 It's Saturday, February 20th, and this is For Good Reason. Welcome to For Good Reason, I'm DJ Grothy. For Good Reason is the radio show and the podcast produced in association with the James Randy Educational Foundation, an international nonprofit whose mission is to advance critical thinking in society, mostly about the paranormal, pseudoscience, the supernatural. Before we get to this week's guest, I want to thank our listeners who've been writing in past few episodes, really gratifies us to get all the kudos emails. For those of you who have expressed how much you have been enjoying the show, please let us know by becoming a member of JREF. You can do so at randy.org. My guest this week is Carol Tavris, a social psychologist and writer whose books include The Mismeasure of Woman and Anger. She's written on psychological topics for the LA Times, the New York Times, Scientific American, many other publications. She's a fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Association for Psychological Science. She's a member of the editorial board of Psychological Science and the Public Interest and a senior fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. She also wrote Mistakes Were Made But Not By Me. Great book, I want everyone to read. Her co-author is Elliot Aronson, who's one of the most distinguished social psychologists in the world. His books include The Social Animal and The Jigsaw Classroom. He was chosen by his peers as one of the 100 most influential psychologists of the 20th century and he's been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is the only psychologist to have won all three of the American Psychological Association's top awards for writing, for teaching, and for research. Carol's joining me on the show to talk about the book they wrote together, Mistakes Were Made But Not By Me, Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts. Thank you for joining me on For Good Reason, Carol Tavris. Very happy to be here as ever, DJ. It's a pleasure to have you on the show. Mistakes Were Made, as I've said in print, I've said elsewhere on my last show, Point of Inquiry, one of the best books I've read in years, especially as it applies to my interests in skepticism and self-deception. My background in magic leads me to be into self-deception and deception in general, especially how fake psychics and charlatans and faith healers can begin to believe they're legit. Your book, it's about the topic of dissonance theory, the theory of cognitive dissonance. It helps explain what's going on there. So Carol, to start off, tell our listeners, tell me what dissonance theory is. Well, more than 50 years ago, a terrific social psychologist, a genius, named Leon Festinger, developed this theory of cognitive dissonance, which is quite simple really. It argues that it is cognitively uncomfortable for human beings to hold two ideas in our minds that conflict with each other, that this state is as uncomfortable as being hungry or being thirsty, and we are motivated to reduce it. So the cognitions that might conflict are at a simple level. You love Woody Allen movies, and your best friend hates Woody Allen movies, and that's uncomfortable. You're going to try to persuade your friend or you're going to maybe start liking Woody Allen a little less. More seriously, the classic example is of the smoker, who knows that smoking is hazardous to health, but really enjoys smoking. On the John Stewart show, Lewis Black defined it perfectly. He said dissonance is when an environmentalist drives an SUV, might as well be filling his gas tank with cognitive dissonance. He used the term. It was really wonderful, and that's exactly right. So what it means is the smoker has to give up smoking or justify smoking. Okay, my life will be shorter, but I'll be cuter and thinner, and it relaxes me or whatever excuse they come up with. Or they say they just like it and leave it at that. Or they do. Yeah, but they have to minimize in some way, minimize or trivialize their knowledge that it is really a stupid and harmful thing to do. Now, my colleague and good friend Elliot Aronson, who had been a student of Festinger's, took cognitive dissonance theory the next step. He said this is not just a cognitive theory. You don't think two ideas clashing in your mind. Dissonance is most painful, most difficult, and most motivating for us to resolve it when the conflict involves a clash with some important self-concept. So, you know, if I don't think I'm a world expert on film, my views of Woody Allen aren't important, but if I think they are, then my view of Woody Allen is going to be better than your view. Now, what are the central concepts that people have about themselves? I'm kind, I'm ethical, I'm smart, I'm competent, and I know what I'm doing. And if you now present me with evidence that I have just done something stupid, foolish, harmful to another person, cruel, a colossal mistake that perhaps resulted in the illness or death of a patient I'm treating, now what am I going to do with this information that you've just given me? It's clear information. That information has to do with who we are. It's not just an idea, so we're even more motivated to make sense out of the dissonance. Exactly. And what we are inclined to do, and given a choice between modifying the self-concept or throwing out the evidence, is we throw out the evidence. So we minimize it. It's not really important. It's not really true. Who are you telling me that I'm wrong about this? Who are you to tell me I really did such a harmful thing? You know, go away and don't darken my door again. In this way, we get to sleep at night, secure in the knowledge that we really are good, kind, competent, and ethical after all. We dismiss the evidence that is dissonant. Okay, here is the most dissonant situation we find ourselves in. When I, a good, kind, competent, fair person, is confronted with evidence that I've just done something not kind, unethical, incompetent, and so forth, I have a choice. I can accept the evidence and say, oh, thank you for showing me that I've just made a colossal mistake that has caused an enormous harm to those I love or the patients in my care, or I can tell you where you can go with