there was a famous story, example of a, of a professor in the United States who in teaching about Vietnam, and America's role in Vietnam, slowly began inserting himself.
And to his stories about serving in Vietnam. He was never in Vietnam. He was never a hero. He was never But every time he told the story about his own experience in Vietnam, which might have started as his telling the story of his best friend Bob's experience in Vietnam, who can say? But he eventually began to confabulate his own memories of having been there. That's the kind, and you know, that seems so bizarre to somebody. Why would he lie to his class about having been in Vietnam?
He's not lying. He has created a memory of himself being in Vietnam. And to some extent we, we can do that all the time. I have a cousin my age who remembers when she was 10 years old being at the, we had a family gathering at my house in Los Angeles. She lived in Chicago and she absolutely remembers an event that my father staged, a sort of funny thing he was going to do. pick a quarrel with my mother and start hammering on the wall in anger and rage.
And he told all the children that he was going to do this because he was then going to announce that they were going to begin to remodel the house the next day, something my mom had wanted for so long. It was a planned joke. My cousin tells me that she never liked my dad because he was so violent. Two years ago, I said, what? My mom was never, what are you talking? Well, I remember the time he went after your mother with a hammer. Number one, she wasn't there at all.
She remembers seeing him do this. Number two, it's such a, see, this is how memory works also. You can import a false memory if the details are vivid and plausible to you. You've seen what an angry man might look like with a hammer banging a wall. , I might not be able to, persuade you you've actually been on a spaceship to Mars. That would be a harder thing to port into your mind. But she'd heard the story over and over and over, except that she never heard the part about how it was a joke.
Now that, that on a smaller scale is what Benjamin Wilkimorski did for his whole persona. Being a Holocaust survivor and suffering as he did was a far more sympathetic story that got him the attention and support that he so craved. And so that story was self reinforcing and it eventually became part of his narrative and his beliefs and his therapists too, who was supporting him in these delusions. They're really delusions.
So an idea can start as a small, small bit of ice and become a giant avalanche. If you don't. Stop it mid course, I guess. So memory is our self justifying historian.
One of the beautiful metaphors that you introduced here as well is the benevolent dolphin. I love that. I love that story. Which also brings us into good intentions, bad science and the closed loop of clinical judgment. And you start off this by a hero of the show, Richard Feynman. He said that it doesn't matter how beautiful the guess is, or how smart the guesser is, or how famous the guesser is. If the experiment disagrees with the guess, then the guess is wrong. That's all there is to it.
I'll set you up with that and I'd love you to tell us about your metaphor.
Well, Richard Feynman was the consummate scientist. He understood that if the experiment doesn't confirm what you believe, you're wrong, period, end of discussion. You know, you can do some more studies, of course, but you have to accept the evidence that you were wrong. That's science. My favorite sentence, one of my favorite sentences in the book is science is a form of arrogance control.
Because it's one of the few methods we have of forcing us to hold our belief up to the light, up to the evidence, to see if it's right or wrong. Because it's not natural to the human mind to want to be wrong. Cognitive dissonance theory rests on several principles. normal human biases in how the mind works. The first one is the confirmation bias. This is the most important thing for everyone to understand in terms of the frailty of our thinking.
The mind looks for, seeks, and remembers evidence that confirms what we believe And it minimizes, forgets, trivializes, overlooks, and ignores any information that disconfirms what we believe. Science is our way of testing a belief to see if it disconfirms our beliefs. That is why science is so unpopular. We don't like it when our own hypothesis turns out to be wrong. Nope. That view, the other biases that we have, actually, my favorite one is the bias that we are unbiased.
This is a very deeply held human bias. I am a reasonable, rational, intelligent person. Therefore, what I believe is not biased. Therefore, if you don't disagree with me on my theory of whatever it is, you're the one with the bias. So just sit right down while I tell you why you're wrong, and then you'll understand. That is also natural to how we think. And again, it goes to the fact that we want to preserve our belief in ourself as smart, competent, and good.
So we have these inherent biases and they underlie the mechanism of cognitive dissonance, because dissonance is a way of making sure we confirm our beliefs and that we're right about our beliefs. What the confirmation bias sees to it is that we see confirming evidence of belief and we don't look for any evidence that disconfirms it.
So when dolphins do something wonderful rescuing sailors at sea, you know, or a swimmer who's about to be hit by a shark or something, okay, we say, aren't they wonderful benevolent dolphins? They're so cute and I love them and they're so smart. Okay. We are not looking for or noticing mean dolphins. Is there a school of mean dolphins somewhere who let the damn sailor die? You know, no, we don't know because we haven't seen them. We haven't reported them. We don't see them.
And that's the kind of thing that we do all the time. You know, let's say in the case of vaccinations. There's always somebody who says, Oh, wait, though, you know, there was a terrible side effect of this vaccine that I had. And therefore , all vaccines are deadly. Every drug we take from an aspirin to an anything is going to have a side effect for somebody. The question we need to ask is what are its benefits for the vast majority?
