Hey everyone, welcome to the drive podcast. I'm your host Peter Atia this podcast my website and My Weekly Newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and wellness. And we've assembled a great team of analysts to make this happen if you enjoyed
This podcast we created a membership program that brings you far more in-depth content. If you want to take your knowledge of the space to the next level at the end of this episode. I'll explain what those benefits are or if you want to learn more now head over to Peter Atia m.com forward slash subscribe. Now without further delay. Here's today's episode my guest this week are Carol tabris and Elliot Aronson girl's name may sound familiar to some of you because she was actually a guest on the podcast back in early.
As in 17 along with avram blooming when she in a room were on to talk about hormone replacement therapy in this podcast with Elliot. We talk about something very different which is a book that they co-authored in 2007 mistakes were made but not by me why we justify foolish beliefs bad decisions and hurtful acts. If you've listened to this podcast much. You've probably heard me talk about this book at least once it's certainly one of my favorite books and one of the books I recommend
amend most to other people.
It's important to understand the background of Carolyn Elliott to understand how they came together to do this. So Carol received her PHD in social psychology from the University of Michigan. She's a fellow of the association for psychological Sciences. She's received numerous awards for her efforts to promote gender equality science and skepticism. And that's something that Carol and I bonded over early Elliot received his PhD from Stanford in the late 1950s, and it was during his time at Stanford in the 1950s that he
Trained with the great Leon festinger's the father of the theory of cognitive dissonance. He went on to teach at Harvard University the University of Minnesota University of Texas and UC Santa Cruz and eventually back at Stanford Elliot is the only psychologist to have won the American Psychological associations highest Awards in all three major academic categories for distinguished service and writing in 1973 distinguished teaching in
80 and distinguished research in 1999 and in 2002, he was listed among the 100 most eminent psychologists of the 20th century in this episode. We talked about how Carol and Elliott began to work together on this project what prompted them to ultimately write the book and we talk a little bit about how cognitive dissonance shows up in many aspects of Our Lives not just in science, but also in politics in criminal justice how it is shown up historically.
And perhaps most importantly how we can train ourselves to not be victims of some of the worst aspects of cognitive dissonance and dissonant behavior. And instead how we can use our understanding of why our minds naturally try to reduce the pain of cognitive dissonance to actually hack it a little bit and try to instead be as intellectually honest as possible by the end of this episode. You'll understand that there's really no one who is immune from this
You're a doctor a lawyer a da a mental health worker scientist. We all suffer from the pain of cognitive dissonance. And that really the question is what do we do with that discomfort or were able to sit in it or do we succumb to it? I found this to be a fascinating discussion and I hope you do as well. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Carol to avarice and Elliot Aaron's Carol and
it thank you so much for making the time to do this and the backstory to this is pretty funny. So if you'll both bear with me along with the listeners, I want to explain it. I read mistakes were made but not by me for the first of many times Circa 2012, maybe 2013. It was love at first sight. And the first thing I did was Google you guys and somehow I came across Carol's phone number.
It was an email but I think it was actually a phone number and I called and and and I actually got ahold of Carol and I don't know if you thought I was a psycho Carol you probably did but you were too kind but I somehow could jold you into coming down to San Diego for dinner, which you did and we had this amazing evening of talking about cognitive dissonance. And that was the beginning of a beautiful friendship and then two years ago when I started this podcast you were one of the first
People I reached out to and I said Carol. Can I please interview you and you said Peter? I'm sorry. I just can't talk about it anymore. I've said all I can say about this. Subject matter. I did I did you did you just said I just don't have it in me to talk about this anymore.
No. Yeah,
and you said but please don't hold it against me. I said I would never hold it against you Carol. If you ever change your mind, let me know.
And so here we are and then the second Point that's noteworthy is Elliot. This is the first time you and I have got to meet. So Carol has always said to me you're you're the brains behind the science behind sort of the foundation upon which this field that we're going to dig into very deeply as sort of informed the work you to have collaborated on and so I think I want to kind of start a little bit with with with your relationship your collaborative relationship, which has been how many years have you guys been collaborating over?
Boy, do we go back to Psychology today?
When I think the baby
is a baby and you were a toddler what
it's been close to 50 years, right? Is that right? 72 or something like that? I think we met at an American Psychological Association Convention. Carol was working as an editor of a magazine called Psychology today, which you
Be a good magazine when she was on it and I had just won some prize for writing a book the senior editor the ask Carol to interview me in the hopes that I could do an article for psychology today based on the book. I wrote which was called The Social Animal
one of the great social psychology textbooks ever written and deservedly famous and you had gotten the APA.
Yes, I think distinguished writing award. So I was dispatched to try to get you to write an article for the magazine and we both shared a love of not just a love of social psychology but a love of communicating social psychology to the public in what can only be called English supposed to jargon
and we even made a movie together a documentary film and we've been friends ever since and this particular project.
Act came about partly because I was losing my eyesight and Carol became my eyes my ears and my brain and we collaborated on this very it was really great fun. Great fun to write this book.
It was an interesting Harmony, I think for the two of us as well because Elliot as I'm sure we will discuss
Took Leon festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance and made it into a focus on self-justification and we were sitting around talking about the Iraq War and how it came to be and why even though there were no weapons of mass destruction George Bush was holding on to his determination to believe there was absolutely the right thing to do and Elliott said, you know, I think that George Bush was not lying.
The American people. I think he was doing what all of us do which is make a decision and then justify it by cherry picking the evidence to show that we were right in making that decision and from that conversation. We thought you know, this is really an important message for people to hear how in so many domains of Our Lives the way we think can really get us stuck and hard to get out of out of the mistakes we've made
one little correction Carol you said cherry-picking which is true, but that implies consciously cherry picking and the point that I was trying to make is that
The cognitive dissonance reduction is an unconscious process people. Don't say hey, I think I'm going to reduce a little distance right now. They just do it and there and it flies just below the level of awareness so that when George Bush was convinced there were weapons of mass destruction. He convinced himself of that even though
The evidence was ambiguous. There was some evidence that indicated that Saddam Hussein did have weapons of mass destruction and some evidence indicated that he didn't and he simply was hell-bent on invading Iraq so that he downplayed the importance of the evidence that would have cautioned him not to invade and I think that is something we all do if we're not careful.
And there are certainly some fields in which I think the implications of I have done something incorrectly and new information emerges that suggests. I've done it in correctly becomes very hard to swallow probably nowhere near as difficult to swallow as if you're the commander-in-chief and you've been single-handedly responsible for What followed what I guess would have been March 19 2002, I guess or three would have been that Invasion but
But I think what gripped me and what got to me so much. Even from the first reading of your book was as a as a doctor you think about how many times in medicine we do things and then new evidence emerges that maybe that wasn't the right thing to do and sometimes it's not immediately obvious, right? But it's subtle. It's like well we used to nutritionally tell people that this thing was the right thing to eat but more and more evidence seems to suggest it's not
But you've been telling everybody that thing so what is the implication but before we get into these examples, maybe let's give people some real explanations of dissonance. So I think you guys either it was in your book or I've seen this elsewhere but there's a great example of the dissonance. It's like a person who knows that smoking is bad for them, but still smokes. How does that person get through the day? What is that? What how do you describe that tension that must?
Exist in that
person. That's our most famous example Elliot take it away.
I have to say that Leon festinger is example and I was a student. I was very lucky. I was a student of Leon festinger just as he was inventing the theory of cognitive dissonance. I was his graduate student and his majordomo and became his Protege and friend so
I kind of inherited cognitive dissonance theory and the example he uses.
Is a person as smokes two packs of cigarettes a day and then the evidence starts becoming clearer and clearer that smoking can cause cancer and other diseases. And what does he do with that? Well those two cognitions I am a smart sensible person.
And I'm smoking cigarettes, even though I know it causes cancer. Well, the simplest sounding thing to do is to give up smoking. It's a lot harder to do than people might think because it is addictive if a person tries to give up smoking and can't then how does he reduce that dissonance and dissonance is
A- Drive state it feels terribly unpleasant like being extremely hungry or extremely thirsty, but it takes place in the mind. So it makes you very uncomfortable. And if you can't reduce the Distance by giving up smoking, then you work on the other cognition that smoking causes cancer and you might try to convince yourself that it's really mostly correlational evidence and therefore not
Really definitive no one has done a controlled experiment with hundreds of thousands of people forcing some to smoke and forcing others not to smoke which would would be of course an unethical experiment. But in the mind of the person that experiment would need to be done before I be convinced or you could convince yourself that obesity is a health risk and by smoking two packs a day.
So I'm keeping myself from eating all of those Rich desserts which would have made me or beasts and I probably would die of a heart attack or its Debonair to fly in the face of danger and smoke a cigarette like Humphrey Bogart in the movies as I'm a really exciting person. I would rather live a shorter but more interesting life than one way.
