Carol Tavris - Mistakes Were Made But Not By Me - The Innovation Show

Episode Transcript
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Aidan McCullen (00:00):
As fallible human beings, all of us share the impulse

(00:03):
to justify ourselves and avoid takingresponsibility for any actions that turn
out to be harmful, immoral, or stupid.
Most of us will never be in a positionto make decisions affecting the lives
and deaths of millions of people,but whether the consequences of our
mistakes are trivial or tragic, On asmall scale or on a national canvas,

(00:24):
most of us find it difficult, ifnot 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 itgoes further than that most people
directly confronted by evidence thatthey are wrong do not change their
point of view or course of actionbut justify it even more anxiously.

(00:50):
, even irrefutable evidence israrely enough to pierce the metal
armor of self justification.
That is a taste of what is to come inone of the best books I have read in a
very, very long time, and probably thebest cover of any book I've ever read.
I'm just, make sure I'mholding up the right way there.

(01:10):
For those people watching us onYouTube, that's the right way up.
It's a great pleasure to welcome theauthor of this book, Mistakes were
made, but not by me, Carol Tavris.
Welcome to the show.

Carol Tavris (01:23):
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 Irishroots as well, which we shared off air.
But I thought we'd get stuck in becauseI thought it was such an important book,
not just for decision makers, but also forparents, for law enforcement, for judges,
husbands, wives, parents, children.

(01:46):
Thank you And I thought maybewe can begin with an overarching
thesis, and then we can pick upthe numerous examples and massive
research that you put into this book.
Maybe we'll start with that.
If you had the elevator pitch of whatthis 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 humannature, 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'snot surprising that people will lie
to get off the hook of a mistakethey know they've made, right?

(02:29):
People will lie to avoid beingdivorced, 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 ourselvesand 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 thedifficult Realization that we have done

(02:58):
something foolish, stupid, incompetent,immoral, unethical, or incompetent.
The mechanism that explains thisis called cognitive dissonance,
which my colleague and co author onthis book, Elliot Aronson, really
developed as a young student himself.

(03:18):
He advanced this theory into atheory of self justification.
Cognitive dissonance, which people haveheard about, they've heard the term,
it's a common term, and it describesa simple mechanism in the mind.
We do not like the discomfort ofhaving two competing ideas or beliefs

(03:41):
that are mutually contradictory,or a belief and a behavior.
So the classic definition of dissonanceis, I'm a heavy smoker, I know
it's unhealthy, but I'm smoking.
That's the dissonance.
So the smoker will be motivated toreduce that dissonance, the discomfort

(04:02):
of the dissonance, by either quittingsmoking, or justifying smoking.
Yes, I smoke a lot, but it keeps mecalm, and that's a good thing, you know.
Yes, I smoke a lot, but not as muchas my brother in law, Fred, okay.
Now, what Eliot did in his work wasto take this mechanism, developed

(04:25):
first by Leon Festinger in the1950s, and say, you know, well, so
dissonance exists when say you andyour best friend disagree about movies.
You know, I love this movie.
I hated this movie.
How could you, a smartperson, love that movie?
Those are small examples of dissonance.
What Eliot did was saydissonance is most painful.

(04:48):
and is most motivating to bereduced when the dissonance affects
our self concept, something aboutourselves that is important to us.
So, most people who have relativelynormal self esteem think of themselves as
being smarter than average, kinder thanaverage, more competent than average.

(05:11):
Better than average.
That's a nice thing for our self esteem.
In America, 88 percent of all peoplethink they're better drivers than average.
The other 12 percent livehere in LA, I'm telling you.
So, what happens then when youtell me that I, a competent person,

(05:32):
just screwed up on this assignmentand was really dreadful at it.
Or when I, who believes somethingreally 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 wrongand here's the evidence for it?
What are my choices?
I can change my mind and admit maybe Iwas a little silly foolish to believe

(05:56):
that French was Or I can tell youwhere 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.

(06:17):
May you go forth into the wildernessand attempt to procreate by yourself.
Okay, which was but we of course don'tsay it quite so elegantly as that.
So basically that's the idea.
When we're given evidence of some harmthat we've caused another person, you.

(06:38):
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 thatwarranted my reaction.
I get to be good, but you'rethe one who started it.
And this, you know, this way of, youknow, Self justifying our actions
begins in very, very early ageas all parents see in their kids.

(07:01):
He started it!
He started it!
You know, yeah, but youhit him with the bat.
No, but he started it bythreatening to hit me with his bat.
You know, the other kid always starts it.
Someone wrote me a charming story ofshe'd taken her little three year old
to the park and had a bunch of stickers,nice stickers, for her little girl to

(07:25):
play with and there's another child thereand the mother says to her little girl,
Sweetie, why don't you go ask this otherlittle girl to have some of your stickers?
So the child thinks about this and says,
That little girl doesn'tlike stickers, Mommy.
Really?
I get to be a good littlegirl and keep my stickers.

(07:47):
That is the fundamental way thatcognitive dissonance reduction works.
That's a funny small example, but nowimagine when it's a major example, when
your harms have led to a, social policyof opposing vaccinations, or when it's
led to a war, or when it's led to anymajor decision with huge consequences.

(08:10):
And then the need to justify ratherthan admit is even more powerful.

Brilliant.
Beautiful job as well.
And we'll talk a little bit, maybeabout some of the many case studies
you're talking about the book.
You even talk about Watergateand 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 asbad as this self justification and

(08:39):
I'm quoting a little piece here.
Now you say between theconscious lie to fool others.
And unconscious self justification to foolourselves lies a fascinating gray area,
and it is patrolled by that unreliable,self serving historian, memory.
And memories are often pruned and shapedby ego enhancing bias that blurs edges.