And so if you single out one anecdote and you're not looking at the larger picture, you get a distorted picture. That's why scientists like to say anecdotes are not evidence. They're not. The one metaphor that I find has been most useful, people tell us when they've read the book, is what we call them the pyramid of choice. And I think this really helps people understand some things that seem so baffling to them.
How is it that that person could do or believe da da da da da that just seems so crazy. But it works like this. You Imagine, well in our book we use the example of students because it was from a real study. So let's use the students. Okay, we got two students at the very top with the same middling view about cheating. It's not a good thing. It's really, you really shouldn't cheat, but it's not the worst sin in the world. If we're listing sins, cheating is not high on the list.
Fine. Now they're taking their final exam. This is really important. Their grade rests on this, and a question comes up at the end of the exam. They draw a complete blank. Every student knows this experience. What to do? Student next to them, the one with the beautiful handwriting. knows the answer. Do I cheat? And look at her answer. Do I preserve my integrity and not cheat? One cheats. The other doesn't cheat.
Now, the minute they do that, they are in a state of constant dissonance between their belief about cheating and what they just did. And they will now need to put their behavior in consonance with their belief about cheating. So the one who cheated will now say, cheating isn't such a bad thing. And besides, it's just this one time. And besides, I really need it for my grade. And besides, I'm without, if I don't get a good grade, I'm never getting into a profession.
The one who resisted cheating will now think that cheating is a more serious crime than they thought originally. In fact, it's really appalling. It's not a victimless crime. It's not fair to other students who aren't cheating. Over time, as they fall down the two sides of that pyramid till they're at the base, at the base, their attitudes about cheating will be very far apart. The one who cheated, will say, listen, this is no big deal. Everybody does it. Oh, please.
And the one who resisted cheating will have made it into a more serious offense and people should be hung up by their ankles. Okay. Now, what this means is you think about it this way. This is not the slippery slope where you're just idly falling down a path of. sin, because it's mindful. It's mindful with every step of self justification. As you slide down that pyramid, you are making it harder to go back up and change your mind. So over time, it's not just a one time thing.
The next time you have a chance to cheat, you'll cheat because by now you've justified the first act of cheating, right? And the ethical person, will become even more ethical because they've resisted the first one and maybe didn't get such a good grade and so now really has even more need to justify that ethical choice. I didn't get a good grade, but I'm a better person for it. See?
So this is why we so often see people who are at the bottom of a pyramid of self justification, which means you think about how hard would it be to go back up that pyramid and change the first decision you made, or even to say, well, you know, I've just, I've just spent 12 years defending my My opposition to vaccines, how am I going to change my mind just because every medical institution in the world tells me I should?
So That's why when we see people doing self defeating things or staying in terribly bad dangerous violent relationships or committing more and more acts of Of accommodation to unethical policies at work We think, how can they be doing that? And the answer is they've spent a lot of time justifying their decision. In our book with the Watergate example, but we also use it with support for Donald Trump.
Is the first decision, you know, at the very beginning when Trump was first running for office or in the case of Watergate, the first act, you know what? I can't, I'm, I'm sorry. I'm, I'm a Republican, but I'm, I can't go with this guy or, I'm a Republican, but what Richard Nixon's doing here is illegal, immoral, unethical, wrong. You make that decision at the beginning. That's where you're going to stay. But now if you make some accommodations.
Boy, Nixon, this is not good, but you know, Nixon's done so many good things. There was the Environmental Protection Act, and yeah, he's an anti Semitism and racist, but on the other hand, he's done some good things that I like, and besides, I'm a Republican, and it's good for my wallet. So you stay. So you stay. And then, as Jeb Stuart Magruder wrote in his memoir of his immersion in Nixon's Watergate scandal, I stopped seeing what was happening around me.
I was in a hall of mirrors, like Albert Speer wrote in his memoir about Hitler. I was in a hall of mirrors, everything reflecting back on me. I could not see that there was any other way. That's what we do to ourselves.
That's such an important point carol for this show i really want to highlight that point that when we don't have people who feel they're psychologically safe to speak truth to power to disagree to say i don't believe this is the right strategy. The leaders are those in power will actually go and double down and then you have escalation of commitment as well.
And I'd love you to share a little bit about that because I'm sure you've seen this beyond the political realm in many businesses as well, where people kind of, they know there's people in the company who have been the naysayer, but there's nobody listening to the naysayer or they jettison the naysayers because they don't want them there in the first place.
Exactly. Naysayers and whistleblowers. Everybody says, Oh, we, we love our naysayers and whistleblowers. You know, they keep us honest. No, they don't. They get fired. They get shunned. They lose their jobs, they lose their money, some of them lose their families. They pay a very big price for blowing the whistle on unethical policies or dangerous policies at work.