your stupid evidence. And what most people do, unfortunately, when faced with the dissonance between their self-concept and the evidence, is they are inclined to dismiss the evidence. This is how tyrants sleep at night, how charlatans sleep at night, how people who bulk others out of millions of dollars sleep at night. It's not that they go to bed knowing or thinking they're villains, they get rid of that evidence so that they can live with themselves. Exactly right. And in a way, as Elliott is at pains to point out, this is a healthy and adaptive quality of the human mind, if you will. If we had to keep changing our minds seven times before lunchtime because of new evidence, we'd never get anything done. We come up with beliefs, we come up with general notions about ourselves, and we let that belief carry us through the day. And for the most part, that's an efficient way for the mind to work. The problem comes, of course, when we really need to change our beliefs, when we really need to listen to disconfirming evidence, and we're unable to do so. You mentioned charlatans, makes me think of folks like TV psychic Sylvia Brown, on Montell Williams show all the time. Montell Williams and Sylvia Brown did this high-priced tour, the end of 2009, where she's selling her wares as a psychic. Lot of skeptics say, how can she sleep with herself at night? But this social psychology that you're talking about, dissonance theory, it explains how. She doesn't actually believe she's harming people. That's exactly right. When we say she doesn't, neither do we I mean, one of my favorite stories is that baby Dr. Valier, the tyrant in Haiti, puts up a sign saying, I'd like the world to see me as the man who brought democracy to Haiti, and he signed it, Jean-Claude de Valier, President for Life. He was a dictator, a cruel and horrible man, and saw himself as the man who brought democracy to Haiti. That's how he slept at night. This mechanism is what allows us to deceive ourselves and forgive ourselves. It works like this. We now understand that dissonance theory really is a nice way, an umbrella term for a lot of the biases of how the human mind works, and it works like this. Before we make a decision or decide on a belief or take a course of action, we tend to be open-minded. What does that mean? We're open to evidence, pro and con for that decision or that belief. But once we make the decision, we buy a Prius rather than a Honda, or we buy one house over another house, or one take one job over another job, once we make a decision, or once we come up with a belief, vaccines cause autism. It is as if, as we say in our book, we take a step off a pyramid, and as you make that decision, you will then be motivated to justify the decision you made and to stop even noticing evidence for the decision you didn't make. They call that confirmation bias. That's exactly right, and skeptics know about confirmation bias. All scientists know about confirmation bias because science is the one system we have that's designed to hold our beliefs up to disconfirmation. That is an abnormal process for the human mind. We're really designed only to see information that confirms what we believe, and to ignore or forget information that's discrepancy. That's how dissonance works. So after we've made a decision and we start falling down this, we take steps down this pyramid, by the time we reach the base, we are very far away from people who made the opposite decision and went in a different direction. And moreover, it becomes harder for us to be open-minded enough to consider the evidence that we might have made the wrong decision to begin with. So it's like throwing good money after bad. We're going to just keep going that way. This is why in the case of the vaccine autism people, you'd think they would say, thank you for showing us with all this massive evidence that we weren't responsible for giving our children, creating our children's autism by giving them a vaccine. Thank goodness for this information. Now we can find out what really is the cause of autism. No, they're fighting tooth and nail to maintain their original belief. But again, it's not because they're villains or they have a certain kind of agenda. Even global warming denialism, those folks, while some of them may have a financial interest, may be big oil or something, or people who are involved with intelligent design creationism versus, say, evolution education, they look at what seems to me to be overwhelming evidence and just refuse to follow where it leads. It's like they need their vital lives. They've already made a commitment and it would muck with their psychology too much to change course. It's not like they know that they're lying to themselves. This is the point. This is exactly the point. This is the crucial thing that we say in our book. Cognitive dissonance is not, or I should put it this way, self-justification is not the same thing as lying to others consciously in order to come up with an excuse so that you won't go to prison because you've embezzled some money or so that your spouse won't find out you've had an affair. We know when we're consciously lying to others to avoid punishment, self-justification is more dangerous, more persistent, and more insidious because we aren't aware that we're lying to ourselves, that we are deceiving ourselves. That's what makes this mechanism so interesting because it protects us from the awareness that we're wrong. Now, how do we know how this feels? In our book, we end each chapter with an example of someone who was able to say, oh my god, I was wrong. A therapist who realized she was wrong about recovered memory therapy. Wayne Hale, the head of NASA, who realized it was his responsibility for sending up that shuttle that exploded. A district attorney who realized he had put an innocent man in prison for 16 years. For me, those stories made it all the more powerful to understand how hard it is to say I was wrong. And you said exactly the right word, the greater a person's commitment to a belief or a point of view or a course of action, the greater their commitment, especially the greater their public commitment, the harder it is to say I was wrong. Why? Imagine yourself in that situation. You