(09:04):
Of past events softens culpabilityand distorts what really happened the
whole piece about memory that you sharedcarol got right into me and made me
doubt memories that i held so , tightlyand made me grip them so much less and
even things you talked about there thechild that later on in life you might

(09:27):
hold grudges towards your own parents.
but actually find out that they didn'teven exist and you found this yourself
with that story that you were readmany many times or so you thought.

The Wonderful O the Wonderful O.
So this is one of my favoritebooks in the entire world, The
Wonderful O by James Thurber.
Just a delicious, deliciouswitty, lovely little book.
And I have a, had a profound memoryof my beloved father reading me this

(10:00):
book when I was a little girl becausehe read books to me and he was a
great storyteller and he would havebeen the one read this book to me.
And so I got down the book one day to readit again and I see that it was published.
One year after my father died.

(10:23):
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 aboutmemory, heh, heh, heh, heh.

(10:44):
We have two choices.
We can become humble about thefallibilities 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 ourviews of ourselves and our

(11:06):
beliefs in consonance in harmony.
One of the most charming lines ofresearch in this respect is that
our memories of our parents conformto what we think of our parents now
and not to what they actually did
earlier on.
So if you're in a good relationship withyour parents you remember your adolescent

(11:30):
experiences with them as being funand terrific and they were supportive
and they loved you and da, da, da.
But if you're conflicted about yourparents now, your memories of how
they were when you were a teenager ora 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 researchershave interviewed teenagers.

(11:50):
What's your relationship withyour mom and dad like now?
Describe your latest fight with them anddescribe how you felt about that fight.
And now we come back 10 years laterand 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?

(12:11):
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 storyof Mary Carr's memoir in which she

(12:32):
remembered her father being abusiveand distant and unhelpful and
unsupportive and, you know, a wholebunch of negative things about him.
And she left home in ahuff and dah, dah, dah.
When she went back to readher journals at the time.
What she found was that shewas the angry, conflicted one.

(12:56):
She was the one who wanted to leave home.
She was the one who used his behavioras an excuse to get out of there.
And he was in fact as lovinga dad as he could have been.
So we rewrite our historiesto conform to our beliefs now.
And this really ought to be the door to,A warmer and more human understanding of

(13:22):
our own faults and our parents' faults.
Than it is, than it is.
But, you know, you asked in yourquestion about the way that memory
is, is our, is our historian.
Of course we are all ourmemories and that's why.
It's so dissonant.

(13:43):
It's so painful when welearn a memory is wrong.
It goes right to the heartof who we think we are.
To the story we've createdto 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 chapterand i told my mom as well i told him
about the stories we tell ourselvesabout 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 thenyou tell that story and then

(14:26):
the story becomes the memory.
And over time you tellthe story and story.
And of course, you're alwaysthe hero of your story.
You couldn't be bad in any way.
You couldn't have been the onethat was causing that problem.
You couldn't have been the one thatdidn't do a great job and got let go
inside a company, et cetera, et cetera.
But there's so many literallyincredible confabulations in chapter

(14:48):
three, including alien abductions.
But the most remarkablewas that of Benjamin.
I'm going to try
and pronounce his name right.
Will Kaminsky
aka Bruno Grosjean.
And maybe you'd share, maybethe alien abductions which
people will find incredible, butalso this gentleman, Benjamin.

Well, the story of Bernard Han, that's an extreme example, of
someone creating an entire identity andcoming to believe it and remember it.
You know that everythingabout his confabulation.
I mean, that is truly at the abnormal endof how memory works, but, but many people

(15:34):
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 aboutVietnam, and America's role in Vietnam,
slowly began inserting himself.
And to his stories aboutserving in Vietnam.
He was never in Vietnam.
He was never a hero.

(15:54):
He was never But every time he toldthe story about his own experience in
Vietnam, which might have started ashis telling the story of his best friend
Bob's experience in Vietnam, who can say?
But he eventually began to confabulatehis 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 classabout having been in Vietnam?

(16:16):
He's not lying.
He has created a memory ofhimself being in Vietnam.
And to some extent we, wecan do that all the time.
I have a cousin my age who rememberswhen she was 10 years old being
at the, we had a family gatheringat my house in Los Angeles.

(16:37):
She lived in Chicago and she absolutelyremembers an event that my father staged,
a sort of funny thing he was going to do.
pick a quarrel with my mother and starthammering on the wall in anger and rage.
And he told all the children that hewas going to do this because he was then
going to announce that they were going tobegin to remodel the house the next day,

(16:58):
something my mom had wanted for so long.
It was a planned joke.
My cousin tells me that she neverliked 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 wentafter your mother with a hammer.
Number one, she wasn't there at all.

(17:19):
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 thedetails are vivid and plausible to you.
You've seen what an angry man mightlook like with a hammer banging a wall.
, I might not be able to,persuade you you've actually

(17:41):
been on a spaceship to Mars.
That would be a harder thingto port into your mind.
But she'd heard the story over andover and over, except that she never
heard the part about how it was a joke.
Now that, that on a smaller scaleis what Benjamin Wilkimorski
did for his whole persona.
Being a Holocaust survivor andsuffering as he did was a far more

(18:05):
sympathetic story that got him theattention and support that he so craved.
And so that story was self reinforcing andit eventually became part of his narrative
and his beliefs and his therapists too,who was supporting him in these delusions.
They're really delusions.