So what that means is, for somebody who is at the head of a company or in a position of power, if you say to your team sitting around the table, Okay, so does anyone disagree with me that thinks this may be not a great idea? Who is going to say so? Who? Who? Okay. So what, what John Kennedy did with the Bay of Pigs fiasco is he left the room and he said to his advisors, you guys, you discuss among yourselves what you think should be done here.
And then somebody is going to tell me, you have to create an environment. In which you want to hear all the reasons, not the ones that confirm your decision, but that disconfirm your decision. What are the reasons not to do this? What are the things that could go bad? What's the downside of this choice? Tell me every possible downside so that then when we make a decision, we can weigh what we'd like to have happen, but what might actually happen.
Any responsible Leader of a group, whether it's a small group or a country, really needs to be able to do this to make it clear to staff that you really do get to say your opinion without penalty. Unfortunately, that is not a very popular thing to do, is it? But you can see that it's crucial in terms of decision making because you have to look for the dolphin who's out to kill the sailor.
You know, you just, you just need to know what's going to happen out there and be open to it and not feel that criticism of your preference means that you are foolish or wrong to have even suggested it. I mean, George Bush did this with the war in Iraq, as we now all know. Actually this is how our book began. Elliot and I were sitting around talking about.
The war in Iraq and Elliot said to me, you know, he said, liberals in this country think that George Bush Lied to the country about weapons of mass destruction That Saddam Hussein had met weapons of mass destruction, and that's why we had to invade He said I don't think he was lying to the country. I think he was lying to himself I think he had made the decision to go into Iraq for whatever reason political Daddy, who knows?
And once he made the decision he cherry picked the evidence To support the rightness of that decision. And we now know that's exactly what happened. And you know what else to this day, to this day, that every year, there are a few Republicans who write to us and say, but there were weapons of mass destruction. They were there. They were absolutely there. How dare you say they weren't there?
And then we have to quote to them from George Bush's own memoir in which he says, the worst mistake of my life was believing he had weapons of mass destruction
it's such an , important leadership skill, decision making skill. It's a nice segue actually to law enforcement. I mentioned that in the introduction. And also you have a whole chapter that talks about things like the Reid technique as well, you might be asking for. disconfirming evidence, but the way you ask has a dramatic effect on the answers that you get. But when you talked about law enforcement, I was telling you before we came on air, it really got in under my skin.
I felt so sorry for so many people who are wrongly convicted and the way they're wrongly convicted. And then the dissonance that happens with the people who convict them. because they can't be wrong they can't live with that love you to share a little bit about this
oh, painful. Painful. Yes. So painful. This, let's see, where, oh, where to start. So, the first process in law, in the law for detectives. To find out who the perp was, who's the guilty party. And if an investigator, detective, or detective, jumps to a conclusion too soon, in advance of the evidence, or without evidence, that so and so is the villain, so and so did it, and exclude any evidence or possibility or hypothesis that someone else might have done it.
They have a suspect and they think that person is guilty. And now the confirmation bias will set in. This person is guilty. I know they're guilty. I'm a detective. I've had years of experience in this. You know, I know it's, this is the likely candidate. I've seen too many of these cases. This is the one. And now I'm going to do what I can to get a confession from this person because I know I'm right and this person is guilty.
This is, of course, what happened in the terrible case of the, Central Park Five in New York City accused of, you know, raping the Central Park jogger. Well, there's just hundreds of these cases where the police cannot accept disconfirming evidence. And they get, of course, tremendous points and kudos and success for finding the perpetrator, the more heinous the crime. the more glory they accrue for having found that person.
The public is demanding accountability, demanding that you find this killer, demanding that you find who did this. And you are, after all, one of the good guys, right? You've seen all those westerns, you know, the good guy wears the white hat, and the good guy gets the bad guy, and I'm a good guy, and I'm gonna get put this bad guy away. And, unfortunately, that thinking process and that pressure process can really lead to some terrible miscarriages of justice.
The Reid technique was a way of teaching detectives how to interrogate suspects, but it's not a way of interrogating suspects to find the truth. It's a way of interrogating to confirm what you believe. One investigator told my good colleague, Richard Leo, who studies the psychology of false confessions. This interrogator said, well, I never interrogate innocent people. How do you know? How do you know? I never interrogate innocent people. Well, this is, of course, preposterous.
Of course you have. You do. Richard Leo's research shows exactly how it happens that the police press an innocent person into confessing. This is particularly true if they're young, inexperienced, do not know how the police operate, and who believe. This is so naive and touching. Who believe that the police will never lie to them. All right. So now a police officer says to you, well, you know, your girlfriend is dead. And we think that, you know, we must've been the killer.
No, I wasn't the killer. I was asleep in my bed. Well but your fingerprints are on the murder weapon. I, what? My fingerprints are on the murder weapon. This is, this is not true. This is completely not true. Now the suspect, this young person, is in a state of dissonance. I don't remember this happening, but the police officer, whom I trust and respect, is telling me my fingerprints are on the murder weapon. How could that even be? Well, maybe.