I was forever being cautious all of these things each one of them and all of them together can be used together as a way of allowing me to smoke and still feel good about myself.
Lets us sleep at night to use your point Peter as well. The ability to reduce dissonance is what allows us to say. I'm doing something stupid but look here are all the reasons that I justify it. There was a study not long ago of
Don't women smoking and pregnant women have a double knowledge of smoking being bad not only for their own health, but for the baby's health and what did these women say in explaining why they were going to keep smoking. Well, I've cut down now the amount of cigarettes. I smoke every day isn't really as hazardous as would have been before I cut down though. This is indeed how we sleep at night and as Elliott has often said that's the benefit of our ability to reduce.
And it's but you know what Sometimes some sleepless nights are called for
especially if you're the president of the United States making life and death decisions for millions of people. Well, that's what's interesting. Right is you've discussed this as a an incredibly negatively valence to motion, right? I mean, I love the way you compared it to the incredible discomfort of starvation or thirst, but but it's
Call discomfort of that variety because I know so little about psychology. It's amazing to me to understand the timeline of these things. Now you show up at Stanford in 1955 as a grad student 55 is about when Leon got there. It's only two years later that this theory is put forth in the grand scheme of things. That seems relatively recent in my mind. I'm not saying that the discredit that but or the field but what you're describing sounds so fundamental to the way we
Humans live that it's it strikes me as such a major breakthrough. Like why didn't this happen a hundred years sooner was there some other critical piece of insight that was necessary that preceded this amazing observation that took place barely 70 years ago. I think psychologist for a long time had the notion of rationalization that people often rationalize their own behavior, which is
is a kind of a pale version of cognitive dissonance theory and we all knew about that and that was that okay people rationalize but the genius of Leon festinger first of all the way he really invented the theory was because he was studying rumor transmission and in India, there was a major earthquake.
A lot of people got killed and what he learned was rumors spread at the epicenter of the earthquake that and Leon was studying rumors. So he saw that these rumors were very reasonable rumors. They spread don't worry help is on the way people are coming. They're going to rescue us. They're going to bring food with starving but they're going to things are going to be okay. Those were the kinds of rumors but made sense.
And they were comforting rumors meantime. There was a city about 15 or 20 miles away where there wasn't a great deal of damage, but there was enough shaking and enough damage and enough people got mildly injured that they were really anxious and really scared and the rumors that spread in that area was that there was a typhoon coming that there was going to be a hurricane that there
Going to be huge flooding and and people were really worried about all of that. And first thing is scratched his head and said why in the world would people spread rumors that would increase their anxiety and what he arrived that as a strong possibility was that the earthquake made them feel extremely anxious, but they had very little to be anxious.
About because hardly anyone got hurt and hardly any destruction occurred. So they invented future things that were going to happen and spread rumors about them in order to justify their anxiety. And that was the beginning of cognitive dissonance theory, that's one part of it the second part of it. Was that Leon festinger was
A genius as an experimental psychologist so that he immediately thought up three or four really interesting experiments that went Way Beyond what anyone ever conceived of in terms of me rationalization showing that cognitive dissonance reduction Works in ways that are often counterintuitive. It isn't the obvious thing that your
mother fought about and would tell you about it happens in ways that are exciting and interesting when you understand the theory and seemed completely off the wall. If you don't know the theory I'd love to hear an example of one of those experiments or such. Yeah. Best example that I can think of which is one of the early experiments by Leon festinger and an undergraduate at Stanford. Who was he
Actually became my graduate student when I was became a professor a guy named Merrill carlsmith and what they showed was if you pay someone $20 for telling a lie to another person.
He knows it's a lie. And if you ask like what he had to tell the other person who was about to go into the experiment to do such a tedious task like the kind of task that you would be doing. If you worked on an assembly line packing spools turning a screw half a turn to the right for a couple of hours, which was really tedious.
But he's pretending he had just come out of the experiment doing that and his job was to tell the participant who was waiting to come in next that it was really an interesting experiment and Cosmic gave him 20 dollars to do that.
In another condition he gave him one dollar for doing that.
And what happened was that the students who were given one dollar for doing it actually came to believe that the task was more interesting than the students who were paid $20 for doing it completely upside down from what would be predicted by the dominant theory of the time the behaviorist theory of reinforcement that the more you paid for something the more you like it.
What cognitive dissonance theory predict is the less you're paid for it? The more you have to add justifications of your own. So if you pay $20 for telling a simple lie, you can say to yourself. Well, I sold my soul but twenty dollars is a pretty good price for my soul. But if you're paid only one dollar in effect, you're asking
yourself know. Why did I?
I do that for a lousy dollar. Well, you know,
it wasn't such a big lie, because you know the task on the surface. It looks like a boring path, but it's really a lot more interesting and more intricate than it really looks on the surface and they convince themselves. Not that the task was exciting but it wasn't so bad.
So here's the relevant thing about this Peter when you were saying about the origins of cognitive dissonance psychological.
When I was a graduate student was almost an oxymoron. Everybody joked about it psychology. What are you talking about is not a science. It's an oxymoron T. It's not research-based. It's not empirically based when Elliott was first doing his work the dominant paradigms in psychology were psychoanalytic or behaviorist. Those were the two big schools of that were devoted to explaining how human beings operate and how they think and what
Motivates them and both of them were past their Prime by the middle of the last century what Elliot was doing in terms of cognitive dissonance was first of all looking into the black box of the mind which behaviorist were ignoring completely. We just have to observe Behavior. It's all a matter of rewards and punishments and saying no there's something happening in there that affects our Behavior most profoundly and it was also a Time
I'm of questioning the qualitative observation the non scientific observations of the psychoanalytic approach to understanding Behavior which were Lively and popular and wrong. So comes cognitive dissonance and the cognitive Revolution and the world of psychology changed the world of psychological science changed.
Whoo.
I've got I have to come in because I got an example of the psychoanalytic thing. I came to Stanford in 1956 and I got my PhD in 59 and then I went to teach at Harvard.
When I arrived at Harvard, there was a guy named Michael Kahn doing an experiment for his PhD dissertation. He was a really good Freudian psychologist. And he wanted to do a test on one of Ford's Notions called catharsis. My father says that when you feel angry at someone you need to get it out of your system by punching a punching bag or even punching the person who made you angry.
ring in the nose assuming it's someone who's a little smaller than you are I guess so he did an experiment like that trying to demonstrate for its theory of catharsis that acting out on your aggressive feeling is going to make you feel better and less aggressive and what he found was
just the reverse when a person expressed his anger by getting his Tormentor into trouble so that his Tormentor actually lost his job as a result of it this resolved in an experiment. That was the scenario that the participant actually believed. He was costing the person whose job.
It actually increased is negative feelings about that guy and Michael Kahn was really confused and said, how can this be? It not only didn't my experiment proved the catharsis work just the opposite happened. How could that possibly be and somebody around that said? Oh we got this new guy just came as an assistant professor Aronson. I think he might have an answer and it's exactly the
The answer is cognitive dissonance. If you make me angry and I retaliate in a way that causes you an extreme thing like more than the simple act. That made me angry.
I have to justify it somehow so the fact that I cost you your job makes me feel dissonant my God, I really hurt that guy. Well, he must have really deserved it. He's a terrible person. Anyway, look at the awful thing. He did to me and that needed to be punished and he'll probably find another job anyway, but he's a jerk and he would have done the same thing to me if I did that I did to him at set
Sarah and that really explains the phenomenon of blaming the victim that if a person gets hurt and we can't account for it. We try to figure out maybe he did something that brought that on
what it allows us to do is say I am a good kind compassionate smart person. And if you're telling me I did something that wasn't good kind compassionate or smart I could accept your
Parents, or I could I could save it to hell with your evidence in a way that allows me to continue thinking of myself as a good kind smart person. That's what Elliot brought to this as the fundamental heart of the reason that we so often reduce dissonance in a way to preserve our self-concept how we see ourselves.
Obviously the seeds of this hearse own. Like I said 60 years ago, but I've seen lectures where people talk about the impact.
t' on the actual brain itself structurally and functionally, so if you look at fmri in a person who's placed in a dissonant situation how you actually see a change functionally do either of you care to comment on on how that looks
I have to preface this by saying one of my favorite studies and all the world show that if you give a lecture and you wave around some fmris and you give the exact same lecture without the fmris everybody thinks this first version was really
We just love those brain studies. We do. Well, yes, you are describing Studies by Drew Weston, which basically brought people to the laboratory and showed what was going on in their brains when they were confronted with dissonant information about someone from their own political party. If someone from your opposing political party behaves like a corrupt, idiot or jerk that's perfectly confident for you people from that party always behave that way if someone from your own party behaves exactly
Lee the same way, well, you know, it's no big deal all politicians do this and so forth. So he brings people into the laboratory wires up their brains and basically finds that in a state of dissidence these brains were not happy. They were just not happy but give them a chance to restore consonants and it settles down now I want to say about this that I think this kind of research certainly does xsplit certainly very helpful.
and understanding
what efforts are brains go through so that we can live in a state of consonants between what we believe and how we behave everyday it's to our evolutionary benefit to hold beliefs that make us feel part of our tribe our community our religion our group and so forth. And so there really is a benefit and evolutionary benefit to being able to get rid of dissonance when it occurs.