(18:27):
So an idea can start as a small, smallbit of ice and become a giant avalanche.
If you don't.
Stop it mid course, I guess.
So memory is our selfjustifying 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 goodintentions, bad science and the
closed loop of clinical judgment.
And you start off this by a heroof the show, Richard Feynman.
He said that it doesn't matter howbeautiful the guess is, or how smart the

(19:08):
guesser is, or how famous the guesser is.
If the experiment disagrees withthe guess, then the guess is wrong.
That's all there is to it.
I'll set you up with that and I'd loveyou to tell us about your metaphor.

Well, Richard Feynman was the consummate scientist.
He understood that if the experimentdoesn'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 myfavorite sentences in the book is

(19:42):
science is a form of arrogance control.
Because it's one of the few methodswe have of forcing us to hold our
belief up to the light, up to theevidence, to see if it's right or wrong.
Because it's not natural to thehuman mind to want to be wrong.
Cognitive dissonance theoryrests on several principles.

(20:05):
normal human biases in how the mind works.
The first one is the confirmation bias.
This is the most important thingfor everyone to understand in terms
of the frailty of our thinking.
The mind looks for, seeks, and remembersevidence that confirms what we believe

(20:28):
And it minimizes, forgets, trivializes,overlooks, and ignores any information
that disconfirms what we believe.
Science is our way of testing a beliefto see if it disconfirms our beliefs.
That is why science is so unpopular.

(20:49):
We don't like it when our ownhypothesis turns out to be wrong.
Nope.
That view, the other biases thatwe 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.

(21:11):
Therefore, what I believe is not biased.
Therefore, if you don't disagreewith me on my theory of whatever it
is, you're the one with the bias.
So just sit right down whileI 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 thatwe want to preserve our belief in
ourself as smart, competent, and good.

(21:34):
So we have these inherent biases andthey underlie the mechanism of cognitive
dissonance, because dissonance is a wayof making sure we confirm our beliefs
and that we're right about our beliefs.
What the confirmation bias sees toit is that we see confirming evidence
of belief and we don't look forany evidence that disconfirms it.

(21:57):
So when dolphins do something wonderfulrescuing sailors at sea, you know, or
a swimmer who's about to be hit by ashark or something, okay, we say, aren't
they wonderful benevolent dolphins?
They're so cute and I lovethem and they're so smart.
Okay.
We are not looking for ornoticing mean dolphins.
Is there a school of mean dolphinssomewhere who let the damn sailor die?

(22:18):
You know, no, we don't knowbecause we haven't seen them.
We haven't reported them.
We don't see them.
And that's the kind of thingthat we do all the time.
You know, let's say inthe case of vaccinations.
There's always somebody whosays, Oh, wait, though, you know,
there was a terrible side effectof this vaccine that I had.
And therefore , all vaccines are deadly.
Every drug we take from an aspirinto an anything is going to have

(22:42):
a side effect for somebody.
The question we need to ask is whatare its benefits for the vast majority?
And so if you single out one anecdoteand you're not looking at the larger
picture, you get a distorted picture.
That's why scientists like tosay anecdotes are not evidence.
They're not.

(23:02):
The one metaphor that I find hasbeen most useful, people tell us
when they've read the book, is whatwe call them the pyramid of choice.
And I think this really helpspeople understand some things
that seem so baffling to them.
How is it that that personcould do or believe da da da

(23:24):
da da that just seems so crazy.
But it works like this.
You Imagine, well in our bookwe use the example of students
because it was from a real study.
So let's use the students.
Okay, we got two students atthe very top with the same
middling view about cheating.
It's not a good thing.

(23:45):
It's really, you really shouldn't cheat,but it's not the worst sin in the world.
If we're listing sins, cheatingis not high on the list.
Fine.
Now they're taking their final exam.
This is really important.
Their grade rests on this, and aquestion comes up at the end of the exam.
They draw a complete blank.
Every student knows this experience.

(24:06):
What to do?
Student next to them, the onewith 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

(24:27):
dissonance between their belief aboutcheating and what they just did.
And they will now need to puttheir 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 reallyneed it for my grade.
And besides, I'm without, ifI don't get a good grade, I'm

(24:49):
never getting into a profession.
The one who resisted cheating will nowthink 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 otherstudents who aren't cheating.
Over time, as they fall down the twosides of that pyramid till they're at

(25:10):
the base, at the base, their attitudesabout 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 cheatingwill have made it into a more
serious offense and people shouldbe hung up by their ankles.
Okay.
Now, what this means is youthink about it this way.

(25:34):
This is not the slippery slope whereyou're just idly falling down a path of.
sin, because it's mindful.
It's mindful with everystep 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 notjust a one time thing.

(25:58):
The next time you have a chanceto cheat, you'll cheat because
by now you've justified thefirst act of cheating, right?
And the ethical person, will become evenmore ethical because they've resisted
the first one and maybe didn't get sucha good grade and so now really has even
more need to justify that ethical choice.

(26:20):
I didn't get a good grade, butI'm a better person for it.
See?
So this is why we so often see peoplewho are at the bottom of a pyramid of
self justification, which means you thinkabout how hard would it be to go back
up that pyramid and change the firstdecision you made, or even to say, well,

(26:41):
you know, I've just, I've just spent12 years defending my My opposition to
vaccines, how am I going to change my mindjust because every medical institution
in the world tells me I should?
So That's why when we see peopledoing self defeating things or staying

(27:03):
in terribly bad dangerous violentrelationships or committing more
and more acts of Of accommodationto unethical policies at work We
think, how can they be doing that?
And the answer is they've spent a lotof time justifying their decision.