Now the police officer says, well, how could that be? Well, maybe I, I walked in my sleep. Could it be I, the innocent person will try to come up with a hypothetical story that before long becomes the narrative and the confession. It's not as hard to do as you think it would be. People think an innocent person would never confess and all too often they are induced to do so. Sometimes through flat out lies. If you confess, you can go home tonight. No, you confess, you're going to prison.
So, it's really important for corrections to be made, on the use of these methods, and in many jurisdictions they are, and in many jurisdictions in the United States, district attorneys, as they're called here, prosecuting attorneys, are re opening cases to see where such miscarriages of justice might have occurred. The crucial thing to understand is that it is almost never the person who committed the bad interrogation.
It is never the prosecutor who put the innocent person in prison who will reinvestigate. to see if they were wrong. It's too impossible to accept. It happens. It happens. In our book, we do have a few examples. We always have an example at the end of every chapter of somebody who is able to see what they did wrong.
And as for me, that is the most powerful part of the book, to read their stories and feel as they did, How could I have believed my client in therapy when she said her parents killed babies and buried them under the living room floor in a satanic cult? How could I have believed my client saying such a preposterous thing?
that there are people out there and we need more of that but again back to your point about whistleblowers and truth speakers it's very very difficult, you mentioned there but i'm gonna mix a couple of things together now one was the earlier on we set a memory but then also if you interrogate a child, You can easily implant thoughts into a child very, very easily.
And you mentioned that how in the 1980s and 90s, the newly emerging evidence of the sexual abuse of children and women set off two unintended hysterical epidemics. One was phenomenon of recovered memory therapy, and the other was a panic about the sexual abuse of children in a daycare centers. And again, this just shows you how far or up the pyramid you can go with all of this.
it can. Well, Elliot and I were both in Los Angeles when the McMartin daycare scandal emerged. This was a mother and her two grown children who'd been running a daycare service for years and years and years. Everybody loved their school. The children showed no signs of anything, but a mother who later turned out to be severely mentally ill made accusations against the son in this daycare center and pretty soon everybody just went crazy.
At the time, the kind of evidence that was used in interviewing children, who were three and four years old, you know, three and four, five years old. The kind of evidence they used, well, first of all, they believed that a child wouldn't say the truth unless you really pressed them because the child would be so embarrassed to admit anything about sexual touching that you had to interrogate them over and over and over again.
Well, Sure, maybe not sure, because what we later learned, thanks, by the way, to the work of psychological scientists who studied. Children's who studied the question of how best to interview young children so that you get what happened rather than a confirmation of what you think happened. One of the things they learned is that if you ask a child the same question over and over, did he touch you here? Did he touch you here? Did he touch you here?
The child says, no, no, no. And finally, the child will think, I guess that's the wrong answer. They want to hear yes, and that's what the adult wants to hear is yes. Well, he did. Where else did he touch you? The child is gonna make up all kinds of things and No one stopped to think that the idea that daycare teachers would be taking children on a plane trip to molest them with clowns and frogs Nobody, where was everybody's critical faculties? What, what, what?
What income would a daycare worker have to have to charter a plane to take children away to molest them? You know? Frogs in the tree? I, you know, the allegations were nuts themselves, but nobody, what people said is, oh, well, children, you know, children, that's how they speak, but the underlying truth is they were molested. There was no way to disconfirm that until thankfully, The psychological scientist studying child development learned how you speak to a child. You don't get hysterical.
One good example of this, a friend told me, she, she was, what a lucky example, parents divorce, father had custody of the child, little girl, weekends, the little girl comes home to her mom on the Sunday night and her mother says, what did you do? And she said, Oh, I had a good time. She said, and and daddy put his pee pee in my pee pee. Daddy did what? Daddy did what? Daddy put his pee pee in my pee pee. So mother gets hysterical, of course, calls the police, calls a detective. She's.
Sure. That means you know what the father did. Yeah. And fortunately, fortunately, this police officer had been trained in the newer, the new method of how you, how you get a story from a child. You don't assume you know what happened. You ask the child what happened and the child basically said, well. Daddy gave me a bath, and I had a nice bath, and Daddy wrapped me in a towel, and then I made a pee pee, and then I went hmm, and then Daddy put his pee pee in my pee pee. Peed in the same time.
What a lucky child, what a lucky mother, what a lucky, really lucky father, yeah? So it was only by realizing that, if you, how devastating the confirmation bias was. And keep in mind that social workers and interrogators and police thought they were the good guys. We want to put those child molesters away. Of course you do. Of course you do. No one disputes this, but not, not at the price of putting innocent people in prison for years and years and years.
Last year I had the most emotionally touching experience. A man named Joseph Allen, a black man in Ohio, and a white woman, Nancy Smith, were both accused, very like the McMartin story, by a crazy mother, that the white woman had taken a bus full of children to Joseph's house where they molested the children. And this became a horrific story. It went on for years and years. Both of them were convicted. Both of them were in prison.