believed right along that vaccines have nothing to do with autism, and now someone gives you a terrific study showing, you know what? It's actually pretty persuasive. I'm trying to reverse the situation. How difficult that would be to say, whoa, for 15 years, I thought this wasn't the case, and now you're asking me to change my mind. Well, and you're raising questions about how this applies to skeptics as well. So maybe there's some close-mindedness in the skeptical world. I want to finish up with a conversation about that, but you were mentioning these examples of people who didn't follow maybe their natural cognitive biases and self-justify. They admitted their own role in these mistakes. It makes me also think of Alan Greenspan, whom I respect, if for no other reason than on Capitol Hill after what worldwide economic fallout, the crisis. He said, I messed up. I was wrong. He didn't say mistakes were made, but not by me. He assumed responsibility, and that's almost unheard of when you're talking about big mess-ups like that. Exactly. And you know what? Look at how people respond. You know, people often fear admitting that they were wrong or that they made a mistake, but the fact is that everyone around them is more likely to be grateful for it, you know? So if you're a calculating person, and I'm not saying this should be your only motivation, but you might want to admit your errors in thinking or when you did something wrong, just because it's socially advantageous. Often it is beneficial for people to admit they were wrong, and the reason is that it makes them more human to their friends and partners. I mean, how many people would really be angry if their loved one said to them, you know, honey, I've been thinking about this quarrel we've been having for the last 27 years, and you know what? You are entirely right, and I was completely wrong. I don't think they would get in trouble for that, you know? But of course, people worry and often rightly worry that if they admit mistakes at work or in that kind of context that they could be liable for the consequences. So I'm not talking about the social reasons for not admitting mistakes. We know we've made when you think you might be punished for them, but rather something more complicated. What happens when we're able to shed the protective cocoon of righteousness and really examine the evidence the way we would ideally like a scientist to? What really is the evidence that this causes that, or that this is so, or that this is not so? What really does the evidence tell us? The important thing to understand is that the more we have invested in a point of view in terms of years, in terms of financial success, Sylvia Brown is making her living with these cockamamie predictions. She's got financial incentives to believe what she does. She has cognitive incentives. She's not going to wake up one morning and say, gee, I guess that everything I've done in my entire life has been wrong. Who among us is able to do this? And the reason that people are not is the reason that we reduce dissonance in a self-forgiving way. It's excruciating to face the realization that everything you've believed of something that was of great importance to you is wrong. How do you give that up without feeling that you've been an absolute idiot? Well, let's get into that a bit because while you talk about how rare it is, we both know examples of folks who do just that. So I think of friends in the skeptics movement who, for years, were knee-deep into the paranormal or the new age movement, and they had a kind of deconversion experience. Something happened where they said, oh, criminy, I'm completely wrong about these claims. So you go to a psychic. Most people who go to psychic fairs or to a psychic like Sylvia Brown or John Edward, they don't want to admit that they're being huckstered, that they're being deceived. And I think dissonance theory helps explain how we actually misremember stuff to make it better for the psychic or say that you're into dowsing. Every time you tell an account of your own dowsing experience, even if you're an amateur and not making a buck on it, you're going to make it sound better and better. It's not that you're meaning to lie, but you just can't admit that you're flat out wrong. And I think the best example that's just loud and clear in my experience is from ledger domain, from magic. I've gone to entertain at cocktail parties years ago, and I go back the next year to be the entertainment. And people recount to me a magic trick that I did, and I never did it, right? They describe something that's humanly impossible, but they kind of misremember. And I think that misremembering fuels the self-justification in this other context. That's indeed one of the mechanisms that we talk about, that memory is a self-justifying historian. Memory keeps things consonant if it's a memory of how our parents treated us or how we were in the past and so forth. The best predictor of our memories is what we believe now, not what really happened then. I think that's such an enchanting thing. It's why if you're currently feeling really good about your mother, you remember how good she was to you as a kid, and if you're really pissed off at your mother, you remember all the bad things she did for you. You're keeping the current view consonant. And yes, magic, of course, depends on, or dowsing, or all non-falsifiable theories are based on the confirmation bias that people will notice the hits and ignore or forget or trivialize the misses. And that allows us to continue to think, oh, well, this, you know, this dowsing thing, you know, look how often we get hits. We don't notice the misses. But you see, the thing we start with is what is the major central belief? See, for skeptics and for scientists, if your basic self-concept is, I am a skeptical person who is open to disconfirming evidence because I find that interesting and illuminating, and it's how I learn, then being exposed to information that is disconfirming or something you don't want to hear isn't necessarily dissonant. Well, in principle, that's the ideal you're describing. But even though I love that in science, in principle, the best ideas rise to the top. You know, the