That said there are enormous psychological and cultural differences in what causes people to feel dissonance. So it's not like everybody always will feel dissonance. If for example, you're a scientist and you get information that your study didn't turn out the way you might have liked. Well you might feel a Pang but the scientific approach would be to say well I've learned something. What can we do next?
Likewise there have been very interesting studies comparing what causes dissidents in Japan or the United States in the United States. We feel a state of dissonance if we ourselves personally are ashamed or embarrassed or humiliated by something that we've done in Japan people are more likely to feel the need to reduce dissonance if they behaved in a way to harm hurt or embarrass other people in their group because they are typically a more other.
Subculture. So while we can appreciate what is universal about dissonance. Let's not make the corresponding error that we all automatically and forever behave exactly the same way.
Let's unpack that a bit. So from it natural selection standpoint, when you go back even just several hundred years. Let's call it, you know a thousand years or even go back further to the point where we were mostly functioning in tribes of relatively small numbers say
Even going back to hunter-gatherers assuming for a moment that we could find sufficient food and shelter and take care of the most fundamental of our needs what would have been instances in which we would have experienced dissonance. And therefore why would this have been a conserved feature of our Evolution to not stay up at night worrying about things that were tormenting us that we're creating this sort of dissonant or dialectical difference?
And instead allowing us to basically placate our little brains which weren't little by that point. Of course. They were basically the same size as they are today and move forward. I got I find this fascinating because it strikes me as sort of a very modern problem like something that only in the last few thousands of years. Could this have even been relevant? But of course, I'm just not thinking of the right examples perhaps its opposition that cognitive dissonance is hardwired and the
The way that happens in terms of evolution is that it has more survival value in the sense that if you are a hunter.
Back 10,000 years ago or Twenty Thirty forty thousand years ago and you experience dissonance because you've done something that Perth one of your tribesmen or in a way that you're concerned that he might take retaliation and you would lay awake all night worrying about it. And then the next morning you get up bright and early to go hunting.
And you get pounced on by a good by a tiger because you didn't sleep at night because you would just so busy worrying about this thing. You're not as Vigilant as you normally would have been then chances are your jeans are less likely to get into the gene pool. So those who are good at reducing dissonance. Those were good at saying it wasn't such a bad thing. I did he'll forgive me. I'm sure and then you sleep soundly you got
And you do your hunting and everything is fine. I think that that that cognitive dissonance reduction the ability to reduce this moment is hardwired precisely because it has survival value in that thing
exactly and as human beings evolved and created new technologies as agriculture emerged as economies grew and flourished people had more beliefs to defend as being the right ones.
If you're living in a little band where you have your creation myth of how your people came to be and you never meet anybody from another band with a different point of view the day that you do the day that the next tribe arrives and says no. No your God isn't the right God. Our God is the right God. Well now what are you going to do with that information? What are you going to do with information that your way of planting crops has the wrong way in our way is a better way.
so to the extent this this to me is one of the
Most interesting things about dissonance it's to the extent that a belief is really deeply important to us. That's when we become most tenacious in holding on to it. It's why for example, it's not just dumb people who feel the need to reduce dissonance. The greatest danger comes from smart people who refuse to accept the evidence that they have done something foolish or stupid or that they were holding on.
A belief or a medical practice long passage shelf life and now you're saying I a smart competent professional person who knows more about the subject than anyone in the world and you're telling me I'm wrong the hell with you.
See well, that's the scary part, right? That's that to me is the part that is look just on a personal level. That's what gripped me with reading about. This was wait a minute how many times am I doing this because by definition the person doing it is generally blind to it.
In this is effectively a form of confirmation bias. That's the cherry picking that you were alluding to that Elliott you pointed out is it's a subconscious type of cherry picking and confirmation bias. We can talk about it all day long and any science student worth their salt can Define it up and down but it's how often are we doing it and the more and more entrenched we get in our Fields the more and more quote knowledgeable. We become the more
Difficult it becomes to walk back from something that you once held dear and Peter my favorite example of this is the prosecuting attorney who worked hard on a case. Let's say it's a murder case and he sends the person to prison he gets a conviction. The person goes to prison and is in prison for 25 years.
And then some DNA evidence shows up that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt in anyone else's mind that the convicted person was actually innocent of that crime.
What happens to the typical prosecuting attorney in that situation is?
He would feel so bad. So incompetent so awful learning that he sent a person away for 25 years when he's really innocent and then he says to himself that can't be true. The DNA evidence has to be wrong. And so he keeps them in prison for another 25 years, and he does that not because
He's an evil guy. But because he thinks of himself as a good guy and a competent guy as someone who would never make a terrible mistake like that. Yeah, it's funny you mention that Elliott. One of the things I was thinking about when I read the book and I made a note to bring it up because I went back and re skimmed it for the 57th time was the Amanda Knox case to remember this American Girl. I think she was from the Northwest and she
Was studying abroad in Italy had a roommate that it was this tragic thing where the roommate and I think the roommates boyfriend were murdered and it was pretty clear on first past that Amanda had nothing to do with this and yet this prosecutor in Italy had a real bee in his Bonnet that she was hands down the perpetrator and then of course the DNA evidence to merges because the killer actually went to the bathroom while he was in the house was my recollection. They basically get his DNA out of the toilet. Nope it
This other guy who they find the prosecutor keeps moving the goalposts. Well, maybe she didn't actually kill him but she was in cahoots with this guy though. There's no evidence. She's ever met this guy before had any motive. I mean the whole thing got more and more and more ridiculous now in her case, she's lucky despite the multiple times. She was actually convicted in an Italian Court ultimately it was overturned but you watch that story unfold another example, which I've heard you lecture on Carol is the the Duke lacrosse.
One from God is probably 15 years ago now right?
Well in that case so many issues played into this
walk us through that story and how that's another great example of a case study in cognitive dissonance
this the examples in all of these cases are what happens when a district attorney for political reasons personal advancement reasons decides that he or she knows who the guilty person is, and then just Narrows the focus on getting that person convicted.
Ignoring any disconfirming dissonant evidence that would throw that assumption into question. The lacrosse case was the guys from the lacrosse team who had a stripper to a party at there against their fraternity house. Right? And she later claimed that she had been raped. Well this story fit every every story that just touches so many buttons of race and women and
tease and how terrible paternity guys are and they're all racist rapist anyway, and so forth the I don't know something like 80 faculty members at Duke took out a ad in the school paper about the toxic masculinity of the lacrosse team in particular and men and fraternities in general and so forth I was looking and so they were all back in themselves into a corner until it turned out that the district attorney was
Not giving the exculpatory evidence to the defense. The district attorney was eventually disbarred. It was a scandalous case, but he saw in this story of race and gender and rape and fraternity Brothers a way to really make name & Fame for himself. That's a particularly egregious example, but it's not uncommon.
No, these cases are not rare at all. And my favorite example, of course is the is the Central Park jogger case.
where these black kids they actually confessed to the crime and were sent to prison of fellow named Donald Trump took out full-page ads in all of the New York newspapers saying they should be executed even though some of them were underage and then it turned out that the DNA evidence never matched on the kids and and the semen that was found on the woman and then some other
Son who was in prison for a similar crime confessed to it and sure enough. He is DNA evidence did match and the prosecuting attorney Linda fierstein insists to this day that she was right and she would refused to overturn the evidence that had to be overturned by the district attorney who oversaw the case and totally vacated the
It's and the City of New York paid a huge compensation amount of money to those kids who were who spent several years in
prison. Thurston said the just the typical thing that prosecutors say, we always knew there was a sixth man
and the fact that they know
exactly we always knew there was a sick man. That's what they say. Okay, so at the time of the trial where only Prosecuting this one guy because we know that he was the rapist.
Murderer, oh, well, it wasn't his semen. Oh, well, then there was another guy there and our guy was just holding the woman down while the other guy actually raped her the Innocence Project guys call this the unindicted KOA Jack you later Theory. No, it's just you know, after the fact we can come up with any explanation of why we are still right even though we're wrong.
There's a delicate balance here and I think the great story that I know you've talked about because it's hard for you Carol.
