 afternoon. I didn't realize that being a skeptic required massive amounts of stamina. Days now, days of information, science, excitement, booze, drugs, food, sleeplessness, and you're still here. I mean, hello. I am impressed. I am impressed. This has been a meeting of many, of kind of a braid of themes, don't you think? I mean, yesterday when I arrived at the airport, I was met, of course, by the TAM people, and Bill Nye was in the car with me, and I was so excited. Bill Nye, I'd never met him before, but of course I'd heard him, so I started off by saying how much I enjoyed his presentation last year at TAM, and he said, I've never been to TAM. So that's when I realized I'd had an imported memory, a memory malfunction, which of course Dr. Loftus has explained all to us today. So there you go. I have spent my life writing about psychological science, gender issues, and critical thinking. I mean, after all, if you're going to take on one impossible subject, you might as well go for the trifecta and do three impossible ones at once. So anybody who does this knows the challenges. When I first started out, my problem was that people thought psychological science was an oxymoron, like airline food. And so you had to explain that no, there really was a science in psychology, and people really were doing extraordinary good research. Now, so today people understand that there is such a thing as psychological science, but there is a great temptation to oversimplify and reduce the findings we get, such as work in behavioral genetics, where here we have a judge who has the general concept of gene, but has decided that there is probably a pornography gene, which has not yet been discovered, but will be one day. So we have a good scientist at work in our judicial system. And of course, in the area of gender, we also have to deal with the problem of reductionism and oversimplification. It seems to be I've been dealing with this for many, many years. Today, for example, there is the notion that men and women differ in essential, fundamental ways in our brains. I have been trying to drive a stake through the heart of this notion for most of my life, but you can't do it. It is the Dracula of gender research. Every few years, somebody comes around and get once again and says, no, no, men and women differ in fundamental basic ways, and it's all in the brain. When I was growing up, there were no women bus drivers, attorneys general, general generals, secretaries of state, rabbis, Supreme Court justices, or hot dog vendors at baseball stadiums. I think this might have been because people thought it was unseemly for young women to be handling hot dogs. I really can't imagine why. It was not, of course, all bad in those days. PMS had not been invented when I was growing up. It was invented in 1964 for those of you who are interested. And, of course, as for critical thinking, that's an interesting concept, too. I remember when critical thinking was called education. There was no separate thing called critical thinking. It was education. And then suddenly there was a critical thinking movement. And then, of course, it became how do we teach students how to think scientifically and critically? And then we realized that they were interpreting this word critical as being negative, and so we began changing the term to critical and creative thinking or critical and scientific thinking. And now we realize the problem is not just getting people to think critically and scientifically, but to explain why so often we don't. What are the cognitive mechanisms that allow us to think critically and scientifically about ideas and behavior we don't like, but block us from thinking critically about our own beliefs and our own bad behavior? My talks are almost always on some aspect of psychological science because I love that field and I love the research it's produced that has been so helpful to people in our real lives. As Dr. Loftus' talk I think illustrated beautifully. But today I would like to add a personal dimension because I've been thinking about what the study of this science has taught me personally about communicating science and skepticism, and what that might mean for the future of our movement. The good news is that this movement is now huge. Look at the size of this audience and you are the tip of the iceberg of people interested in this subject. The bad news is that this movement is now huge, which means there will be inevitably internal divisions, disagreements, and furious fights as there are in every family as we saw this very day on the lectern podium debate. Let me start with my own influences. My mother and father had two very different styles of communication. My father would roar. He was really good at roaring and fulminating to persuade others of the rightness of his position. He was fearless, always willing to speak truth to power, and in those grim, gray, oppressive years of the McCarthy era. That was not an easy thing to do when so many of our family's friends who were teachers and scientists, not just the screenwriters in Hollywood, were losing their jobs. In contrast, my mother used reason and charm to persuade. She became a lawyer in 1927 at the age of 21 in Chicago and doing she goes to apply for a job as a law secretary and the boss hired her and then he said, you aren't Jewish, are you? And she said, well, yes, I am. Why? Well, he said, we don't hire Jews. Oh, she said, why? Well, he said, they're so noisy. And at just that moment, the screaming voice of the office manager came bellowing through the office and my mother said, ah, I see the wisdom of your decision. You've already hired one and regret it. She got the job and eventually she overcame his other prejudice against women lawyers. So