(27:24):
In our book with the Watergateexample, but we also use it
with support for Donald Trump.
Is the first decision, you know, atthe very beginning when Trump was first
running for office or in the case ofWatergate, 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'tgo with this guy or, I'm a Republican,

(27:48):
but what Richard Nixon's doing hereis 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 youknow, Nixon's done so many good things.
There was the Environmental ProtectionAct, and yeah, he's an anti Semitism

(28:11):
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 wrotein his memoir of his immersion in
Nixon's Watergate scandal, I stoppedseeing what was happening around me.

(28:32):
I was in a hall of mirrors, like AlbertSpeer wrote in his memoir about Hitler.
I was in a hall of mirrors,everything reflecting back on me.
I could not see thatthere 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 whenwe don't have people who feel they're
psychologically safe to speak truthto power to disagree to say i don't
believe this is the right strategy.
The leaders are those in power willactually go and double down and then you

(29:08):
have escalation of commitment as well.
And I'd love you to share a little bitabout that because I'm sure you've seen
this beyond the political realm in manybusinesses as well, where people kind of,
they know there's people in the companywho have been the naysayer, but there's
nobody listening to the naysayer orthey jettison the naysayers because they
don't want them there in the first place.

Exactly.
Naysayers and whistleblowers.
Everybody says, Oh, we, we loveour 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 theirmoney, some of them lose their families.
They pay a very big price for blowingthe whistle on unethical policies
or dangerous policies at work.
So what that means is, for somebody whois at the head of a company or in a

(29:53):
position of power, if you say to yourteam sitting around the table, Okay,
so does anyone disagree with me thatthinks this may be not a great idea?
Who is going to say so?
Who?
Who?
Okay.
So what, what John Kennedy did withthe Bay of Pigs fiasco is he left the
room and he said to his advisors, youguys, you discuss among yourselves

(30:17):
what you think should be done here.
And then somebody is going to tellme, 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?

(30:38):
Tell me every possible downside sothat then when we make a decision,
we can weigh what we'd like to havehappen, but what might actually happen.
Any responsible Leader of a group, whetherit's a small group or a country, really
needs to be able to do this to make itclear to staff that you really do get

(30:59):
to say your opinion without penalty.
Unfortunately, that is not avery popular thing to do, is it?
But you can see that it's crucialin terms of decision making because
you have to look for the dolphinwho's out to kill the sailor.
You know, you just, you just need to knowwhat's going to happen out there and be
open to it and not feel that criticism ofyour preference means that you are foolish

(31:24):
or wrong to have even suggested it.
I mean, George Bush did this withthe war in Iraq, as we now all know.
Actually this is how our book began.
Elliot and I were sittingaround talking about.
The war in Iraq and Elliot said to me,you know, he said, liberals in this
country think that George Bush Liedto the country about weapons of mass
destruction That Saddam Hussein hadmet weapons of mass destruction, and

(31:48):
that's why we had to invade He said Idon't think he was lying to the country.
I think he was lying to himselfI think he had made the decision
to go into Iraq for whateverreason political Daddy, who knows?
And once he made the decision hecherry picked the evidence To support
the rightness of that decision.

(32:09):
And we now know that'sexactly what happened.
And you know what else to this day, tothis day, that every year, there are a few
Republicans who write to us and say, butthere 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 fromGeorge Bush's own memoir in which he says,

(32:30):
the worst mistake of my life was believinghe had weapons of mass destruction

it's such an , important leadership skill, decision making skill.
It's a nice segue actuallyto law enforcement.
I mentioned that in the introduction.
And also you have a whole chapter thattalks about things like the Reid technique
as well, you might be asking for.
disconfirming evidence, but theway you ask has a dramatic effect
on the answers that you get.

(32:56):
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 peoplewho are wrongly convicted and the
way they're wrongly convicted.
And then the dissonance that happenswith the people who convict them.
because they can't be wrong theycan't live with that love you

(33:16):
to share a little bit about this

oh, painful.
Painful.
Yes.
So painful.
This, let's see, where,oh, where to start.
So,

(33:42):
the first process in law,in the law for detectives.
To find out who the perpwas, who's the guilty party.
And if an investigator, detective, ordetective, jumps to a conclusion too
soon, in advance of the evidence, orwithout evidence, that so and so is the

(34:06):
villain, so and so did it, and excludeany evidence or possibility or hypothesis
that someone else might have done it.
They have a suspect and theythink that person is guilty.
And now the confirmation bias will set in.
This person is guilty.

(34:26):
I know they're guilty.
I'm a detective.
I've had years of experience in this.
You know, I know it's, thisis 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 geta confession from this person because I
know I'm right and this person is guilty.
This is, of course, what happenedin the terrible case of the,

(34:50):
Central Park Five in New YorkCity accused of, you know,
raping the Central Park jogger.
Well, there's just hundreds ofthese cases where the police cannot
accept disconfirming evidence.
And they get, of course, tremendous pointsand kudos and success for finding the

(35:11):
perpetrator, the more heinous the crime.
the more glory they accruefor 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, oneof the good guys, right?
You've seen all those westerns, youknow, the good guy wears the white
hat, and the good guy gets the badguy, and I'm a good guy, and I'm

(35:32):
gonna get put this bad guy away.
And, unfortunately, that thinking processand that pressure process can really lead
to some terrible miscarriages of justice.
The Reid technique was a way ofteaching detectives how to interrogate
suspects, but it's not a way ofinterrogating suspects to find the truth.

(35:55):
It's a way of interrogatingto confirm what you believe.
One investigator told my goodcolleague, Richard Leo, who studies
the psychology of false confessions.
This interrogator said, well, Inever interrogate innocent people.
How do you know?
How do you know?