You talked about it being one of the times it really challenged. You was the McMartin Nursery Scandal back in the early 80s and there's a great quote. I think you said about Elliott something to the effect of we sacrificed our skepticism at the altar of outrage. I love that and I want to come back to that. But again, let's tell that story because that's another great example, but what I want to do is tell this story through the lens of how do we think about this in the current ERA?
We're accusations are coming greater and greater and some of these accusations are going to be true and some of them are not going to be true and how there's two ends of that. You can be at polar extremes of either of these which are probably incorrect but there has to be a rational way to do it. So so maybe thinking about that that that McMartin preschool story which in retrospect, you know, I don't remember it. I wasn't really old enough. I went back in a read about it and I got to be honest with you on the
unhand it sounds completely idiotic now, but then at the time I can say but if you were a parent whose kid was going there you could easily see yourself getting sort of spiraled out of control too. So there's a part of me that actually has quite amount of empathy for everybody involved and it just overall seems like a really tragic story tell us about that story specifically your own struggle within it
the first of all this is a very very important question because here's what
Happens the minute there is a sensational story in the news. Somebody is accused of something. For example, what does the public generally do? We jump to a conclusion just as I thought that son of a bitch really is a bastard and he did it and then how horrible and the okay or we say no the accuser is lying. The accuser has a checkered history. I don't want to believe what the accuser says. And so if we jump to a conclusion
now what dissonance theory would predict is the minute we make a decision believe this person or believe the other person we will now make our belief conform to the evidence. We're prepared to hear as things go forward. So this is the danger of the early jumping to a decision because then as time goes on that choice.
Is that belief that we have will harden rather than become more open to disconfirming evidence. We will start looking for all the reasons. We were right to believe the accuser or to not believe the accuser and we will ignore and minimize or trivialize any information suggesting that we were wrong. That is why that first decision is such a crucial one because again, the more we put into supporting that initial decision the harder it will be to change our mind.
People say this is the slippery slope, but the thing that dissonance theory teaches us is that there's nothing slippery about it. It's our active self justifications for the beliefs. We have that take us down. Sometimes what turns out to be a wrong path we mention in the update to our book. There's a wonderful YouTube that Sarah Silverman did that shows the pain of dissonance right there on the YouTube screen where she talks about
Her feelings about Louis CK when he was first, you know admitted to have been behaving in these inappropriate ways and with women sexually fine what she says in this video is a perfect demonstration of dissonance. She says, he's my dear good wonderful friend. I love him. I think he's a wonderful father. I adore this man and what he did is reprehensible and what he did was a terrible thing to women.
And I want to side with the women whom he offended so deeply she doesn't answer it. But she lives with this dissonance of this uncertainty my case with McMartin was something else. I was in Los Angeles at the time when the mother and her two children who were working at this daycare center were suddenly accused of
What turned out to be utterly preposterous assaults on the children in their care and spite of the fact that for many many years they had run this daycare center. Nobody noticed anything amiss parents were walking in and out of the place all the time, but sanity and Common Sense generally goes out the door when you have a sentence with the words children and sex in the same sentence. Just just as you said somebody comes and tells you a police officer turns up at your door as the police did in this case.
Case and says Peter there have been some allegations of child molestation going on at your child's. Daycare. You have any information about this? What are you gonna say? What are you going to say? Oh, this is likely to be a sex panic. I don't think you will and I remember it was such big news here in Los Angeles. It was hysterical news. I knew the prosecutor at the time. She was convinced that this was really happening.
And there were no researchers at the time doing psychological research on how to interview children or on how children respond to repeated questions. Nobody knew very much about anything. And at the time there was a developmental psychologist who argued that if you don't ask children leading questions, did the doctor touch you here on your private parts. Did this person do this to you? If you don't ask leading questions the
I won't tell you for example that she's been in a medical exam with the doctor who touched her. Well that seemed to justify the tactics of the social workers and police were doing with these little kids and I wrote an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times.
Called do children lie not about this
your title.
No, but I've had to live with that. There is an effect. That was the message of the op-ed. The op-ed was about how you really have to ask children leading questions. So, of course I can say that bed was the psychological science as we knew it at that point. Bye.
But am I embarrassed by it? Oh you bet. I am especially finding myself at a conference a couple of years later when Stephen CC who became one of the great Heroes of the research on this question who we minded everybody do children lie. Are you kidding? I do the children Never Lie could only be said by someone who never was a child or new a child for crying out loud. Anyway, Steve used a screenshot of my op-ed.
As an
example the
French endless foolish and stupid. Even our good social psychologists are oh
my God to use the word good social psychologist.
Well, I was very embarrassing. Okay. So Peter to your question, how did I feel embarrassed? That's how I felt that is how I felt
and I was much smarter than you Carol
unless you are as usual as
usual. I'm only kidding because I
felt the same way that you did I was far away at the time. So I didn't I wasn't getting bombarded with the news but I remember picking up a copy of Newsweek magazine and seeing a picture of this is McMartin sticking her tongue out and I thought oh my God, this this molester is is mocking the whole the seriousness of the situation. But since I didn't know much about it, I kept out of it.
But of course she was sticking her tongue out some photographer was harassing her and she stuck her tongue out at the photographer and that got published in Newsweek.
And that's an example of
what happens a person does a normal thing gets angry at a photographer for harassing her when she's being falsely accused in the press and in court of having done a heinous crime, which she is in
innocent of but if we believe that she's guilty everything she does begins to look like bizarre Dreadful Behavior because once we have the rubric of she is guilty of child molestation, then we can't see her as an innocent person being angry at a harassing
photographer exactly.
I want to just highlight that with a thought experiment.
and Elliot, which is you pick a person, you know, whether it be someone who's accused of a crime or a political figure or something who you just hold an absolute contempt and imagine them in 10 different positions, you know, smiling this way frowning that way sticking their tongue out giving you the finger there is not one of those 10 in which you can't come up with a negative narrative you look at someone that you deem grotesque no matter
How they present themselves, even if they're standing there with the slightest smile, you would view it as disgusting. How can they not show more remorse apply the file becomes a Smurf? Yes, a frown becomes an admission of guilt. We are so able to color this lens. It's amazing, isn't
it? I'd like to add what I think is the important take home on. The McMartin case McMartin was the first of a wave of hysterical.
Cases across the country in which they care workers from here to Boston hundreds of them were accused of these kind of ritual sexual molestation of children in their care hundreds of daycare workers went to prison some of them are still in prison. And the lesson of McMartin is not simply that I was wrong or that others were wrong. It's this and this is what's harder.
The first reaction that anybody had to McMartin we didn't know anything the public had no way of knowing that the first allegation was made by a woman who was so psychotic so crazy known to the police that they stopped even listening to her after a while. Nobody knew that the police had gone to every parent's home leading them into a panicky reaction as your child and sexually molested and nobody understood how the children were.
Actually being interviewed by social workers who were bringing in those anatomically detailed dolls with prominent genitals and testifying that they knew if a child had been molested based on how the kid was playing with the doll. Well, as you would have said before of the you know, those genitals are pretty interesting no little kid is going to ignore the genitals. But if they did ignore the genitals, it's become they've been sexually abused and traumatized and if they play with the genitals, that's because they've been
sexually abused and traumatized it took psychological scientists to do a controlled experiment and ask children known to have been sexually molested and children. No not no not to have been sexually molested give them these dolls see how the kids play with them. And as you can imagine there was no difference between these two groups. So the kinds of therapists who were marching into court with no psychological scientific training at all.
Just their own observations that are hunches and their biases could testify with assurance that they knew that this kid had been molested. So this is the kind of research that was done in the aftermath of these daycare cases that came to transform how we understand children's testimony so that we can help the children who have been molested but not destroy the lives of innocent adults either so the task
Ask for us embarrassed as I was distant that I felt for my own participation in what I wrote about McMartin. I really began atoning for this by writing about what was happening in the other day care cases across the country such as the Emerald case in Boston, which was almost a mirror image of my
there's a very subtle difference between always believed the victim versus always be skeptical and take the
Ation, seriously, right? Those are those are not the same thing, but they're similar. They can look similar at the outset that this is a layer of nuance that seems to be missing from a lot of the discussion today, isn't it? Absolutely and in science whenever ideology interferes, it can distort the science and it certainly can distort public opinion. So the ideology now because
and it's understandable because women for example have been ignored for a very long time. So when they talk about sexual harassment now in this climate, the idea is always believed them always believe them because why would a woman come forward if she wasn't telling the truth, but that's an idea logical conclusion. I would substitute for that is always pay attention.
Always listen, but keep an open mind and realize that there are probably at least two sides to every story. So be respectful listen, but keep some skepticism in mind now some of the radical feminists are saying so it doesn't matter. So what if some guy is falsely accused and falsely loses his job.
Bob it's almost as if it serves the people of that gender, right because of all the abuses our gender took in the past and that's never a reasonable position.