my parents you see taught me the benefits of being bilingual when it comes to persuasion and the field of social psychology really illustrates the reasons for the success of many strategies of persuasion. There is, I've come to realize in my work in gender equality is there is a time and place for shouting, especially when you know the opposition is so vested in its position and so powerful that it does not care what you think and when the goal is to enlist allies and inspire them in a long fight. And then there is a time and a place for the gentle arts of persuasion when the goal is to acquire allies for the long fight when you want the job as it were. Sadie Crabtree this morning spoke perfectly about what those techniques of persuasion might be and I commend her talk to you highly. My first venture into communicating psychological science was to write a book on anger, which reported the decades of experimental clinical and field research that clearly demolished the belief in catharsis. You know this, this is the popular notion in our culture that ventilating anger feels good, it gets it out of your system, you won't get an ulcer, never mind where the hell it lands and who it lands on, you will feel terrific. Okay, here we have a typical example of the benefits of catharsis from the internet currently. Notice this last sentence, with the correct prompting, it is surprising how rapidly people can begin to experience their anger. Well, this was the common notion about ventilation and in fact the research shows just the opposite. Catharsis may feel good for a moment, but it usually makes the recipient even angrier back at you, it makes you even angrier as you get your heart rate going and it rehearses a hostile habit. You can see that my book was instrumental in promoting the rise of civility in American discourse. Actually, the research shows pretty clearly why civility in America came to be in peril. The vicious expressions of anger are especially likely to flourish under three conditions, when the expressor is anonymous, when the message can be sent impulsively, with no chance to count to ten, and when there are no consequences for the sender. The internet, anyone? So last year, when I spoke on cognitive dissonance, I talked about the importance of this mechanism for understanding why it is that it is so difficult for us to accept evidence that we might be wrong. This is a subject that, well, is very near to my heart and the more I have talked about it and heard from people about their own experiences with it, the more I have learned. I've learned, you know, you write a book, it's a two-way conversation, which I invite you to share with me. Dissonance is defined this way, cognitive dissonance. It occurs when two attitudes or an attitude and a behavior conflict. The classic example, of course, is the smoker, a smoker who knows that smoking is hazardous to your health, but wants to keep doing it. The important point about dissonance is that, like hunger, it is motivating. It is uncomfortable. We want to reduce it. The smoker has to quit or justify smoking. We now have more than 3,000 experiments in cognitive psychology, social psychology, evolutionary psychology that have confirmed how this mechanism works and the biases of memory and perception that underlie it. Researchers, of course, nowadays, people don't think you're doing science unless you have a brain and so they have indeed tracked dissonance into the brain and basically found what was happening in the brain while people were processing dissonant or consonant information about their favorite political candidate. And basically, as you see, we have learned here that motivated reasoning, being in a state of dissonance, is qualitatively distinct from reasoning when people do not have a strong emotional stake in the conclusions reached. Could this be relevant to skepticism? One wonders. So, dissonance is especially painful and especially motivating under two conditions. One is when we have invested time, money, effort, reputation or pain in some activity or on behalf of some belief that turns out to be wrong or foolish or baseless. This is called the justification of effort technique, mechanism. And what we will do is rather than say, gee, I just spent all that time, money, effort and pain in promoting something that turns out to be wrong, we will instead maintain our view of ourselves as being smart, competent and wise and justify our investment in what we did. Here's one adorable study illustrating this. They found that a self-help study program was a complete bust. Students enrolled in this program, hoping it would help them improve their grades. At the end of the study, their grades were not improved, but the students all said the program had helped them enormously. How could this be? How could they say this? You have the data, the grades didn't improve. How they did it was by revising their memories. They couldn't dispute the result, so they changed their memories of how bad off they were at the start. And in that way, they could maintain the program had actually helped them. The researchers called this way of reducing dissonance, getting what you want by revising what you had. The second condition that makes dissonance especially painful and motivating occurs when a central concept of our, a central element of our self-concept is threatened. When the information we get disputes how we see ourselves, a central belief about ourselves, that we're scientific, that we're skeptical, that we're smart, that we're ethical, that we're competent in some particular domain. The more important the belief is to us, the more central it is to our self identity, to our political ideology, and to our feelings of self worth, the harder it will be