scientists are rewarded the most when they come up with theories that prove everybody else wrong. That's, you know, in principle, I notice in skepticism as a movement, and even in science, you know, you talk about scientific revolutions and how people are incalcitrant in their views, there's sometimes a lot of closed-mindedness. And I say this as a leader in this little movement. I don't want to kind of criticize my own. But what I'm getting at is that for some skeptics, they just can't conceive that they could be wrong about this or that claim. That's cognitive dissonance again, right? DJ, first of all, when you say you don't want to criticize your own, if you don't, who will? A point taken. No, I feel very strongly about this. I've heard this all my life, feminist thing. We don't want to criticize other feminists who are believers in this recovered memory stuff because after all, you know, there are sisters. No, the ideas are wrong. They're wrong and they're harmful. And that's what's important. We must criticize members of our own family first and foremost because that is how we come to our own decisions and views about things and also because it's the intellectually honest thing to do. You don't stand by and watch harm being done if you can possibly speak out. And you can do this in a supportive and loving and generous way. It doesn't mean you have to call people names either. But all of us are human beings. Cognitive dissonance is a universal phenomenon. The content of it will vary because the sources of people's self-esteem or their self-concept are different across different cultures. But anybody in any culture when confronted with dissonant information, I mean, there are those who think that some of the rage of people in radical Islam is the dissonance they feel between the belief that my religion is the best of all in the world and the fact that so many Muslims are living in poverty and in difficult circumstances. You know, how can this be? Well, the West must have taken our civilization from us. Dissonance is a motivating phenomenon everywhere, including for humans, including for skeptics, and including for scientists. And that's what I really love about this book. I take Galat from this book for the skeptic movement as a whole. Without naming it this, you describe what I've called the Mensa effect. So in the skeptic world, you get together in a, you know, skeptics in the pub meeting or something, and we suffer from the Mensa effect, where one really smart person says, I'm a smart skeptic, therefore I'm right. And you're a skeptic and you're really smart, so you should know that I'm right. And that's the jutting of heads in the skeptic movement that you get sometimes even more than you get in some other sectors of society. Let's put it that way. You've said something very important. Remember, I said before that what is most dissonance for us is when information threatens a core belief about ourselves. I don't see myself as a car expert, therefore if someone criticizes my knowledge of cars, I'm inclined to say, oh, thank you very much for this information. Skeptics, as you've just said eloquently, defined themselves by their intelligence and smarts. Therefore, someone disagreeing with them is an immediate attack on their view of themselves as intelligent and smart, and by the way, in all domains. And so for them in a way more than ever, it's difficult to accept disconfirming evidence that might suggest that perhaps on this point you weren't in fact so smart. In relation to this, one of the most important, I think, but also funny implications of our book is that the one sure and certain way that you will not get anyone else to change their minds is to put them in dissonance, meaning you say to them, DJ, what were you thinking? How could you possibly believe such an incredibly stupid and ludicrous thing? Are you a man? What's the matter with you? That will actually keep people from accepting the new evidence. The more I learn about dissonance theory, the more skeptical I am that just telling people that God or ghosts or some paranormal or supernatural claim doesn't exist, right? The evidence doesn't matter to some folks because these other psychological factors are at work, and if you tell people they're idiots, you'll only engage those psychological phenomena. Exactly. If you threaten their fundamental belief or self-concept, they will cling to that belief more tenaciously and reduce the dissonance by attacking you. You can see this in relationships, in intimate relationships. You can see this at work. You can see it with your employer, and you can certainly see it politically and socially and in intellectual movements. You don't get people to change their minds by making them feel stupid. So let me ask you, what's the right way to approach the skeptical movements, cultural competitors? You know, the folks who don't share my skepticism about God or ghosts or the supernatural, it almost sounds like you're saying the research in dissonance theory says that just speaking the truth to them is not enough. We need to be more cunning in our approach. It kind of makes me feel a little manipulative, cunning is an interesting word. Well, okay, the shortest answer to your question is, I don't know, but we should have a whole session on this one, because it's a very important question. I do not think that you can get people to dislodge their religious belief, or their paranormal beliefs, or their political beliefs by having furious arguments. This isn't going to budge the conversation one way or another. The way that religious people change their views is by listening to other religious people who move them along. I learned this, interestingly, from an ACLU lawyer who pointed out to us, he was talking about religion and the Constitution and so forth, and he said, you know, if you make Americans choose between science and religion, they will choose religion, partly because they feel they should, and for some because religion is a central core defining life organizing set of values for them. So if you say you have a choice between being a religious person or believing in evolution, they're going to say the hell with evolution. But if you say within the religious