It's a very very old one, of course in the era of recovered memory therapy Peter, which
you've written about pet length. This is got you. This is one you a lot of friends,
Carol a lot of friends a lot really a lot a lot
of friends one of my
Descriptions you ever gave was after you wrote your first lengthy Tome on that someone you said you got a lot of how did you describe it? A lot of lovely requests to go and passionately make love to yourself or something like that.
May you go forth into the world and multiply by yourself. Yes. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, you see any exhortation to believe just to believe I mean, I remember
A cover of news magazine many years ago about this the alleged Satanic ritual abuse calls which were supposedly a foot all over the country and people were believing that there were Satanic ritual abuse Cults that were trapping children and women and so forth and the cover of news magazine had one of these satanic images with the cover line believe it believe it really I'm supposed to believe it. So the idea that as women were going into Psychotherapy and coming out believing that they had
football personalities not just three or five but ten a hundred five hundred there was an escalation of the belief in multiple personality disorder, which was another hysterical epidemic in our country fomented by many psychoanalysts and psychiatrists and social workers until malpractice suits brought that bubble ride down but to say
I understand that a person in therapy may be having trouble in may be suffering but I get to question the explanation that the therapist is giving them. It's not a matter of disrespect. It's a matter of understanding and bringing our best science to bear on understanding. So I have always been skeptical of the believe X Group whatever X group is uncritically. What's the evidence? What's the best explanation for it? So one of the more interesting to me ways of understanding
Standing many of these very difficult. He said she said disagreements and debates which are so painful and so difficult and we do understand how many many thousands of women have been sexually abused and in so many ways, but but here's the butt
if you are bringing up an allegation that occurred six months ago six years ago 35 years ago.
We're entitled to talk about what we understand about memory what we understand about the way in which information since the original event changes our memory or changes. Our interpretation of the event events that happen to us 25 years ago that at the time we thought were benign we can come to see as being malevolent and dramatic and oppressive that's all part of how the psychological process works and
What social psychologists like Deborah Davis have shown is that a person doesn't have to be lying to be wrong in making an allegation and a man doesn't have to be lying. He can be self-justifying in responding to an allegation. This is a different level of understanding that I think is important, especially when charges involved.
The possibility of ruining someone's life. It doesn't fall into the category of there's always a simple answer and there's always a right or wrong way to see a particular
allegation this point also about memory probably about six years ago. I read five years ago. It was after I had read your book for the first time, but I read the book by Catherine Schultz being wrong, and I also was very moved as probably the wrong word, but
But I was struck by how feeble my memory was because I've always I think up until reading that book. I had never questioned that the way I remembered something was correct because I have a very good memory for random stupid things. You know, like I can tell you that on, you know, Monday June 27th 1988. I did this and it happened this way and that way and this way and that way and I can be right on some of those things, but I can be surprisingly wrong on other things.
And I think reading that book helped me appreciate how much I could be wrong about and that became really scary to me because it really made me realize that I'm quite fallible to my own BS. I thought I was somehow I levitated above that. Like I just thought whatever was in Peters memory Vault had happened and now to know that that's not true is a little scary but to your point, it's probably not true for anyone.
One but a common idea is that we have a little tape recorder and thought brain and all we have to do is press the button and it'll all come out is wrong because it's not all in there. A lot of it gets confabulated and things get mixed together that don't belong together. So it doesn't have to be any matter of self justification or any kind of dissonance reduction. It can be just wrong just
Randomly wrong and misremembered in some sort of harmless way as in Carol's famous memory of that book that she's sure her father read to her.
How did I miss the ball Landing right here in my lap? Oh, well, yes when we were writing our book. I had a vivid vivid memory of my father be
Eating me James thurber's the wonderful. Oh, it's a by the way a wonderful book by Pirates Who remove the letter O from the alphabet from speech and from every object. You may keep geese but not a goose and so forth and it was a wonderful wonderful book and I remember him reading it to me and are laughing about what names would be like without their owes Ophelia Oliver and so forth and then because I like to read that book every so often just to cheer myself up I go and I see its publication date.
Which was one year after my father died. It just hit me in the how could what how could that be? And of course then that starts you on another Trail? Well who did read it to me and wait a minute. I was a teenager who's reading me a book when I'm a teenager. Well, you know all the things that I had made up around that and they were wrong which is why I like to think of dissonance theory as an incredibly helpful.
helpful, mechanism of understanding that is a form of arrogance control and certainty control and if we can learn to have passionate beliefs that give our lives color and meaning that we live by but to hold them likely enough so that if the evidence comes along that our favorite diet leader is wrong we can
We have to say you know, what I was wrong on that one.
Yeah, this idea of Doubt versus arrogance is amazing. But but Society doesn't really reward doubt as much as it rewards arrogance, right? I mean isn't that part of the challenge? We're we're I think culturally a little bit more likely to find somebody believable wouldn't doesn't a patient want a doctor may be arrogant is too strong a word but doesn't a patient want a doctor. That is exactly much more certain for the
Has much more confident uncertainty. Yeah.
And certainty can easily morph into arrogance. I remember once when I was serving as an expert witness in a murder case, I was presenting some psychological data that favored the accused person. I said all things being equal and the prosecuting attorney leaped on that saying, oh sure all of the things but in the real world
First serve all other things are hardly ever equal and of course, as you know court trials are somewhat theatrical because they're playing to the jury and I finally had to turn to the judge and said that requires an explanation and the judge was very sympathetic to me. And I finally had to say that all other things being equal is simply the Cradle of experimental science it
Means that you control extraneous variables that could distort that the data but not that it proves your case it simply random error that can distort the data so that it's a good thing to hold all other things equal not not a bad thing about science. That's the kind of thing that were talking about that so if he's not sure why I started that
Or well no because see the this is another interesting thing. It's why many people prefer the pseudo-sciences where somebody gives you a certain answer. I know that if you eat this thing this following health benefit will occur where as scientists have the irritating habit of talking and probabilities. It is likely that it is probable that in fact, every scientist knows that the people who speak in certainties are not speaking scientifically, that's just
out how scientists think and that's not how they would present their findings but certainty is what most people want to hear. But of course if someone really is certain about something they have almost certainly Frozen their ability to change their minds when they need to
have a talk about something that you guys have written about is you have your pyramid diagram. I talked about it as sort of a path dependency is the way I kind of describe it to people and I I find
to be I think one of the most remarkable explanations that you provide for how two people can start out with a very similar set of beliefs and yet come to these very pivotal moments where a decision is made that sets them on a path and that path becomes reinforcing and reinforcing and reinforcing and after a long enough period of time those people are so Divergent in their
ifs and in their behaviors and including their view of each other that they seem unrecognizable as though they came from the same species let alone that they once stood next to each other. Let's go with two examples. Let's talk about the to college freshmen who have never before cheated on a test that are now both in the final exam room and they are both coming to the same question that they don't know the answer to confronted with an opportunity to cheat.
So Carol walk us through how one could cheat one could not and the implication of this what these two people how these people go through the world 10 years later as a result of that decision,
right? This example was actually based on an experiment that had been done many years ago with children and it's it's really quite simple. The two students have pretty much the same attitude about cheating. It's not desirable thing to do. We know it's not a good thing to do, but you know, it's not the worst sin in the world.
And now here they are in their exam and they draw blank on this crucial question and The crucial question will determine their grade on the exam and in the manner of students not only on the exam but in this course and in life and everything will go south. If I don't get an A on this exam and so forth in the way that students often panic and suddenly they are given the opportunity to cheat as the student next to them. The one with the beautiful handwriting makes makes her answers available to them. Now they have
A second to decide cheat or not cheat one sheets one doesn't cheat one gives up Integrity for the grade. The other says no Integrity is too important. I'm not going to look the minute. They make that decision as I was using this in a way earlier the minute they make that decision. They now have to put their behavior and their attitude toward cheating in two consonants.
So their attitude about cheating will now change to be consonant with the behavior of what they did. So the one who cheated will not modify that view to say cheating isn't such a bad thing, please everybody cheats. It's it's just some thick Timeless crime who cares but the one who resisted cheating will now feel even more strongly that cheating is wrong and unfair and it's not a victimless crime. What about all the people who don't cheat?
Then work hard and learn the material over time as they move along.
their attitudes about cheating
and their self justifications for their own behavior will keep reinforcing and by the we use the metaphor of the pyramid because they start out at the top side by side. But by the time they have finished justifying one step at a time their own behavior. They stand at the bottom of the pyramid very far apart from each other and for me what I find most Illuminating in this
This metaphor is that it demonstrates how hard it is to go back up because now here you are at the bottom and you spend all this time and energy justifying your decision to cheat or not cheat. How are you going to now go back and say, you know that first step. I took off the pyramid was really the wrong.