Nancy Smith, being a white woman, was let out of prison after a while. Joseph Allen was put back. It was let out for a while, then he was put back in prison. They retried and put him back in prison. And I had belonged to an organization that was working to defend the falsely accused daycare people who've been imprisoned, you know, for years. And finally going through the courts in Ohio, Joseph Allen was to be granted a new trial.
And what happened at this courtroom hearing was the judge who was only supposed to determine whether Joseph Allen would get a new trial, that he couldn't determine guilt or innocence, but he all but said, This man is so abundantly innocent, which I can't do, but what I can do is say he deserves a new trial. And the prosecutor, the prosecutor turned to Joseph Allen and to those of us watching on Zoom and to everyone in the courtroom and said, I will not retry this case.
You have my apologies for the false conviction that caused you so much suffering. And we all said, you know, we're going to be there at the prison gates when they released Joseph Allen. We weren't at the prison gates, but our group and Joseph and his lawyers all met in Boston to celebrate his release. The state of Ohio has yet to pay him any compensation for the years of his life that were lost. And what a sweet man. What a forgiving. Loving man.
Yeah, it's absolutely heartbreaking reading the stories in the book and then the thousands and thousands of people that this has happened to. And then the ones we don't know who this has happened to as well. The ones that are still, you know, experiencing this and the dissonance that goes with that. And the difficulty I have to say as well, it must be so difficult to be a police officer knowing that this can happen as well. But I wanted to just bring it right back to the start of the pyramid.
Because how does this begin and you say we make an early, apparently inconsequential decision and then we justify it to reduce the ambiguity of the choice. This starts a process of entrapment, action, justification, further action that increases their intensity and, commitment, and may end up taking us far from original attentions or principles at all.
And some examples you give, and feel free to bring this wherever you want, Carol, are the, the judge who takes that golf trip to St Andrews in Scotland, along with somebody who he shouldn't be doing that with, or even the cases of physicians who take a little maybe stress ball with the name of a pharma company printed on that ball. and how this has a dramatic effect on how decision making is made.
Oh, you really did read this book closely. Thank you. Thank you. It's so rare to talk to somebody who's actually read the book and not just the CliffsNotes. Right. No, that's true because see, remember, I'm not biased. I'm not biased. I make all my decisions in a calm, rational way, based on the best available evidence. You can't influence me. You can't buy me. So, so what if I have lunch with a lobbyist? And so what if I take a trinket from a pharmaceutical company?
And so, so what if I take this little goofy thing from somebody who wants me to do something for them? No, it's not going to affect me. When the Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, Went duck hunting in Texas with a friend who was, had a case that was going to be before the Supreme Court. So people said, well, you should recuse yourself, he's a friend. And Scalia said, somewhat huffily, and in an op ed, I don't see how, how anyone could question my impartiality. Thank you.
I don't see how anyone could question my impartiality. Well, we can! We do! You can't be! But his view, and particularly as a Supreme Court Justice, he is above bias. Look at Clarence Thomas, taking millions and millions of dollars and vacations and holidays from supporters who questioned I mean, who, who accepted Donald Trump's claim that the election was stolen. and he would not recuse himself on a Supreme Court issue that pertained precisely to that issue? Oh, I'm above such biases.
Oh, please. It's why everyone can see a hypocrite in action except the hypocrite, because the hypocrite is busy self justifying. In the case of, of physicians, the pharmaceutical industry has long known. How you woo a physician to using your drug, which has changed two molecules over an older, more established drug and costs 15 times as much. How do you do that? There's no medical reason. Okay. Well, all right. Here's what we'll do. I'm going to, I'm going to give him dinner.
I'm going to give him a notepad with our, the name of our company on it. My very good colleague, and very dear friend, Auburn Blooming, an oncologist. And I have co authored a book on the importance of estrogen for women in menopause. And Avram is always careful to say, I never took one dime from the pharmaceutical industry. Not a dime, not a notepad, not a pen, not a pizza. You know, I never left them in my office.
That's not the way I'm going to learn about the effectiveness of a medication by a drug rep. That's not how you look at the medical literature. So, but that's what it takes. That's what it takes is not to jump off the pyramid at all in that direction.
And you, there's a great line here 'cause the book is, follow these beautiful lines. It's the people who almost decide to live in glass houses. Who throw the first stones. Love that one. But there, there's another one here. 'cause I don't want to let us off the hook. So us, you. This is not me and Carol talking about those people. This is us. And you say the metaphor of the pyramid applies to most important decisions. involving moral choices of life options.
Instead of cheating on an exam, for example, Now substitute, deciding to begin a casual affair or not, sample an illegal drug or not, take steroids to improve your athletic ability or not, stay in a troubled marriage or not, lie to protect your employer and job or not, have children or not, pursue a demanding career or stay at home with the kids or not. It applies to absolutely everything and I'd love you to share maybe some of your favourite examples that I might have missed.
Provoked from that quote
one of the things people always ask Elliot and me is Well then, big shot. Big shot. What mistakes have you made, huh? You know, well, it's, and it, by the way, a completely fair question. think Elliot is the only person I know who's actually never made a mistake.