community, some religious people support evolution, and some do not, so let us examine the beliefs of those for whom evolution and religion are compatible. In this way, you don't make people choose. You're not saying to them, you have to give up a central core belief in order to understand what evolution means and why it's important. This is a very different approach, as you can see. I mean, it's great fun to listen to the great arguments between atheists and believers and so forth, but it's not going to budge anybody any more than arguments between Democrats and Republicans are going to budge either side. What's necessary is for someone within your own party, within your own family, within your own religion to say here's what we should be thinking about, because then you remove the dissonance for the listener. I get what you're saying and how it could be more strategic, but what if you're like me and you think the implications of evolution are atheistic or the implication of scientific skepticism is against the beliefs of the paranormal. It's not enough to just kind of, at least for me, maybe I'm just not constitutionally capable of easing someone along. I want to just speak the truth at all costs, no matter how painful. Well, then you should. Then you should. And your ideas will fall where they fall. But you're just saying it's not as strategic as the approach you just outlined. Well, who's listening to you and who are you trying to influence? I mean, I remember years ago with my book on anger. People would say to me, be careful how you express anger. It's going to land on someone. You might feel better for a second, but someone else is now going to be really angry at you. There are two reasons you could express anger. One is you want to feel better, because you're really pissed off and you'd like to let the world know that. And the second reason is you'd like the other person to apologize or change their behavior or fix what they did wrong and you want to get them to change in some way. Those are two different reasons for expressing anger. If your reason is just to feel better, go ahead and yell. If your reason is to get the other person to change, then you might want to think about a different way of expressing anger to them. The crux of it, I think you're getting at is it depends on who your audience is. Exactly. If you care deeply about the truth and you just want the truth out there, you want to kind of forcefully say the truth no matter how many apple carts it upsets, do that. But if your audience is this middle ground of people, the people who are on the fence or something in that category, you take the approach you just outlined. It is always in my view worth speaking up in this country for skepticism, for science, for secularism, for atheism, for a whole set of values that do not conform to the dominant religious view and certainly a fundamentalist in our country. That is worth it just for its own sake for the world to know that this is not a small, cranky minority group, you know what I mean? So that people are exposed to these ideas, understand that they're not anomalous and strange and this is why we believe as we do. That is always a goal worth speaking out for. That's one thing. Second is the question of who the audience is and what we want to persuade them of. During the heyday of the recovered memory movement in the United States, I spoke truth to power as I thought. As a social scientist and as a feminist, I thought it was crucial to point out that the notions of recovered memory therapy were spurious, unscientific, wrong-headed, and dangerous. That this was not the way memory works. It's not the way trauma works. It's not that the notions of this therapy were really dangerous. People were accused of doing stuff. There was no evidence they did and lawsuits and all that stuff. Lives were ruined. Lives were ruined. Hundreds and hundreds of lives were ruined. The daycare center people, some of them are still in prison after all these many years. Right. All those Satanism scares, all that. All of that. Okay. Now, who was I trying to persuade? I certainly had no influence on the dozens and dozens of psychiatrists and psychotherapists who were perpetrating this nonsense, on the courage to heal those popular books. They were not going to listen to me and say, oh, thank you, Dr. Davis, for your wonderful information about memory and trauma. We will go and revise our book immediately. I will change my therapy practice at once. Of course not. They called me anti-feminist. They called me all kinds of names. They were not going to change, but what was really crucial was to get this point of view out to lawyers and to judges and to the general public who wasn't really paying too much attention to realize what egregious harms were being committed by these people. So that's a different audience you're trying to reach to explain the importance of science and investigating these claims. So I knew I was not going to persuade the perpetrators of recovered memory therapy, but it was really crucial to speak out about what they were doing wrong, just as it's crucial for skeptics to speak out about why psychics are wrong so forth. But your audience determines your strategy. That's the point there. I'd like to let our listeners know that you can get a copy of mistakes we're made through our website forgoodreason.org. Like I said earlier, I've really enjoyed and gotten a lot out of this book. If you care about deception and self-deception, you should pick it up through our website. Carol, I think there are so many implications to dissonance theory that we've only scratched the surface on. We could talk about law implications for the justice system. My spouse is in law school, so we're talking about that all the time, and prosecutors who refuse to admit some guy on maybe even death row is innocent even if the DNA evidence exonerates. So there's so much to talk about. But I want to talk about right now happiness. If you're truthful about yourself, might it actually be harmful for your mental health, or at least make us less happy? That's what I mean. If we go around grasping all the ways that we were wrong, it's going to upset how well adjusted we are. In other words, I'm