(36:17):
I never interrogate innocent people.
Well, this is, of course, preposterous.
Of course you have.
You do.
Richard Leo's research shows exactlyhow it happens that the police press
an innocent person into confessing.
This is particularly true if they'reyoung, inexperienced, do not know how

(36:38):
the police operate, and who believe.
This is so naive and touching.
Who believe that the policewill 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.

(36:58):
No, I wasn't the killer.
I was asleep in my bed.
Well but your fingerprintsare 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

(37:21):
trust and respect, is telling me myfingerprints 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 personwill try to come up with a hypothetical
story that before long becomesthe narrative and the confession.

(37:49):
It's not as hard to doas you think it would be.
People think an innocent personwould 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 correctionsto be made, on the use of these

(38:15):
methods, and in many jurisdictionsthey are, and in many jurisdictions
in the United States, districtattorneys, as they're called here,
prosecuting attorneys, are re openingcases to see where such miscarriages
of justice might have occurred.
The crucial thing to understand isthat it is almost never the person

(38:38):
who committed the bad interrogation.
It is never the prosecutorwho 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 theend of every chapter of somebody who

(39:00):
is able to see what they did wrong.
And as for me, that is the mostpowerful 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 parentskilled babies and buried them under the
living room floor in a satanic cult?

(39:21):
How could I have believed my clientsaying such a preposterous thing?

that there are people out there and we need more of that but again
back to your point about whistleblowersand truth speakers it's very very
difficult, you mentioned there but i'mgonna mix a couple of things together
now one was the earlier on we set amemory but then also if you interrogate
a child, You can easily implant thoughtsinto a child very, very easily.

(39:52):
And you mentioned that how in the 1980sand 90s, the newly emerging evidence of
the sexual abuse of children and women setoff two unintended hysterical epidemics.
One was phenomenon of recoveredmemory therapy, and the other was
a panic about the sexual abuseof children in a daycare centers.

(40:13):
And again, this just showsyou how far or up the pyramid
you can go with all of this.

it can.
Well,
Elliot and I were both in Los Angeleswhen the McMartin daycare scandal emerged.
This was a mother and her two grownchildren 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

(40:43):
severely mentally ill made accusationsagainst the son in this daycare center
and pretty soon everybody just went crazy.
At the time, the kind of evidence thatwas used in interviewing children,
who were three and four years old, youknow, three and four, five years old.

(41:06):
The kind of evidence they used, well,first of all, they believed that a child
wouldn't say the truth unless you reallypressed them because the child would be so
embarrassed to admit anything about sexualtouching that you had to interrogate
them over and over and over again.
Well, Sure, maybe not sure,because what we later learned,

(41:29):
thanks, by the way, to the work ofpsychological scientists who studied.
Children's who studied the question ofhow best to interview young children so
that you get what happened rather than aconfirmation of what you think happened.
One of the things they learned is thatif you ask a child the same question
over and over, did he touch you here?

(41:50):
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'swhat the adult wants to hear is yes.
Well, he did.
Where else did he touch you?
The child is gonna make up all kinds ofthings and No one stopped to think that

(42:11):
the idea that daycare teachers wouldbe 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 workerhave 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 nutsthemselves, but nobody, what people

(42:36):
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 thatuntil thankfully, The psychological
scientist studying child developmentlearned how you speak to a child.
You don't get hysterical.

(42:58):
One good example of this, a friendtold me, she, she was, what a lucky
example, parents divorce, father hadcustody of the child, little girl,
weekends, the little girl comes hometo her mom on the Sunday night and
her mother says, what did you do?
And she said, Oh, I had a good time.

(43:18):
She said, and and daddy puthis 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.

(43:39):
Yeah.
And fortunately, fortunately, thispolice 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 happenedand the child basically said, well.
Daddy gave me a bath, and I hada nice bath, and Daddy wrapped me

(44:02):
in a towel, and then I made a peepee, 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.

(44:28):
And keep in mind that socialworkers 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 puttinginnocent people in prison for

(44:49):
years and years and years.
Last year I had the mostemotionally touching experience.
A man named Joseph Allen, a blackman in Ohio, and a white woman, Nancy
Smith, were both accused, very likethe McMartin story, by a crazy mother,

(45:15):
that the white woman had taken a busfull 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.

(45:36):
They retried and put him back in prison.
And I had belonged to anorganization that was working to
defend the falsely accused daycare
people who've been imprisoned,you know, for years.
And finally going throughthe courts in Ohio,

(45:59):
Joseph Allen was to begranted a new trial.
And what happened at this courtroomhearing was the judge who was only
supposed to determine whether Joseph Allenwould get a new trial, that he couldn't
determine guilt or innocence, but heall but said, This man is so abundantly
innocent, which I can't do, but what Ican do is say he deserves a new trial.

(46:25):
And the prosecutor, the prosecutorturned to Joseph Allen and to
those of us watching on Zoom andto everyone in the courtroom and
said, I will not retry this case.
You have my apologies forthe false conviction that
caused you so much suffering.

(46:46):
And we all said, you know, we'regoing to be there at the prison gates
when they released Joseph Allen.
We weren't at the prison gates, but ourgroup and Joseph and his lawyers all
met in Boston to celebrate his release.
The state of Ohio has yet topay him any compensation for the

(47:07):
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 thousandsof people that this has happened to.
And then the ones we don't knowwho this has happened to as well.
The ones that are still, youknow, experiencing this and the
dissonance that goes with that.
And the difficulty I have to sayas well, it must be so difficult

(47:35):
to be a police officer knowingthat this can happen as well.
But I wanted to just bring it rightback to the start of the pyramid.
Because how does this begin and you say wemake an early, apparently inconsequential
decision and then we justify it toreduce the ambiguity of the choice.

