Quotes from Carol Tavris

How do you get an honest man to lose his ethical compass? You get him to take one step at a time, and self-justification will do the rest.

This small story illustrates three important things about memory: how disorienting it is to realize that a vivid memory, one full of emotion and detail, is indisputably wrong; how even being absolutely, positively sure a memory is accurate does not mean that it is; and how errors in memory support our current feelings and beliefs.

Nick's need to reduce dissonance was increased by the irrevocability of his decision; he could not unmake that decision without losing a lot of money.

The investigators asked them how certain they were that their horses would win. The bettors who had placed their bets were far more certain about their choice than the folks waiting in line.19 Yet nothing had changed except the finality of placing the bet. People become more certain they are right about something they just did if they can't undo it.

The more costly a decision in terms of time, money, effort, or inconvenience and the more irrevocable its consequences, the greater the dissonance and the greater the need to reduce it by overemphasizing the good things about the choice made.

The rise of any demagogue never happens overnight, and it's never the result of one election. It occurs because of the slow shift in beliefs and values that follows every self-justifying decision that citizens make. One step at a time.

Therefore, 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. That person will be highly motivated to convince you that it is the right thing to do.

if you want advice on what product to buy, ask someone who is still gathering information and is still open-minded.

Self-justification is complicated enough when it follows our conscious choices and we know we can expect it. But it also occurs in the aftermath of things we do for unconscious reasons, when we haven't a clue about why we hold some belief or cling to some custom but are too proud to admit it.

Memories are often pruned and shaped with an ego-enhancing bias that blurs the edges of past events, softens culpability, and distorts what really happened.

Centuries of experience show that people will tell their tormenters what they want to hear, whether it's confessing to witchcraft in Salem, admitting to counterrevolutionary tendencies in Soviet Russia or concocting stories about Iraq and Al Qaeda."20 Indeed, the Senate Intelligence report confirmed that no information gained from torturing detainees had proved useful in capturing or killing any terrorist, including Osama bin Laden.

the policies that permitted it. "Without a mutual acknowledgment of mistakes made, and some form of accountability, another reversion to torture may be difficult to prevent," says political scientist Darius Rejali. "Nothing predicts future behavior as much as past impunity."25 Impunity, in turn, rewards self-justification, not only in the perpetrators but also in the nation that exonerates them.

No matter how painful it is to let go of self-justification, the result teaches us something deeply important about ourselves and can bring the peace of insight and self-acceptance.

The happiest, most mature adults were those who could embrace the losses in their lives and transform them into sources of deep gratitude—not with platitudes or Pollyanna glosses, say the researchers, but by discovering the genuinely positive aspects of their multifaceted lives.

Everyone has expectations. They are the soul of the human condition, for they reflect the human ability to anticipate the future, to dream, and to hope. The complementary human ability is to bring those expectations into resolution with reality, what folks used to call maturity.

The downside is that stereotypes flatten out differences within the category we are looking at and exaggerate differences between categories.

prejudice is the energy of ethnocentrism. It lurks there, napping, until ethnocentrism summons it to do its dirty work, justifying the occasional bad things we good people want to do.

As a result of the ensuing debates with his advisers, all of whom had different ideas about how to keep both sides in line, Lincoln could not delude himself that he had group consensus on every decision. He was able to consider alternatives and eventually enlist the respect and support of his erstwhile competitors.

Peres took a third course. "When a friend makes a mistake," he said, "the friend remains a friend, and the mistake remains a mistake.

Combine perpetrators who have high self-esteem and victims who are helpless, and you have a recipe for the escalation of brutality. This brutality is not confined to brutes—sadists or psychopaths. It can be, and usually is, committed by ordinary individuals, people who have children and lovers, "civilized" people who enjoy music and food and making love and gossiping as much as anyone else.

We can try to balance sympathy and skepticism. And then we can learn to hold our conclusions lightly, lightly enough so that we can let them go if justice demands that we do.

Once torture is justified in rare cases, it is easier to justify it in others: Let's torture not only this bastard we are sure knows where the bomb is, but this other bastard who might know where the bomb is, and also this bastard who might have some general information that could be useful in five years, and also this other guy who might be a bastard only we aren't sure.

Unromantic explanations—such as the structure of work—are better predictors of how men and women will get along than are explanations based on male and female "nature.

before a victim of a scam will inch back from the precipice, he or she needs to feel respected and supported. Helpful relatives and friends can encourage the person to talk about his or her values and how those values influenced what happened while they listen uncritically. Instead of irritably asking "How could you possibly have listened to that creep?" you say, "Tell me what appealed to you about the guy that made you trust him.