So that is the metaphor we use in explaining why people get themselves locked into a belief or a
practice and what that metaphor really illustrates beautifully is that every time a person has to make an important decision and it's a difficult decision like the cheating example, he or she is doomed to experience cognitive dissonance for the ones for the students.
For cheat the dissonance is I see myself as a basically honest person and yet I'm committing a dishonest act therefore to reduce dissonant a tax isn't so very important because everybody would do it. I'd be a fool not to do it. So the person will resist the temptation to cheat the cognitive dissonance is I could have gotten a really good grade in this course, and that would it allow
Add me to go to medical school and I chose not to do it. Therefore. It would have been
a horrible
crime if I had cheated so that you cannot Escape cognitive dissonance no matter which way you choose and the cognitive dissonance is followed by self justification, which changes the attitude enormously Elliott to borrow your phrase from a moment ago all things equal if I took two hundred students and looked at
Of them who elected One path or the other. So just pick whichever path you want to discuss how much variability is there in the dissonant response amongst that group. So if you take for example say the group that decided to cheat and now has to spend the rest of their life justifying. This was not victimless. This is allowed me to get to graduate school. I'm going to have a greater impact on the world blah blah blah blah blah blah how variable are those students in their
Dances, and how what is the extent to which that is subconscious versus conscious and how it plays out. There's no real answer to that question without doing the experiment but in the experiment that was done with by one of my fellow graduate students at Stanford a guy named Judson Mills. There was almost no overlap between the final feeling between the kids who cheated and the kids are didn't cheat each one.
From their feelings about cheating a day before they were put in that situation. So there was a little overlap but it had a major impact on their attitudes about gaining
if I may happens that we have an example here in our very own book from the high achieving high pressure Stuyvesant High School in New York City 71 students were caught exchanging exam answers and they gave the
the New York Times Reporter a Litany of perfect self justifications, which allowed themselves to keep seeing themselves as smart students of Integrity one said it's like a keep my integrity and fail this test. No, no one wants to fail a test. You could study for two hours and get an 80 or you could take a risk and get a 90. He redefined cheating as taking a risk for others cheating was a necessary evil.
For many it was hoping classmates in need when one girl finally realized her classmates had been relying on her to write their papers for them. She said I respect them and think they have integrity. But sometimes the only way you could have gotten there is two kind of botch your ethics kind of bought your ethics that there you
go. How do they Define integrity it in this way? Exactly. So there's another example that that
It's even more distressing though, and I can I think this was in your book, but if not Carolina we've discussed it which is an expedition. Well, I but I think it is actually in there which is
You to the point where the cop is just planting evidence on people who are clearly innocent. Remember that was this in the
test a lying. There's a
term for it. I think the way you walk down. This is look maybe the first time it happens is they break into the crack house, you know, this house is full of crack. There's no dispute the suit the soon as the battering ram goes through the door. You can see the plume of smoke. You see this one guy running into the bathroom slamming the door locking it and you hear him literally.
Shoveling drugs into the toilet is he flushes it and just as you get the door open, you see the last swirl of water taking that last gram of cocaine down the toilet and you are out of luck. And in that situation when you know as sure as God made little green apples, but these guys are filthy you plant that cocaine right on that guy and you make your arrest and you finally have your bad guy and there's another cop there.
There who would refuse to do it even in that situation. Now again, those guys are the top of the pyramid. What can those guys look like 10 years later that guy who planted that drug in that situation, which seems quite justifiable. Right? What is that guy doing? Ten years later. Is that Mark Fuhrman? You remember this bozo and the OJ Simpson trial? I mean, I guess to me one of the points of these stories is you probably aren't starting out with the most egregious examples of behaviors that people think
About right. You probably got their stepwise.
Well, that's just it we look at people very often who are at the bottom of the pyramid and we don't realize that they started at the top. They made decisions very very small tiny decisions JEB Stuart Magruder in our book and how he got in meshed in the Watergate scandal. It was one step at a time starting with the smallest smallest compromises until he could not get unin meshed, right? And so true very often. We look at the behavior of people without realizing all
all the time effort and money that they put into justifying their behavior as they got further and further along. So behavior that seems really puzzling to us at a distance makes far more sense when we see it in terms of this one step at a time, which is, you know, one of Elliott's great experiments Elliot the initiation experiment. I remember that remember that one terrific demonstration of this you want to tell it
No, why don't you tell it
covid-19. We don't even know if Peter wants you to
die. Would love for one of you to tell
her
no, this is the critical point, right the initiation. This is what I described as sort of the path dependency, right? It's the it's the switch on the train. And as you said if you're faced with a hard decision, I think most of us don't appreciate what the consequences of that can be if we take it with
The wrong mindset and this is something I wanted to come to later which is identity versus Behavior. Right? So it's sort of like you can say in this moment with these facts. I'm going to make this decision, but it's the I think I think when you can do that without pinging your identity to that decision and instead just ping your behavior to it that I think it becomes a lot easier to move off that path when you're encountering new.
Action, but sometimes it's too easy. Let's talk through some of these. Let's talk through this experiment here. Let's take the example. You just gave of the cop who knows they're guilty. He can see the smoke. He hears a toilet flush and sees all of the evidence going down the toilet. Now you said you can see how that could be that is Justified that he plants the cocaine because he saw he knows they're guilty and I would suggest that it's
Never Justified that is never Justified. It's understandable that he might plant the cocaine but because of what I know about how the human mind works. I also know that once he takes that step of planting cocaine that he didn't actually find there. It makes the next step and the step after that a lot easier the next thing.
No, there's a totally innocent person who has been framed for a crime. He didn't commit
and notice by the way the distance a police officer will feel for another cop in the room to say no. No. No, this is wrong and don't do this. I mean we see this is one of the problems and sort of reef in our discussions of police department's the presence of somebody who is behaving ethically is dissonant to
Who is not behaving ethically? I don't like you. You're reminding me you're reminding me that I'm doing something that I shouldn't be doing. If I were an ethical person
and these guys get ostracized by the culture of the most police departments, which is you have to go along you have to play along. How much do you think this figures into police racism police brutality. Do you feel that? This is a similar starting point as well or
I think that racism has far deeper roots that go far outside of conscious choices that are made I think racism in Police Department. There's a very complex issue but it begins with I think a false and illusory correlation since most Street crimes happen in poor neighborhoods, and since a lot of poor neighborhoods consists of ethnic minorities black and brown people.
I think have learned that those dangerous neighborhoods with a lot of Street crimes are often caused by black people then they become suspicious of all black people and become quite brutal of it about them in their behavior toward them. And again, it's understandable but not justified that they behave that way the way they did and in The Gorge Floyd case. It's
again, one step at a time with two of the other cops acting almost as bystanders who are allowing it to happen because the culture is such that they don't want to interfere with the most brutal cop because he seems to know what he's doing and they're afraid of being ostracized by their fellow cops if they interfere with it, and and that's that
One step at a time, which is exactly how we Define how cognitive dissonance can can get us into trouble because each step you take down that pyramid you justify it until what by the time you reach the bottom.
You don't recognize yourself anymore. That's why you have Stuart Magruder is a perfect example because he was a guy with good high morals and he saw himself in retrospect being corrupted in the Nixon Administration until the ended up doing things that a year earlier. He never would have dreamed of doing but one stop at a time justifying.
Each one along the way when he finally woke up as he was being sentenced to prison. It was like waking up from a bad dream.
This is actually one of the most powerful experiences for me and working with Elliot on this book was finding the stories of people who were able to break out of the Cocoon of self justification that they had spun to protect themselves and were suddenly able to see themselves in the
Is of the behavior in it clearer light see sometimes that light is obscured for us. I mean, for example, when we talk about systemic racism systemic racism, which is very hard for most people to understand and experience because by definition we experience things as individuals, but there was a important study in Seattle some years ago of the way that the police and the city government were defining. What a drug crime was. What kind of
Drugs do we want to go after whom do we want to arrest for what kind of drugs so the kind of guy, you know white kids using cocaine. Well, that's okay. That's not a problem. We're going to have drug busts on white kids using cocaine but black kids using crack. Oh, let's go for that. So the very definition of what the problem is in whom we want to arrest set up a pattern of the over arrests of African-Americans compared to whites. That's an example of a decision that occurs at the top and that can have very powerful.
Racist consequences whereas each individual officer is saying by arresting this guy for crack. I'm not a racist. I'm not personally a racist. Yeah, and I would say that one other element in our Police Department says we are now learning is that the culture of brutality is larger than the specifics something like 20 to 25 percent of the police officers in the United States have come from the military. That's their training many.
Of them are excused from having to go to a police academy if they've had military training.
So look how that would shape your point of view about how to control crowds and who the enemy is and so forth. So we have every individual as embedded in a social network taking their cues from that Network and justifying their behavior in order to remain a part of that Netbook.