(47:55):
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 feelfree to bring this wherever you want,
Carol, are the, the judge who takes thatgolf trip to St Andrews in Scotland,

(48:20):
along with somebody who he shouldn'tbe doing that with, or even the
cases of physicians who take a littlemaybe stress ball with the name of a
pharma company printed on that ball.
and how this has a dramatic effecton how decision making is made.

Oh, you really did read this book closely.
Thank you.
Thank you.
It's so rare to talk to somebodywho'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 acalm, rational way, based on

(48:58):
the best available evidence.
You can't influence me.
You can't buy me.
So, so what if I havelunch with a lobbyist?
And so what if I take a trinketfrom a pharmaceutical company?
And so, so what if I take thislittle 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 AntoninScalia, Went duck hunting in Texas with

(49:24):
a friend who was, had a case that wasgoing to be before the Supreme Court.
So people said, well, you shouldrecuse 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 couldquestion my impartiality.
Well, we can!

(49:45):
We do!
You can't be!
But his view, and particularly as aSupreme Court Justice, he is above bias.
Look at Clarence Thomas, taking millionsand millions of dollars and vacations and
holidays from supporters who questionedI mean, who, who accepted Donald Trump's

(50:08):
claim that the election was stolen.
and he would not recuse himselfon 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 hypocritein action except the hypocrite, because
the hypocrite is busy self justifying.

(50:32):
In the case of, of physicians, thepharmaceutical industry has long known.
How you woo a physician to using yourdrug, which has changed two molecules
over an older, more establisheddrug and costs 15 times as much.
How do you do that?
There's no medical reason.
Okay.

(50:52):
Well, all right.
Here's what we'll do.
I'm going to, I'm goingto give him dinner.
I'm going to give him a notepad withour, the name of our company on it.
My very good colleague, and very dearfriend, Auburn Blooming, an oncologist.
And I have co authored a bookon the importance of estrogen

(51:13):
for women in menopause.
And Avram is always careful tosay, 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 tolearn about the effectiveness
of a medication by a drug rep.

(51:34):
That's not how you lookat the medical literature.
So, but that's what it takes.
That's what it takes is not to jump offthe 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 almostdecide 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 tolet us off the hook.
So us, you.
This is not me and Caroltalking about those people.
This is us.

(52:06):
And you say the metaphor of the pyramidapplies to most important decisions.
involving moral choices of life options.
Instead of cheating on an exam, forexample, Now substitute, deciding to
begin a casual affair or not, sample anillegal drug or not, take steroids to
improve your athletic ability or not,stay in a troubled marriage or not, lie to

(52:31):
protect your employer and job or not, havechildren or not, pursue a demanding career
or stay at home with the kids or not.
It applies to absolutely everythingand I'd love you to share maybe
some of your favourite examplesthat 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, bythe way, a completely fair question.
think Elliot is the only person I knowwho's actually never made a mistake.

Although he says no, he did once in 1981.
Something.
shared the story of thecanoe remember the canoe

Oh, the canoe, of course, how he resolved dissonance with the canoe.
No, see, by being as aware ofhow dissonance works as he is, he
really, he's so skilled at helpingpeople understand and identify,
identify the dissonant words.
ideas or the dissonant circumstancesthat is uncomfortable because before you

(53:38):
can do anything, you have to understandwhat'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 werewriting about the McMartin child
abuse case in Los Angeles, We wereboth in California at the time.
I was in Los Angeles at the time.

(53:59):
I knew the prosecuting attorney.
I knew everybody on thethey are guilty side.
And I wrote an op ed for theLos Angeles Times that they
headlined, Do Children Lie?
Not About This.
That was before we realizedthat, of course children lie.
They lie as soon as they can speak.

(54:19):
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'tlie if you've never known a child,
been a child, or seen a child.
I mean, really.
So, so Eliot said, We sacrificed ourskepticism on the altar of outrage.

(54:39):
We sacrificed our skepticismon the altar of outrage.
Outrage feels good.
It feels invigorating.
It feels righteous.
And it keeps us from seeingwhen it's outrageous and wrong.
So I, I would say this about understandingdissonance and how to live with it.

(55:03):
Because there's two choices.
One, you resolve it too fast.
You justify the thingthat you did and done.
The other is that you wallow inregrets and self blame and guilt and
misery for a mistake you made thatyou can't do any reparation about.

(55:25):
That's buyer's remorse, sleepless nights,suffering, post traumatic stress syndrome.
Here's something I did that was sohorrible I can never forgive myself.
Now those are the two extremesof non useful ways, let's say,
of dealing with dissonance.
As Eliot put it, I don't want, inthe first edition of our book, we did

(55:49):
not talk about the people who can't.
reduce dissonance, or justify theiractions and who suffer as a result.
We just talked about thepeople who justify an out.
He said, I, it's because he said, Iwant people to understand that I want
them to understand that sometimessome sleepless nights are called for.
Sometimes you do need to wallowin the recognition that you did

(56:13):
something foolish, wrong or hurtful.
So as to learn from it anddecide what to do about it.
And that it's not a hotpotato to forget about.
But then neither do you want to spenda lifetime suffering and regret.
So.
We, we set, we use this examplein the book of Shimon Peres.

