Quotes from Carol Tavris

Women do not benefit from doctrinaire regulations of the one right way to be

The line "But some of my best friends are [X]," well deserving of the taunts it now gets, has persisted because it is such an efficient way of resolving the dissonance created when a prejudice runs headlong into an exception.

The focus on constant testing, which grew out of the reasonable desire to measure and standardize children's accomplishments, has intensified their fear of failure. It is certainly important for children to learn to succeed, but it is just as important for them to learn not to fear failure. When children or adults fear failure, they fear risk. They can't afford to be wrong.

hundreds of studies have shown that, compared to predictions based on actuarial data, predictions based on an expert's years of training and personal experience are rarely better than chance. But when an expert is wrong, the centerpiece of his or her professional identity is threatened. Therefore, dissonance theory predicts that the more self-confident and famous experts are, the less likely they will be to admit mistakes.

We can all understand why victims would want to retaliate. But retaliation often makes the original perpetrators minimize the severity and harm of their side's actions and claim the mantle of victim themselves, thereby setting in motion a cycle of oppression and revenge. "Every successful revolution," observed the historian Barbara Tuchman, "puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed." Why not? The victors, former victims, feel justified.

False memories allow people to forgive themselves and justify their mistakes, but sometimes at a high price: an inability to take responsibility for their lives.

But we must also be careful which memories we select to justify our lives, because we will have to live by them.

Memories create our stories, but our stories also create our memories.

sensitive lover." From our standpoint, therefore, misunderstandings, conflicts, personality differences, and even angry quarrels are not the assassins of love; self-justification is.

Conway and Ross referred to this self-serving memory distortion as "getting what you want by revising what you had." On the larger stage of life, many of us do just that: We misremember our history as being worse than it was, thus distorting our perception of how much we have improved so that we'll feel better about ourselves now.15 All of us do grow and mature, but generally not as much as we think.

Dissonance theory would therefore predict that when victims are armed and able to strike back, perpetrators will feel less need to reduce dissonance by belittling them than they do when their victims are helpless.

young social psychologist named Leon Festinger

Self-justification is blocking each partner from asking: Could I be wrong? Could I be making a mistake? Could I change?

As Debra and Frank's problems accumulated, each developed an implicit theory of how the other person was wrecking the marriage. (These theories are called "implicit" because people are often unaware that they hold them.)

Dissonance is disquieting because to hold two ideas that contradict each other is to flirt with absurdity, and, as Albert Camus observed, we are creatures who spend our lives trying to convince ourselves that our existence is not absurd. At the heart of it, Festinger's theory is about how people strive to make sense out of contradictory ideas and lead lives that are, at least in their own minds, consistent and meaningful.

But, for better or worse, the human mind is more complex than the brain of a rat or a puppy. A dog may appear contrite for having been caught peeing on the carpet, but she will not try to think up justifications for her misbehavior. Humans think—and because we think, dissonance theory demonstrates, our behavior transcends the effects of rewards and punishments and often contradicts them.

Elliot predicted that if people go through a great deal of pain, discomfort, effort, or embarrassment to get something, they will be happier with that "something" than if it came to them easily. For behaviorists, this was a preposterous prediction. Why would people like anything associated with pain? But for Elliot, the answer was obvious: self-justification.

Their stories, so different on the face of it, are linked by common psychological and neurological mechanisms that can create false memories that nonetheless feel vividly, emotionally real. These memories do not develop overnight, in a blinding flash. They take months, sometimes years, to develop, and the stages by which they emerge are now well known to psychological scientists.

Successful partners extend to each other the same self-forgiving ways of thinking we extend to ourselves: They forgive each other's missteps as being due to the situation but give each other credit for the thoughtful and loving things they do. If one partner does something thoughtless or is in a crabby mood, the other tends to write it off as a result of events that aren't the partner's fault:

The results are always the same: severe initiations increase a member's liking for the group.

These findings do not mean that people enjoy painful experiences or that they enjoy things because they are associated with pain. What they mean is that if a person voluntarily goes through a difficult or painful experience in order to attain some goal or object, that goal or object becomes more attractive.

Cognitive psychologist Maryanne Garry finds that as people tell you how an event might have happened, it starts to feel real to them. Children are especially vulnerable to this suggestion.

The confirmation bias is especially glaring in matters of political observation; we see only the positive attributes of our side and the negative attributes of theirs.

In fact, in one major study of the factors in coronary heart disease, postmenopausal women with cholesterol levels higher than 295 had heart attack rates that were the same as or lower than