Perhaps the most optimistic part of
I think your work is the description of people who are able to Halt the slide down the pyramid, right? So I want to talk both about some of those stories. But also what are the traits or things that we can do insertions of cognitive tools that we can use to kind of guard against it because I hope nobody comes away from this thinking that this is a condemnation of an individual whose subject to cognitive biases and
Biases as they struggle to ameliorate the suffering of cognitive dissonance. I think the point is just the opposite. We're all doing it all the time and the more we talked about it and the more we think about it the better shot we have at getting to better answers as opposed to just reiterating bad behaviors because they fit with preconceived notions. So what are some of your both of your favorite success stories on people who were heading down the
Path down the pyramid and then managed to sort of realize that they were on the wrong side of the
pyramid. Hey McMartin, look, I got out of that mess. Okay Elliot, you're on
know my favorite person in a book. I think is is Wayne hail the guy who made the goat decision on the Columbia disaster in NASA.
The Columbia ship exploded and Wayne Hale was the operations officer at the time.
He knew these guys he knew their families and they all got killed because of his decision.
And he wrestled with that one for a while.
His first response was what? No launch is perfect. There are always little problems and you have to learn which ones to ignore and he literally stopped himself in mid-sentence and said, but you know when I look at it, I have to say
At this point. I wish I had been more cautious the weight of the evidence was to abort the launch just before it started but I made the wrong decision and I'm dreadfully dreadfully sorry and I when I weigh all of the evidence and all of the reasons why he could have doubled down.
own
I say my God. What a courageous guy. That is the take the blame which he deserved for the death of all those wonderful people.
That was a tough one. Yeah, it is. It's immensely powerful. It's in finding these stories. You see truly the courage it takes the honesty to face up.
To it and fess up and generally speaking the reaction of those around you is not going to be critical. It's going to be grateful when Hale did not suffer for his ability to send this email to everybody at Nasa saying look no further for the person responsible for This Disaster. I'm the one and I should say thank you Peter for this question because I too feel that the more people understand about how cognitive
sentence operates and how we are all susceptible to it the more
Helpful, it is an understanding our own behavior. So to know that the minute we make a decision whether it's about a car or partner or a house or how to live with covid any time. We make a decision. We're going to be motivated to throw support for that decision and ignore evidence that we're wrong the moment. We understand that that gives us a whole new toolbox of ways of dealing with our own beliefs and
attitudes and one of the primary tools,
In the toolbox is the ability to say.
I did a stupid thing. I made a stupid mistake. I did something that caused harm, but just because I did something stupid or immoral does not necessarily make me a stupid person or an immoral person and to be able to say that thoughtfully and meaningfully is a very important thing to do. We have to be able to say making mistakes.
It's difficult to deal with but one can do it. If we don't ipso facto Embrace that as meaning I did something stupid. If our I'm a stupid person we have to be able to say I made a stupid mistake.
But I'm not a stupid person. What can I learn from having made that mistake? How can I make sure that I don't make a similar mistake like that again and if that mistake caused harm, how can I make amends and that's how a person lives a meaningful life
exactly. We love the story of Shimon Peres the former Israeli Prime Minister who was thrown into
Of
dissonance when his good friend Ronald Reagan accepted an invitation to lay a wreath at the bitburg cemetery in Germany and some you know National event. It turned out that 47 Nazi officers had been buried at the cemetery. And of course the world was furious at Reagan for accepting this invitation to lay a wreath there Holocaust Survivors. And so many others were just outraged as was Paris. So a reporter said to Paris. So what do you think about your friend?
Ronald Reagan accepting this invitation to speak at the cemetery and Paris said
When a friend makes a mistake the friend remains a friend and the mistake remains a mistake.
In this way, he separated the two dissonant cognitions just as Sarah Silverman was trying to do about her friend Louie. CK my friend made a mistake. He did something wrong. He remains my friend and what he did remains wrong when I do something wrong.
What I did remains wrong and I still remain a good kind person you separate the dissonant cognitions and treat them separately because the usual impulse would be to jump to a decision. I'm done with that friendship or I have to minimize the thing that my friend did and by being able to separate the two dissonant cognitions more closely and evaluate them. Sometimes it requires us to live with the discomfort that we love this person and this person
And did this awful thing
and it requires self-reflection. What kind of a person Am I who have done that this particular thing and serious self-reflection is a lot more difficult than self-justification. The easy route is dilip directly into self-justification. But as we've seen one step at a time that can lead us down the Primrose path.
Path, but self-reflection. I did a stupid thing. Why did I do that? How could I learn something from that but our recommendation for the way to go
in Elliot's absolutely wonderful Memoir not by chance alone. He uses this observation about what Drew him to the field of social psychology and and I agree with the two. He said Clinical Psychology therapy.
It's about repair social psychology is about change and I think that is really a guiding principle of why we wrote this book because it's it's an examination and indictment of so many institutions here the therapy world the criminal justice World family relationships so many domains in which by understanding we do have the power to change.
So what year did the first edition came out? Was it about? Oh six seven seven. So the world's changed a lot in 13 years. Obviously, you've shared that a big part of your motivation for this was sort of the frustration you had with the bush-cheney administration's continued justification for the war on Iraq long after it became quite clear that the reasons that were given to go to war didn't exist and I
I think it's safe to say that even within that Administration there were many different flavors of dissonance. But I think I've read maybe two or three biographies including the autobiography of George Bush. I find presidential biographies, very interesting and I would agree with your take. I don't think for a moment Bush felt he was pulling the wool over anybody's eyes. I really think he believed this to the essence of his core. But here we are 13 years later and and Iraq.
And Afghanistan and and most of the Middle East quite frankly is largely forgotten at this point and and not just with what's going on in terms of coronavirus, but I think more broadly speaking what's going on in terms of populism what's going on in terms of racism a greater polarization within our political system. I mean, I think almost anybody would give their left arm to go back to 2007 politically frankly like when you had two somewhat reasonable parties that kind of behave like it seems a heck of a lot better when you first wrote the book.
Are you more or less optimistic today? And how much do you think cognitive dissonance is factoring into what what really looks upsetting and ugly and just very unpleasant with respect to the way we are governed and with the way we
govern
How much time you got the problem I think is the hard polarization of the parties in our introduction to the revision. We quote Bob Dole saying, you know Bill Clinton this my opponent not my enemy. I mean how far we have come from the idea of seeing the other party as an opponent and not an enemy which is quite an explicit tactic. So it's back to your question about identity in a way.
One of the curious things that have happened in our country is that political identity has come to have a primary importance for people in ways that it did not at one time. That is you know, it used to be you'd say well, would you want your child to marry a fill in the blank a person of another religion a person from another city a person from another ethnicity a person from a different religion and so forth. Now the thing that you most don't want your kid to marry you.
Is somebody from the other political party? It's that the hostility of fat that attitude is a sign of the problem of polarization and what that means is if political parties have become the central part of people's identities then by definition it makes it very hard to accept any evidence that somebody from the other party might have a good idea might be doing the right thing might be somebody I can listen to all those
The current political scene is worrisome and we can all be pessimistic about it. One of the things that has been most heartening for both of us in writing. This book has come from the hundreds upon hundreds of letters from people telling us what they have learned from the book and how it has affected them. Now, you know authors get these it changed my life kind of things but we get stories we get stories from people who have explained how they have taken an understanding of cognitive dissonance.
Into their own lives with often very interesting results. So for example, once I heard from a man who told the following story, he said I've got five siblings and we've been at war at war over the legacy of our family inheritance. We form two factions. We've been fighting with each other and mediation hasn't helped and nothing is help them were estranged from each other and so for these are didn't then he said I read your book.
And I gave it to our mediator and I said here I said give this book to my brothers and they will immediately understand what they're doing wrong. I mean, it didn't quite say that way. Did he give it to the mediator here have my brother's read this book. He said I got no reply. He said and then a couple of years later. He said I picked up your book again, and I read it and I said, oh he said, oh you said incredibly the words on the page had transformed themselves and I wrote.
Ooh the mediator and I said tell my brothers that I now understand what I have been doing wrong in our discussions. I have been greedy. I have been selfish. I haven't thought enough about how you guys have seen the situation. I'd like to apologize. Can we talk and they did
I love that story and it's a perfect example of what a lot of people discover on reading the book.