to accept dissonant information. The problem we face then is not just bad or foolish people doing bad and foolish things and justifying them. It's good people, smart people, ethical people, competent people who do foolish and wrong-headed things and justify them in order to preserve their belief that they're smart, good, ethical, and competent. So last night when Neil deGrasse Tyson seemed to be surprised that the failure of the latest doomsday prediction didn't turn all those believers into atheists, all students of dissonance theory could have told him why. All students of dissonance theory understand that when a doomsday prediction fails, it will make the religious person even more religious in any way they can come up with to justify it. Well, he was reading the wrong thing in the Bible or how foolish that he used this chapter rather than that chapter and so forth. The most, the classic way that dissonance was reduced many years ago was our belief in doomsday, our belief that the world was ending, caused God to have sympathy for our planet and saved us all. I preserved my religious belief and I wasn't such an idiot after all to sell the house, the car, and give away my dog. So let me just show you why this matters for our movement and over the long haul. Imagine that we have two students at the top of a pyramid. They are a millimeter apart in their attitudes toward cheating. They don't think it's a great thing to do, but they don't think it's a terrible thing to do. There's worse crimes in the world. Now they're taking an exam and they freeze. They completely freeze. If they don't do well on this exam, they're gonna fail the exam, they're gonna fail the course, and there goes their entire career and no one will ever love them and they'll have a miserable life. So they have a lot of vested in this exam. Now they're given an opportunity to cheat. The student sitting in front of them, the one with the beautiful handwriting, makes her answers available. One cheats impulsively and the other resists impulsively. The minute they take an action, the minute they take that action, they will begin to justify what they did in order to keep their belief and their action in consonance. The one who cheated will now minimize how bad it is to cheat. The one who resisted cheating will now say, cheating is really a terrible thing and it's much more important to be able to resist this. They will immediately begin this process of self-justification. A week later, the one who cheated will really minimize the seriousness of cheating. Please, it's no big deal. Everybody cheats and this is not a major issue, but the one who resisted will think it is a major issue and we should hang all cheaters upside down by their ankles and expel them, by the way. Now the important thing about this is that by the time they have finished this process of self-justification over time, they will come to believe they always had that attitude about cheating. This was an actual experiment that had been done with children, but now I invite you to consider how this metaphor applies to so many dimensions of our lives, how moral panics take hold, how once ethical scientists and physicians can become corrupt, how minor disagreements can turn into major wars. Instead of cheating on an exam substitute, accept industry funding for your research, even though it comes with enough strings to choke a cat, stay in a troubled relationship or get out. Take an unpopular position among your friends or keep quiet. Rush to judgment of a celebrity or a daycare worker accused of some heinous act or here's a concept, wait for the trial evidence. Be persuaded that vaccination caused your child's autism or wait for the data. Fire off a nasty post to someone who's annoyed you or count to 3,211. Side with Dawkins or Tyson on persuasion. Side with Dawkins or Genie Scott on evolution and atheism and what the goals should be. Side with Dawkins or Rebecca Watson on elevators. Do we see a theme here? As soon as we take a position and act in either direction, we will proceed to justify it. And then the mind's biases will kick in to help us out, especially the confirmation bias, which directs us to notice and remember the wisdom of the choice we made and to ignore any possible positive reasons for the choice we didn't make. And with every step of increasing self-justification, it gets harder to climb back up that pyramid and change directions. This is how the smallest rift can become a fisher. I want to suggest to you that an understanding of anger and dissonance has much to offer to skeptics and to our movement, both looking outward as we communicate with the public and looking inward in resolving our own disputes. First, of course, and this has been a theme of this conference. I've been happy to see this. The mechanism, the reason we don't change someone's mind by making them, by saying, implying to them, how could you be so stupid as to have fallen for that hoax? How could you have been so stupid to believe in doomsday and sell your house? How could you be so stupid to think that your version of our quarrel is the right one? I see things clearly after all. If I can just explain things to you about how they really are, you will listen to me and believe me. And if you don't, it's because you're biased. This is how we tend to think. So what we can see from dissonance theory is that in effect what these communications are saying is we are putting people in a state of dissonance. We are forcing them to choose between their view of themselves as smart people who know what they're doing and evidence that they don't. Given that choice, guess which way they're going to fall? This is the reason, by the way, that no one is a racist, an anti-Semite, or a sexist. I'm