asking, isn't self-deception absolutely necessary for us to thrive? Yes, but we're really talking about self-justification rather than self-deception. Let's make a distinction here. When we've made a decision and hold a belief, we justify it as being the wisest, smartest, best possible decision we could have made, and indeed, that is beneficial to our health. In fact, we all know people who can't resolve dissonance, and the consequence for them is the sleepless night problem. These are the people who beat themselves up. I bought this car, but I really should have bought that other car. Oh my god, I was so stupid. How could I have bought this car when I should have bought the other car? Okay, we all know people like that. They live their lives with regret and self-torment. I should have, should have, should have. I did the wrong thing. How stupid I was to have believed that when I should have believed this other thing. So in their suffering, we can see what the mental health benefits are for the majority of people who in fact make a decision and then live with it and justify it and sleep soundly. Okay, of course, the ability to reduce dissonance is beneficial for our mental health, and so it should be. For the most part, this is a fine and useful thing for all of us. It does help us avoid the sleepless night problem, the agony of remorse and regret. You're just focused on when it gets really destructive. When it gets destructive. Exactly. When it sets us on, not just one decision, I bought this car versus that car, but when it sets us on a path of action that we can't get ourselves off of, even when that path is leading us right into quicksand, right into a disastrously violent marriage, right into any self-defeating or dangerous path of action where we just keep justifying the thing we're doing or the belief we're holding, even when it is crumbling under the evidence that we were wrong. Or you broaden it and you look at the destructive aspect of self-justification when you're a psychic telling people who are in the process of grief that their deceased loved one is standing right by them and playing a guessing game, whatever. It doesn't help people, it causes harm, and that righteous indignation skeptics feel about those situations lead to something else you talk in the book. It's the kind of us versus them mentality, the skeptical movement. I think sometimes we tend to make our opponents all bad. We call people who believe in the paranormal woo-woos. They're all idiots or worse. They're all liars. The religious folk do it too. They think all atheists are immoral and evil. That's why you said we should speak up, speak out. So what's the solution? I don't want everyone to get along only by ignoring our differences in our worldviews, but if you don't ignore them, then you are into this us versus them stuff. Well, the us versus them, let's take, there's two pieces of us versus them. One is sometimes there is an us versus them. That is two different points of view that are not compatible. Yeah, there are real differences that are divisive. Each of us make our own commitment to stating our case for the things that we believe are important as best as we can. But the second aspect of this is to understand that we is them. Them are us. That is, you said before, you want to speak the truth about Sylvia Brown and other psychics and so forth or about people who are religious, but you know, they feel they have a truth too. The word truth is an inflammatory word because what is true to you and to me has a different meaning to others who believe that they have the truth as well. And with that, you're not talking all post-modernistic, you're just saying, you know, socially people have different views. That's what you're saying. Yes, I'm not saying all ideas are created equal and that everybody is right. No, absolutely not. Thank you for making that point. Of course not. No scientist would agree with that. Opinions may be, you get to set your opinion or your taste or your preference, but when you start making claims that are empirically verifiable or disconfirmable, then not all opinions are created equal, of course. But by truth, I mean, you see, the word is an inflammatory word. As soon as you say to somebody, I have the truth and you don't. They're gone. They're out of there. They're out the door because you've now said to them, this thing that you have lived by that is the truth for you, that God is looking over your shoulder and taking care of you, forget that. Just forget it. You're wrong and I've got the truth. Well, what they will say to you is my truth is that God is looking after me. I'm not giving that one up. So now what exactly? All that speaking the truth has done is to create a greater wedge. Again, though, DJ, this has to do with what the audience is and what the lesson is and what the point of view is. So, for example, when charlatans are making money ripping off people, then they should be exposed. It doesn't mean that they will say, oh, thank you for pointing out to me that I can't really channel this guy from another world. They're not going to admit it. They would be liable in lawsuits. You can persuade their audiences. But you're saying the righteous indignation that skeptics feel is not misplaced there as long as it's focused primarily on the people being harmed and not going on this kind of fool's errand of trying to change the mind of the claimant. Exactly right. So Carol is the solution here to reach out to people who believe unlike us. I think of this growing skeptics and the pub movement, you know, these groups all over the United States. There's a big one here in St. Louis now. Maybe the implication of what you're saying I'm hearing, maybe they should be more open to all comers, right? You know, it's not just skeptics in the pub, but it's people who care about these questions in the pub, right? That presents some challenges, I think, to organizing because on the other hand, I think there's some rationale to being somewhat exclusive or exclusivist. If we have these clubs all over that accept everyone, they're not really clubs, you know, they're just kind of people in a pub. Well, it depends on what the defining membership requirement is. Is the