Quotes from Carol Tavris

To show how memory changes to fit our story, psychologists study how memories evolve over time: if your memories of the same people change, becoming positive or negative spending on what is happening in your life now, then it's all about you, not them. This process happens so gradually that it can be a jolt to realize you ever felt differently.

even reading information that goes against your point of view can make you all the more convinced you are right.

People who receive disconfirming or otherwise unwelcome information often do not simply resist it; they may come to support their original (wrong) opinion even more strongly—a backfire effect. Once we are invested in a belief and have justified its wisdom, changing our minds is literally hard work. It's much easier to slot that new evidence into an existing framework and do the mental justification to keep it there than it is to change the framework.

Confabulation, distortion, and plain forgetting are the foot soldiers of memory, and they are summoned to the front lines when the totalitarian ego wants to protect us from the pain and embarrassment of actions we took that are dissonant with our core self-images:

Many subjects harshly devalue the victim as a consequence of acting against him. Such comments as, 'He was so stupid and stubborn he deserved to get shocked,' were common. Once having acted against the victim, these subjects found it necessary to view him as an unworthy individual, whose punishment was made inevitable by his own deficiencies of intellect and character.

when you are about to make a big purchase or an important decision—which car or computer to buy, whether to undergo plastic surgery, or whether to sign up for a costly self-help program—don't ask someone who has just done it.

Understanding without vengeance, reparation without retaliation, are possible only if we are willing to stop justifying our own position.

In one way or another, all of us are blind to whatever privileges life has handed us, even if those privileges are temporary

How can you tell when a presidential scandal is serious? A. The president's poll numbers drop. B. The press goes after him. C. The opposition calls for his impeachment. D. His own party members turn on him. E. Or the White House says, "Mistakes were made." —Bill Schneider, CNN's Inside Politics

The specific tactics vary, but our efforts at self-justification are all designed to serve our need to feel good about what we have done, what we believe, and who we are.

misunderstandings, conflicts, personality differences, and even angry quarrels are not the assassins of love; self-justification is.

We cannot avoid our psychological blind spots, but if we are unaware of them, we may become unwittingly reckless, crossing ethical lines and making foolish decisions. Introspection alone will not help our vision, because it will simply confirm our self-justifying beliefs that we, personally, cannot be co-opted or corrupted and that our dislikes or hatreds of other groups are not irrational but reasoned and legitimate. Blind spots enhance our pride and activate our prejudices.

All of us recognize variation within our own gender, party, ethnicity, or nation, but we are inclined to generalize about people in other categories and lump them all together as them. This habit starts awfully early.

Throughout the 1980s, the ideological climate shifted from one in which science was valued for its own sake or for the public interest to one in which science was valued for the profits it could generate in the private interest.

A stereotype might bend or even shatter under the weight of disconfirming information, but the hallmark of prejudice is that it is impervious to reason, experience, and counterexample.

separates his behavior from his identity

separates his behavior from his identity, and that ability is what ultimately allows people to live with behavior they now condemn.

Seeing disagreement as disloyalty is another hallmark of demagogues, dictators, and strong-arm leaders.

Thanks to dissonance reduction, many of Trump's loyalists, even those who were sacked, will not see themselves as sellouts or facilitators; they will convince themselves that the Republican agenda—and that fat tax cut that put many dollars in their pockets—are worth the small price of lavishing a few compliments on him and turning a blind eye to his offenses. Congratulations indeed.

As with the psychotherapists we discussed in chapter 4, training does not increase accuracy; it increases people's confidence in their accuracy.

The reason Big Pharma spends so much on small gifts as well as the big ones is well known to marketers, lobbyists, and social psychologists: being given a gift evokes an implicit desire to reciprocate.

Whether those claims are true or false is irrelevant. When we cross these lines, we are justifying behavior that we know is wrong precisely so that we can continue to see ourselves as honest people and not criminals or thieves. Whether the behavior in question is a small thing like spilling ink on a hotel bedspread or a big thing like embezzlement, the mechanism of self-justification is the same.

Fitzgerald was telling us that Americans are inclined to bypass act two; they don't want to go through the pain that self-discovery requires.

We are forever being told that we should learn from our mistakes, but how can we learn unless we first admit that we made those mistakes? To do that, we have to recognize the siren song of self-justification.