Although he says no, he did once in 1981. Something. shared the story of the canoe remember the canoe
Oh, the canoe, of course, how he resolved dissonance with the canoe. No, see, by being as aware of how dissonance works as he is, he really, he's so skilled at helping people understand and identify, identify the dissonant words. ideas or the dissonant circumstances that is uncomfortable because before you can do anything, you have to understand what's causing the dissonance in order to make a decision then about it, right? I will just say what, I mean, one, example from our own lives.
I mean, Elliot and I, when we were writing about the McMartin child abuse case in Los Angeles, We were both in California at the time. I was in Los Angeles at the time. I knew the prosecuting attorney. I knew everybody on the they are guilty side. And I wrote an op ed for the Los Angeles Times that they headlined, Do Children Lie? Not About This. That was before we realized that, of course children lie. They lie as soon as they can speak. That's what speech is for, lying.
I didn't eat the cookies, mommy. No, you know, are you kidding? I mean, of course children lie. You can only say children don't lie if you've never known a child, been a child, or seen a child. I mean, really. So, so Eliot said, We sacrificed our skepticism on the altar of outrage. We sacrificed our skepticism on the altar of outrage. Outrage feels good. It feels invigorating. It feels righteous. And it keeps us from seeing when it's outrageous and wrong.
So I, I would say this about understanding dissonance and how to live with it. Because there's two choices. One, you resolve it too fast. You justify the thing that you did and done. The other is that you wallow in regrets and self blame and guilt and misery for a mistake you made that you can't do any reparation about. That's buyer's remorse, sleepless nights, suffering, post traumatic stress syndrome. Here's something I did that was so horrible I can never forgive myself.
Now those are the two extremes of non useful ways, let's say, of dealing with dissonance. As Eliot put it, I don't want, in the first edition of our book, we did not talk about the people who can't. reduce dissonance, or justify their actions and who suffer as a result. We just talked about the people who justify an out. He said, I, it's because he said, I want people to understand that I want them to understand that sometimes some sleepless nights are called for.
Sometimes you do need to wallow in the recognition that you did something foolish, wrong or hurtful. So as to learn from it and decide what to do about it. And that it's not a hot potato to forget about. But then neither do you want to spend a lifetime suffering and regret. So. We, we set, we use this example in the book of Shimon Peres. It's a fabulous example.
Shimon Peres, when he was prime minister of Israel, was really angry when his good friend, Ronald Reagan, accepted an invitation to go to the cemetery in Bitburg, Germany, to lay a wreath, you know, the war is over. And then Reagan learned that 47 Nazi officers were buried at Bitburg and everybody went. Don't do that, Ronnie. Don't go there. Don't do that. What are you doing? But Ronald Reagan went to Bitburg, where these Nazis had been buried.
So someone asked Shimon Peres, well, what do you think about that? Your friend, Ronald Reagan, went to Bitburg. And Peres said, when a friend makes a mistake, the friend remains a friend, and the mistake remains a mistake. This is a brilliant understanding of dissonance because what do most people do? The friend makes a mistake. The friend votes for someone you hate. The friend does something on it. The friend does something wrong.
That's still your friend and what that person did is still that thing. And now you, what, what most people would do is end the friendship or minimize the mistake. That's how you would normally, those would be your normal choices. A third way is to say, you know, both are true. Now I have to live with this and decide where I want to go with this. When I make a mistake, I remain a good, smart, kind person. And I made a mistake and I did something wrong and not, not.
We have in the latest edition of our book the wonderful example of Sarah Silverman, who was Louis C. K. 's very close, loving friend. Louis C. K. made all the media headlines because he had committed, he was masturbating in front of young women in the comedy business, and he, you know, made big news and it was scandalous and horrible and so on. And Sarah Silverman has a YouTube that's another, it's like Shimon Peres. I hate what he did.
I've been working to get women to speak up about, sexual harassment. What he did was flat wrong, and yes, women have to speak out about it. And, I love him. He's been a friend for 25 years, he's a great dad, I think he's the most wonderful human being. And, and, he's both of those things. What? That's That's what helps us understand and make sense of and think about. It gives us the space to decide, should I end this friendship? How do I want to think about what that person did? And me, as well.
i don't have sarah silverman i love her by the way. I don't have her in my in my copy so i didn't see that i'll just link to that video as well.
Just point out to you. is the third edition, which has a whole chapter on dissonance and the demagogue. Guess who that would be? But what we do in that chapter, as Eileen says, every edition of our book has a new American president to do something with. But it is indeed, it's not just about, well, it's about the Republican. dissonance, over supporting the candidate that you can't stand.
Okay. What we didn't do in that, and it, but it's not a chapter about liberals versus conservatives, it's a chapter about conservatives versus conservatives and how we make those decisions. And we could easily have had a chapter on liberals versus liberals because the dismissal of scientific findings is not something that just happens on the right wing, right wing. It's also a left wing phenomenon.
