Rationally Speaking #23 - Carol Tavris on Everybody Making Mistakes, Except Us
Episode metadata
- Episode title:: Rationally Speaking 23 - Carol Tavris on Everybody Making Mistakes, Except Us
- Show:: Rationally Speaking Podcast
- Owner / Host:: New York City Skeptics
- Episode link:: open in Snipd
- Episode publish date:: 2010-12-05
Show notes
> 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."
- Show notes link:: open website
- Tags:podcastssnipd
- Export date:: 2024-03-23T07:24
Episode AI notes
- Life stories are not fully known to others, as everyone has private aspects that are never revealed.
- It is important to find a balance in understanding where mistakes were made, facing errors without being overly critical.
- Reducing dissonance over past decisions and choices is crucial to moving forward.
Snips
[37:32] Learning and Recuperating from Dissonance
🎧 Play snip - 1min️ (36:27 - 37:25)
✨ Summary
To tell our life story effectively, we must strike a balance between understanding our mistakes without self-blame. This involves reducing dissonance over paths not taken, decisions seen as bad in hindsight, and choices regretted. It’s about acknowledging our missteps, reflecting on them constructively, and refraining from endlessly criticizing ourselves.
📚 Transcript
Click to expand
Speaker 1
How do we tell a life story that finds a balance between being able to understand where we might have gone wrong, what we might have done wrong, to face those that's the counter life idea, To assess the mistakes that we made and not beat ourselves up about them endlessly as some people will do, but to, in a way, there's two parts here. One is that we need to be able to reduce dissonance over paths we didn't take, that we now think we should have, decisions we made that we now think were bad ones, choices we made that we Wish we had not.