We all have blind spots and perhaps the ultimate blind spot is the belief that I don't have a blind spot and if only people would see it my way then they could arrive at the reasonable solution to any problem. But the fact is what people often discover is that the blind spot is in me. I think you're absolutely right Carol. I think this
all comes back to this idea of I did versus I am. I don't know if either of you had ever met Marsha Linehan
I do I haven't seen her in a long time. But yes her work on
DBT. Well her work on dialectical behavioral therapy, which I've become such a fan in such a student because I think that what Marcia and and that school of DBT have taught is effectively the exact way you're describing this which is the more we can
Our identities from these actions the easier it is to hold and sit in the discomfort of these two things again. I think the Silverman Louis CK example is a great one. I do it as a practice every day, by the way, so I do this thing because one of the things I've struggled with historically is I tend to Peg my achievement to my identity. So even with something that's as seemingly stupid as shooting my bow and arrow so which I do very
Very often so I'll go in the back and I'll shoot my bow and arrow and if I have a good day shooting I'm going to have a good day period And if I shoot poorly I'm going to have a bad day. And of course the only way that can be true is if you are so silly as to assign Worth to yourself as a result of how you perform. So now every single day when I do whatever it is, that's my Recreation activity. I dictate into my phone for no more than two minutes three at the
Most a lovely discussion to myself separating my performance from my worth it can go something like this. Hey Peter great job today shooting. I mean it was really amazing. You got up there and you went you know, you you shot a 296 32x that was really good and you went and did the demeaning all of these are very good. But I just want to remind you that doesn't actually make you any better today. You know, you're no better a father. You're no better a husband. You're no better off.
Friend, you're no better a doctor than you were yesterday. When you shot very poorly and this exercise by doing it out loud and actually sending it to my therapist every single day and knowing she listens to it has been such a powerful tool for me to uncouple what I do from who I am now, that's a silly and small example, but listening to our discussion today, I want to think of bigger and better ways to do that because I do think that in as much
Is our political identities become our personal identities were really hosed. I do fear that as sort of a population. It's going to be very difficult. When as you said like when whatever the other person says is wrong no matter what when no matter the countenance on the other person's face anything from crying smiling laughing will always be colored in the wrong thing. I don't know how you can make progress in thought if a society can't make progress
right in some in some form of manner whether it be knowledge or Insight or thought. I don't know does this represent the end of of progress?
Oh students you start the end of the end of days right here,
but I don't mean then a doomsday scenario, but I mean like at some point right there. I mean when you think about what what it was that enabled radical transformation of society in the past, I don't know for 500 years A lot of it had to do with
remarkable progress in thinking the standardization of
formal logic scientific methodologies. I mean everything that you've spoken about today Elliott on some level is grounded in the ability to do an experiment Carol you and I have spoken for hours about our hero Richard Fineman and his very famous Caltech. Actually. I might have even been a core now. I can't represent Cornell or Caltech when he gave this lecture that is very easily searched on YouTube. It's beautiful where he basically explains what an experiment means and you know, how you know if an idea and the beauty of
Looking for the null hypothesis, which is really hard to do. But it's what we have to do. The Age of Enlightenment was around the 16th century when when people began to do experiments and think scientifically and every society has to bring its population into the age of it Enlightenment and I think our educational system our public educational system has
failed us when you see some of the sort of people on the street being interviewed. I am appalled by how illogical they are in their thinking many of them and how irrational they are and how one thought does not proceed from the previous thought it's appalling and it seems to me that critical thinking has to be taught in junior high school and high school in this country.
People have to learn how to separate bullshit from fact people have to learn how to trust science rather than off-the-wall exclamations of fact that aren't really factual and that's all part of our educational system. The Democracy a democracy is not going to work with an uneducated population
and a distrust of the institutions that are the Bedrock of
of that democracy science government the
law. So that's basically my point which is my fear is we are further in the wrong direction today than where we were if the time you wrote this book and so my call to you is if you could transmit to that generation, that is so critical right those kids that are 10 11 12 13 15 years old where there's still in these formative years and we want to
Soap on them, you know for me personally, I'd because I have one of my kids is in that age group. I think Non-Stop about how to excite her about science and how to you know how to look at the world and question everything like why does that thing float in the pool? But that thing sinks and why does you know, why is it that the vinegar and the oil separate like every single thing you see you should be starting to think. Why is that happening? What is it from your work that I could improve?
Part to my daughter who is you know, 11 years old to give her the best shot at having a tool of being the kind of person that is comfortable sitting in discomfort making these hard decisions and being able to change her mind when the facts call for it.
I think the first thing that I would suggest is something that I learned the hard way as a parents and grandparents and now I'm learning as a great grandparent is the importance of modeling.
In the home you behave in a way that you want your child to behave when your child is your age and there are no exceptions to that. You just do it you do it the way you want your child to learn to do it. I think that modeling is a very very powerful tool.
You want to tell your story about when you were first married to Vera and the anger. My father would have Angry. Yeah, you know, that was a big change in you.
It really was I grew up with a father who my mother and father frequently quarrel, and I remember sitting at the dinner table and we could see it happening because the only time my mother had a chance to get at my father and and give him a Litany of her.
Complaints was at dinner time. So we'd be sitting at the dinner table. I remember I was maybe 10 or 11 years old and my mother would be complaining and my father would regard that as nagging and we could see my father beginning to see the inside and my older brother looked at me.
And winked and what that meant was we'll give him about 20 seconds before he explodes and he exploded and he would slam his knife down knife and fork down on the table. They goddamn it can a guy have a peaceful meal around here and he grabbed his coat and leave the house and not come back until after my brother and I were asleep and we hardly ever got to see my father because it would happen often and that was my mom.
Model growing up soon after I was married I got married when I was 22 years old to a remarkable woman and we're still married now 65 years and County but early in the marriage we had an argument about something and I remember getting really angry raising my voice and then walking out the door slamming the door going down the steps. I got halfway down the steps and I suddenly said to myself
The hell are you going
what are you doing?
And I realized at that moment
that I was modeling. My father's Behavior, which I did tested.
And I slowly walked back up the stairs and apologized and we talked rationally about the issue that had brought on that explosion and I gradually taught myself that getting angry raising. My voice was not the best way to deal with I was married to a very gentle
I am married to a very gentle wonderful person who was not accustomed to that kind of thing and therefore would not tolerate it and it helped me let go of it and to use reasonable rational discussion stating of feelings. The positive ones the negative ones whenever they become apparent and that became a model for
Rocket because the way we relate to each other is now pretty standard in our family. I don't take great credit for that. I I really learned it the hard way, but I learned it
and taught it in the encounter group world and so forth the ability to identify a feeling instead of just roaring no catharsis and that respect. Those are skills to be learned and Peter when you said what can you do to make
Science itself interesting to your daughter remember that as human beings. We think in stories storytelling is our way of understanding the world explaining the world and making the world interesting what science does is tell us which stories are better than other stories and that's its charm and that's its magic if you will and that's its appeal when science is presented as a series of finding finding finding finding there's this thing in this thing and
this thing and another thing it loses its interest and it's zip, but when it's told as a story in which the discovery is something that changed us the story We Tell the beginning of our book of semmelweis.
And his his observations about why the women in his Hospital were dying of childbed fever and that maybe it was because his students were coming from the morgue to the bedside of these women and delivery with the having just done autopsies on the women who had done died the day before and thinking oh, he's carrying something on his hands and said that was a story that some of my story was something that my junior high school teacher told our little science seminar group.
And I remember I was fascinated by the story. But I guess I was a budding social psychologists because it was fascinating to me was not just that semmelweis had found the reason that the women were dying. They didn't know about germs yet. But he found the reason just wash your damn hands and these women will stop dying.
He had the solution before he knew the problem and and very
interesting absolutely but see in the story that mr. Crane told us what
And me was why didn't someone wise fellow doctors say hey agnostics great explanation. Thank you for explaining. One of my patients are dying. I can change my practice immediately. You know, this is terrific information. What did they say? They said, oh piss off you Hungarian nitwit. I mean the equivalent of it in 1847
very hard and read the theory of cognitive dissonance. Yes. Oh, they certainly had. I don't think he was ever Vindicated in his life. I mean he died basically in an insane.
Shane Asylum still believing that no one had effectively come to acknowledge this Theory
absolutely but you see it's an amazing story and all of the elements are in it the psychological story of his fellow scientists who didn't want to believe them. I mean, which is the story of History throughout history. Oh, thanks Galileo, you know really grateful for your new Theory here, right? It presents both the excitement of scientific discovery and the challenges.
And the challenges
because I want to I want to really thank you for this discussion today. I know I know it's probably longer than most discussions you guys have on this topic. But as I said at the outset, it's it's a book that I love but more importantly I think it's just a topic that that I think everybody needs to spend some time paying attention to it is a part of everyone's life whether they are aware of it or not. That's the importance of it right in the in the spirit of what water.
Otter is to have fish as David Foster Wallace spoke about in his commencement speech whether you are conscious or unconscious of this thing it is with you. So we are probably better off being conscious of it and having some measure of control and thought around it. Then we are ignoring it. It was the pleasure to talk to and the discussion if anything was not long enough. Thank you
very much. Thanks so much.
Thank you for listening to this week's episode.
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