If you don't like the findings of science because they disconfirm some ideological principle you hold, you're going to tell, you can just get rid of those, science is wrong. And the right wing does it and the left wing does it.
a useful example actually would be, you talked about Lee Ross's naive realism and he said that if your own proposal isn't going to be attractive to you when it comes from the other side, What chance is there that the other side's proposal is going to be attractive when it actually comes from the other side, right?
And you said closer to home, social psychologist Jeffrey Cohen found that Democrats will endorse an extremely restrictive welfare proposal, one usually associated with Republicans, if they think it has been proposed by themselves. So maybe you'll elaborate on that because I thought about how that's exactly what we try to do when we're trying to, you know, instill transformation or change. You, you have to try and make it their idea. If you try and make it their idea, your idea stands a chance.
That's, well, that's right. Yes, what Lee Ross did, it was such a, such a brilliant idea. We take a peace proposal and we give it to Palestinians and Israelis, the same peace proposal, and we change only, well, whose peace proposal is this? If it's yours, you think it's brilliant. If you think it came from them, it's terrible. And we, well, don't we see that all too tragically, of course. So, yes, in an adversarial situation, that's so. And by the way, that's true in marriages, isn't it?
Because what is the first thing therapists always say to couples? You have to be able to state what your partner's angry about, or what your partner's angry about. problem is you have to be able to state that in a way that they agree with why you have stated it, meaning you've heard them, you get it, you know what it is they're mad about, and you're not hearing it through your own fuzz of retaliation.
It's not easy, it's not easy, but at least it's a start in trying to understand what is the other person's position. So yes, and of course, the more adversarial situation is, certainly in war. It's why third parties have to intervene to come up with some solution that both can live with. And, by the way, the two sides have to stop saying, You are wrong because you. You have to start saying, I was wrong about this because I. Okay.
if you want the other person to listen to you, that's quite crucial. I was giving a talk about this not a while ago and a guy in the audience, this is by the way, one of the main reasons to write a book. You hear from people, they write you their stories, you know, they've always got something more to say. Sometimes they yell at you, you know, but so this guy told a very interesting story.
He said, , I'm one of four siblings and we have been fighting about our parents' estate for five years, something like that. Years, you know, and we're angry at each other and we're not speaking, and we're really angry and they're having a typical family rift, and they're not even Irish, I have to say. They weren't even Irish. But there you are. They're fighting like man. So he said, when your book first came out, I gave the book to our mediator and I said, give this book to them.
Finish the sentence so they can see why they're wrong. Okay. Right. He said, incredibly, it had no effect at all. Right. Hey guys, read this book. It looks like he said, then I reread the book this year. He said, and an amazing thing happened. The words moved around on the page and I wrote, to my, to the mediator and my siblings. And I said, this is where I was wrong. This is the mistake I made in thinking about this whole situation. He said, we resolved it in a week, in a week.
They just wanted to hear that, We will go to great lengths to maintain our being right. When sometimes just saying we were wrong gets results, you know, it's like removing a boulder from your shoulders. Just, you know, I mean, if you say to your sweetheart, Honey, you know that fight we've been having for the last 26 years about our memory of the thing? You know what? You were completely right and I was completely wrong. Is your partner going to be furious with you? I don't think so.
There was a great line in that chapter. So there's a whole chapter on marriage, by the way, and it's a, it's a great chapter, but one of the lines I loved, I don't know which of you wrote this one, but it was like, you, you say to your wife, Oh, you're just like your mother. And in brackets, it says, and you're not talking about the apple pie that she makes really well or something like that. That was a great line because if there's one way to.
Wind up your other half by saying their parents, but I thought we'd share maybe one last thing. So I love that chapter. Absolutely love the book. We were talking about Bruno Grosjean, the, this was the guy who faked that he was a Holocaust survivor, there's, there's a whole huge piece on that. But what I thought was really interesting about that was that why, right? So one of the questions you asked, why would you do this?
And why would I prefer the fake memory of some, maybe I was abused over actually, no, I just have turned out this way because of my own actions. And it's one of the things you say is that because I need to know that I've made some type of transformation, I'm better now than I was back then. And even you talk about this is the same, but why the heck would somebody make up a story of an alien abduction? I don't know. You said here that the abduction story helps experiencers.
their psychological distress and also avoid responsibility for their mistakes, their regrets and their problems.
Exactly right. Yes. , we all want a story. We all want to know why are we the way we are? How'd I get here? Nowadays, not, and not just recently, the victim story overcoming trauma, the trauma industry has exploded From its original notion that a trauma is a traumatic experience, such as being in war, or being in the holocaust, or surviving a disaster, those used to be the defining notions of trauma. Now, a trauma is anything you say made you feel really traumatized. It's a tautology.