not anti-Semitic, Mel Gibson said. It's just that the fucking Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world. Mel Gibson does not see himself as an anti-Semite. He feels he has a legitimate, justifiable reason for hating all Jews. So we can see that the goal in dealing with people is not to put them in a state of dissonance which will cause them to retreat to their original position even more firmly. I had this experience myself with a friend of mine last year. We were having a conversation about vaccines and autism and I just sort of took it for granted that we were on the same page about this. And pretty soon I discovered we were in a furious argument. She was really angry with me and it turns out which I had not known that she had an autistic, has an autistic grandson who's nine years old. And as we're having this conversation about vaccines she's getting angrier and angrier and angrier at me until she finally says I have a 165 IQ and a PhD, thank you very much, but it was with that statement that I understood that she was telling me that I was making her feel stupid. I was speaking the way a scientist, me the know-it-all scientist, what do I know? Do I have an autistic child? I do not. How dare I assume that I can speak for her experience with this child and what she knows from having raised him and what she knows from having read whatever she can about autism. That is when I got it. That is when I got the importance in talking to our friends and loved ones of not making the other person feel stupid. You want to bring people along with the same goal when you can. So how much time have I got? Five? Five? Oh, yes. Okay, we'll just hurl through this other sections. The reason I think this lesson is important for us, how we take this into our own tent, if you will, is that our movement is big enough now to have disagreements about our directions, our goals, and our means. These are inevitable. By definition, that means we will often be feeling dissonance when someone we admire says or does something we think is wrong or muddle-headed or insufficiently skeptical or insufficiently atheist or insufficiently whatever the insufficient is. Friends, we have to learn to live with this dissonance. One of my favorite stories, it's a story told of Shimon Perez, who was furious, he was then Prime Minister of Israel, who was furious when his friend Ronald Reagan went to the cemetery at Bitburg where 47 Nazi SS had been buried. You can imagine the rage that spread around the world at Reagan's doing this. And Perez was a friend of Reagan's, and so a reporter said to Perez, what do you feel about your friend Ronald Reagan going to Bitburg? And Perez said, when a friend makes a mistake, the friend remains a friend, and the mistake remains a mistake. This is a guy who is able to separate the two dissonant cognitions and not feel the need to leap to a quick resolution of them. Normally, what do we do when a friend makes a mistake? We minimize or trivialize the mistake. It really wasn't important that he killed four people. A lot of people run around killing people, I suppose it's okay. Or we end the friendship. But most of the time it needn't come to this, and we can find a way to live with those who differ with us. For one reason, we need our allies. When I was a child, I asked my mother why it was always the great people on our side who were assassinated. Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, how come I said we never assassinate anyone on their side? So after giving me the obligatory thing, it's against the law, you shouldn't do it. It's not a moral thing. She smiled and said, besides, there are more of them than there are of us. As skeptics, as scientifically minded people, we know that there are more of them than there are of us. And therefore, in our ambition to promote science and skepticism in the world, we need to tolerate some of the foibles of our friends and concentrate on those folks who are the real enemies of science and equality. There are enough of them to keep us busy. One of my friends said years ago, society is a mule, not a car. When pressed too hard, it doesn't speed up. It bucks and kicks its rider. The great span of history, the sweep of history, teaches us the importance of getting back up on the mule. We can't change the world, but we can sure as hell change some big pieces of it along the way. I look back on my life in times. I can look at just as we have here at what remains for us to do. We can despair of scientific illiteracy in our society. And we should, but we should also notice same sex marriage is legal in many countries and in several states in our nation. We have an African American president. We have the rise of atheism as a movement of humanism, skeptics that come in so many incarnations, enormous improvement in the status and rights of so many people in our society. And so I want to end with the wonderful words of Molly Ivins, that great essayist, humorist and feminist activist. Molly Ivins was from Texas, a state, she said, that was put on this earth to make everyone else grateful for where they live. She understood about challenges. You know, she's the one who said, commenting on a Texas legislator, if his IQ drops any further, we'll have to water him twice a day. She, she knew what the challenges were for all of us in this quest. And at a conference that I went to on activism, she said this, keep fighting for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don't you forget to have fun doing it. Let your laughter ring forth, be outrageous, ridicule the frady cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through celebrating the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was. My friends, it really has been fun. Thank you.