requirement of being a skeptic that you can't be a religious person? I think that would be a mistake. I think that the one of the things that really distressed me that the Center for Inquiry did with this blasphemy day business, that really distressed me because it seemed to me to be gratuitously insulting to religious people. Right, to people who shared the values maybe of the Center for Inquiry except for the blasphemy. Exactly, exactly. Plenty of people who believe in God are good scientists and good skeptics and love science and skepticism, but if you're going to run around insulting them, why should they want to find any common ground on the kinds of things that are so important for our country right now? Leaving aside my personal view that blasphemy is a victimless crime, literally, I agree with you that there are these strategic questions raised. If you're trying to build a broad base to advance critical thinking, insulting a big segment of that base is shooting yourself in the foot. It is. That's my view exactly. As I say, there's two reasons for expressing our views. One is to feel better and the other is to change people's minds and to bring people along. I think it is really, really important for skeptics to speak out about what it is we are for and not just what it is we wish to debunk this week and to show what is gained when we are able to face the ways in which we've been wrong. Many people think of skepticism as debunking. It's like critical thinking. It means you're critical. You don't like my dress. I'm being critical of that movie. No. Critical thinking, skeptical thinking is about creativity and imagination. It is about two things. Being able to say, this method in medicine or teaching or any other area is wrong. It really doesn't work. We've measured it now and look. It's not producing the results we wanted. You're talking about some pseudo-scientific claims, say, in medicine or pedagogy or something that skeptics would go against saying that it's wrong. Yes, facilitated communication, for example. Or a method in medicine that was established practiced for 50 years, only now it turns out not to be so important or useful or good or not as good as a newer method. What skepticism gives us, I think this is so important, is it's not just tearing down. It's not just saying, gee, this method doesn't work. It's saying, now we can find something that's better. We can find a better way of treating this problem. We can find a better way of reaching out to autistic children or treating autistic children. It's creative. It is not just tearing down. Skepticism, it's affirmative, you're saying. It's not just naysaying. It's not just cynicism. It's skepticism in maybe the classical sense of the term, which means to inquire, to find things out, to look for the best evidence for things. For you, and this is one of the things I take away from the book, another reason why I tell everyone they should get it, skepticism is not just used as a weapon to conk others over the head with. It's an affirmative approach and it's best when it's self-applied. That is the heart and soul of my life and of this book. Don't we want doctors to wash their hands because it will save lives? Don't we want psychologists to have better ways of interviewing children so that we don't put innocent people in prison? Don't we want better methods of determining whether a suspect is guilty or innocent so that we don't have people in prison for 30 years for a crime they didn't commit? Don't we want better ways of running companies and of improving our cars? Only when we're able to say to admit that we were doing things the wrong way because the evidence shows us it was the wrong way can we determine the right way and the better way. Last question, Carol. Here you've persuasively talked about skepticism's positive aspects you know this positive approach not just tearing down but nonetheless skepticism does tear down the nonsense and we do that unapologetically. We go after stuff we think is incorrect but here we're talking about self-justification and changing our own minds. Have you as a skeptic ever changed your own mind about some claim? Have you ever been wrong as a skeptic? Of course not. Why? What makes you think I would ever have been wrong? Of course I have. Oh boy of course I have and actually you know I'm the co-author of an introductory psychology textbook. Widely used in universities all over. Well yes it is thank you and I mean we were the first actually to bring critical thinking as a as a guiding philosophy to the to the field into this book and my co-author and I keep each other honest this way you know she will say to me as we go to revise a new edition you were wrong you know but when you said about this and this and I say I was not whatever do you mean and Jesus I mean we joke about this but as textbook writers we had better be able to change our notions of you know ideas that we thought were really important and useful I remember how excited we all were about Carol Gilligan's theory of the moral reasoning in women all of this seems to be such a wonderful corrective to the male bias in the field and it turned out to be complete blather there was no data there was no support for it it had a little you know flash of interest certainly in the public but it was completely wrong so there you have it Carol Tavris admitted mistakes were made and by her by me yes I do them frequently thanks for the discussion Carol before we go I want to announce to our listeners that you are going to be a featured speaker at the amazing meeting in Vegas this year July 8th through 11th so that's another good reason for folks to register online at randy.org well I'm really happy that you invited me DJ and I'm very much looking forward to coming to the conference which should be great fun and I will do my best to raise a little hell with our fellow skeptics I love it I love it thanks for coming on the show enjoyed our discussion me too DJ thanks so much and now another installment of the honest liar Jamie Ian Swiss what does a villain see in the mirror when thinking about the nature of phony psychics have I mentioned that's redundant I often can't quite help myself from speculating about their mindset it's