RS23 - Carol Tavris on Everybody Making Mistakes, Except Us...
Release date: December 5, 2010
Our guest, Carol Tavris discusses her book (co-authored with Elliot Aronson) "Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts." In it they describe how our powerful cognitive dissonance engine of self-justification gives us the incredible ability to rationalize events and beliefs so that we always end up being better than average at being right. Also, how we are forced into these rationalizations by our absolute need to somehow square our most dearly held opinions of ourselves with the nasty tendency of some facts to contradict them.
Carol Tavris is a social psychologist who has tought at UCLA. She has written for many publications, including the NY Times and the LA Times. She is the author of a number of books, including "The Mismeasure of Women" and the recently re-released, "Psychobabble and Biobunk."
Comment on the episode teaser.
Carol's picks:
- "Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference"
- "Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences"
- "Not by Chance Alone: My Life as a Social Psychologist"
2 Comments
Reader Comments (2)
Another very good episode!
I would like to see Carol Tavris speak at the next Skepticon or TAM.
BTW: You have a typo in the link for Delusions of Gender. Non-techies may not notice they just have to add the "h" at the beginning of http for the link to work.
Well if I understand what was said correctly, Aristotle's eudiamonia could only truly known by the person living that good life because others would of necessity have only a fragmented (and likely biased) perception of that individual. However since it was also stated that human memory cannot be trusted even the person living that good life could not be sure of it and therefore it would seem that a good life is impossible to know. You could theoretically live one, but never trust that you have done so.