(56:34):
It's a fabulous example.
Shimon Peres, when he was primeminister of Israel, was really angry
when his good friend, Ronald Reagan,accepted an invitation to go to the
cemetery in Bitburg, Germany, to laya wreath, you know, the war is over.
And then Reagan learned that47 Nazi officers were buried

(56:54):
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, RonaldReagan, went to Bitburg.
And Peres said, when a friend makes amistake, the friend remains a friend,

(57:22):
and the mistake remains a mistake.
This is a brilliant understanding ofdissonance 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 whatthat person did is still that thing.

(57:46):
And now you, what, what mostpeople 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 anddecide where I want to go with this.
When I make a mistake, I remaina good, smart, kind person.

(58:08):
And I made a mistake and I didsomething wrong and not, not.
We have in the latest edition ofour book the wonderful example of
Sarah Silverman, who was Louis C.
K.
's very close, loving friend.
Louis C.
K.
made all the media headlinesbecause he had committed, he was

(58:32):
masturbating in front of young womenin the comedy business, and he,
you know, made big news and it wasscandalous and horrible and so on.
And Sarah Silverman has a YouTubethat's another, it's like Shimon Peres.
I hate what he did.
I've been working to get women tospeak up about, sexual harassment.

(58:55):
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 understandand make sense of and think about.

(59:21):
It gives us the space to decide,should I end this friendship?
How do I want to thinkabout 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 mycopy 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 wholechapter on dissonance and the demagogue.
Guess who that would be?
But what we do in that chapter, as Eileensays, every edition of our book has a new
American president to do something with.

(01:00:01):
But it is indeed, it's not just about,well, it's about the Republican.
dissonance, over supporting thecandidate 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 chapterabout conservatives versus conservatives

(01:00:23):
and how we make those decisions.
And we could easily have had achapter on liberals versus liberals
because the dismissal of scientificfindings 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 ofscience because they disconfirm

(01:00:44):
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 itand the left wing does it.

Aidan McCullen (01:00:54):
a useful example actually would be, you talked about Lee Ross's
naive realism and he said that if yourown 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 itactually comes from the other side, right?
And
you said closer to home, socialpsychologist Jeffrey Cohen found that

(01:01:17):
Democrats will endorse an extremelyrestrictive welfare proposal, one usually
associated with Republicans, if theythink it has been proposed by themselves.
So maybe you'll elaborate on that becauseI thought about how that's exactly what
we try to do when we're trying to, youknow, instill transformation or change.

(01:01:37):
You, you have to tryand make it their idea.
If you try and make it theiridea, your idea stands a chance.

Carol Tavris (01:01:44):
That's, well, that's right.
Yes, what Lee Ross did, it wassuch a, such a brilliant idea.
We take a peace proposal and we give itto 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 camefrom them, it's terrible.
And we, well, don't we see thatall too tragically, of course.

(01:02:08):
So, yes, in an adversarialsituation, that's so.
And by the way, that's truein marriages, isn't it?
Because what is the first thingtherapists always say to couples?
You have to be able to state whatyour partner's angry about, or
what your partner's angry about.
problem is you have to be able to statethat in a way that they agree with why

(01:02:30):
you have stated it, meaning you've heardthem, you get it, you know what it is
they're mad about, and you're not hearingit through your own fuzz of retaliation.
It's not easy, it's not easy, but atleast it's a start in trying to understand
what is the other person's position.
So yes, and of course, the more

(01:02:56):
adversarial situationis, certainly in war.
It's why third parties have tointervene to come up with some
solution that both can live with.
And, by the way, the two sides have tostop saying, You are wrong because you.

(01:03:17):
You have to start saying, Iwas wrong about this because I.
Okay.
if you want the other person tolisten to you, that's quite crucial.
I was giving a talk about thisnot a while ago and a guy in the
audience, this is by the way, oneof the main reasons to write a book.
You hear from people, they writeyou their stories, you know, they've

(01:03:38):
always got something more to say.
Sometimes they yell at you, you know, butso this guy told a very interesting story.
He said, , I'm one of foursiblings and we have been fighting
about our parents' estate forfive years, something like that.
Years, you know, and we're angry ateach other and we're not speaking,

(01:04:01):
and we're really angry and they'rehaving 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 cameout, I gave the book to our mediator
and I said, give this book to them.
Finish the sentence so theycan see why they're wrong.
Okay.
Right.
He said, incredibly, ithad no effect at all.

(01:04:24):
Right.
Hey guys, read this book.
It looks like he said, thenI reread the book this year.
He said, and an amazing thing happened.
The words moved around on thepage and I wrote, to my, to
the mediator and my siblings.
And I said, this is where I was wrong.

(01:04:46):
This is the mistake I made inthinking about this whole situation.
He said, we resolved itin a week, in a week.
They just wanted to hear that,
We will go to great lengthsto maintain our being right.
When sometimes just saying we werewrong gets results, you know, it's like

(01:05:06):
removing a boulder from your shoulders.
Just, you know, I mean, if you say toyour sweetheart, Honey, you know that
fight we've been having for the last26 years about our memory of the thing?
You know what?
You were completely rightand I was completely wrong.
Is your partner goingto 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, Idon't know which of you wrote this one,
but it was like, you, you say to yourwife, Oh, you're just like your mother.
And in brackets, it says, and you'renot talking about the apple pie that she
makes really well or something like that.
That was a great line becauseif there's one way to.

(01:05:50):
Wind up your other halfby saying their parents,
but I thought we'd sharemaybe 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 wholehuge piece on that.
But what I thought was really interestingabout that was that why, right?