And so it opened the door in psychiatric thinking, to trauma is what you make of an experience rather than something that, was a, was a true natural or personal disaster. Let me put it this way. There's a lot to be gained by saying you are a survivor, in our culture now. Survivors get attention and sympathy. support, sometimes money and services and so forth. And sometimes survivors really do need those things.
Let me not imply that everybody should just brush off traumatic experiences and move on. Of course not. Of course not. But nonetheless, creating a narrative in which you recovered from something terrible puts you in a world and in an identity that gets a lot of sympathy, which, which many people find lacking in their lives.
The alien abduction one is a good example of this in the sense that, it's a perfectly natural experience for many people to, when they first awaken, Well, what people who believe in alien abduction say is, you know, I woke up and there was an alien sitting on my bed, or a goblin, or a monster, or a devil, or a ghost. creature, okay, sitting on my bed. I saw it. I saw the monster. Don't question me.
I saw the monster on my bed, and it was an alien, and it looked exactly like the cover of Whitley Strieber's book from so many years ago, The Round Face and the Thing, which was, by the way, a made up cover of what an alien looks like. And after that, everybody decided those are the aliens they see. It was art director's cover of his book. Digression. Okay. But, what we call that now, what we know is that that's a hypnagogic state, meaning it's a waking dream.
Your eyes are open, oh and the other part of this is usually I can't move, I was immobilized in the bed, I couldn't move my legs. Okay. Okay. Okay. What they're having is a waking dream. Their body is still shut down the way it shuts down when we are sound asleep so that you do not go wandering around the house and out to your garden. You're having a dream which is why it's dreamlike and can be horrifying or a creation of a creature and so forth. But you're dreaming.
It's just that you are right at the cusp of of waking up, and your eyes are open, and so you feel you're awake, but you're not. Now try it, but For many people, especially if you go online and then you find other people who have had this experience and go, Yeah, it must have been an alien. If you had that experience too, it must be a real alien. Right? If so many people have had this experience. The only explanation I can think of is that they're really aliens on my bed.
And then if you find yourself in a community, community of people, reinforcing that belief, reinforcing that identity, It becomes even more compelling and the story we tell in the book from Susan Clancy's work on alien abductions is how the belief that you were seized can come to assuage deep losses, regrets, feelings, sometimes quite a, you know, quite a, a touching feeling. touching way in some of those stories that you, that you read.
The wonderful memory scientist, Rich McNally, who is at Harvard and who wrote a superb book called Remembering Trauma, what it is and what it isn't. It's a savage takedown of the recovered memory assumptions that if something, that we repress traumas. He says, no, if something is really traumatic, the problem is that you don't forget it. You can't forget it. The problem isn't that you repress it. McNally had a debate with John Mack in Boston at one point.
Mack was a psychiatrist who came to believe his patients, because so many of them were reporting alien abductions. Where is that psychiatrist's clinical critical faculties? Anyway and Mack brought with him his, many of the people who believed they had been abducted. They're sitting in that audience. And McNally explains how it works, what the mechanism is, how this is perfectly normal. No, it wasn't really an alien, you know, waking dreams, hypnagogic state.
And a woman came up to him afterwards and said, you think we want to believe we were abducted? That's completely nonsense. If somebody would only give us an explanation, we would accept it. He said, we just did. There you have it.
I quoted that as well. I had that in my notes. I thought that was a brilliant, brilliant line. I, Carol, I absolutely loved it. I've taken loads of your time and I'm so glad we do this and learn so, so much from this book and looking forward to. Further books there for those watching as I have anger there, the misunderstood emotion, one of Carol's books and a textbook as well by Carol and their colleague, Carol Wade. psychology and perspective.
I love, love the cover as well, which makes a lot of sense. So I let people watch us to find out that I'll link to that as well. Carol, I'll link to the new edition of your book and the Sarah Silverman, interview as well. And there's, Also the, the Oprah, you know, mistakes were made. Oprah admitted when those were made as well. And I'll let people be intrigued and find that and read the book to find out more about those. Carol, for people who want to find You where's the best place to find it?
know what, the Social Psychology Network, SPN. Go there and you can send me an email and they'll get it right to me.
Brilliant. Well, I have a quote that I pulled and it's by Thomas Carolyle that you have in the book. And I'm going to quote that. And then I'm going to let you close the show, maybe your call to action for why you wrote this and what you want people to. to do with this information that you're bringing out into the world. This quote goes beautifully. The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.
we had just a few phenomenal predecessors for our book, didn't we? I think what I've learned from writing this book is that here's an interesting little theory, cognitive dissonance theory, that turns out to have us. great relevance and power in helping us understand our own behavior, the behavior of our friends and loved ones, the behavior of our politicians. It's universal. It's inevitable.
And like all of our human frailties, the more we understand our frailties, the more power we have to understand them, correct them, lead better lives, perhaps acquire some humility. realize that admitting our mistakes is not such a bad thing to do.
Author of Mistakes Were Made, But Not By Me, Karl Tavris. Thank you for joining us.
Thank you, Aiden. It's been great fun talking with you. Thank you.