hard not to wonder about what's going on in the minds of fortune tellers spoon benders talk to the dead mediums or the endless glut of television psychic ambulance chasers who latch themselves on to any missing or dead body in desperate hopes of securing a few morbid moments of camera time for those of us who believe that most if not all of these lowly character types are fakes and frauds it's easy to imagine if not insist that such apparent moral outlaws can't escape seeing themselves as villains and must recognize if not even embrace the role but this is in fact unlikely and the truth like most human behavior is more complicated in order to think about this we have to first distinguish between self-styled psychics who must by definition be deliberate self-aware frauds and those who might not always be so if you're a spoon bender for example you know you're doing sleight of hand you have to manipulate the silverware secretly and engage in other deliberate deceits from the magician's bag of tricks in order to pull off the illusion and it's plainly impossible to deceive yourself into not knowing that you're doing such things but while the majority of psychic types are probably engaging in some kind of deliberate deception once you eliminate the elements of physical manipulation or the obtaining of secret information by subterfuge for say use in a psychic reading there remains a broad spectrum of behavior and thinking that makes it difficult to be certain about the inner workings of another person's mind no matter what we think of their behavior while most storefront psychics are indeed ruthless con artists ever at the ready to rob someone of their life savings and the guise of removing a curse or resolving a problem of the heart there are also some psychics who believe they have a gift and all psychic practitioners are helped along in this belief by the self-selecting group of believers who present them with a steady flow of positive and confirming feedback skeptics after all don't generally sign up to visit the neighborhood psychic on a steady basis week in and week out just to continually remind her that most of what she's done or said has been ineffectual and just plain wrong when we catch a faith healer ripping the cash out of the mail and shredding the letters from supplicants without even troubling to read them we may surmise a cynical and manipulative worldview when we listen to the likes of a talk to the dead medium like john edward recite the same tiny set of repetitive techniques over and over again guessing at letters or names or months of the year we can certainly speculate that he is merely guessing and even that he knows it too why is it if you actually had the power to cross the void between life and death that the connection gets reduced to a bad game of charades why is it that once you're dead you can still talk but you can't quite remember your name but for all this apparent villainy it is only in the movies that the villain gazes into his own eyes in the mirror and declares mirror mirror on the wall who is the most villainous villain of all tis high tis high because nobody looks in the mirror and ever sees a villain john edwards website calendar currently lists more than 50 dates in the coming year in which he will fill thousand seat halls and more with tickets selling at 175 dollars a crack try doing the math here yourself filled with satisfied customers who will stand to applaud his very presence the instant he mounts the stage a heady 21st century blend of quasi religious leader and tv celebrity those accolades tell him something and not just that there's a sucker born every minute as the channeled spirit of pt barnham might remind him of asked but those cheering fans also tell him what he tells himself that he is helping people that he is doing good in the world and so it is quite possible even perhaps likely that he might well even admit to himself the occasional or more than occasional dalliance and deception all the while excusing it in the name of the greater good he tells himself he is providing now make no mistake this story as told to the self in service to the resolution of what would otherwise cause a disturbing and ongoing cognitive dissonance is a tissue of self deception and a distortion of reality talk to the dead mediums claim to help people but in fact do the opposite they entrap people in their grief encouraging victims to remain obsessed with death rather than help release them to move forward and return to embracing the future and life itself talk to the dead mediums are among the world's most vicious emotional predators who distort the purity of our memories and the genuine truths of relationships we've had with loved ones who have lived and eventually died only a monster would prey on the grief of a parent who has buried their own child but talk to the dead mediums do it all the time and for nothing more than raw personal riches and the brutally attained high of what it feels like to play god but cognitive dissonance is hardwired into us a magic trick of sorts that our brains play on us in order to make us feel right or at least to help prevent us from feeling too bad about being wrong even the likes of oj simpson whose scientific evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates murdered the mother of his children with his own hands probably doesn't see a villain in his bathroom mirror in fact he might just see an unjustly maligned even persecuted hero albeit one wearing a prison uniform so what does a villain see when he looks in the mirror a grand portrait painted by an artist named cognitive dissonance this is jamie in swiss and i am the honest liar thank you for listening to this episode of for good reason to get involved with an online conversation about today's show join the discussion at forgoodreason.org views expressed on for good reason aren't necessarily the views of the jref questions and comments on today's show can be sent to info at forgoodreason.org for good reason is produced by thomas donnelly and recorded from st louis missouri our music is composed for us by m a award nominated gary stockdale contributors to today's show included jamie in swiss and christina stevens i'm your host dj groovy