(01:06:13):
So one of the questions youasked, why would you do this?
And why would I prefer the fake memoryof some, maybe I was abused over
actually, no, I just have turned outthis way because of my own actions.
And it's one of the things you sayis that because I need to know that

(01:06:34):
I've made some type of transformation,I'm better now than I was back then.
And even you talk about this is thesame, but why the heck would somebody
make up a story of an alien abduction?
I don't know.
You said here that the abductionstory helps experiencers.
their psychological distress and alsoavoid responsibility for their mistakes,
their regrets and their problems.

Exactly right.
Yes.
, we all want a story.
We all want to know whyare 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 Fromits original notion that a trauma is

(01:07:20):
a traumatic experience, such as beingin war, or being in the holocaust,
or surviving a disaster, those usedto be the defining notions of trauma.
Now, a trauma is anything you saymade you feel really traumatized.
It's a tautology.
And so it opened the door inpsychiatric thinking, to trauma is

(01:07:44):
what you make of an experience ratherthan 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 sayingyou are a survivor, in our culture now.
Survivors get attention and sympathy.

(01:08:08):
support, sometimes moneyand services and so forth.
And sometimes survivorsreally do need those things.
Let me not imply that everybodyshould just brush off traumatic
experiences and move on.
Of course not.
Of course not.
But nonetheless, creating a narrativein which you recovered from something
terrible puts you in a world andin an identity that gets a lot

(01:08:34):
of sympathy, which, which manypeople find lacking in their lives.
The alien abduction one is a goodexample of this in the sense that,
it's a perfectly natural experiencefor many people to, when they first

(01:08:55):
awaken, Well, what people who believein alien abduction say is, you know,
I woke up and there was an aliensitting 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 wasan alien, and it looked exactly like the

(01:09:18):
cover of Whitley Strieber's book fromso many years ago, The Round Face and
the Thing, which was, by the way, a madeup cover of what an alien looks like.
And after that, everybody decidedthose are the aliens they see.
It was art director's cover of his book.
Digression.
Okay.
But, what we call that now, whatwe know is that that's a hypnagogic

(01:09:41):
state, meaning it's a waking dream.
Your eyes are open, oh and theother part of this is usually I
can't move, I was immobilized inthe 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 wayit shuts down when we are sound asleep
so that you do not go wandering aroundthe house and out to your garden.

(01:10:05):
You're having a dream which is why it'sdreamlike and can be horrifying or a
creation of a creature and so forth.
But you're dreaming.
It's just that you are right atthe cusp of of waking up, and
your eyes are open, and so youfeel you're awake, but you're not.
Now try it, but For many people,especially if you go online and

(01:10:28):
then you find other people whohave had this experience and go,
Yeah, it must have been an alien.
If you had that experiencetoo, it must be a real alien.
Right?
If so many people havehad this experience.
The only explanation I can think of isthat they're really aliens on my bed.
And then if you find yourselfin a community, community of
people, reinforcing that belief,reinforcing that identity,

(01:10:53):
It becomes even more compelling and thestory we tell in the book from Susan
Clancy's work on alien abductions ishow the belief that you were seized
can come to assuage deep losses,regrets, feelings, sometimes quite a,

(01:11:13):
you know, quite a, a touching feeling.
touching way in some of thosestories that you, that you read.
The wonderful memory scientist, RichMcNally, who is at Harvard and who
wrote a superb book called RememberingTrauma, what it is and what it isn't.
It's a savage takedown of therecovered memory assumptions that if

(01:11:35):
something, that we repress traumas.
He says, no, if something isreally 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 JohnMack in Boston at one point.
Mack was a psychiatrist who came tobelieve his patients, because so many

(01:11:57):
of them were reporting alien abductions.
Where is that psychiatrist'sclinical critical faculties?
Anyway and Mack brought withhim his, many of the people who
believed they had been abducted.
They're sitting in that audience.
And McNally explains how itworks, what the mechanism is,

(01:12:17):
how this is perfectly normal.
No, it wasn't really an alien, youknow, waking dreams, hypnagogic state.
And a woman came up to himafterwards and said, you think we
want to believe we were abducted?
That's completely nonsense.
If somebody would only give us anexplanation, we would accept it.
He said, we just did.

(01:12:39):
There you have it.

I quoted that as well.
I had that in my notes.
I thought that was abrilliant, brilliant line.
I, Carol, I absolutely loved it.
I've taken loads of your time and I'mso glad we do this and learn so, so much
from this book and looking forward to.
Further books there for thosewatching as I have anger there, the
misunderstood emotion, one of Carol'sbooks and a textbook as well by Carol

(01:13:04):
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 findout that I'll link to that as well.
Carol, I'll link to the newedition of your book and the Sarah
Silverman, interview as well.
And there's,
Also the, the Oprah, youknow, mistakes were made.
Oprah admitted whenthose were made as well.

(01:13:26):
And I'll let people be intriguedand find that and read the book
to find out more about those.
Carol, for people who want to findYou where's the best place to find it?

know what, the Social Psychology Network, SPN.
Go there and you can send me anemail and they'll get it right to me.

Brilliant.
Well, I
have a quote that I pulled and it's byThomas Carolyle that you have in the book.
And I'm going to quote that.
And then I'm going to let youclose the show, maybe your call to
action for why you wrote thisand what you want people to.
to do with this information thatyou're bringing out into the world.
This quote goes beautifully.
The greatest of faults, I shouldsay, 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 writingthis book is that here's an interesting
little theory, cognitive dissonancetheory, that turns out to have us.
great relevance and power in helpingus understand our own behavior, the

(01:14:35):
behavior of our friends and lovedones, 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 understandthem, correct them, lead better
lives, perhaps acquire some humility.

(01:14:57):
realize that admitting our mistakesis 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.

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Carol Tavris - Mistakes Were Made But Not By Me

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