Carol Tavris Quotes

“History is written by the victors, but it's victims who write the memoirs.”

— Carol Tavris

“It's the people who almost decide to live in glass houses who throw the first stones.”

— Carol Tavris

In the horrifying calculus of self-deception, the greater the pain we inflict on others, the greater the need to justify it to maintain our feelings of decency and self-worth.

— Carol Tavris

“We need a few trusted naysayers in our lives, critics who are willing to puncture our protective bubble of self-justifications and yank us back to reality if we veer too far off. This is especially important for people in positions of power.”

— Carol Tavris

“Most people, when directly confronted by evidence that they are wrong, do not change their point of view or course of action but justify it even more tenaciously. Even irrefutable evidence is rarely enough to pierce the mental armor of self-justification. When we began working on this book, the poster boy for "tenacious clinging to a discredited belief" was George W. Bush. Bush was wrong in his claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, he was wrong in claiming that Saddam was linked with Al Qaeda, he was wrong in predicting that Iraqis would be dancing joyfully in the streets to receive the American soldiers, he was wrong in predicting that the conflict would be over quickly, he was wrong in his gross underestimate of the financial cost of the war, and he was most famously wrong in his photo-op speech six weeks after the invasion began, when he announced (under a banner reading MISSION ACCOMPLISHED) that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended.”

— Carol Tavris

“What, then, was the new strategy he proposed? More troops and more money. For him, any other option was unthinkable. It would mean he had made a colossal mistake.”

— Carol Tavris

“This habit starts awfully early. Social psychologist Marilynn Brewer, who has been studying the nature of stereotypes for many years, once reported that her daughter returned from kindergarten complaining that "boys are crybabies."25 The child's evidence was that she had seen two boys crying on their first day away from home. Brewer, ever the scientist, asked whether there hadn't also been little girls who cried. "Oh yes," said her daughter. "But only some girls cry. I didn't cry." Brewer's little girl was already dividing the world, as everyone does, into us and them. Us is the most fundamental social category in the brain's organizing system, and it's hardwired.”

— Carol Tavris

“The trouble is that once people develop an implicit theory, the confirmation bias kicks in and they stop seeing evidence that doesn't fit it.”

— Carol Tavris

God is in the truth.

— Carol Tavris

“We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield. -George Orwell (1946)”

— Carol Tavris

“Prejudices emerge from the disposition of the human mind to perceive and process information in categories. "Categories" is a nicer, more neutral word than "stereotypes," but it's the same thing. Cognitive psychologists consider stereotypes to be energy-saving devices that allow us to make efficient decisions on the basis of past experience; help us quickly process new information and retrieve memories; make sense of real differences between groups; and predict, often with considerable accuracy, how others will behave or how they think.24 We wisely rely on stereotypes and the quick information they give us to avoid danger, approach possible new friends, choose one school or job over another, or decide that that person across this crowded room will be the love of our lives.”

— Carol Tavris

Certain categories of us are more crucial to our identities than the kind of car we drive or the number of dots we can guess on a slide-gender, sexuality, religion, politics, ethnicity, and nationality, for starters. Without feeling attached to groups that give our lives meaning, identity, and purpose, we would suffer the intolerable sensation that we were loose marbles floating in a random universe. Therefore, we will do what it takes to preserve these attachments. Evolutionary psychologists argue that ethnocentrism-the belief that our own culture, nation, or religion is superior to all others-aids survival by strengthening our bonds to our primary social groups and thus increasing our willingness to work, fight, and occasionally die for them. When things are going well, people feel pretty tolerant of other cultures and religions-they even feel pretty tolerant of the other sex!-but when they are angry, anxious, or threatened, the default position is to activate their blind spots.

— Carol Tavris

“What can I possibly have in common with perpetrators of murder and torture?" It is much more reassuring to believe that they are evil and be done with them.14 We dare not let a glimmer of their humanity in the door, because it might force us to face the haunting truth of cartoonist Walt Kelly's great character Pogo, who famously said: "We have met the enemy and he is us.”

— Carol Tavris

“We want to hear, we long to hear, "I screwed up. I will do my best to ensure that it will not happen again." Most of us are not impressed when a leader offers the form of Kennedy's admission without its essence, as in Ronald Reagan's response to the Iran-Contra scandal, which may be summarized as "I didn't do anything wrong myself, but it happened on my watch, so, well, I guess I'll take responsibility."3 That doesn't cut it.”

— Carol Tavris

Nothing predicts future behavior as much as past impunity.

— Carol Tavris

“The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none. -historian and essayist Thomas Carlyle”

— Carol Tavris

“American parents, teachers, and children were far more likely than their Japanese and Chinese counterparts to believe that mathematical ability is innate; if you have it, you don't have to work hard, and if you don't have it, there's no point in trying. In contrast, most Asians regard math success, like achievement in any other domain, as a matter of persistence and plain hard work. Of course you will make mistakes as you go along; that's how you learn and improve. It doesn't mean you are stupid.”

— Carol Tavris

To resolve the dissonance between "I love this person" and "This person is doing some things that are driving me crazy" will enhance their love story or destroy it.

— Carol Tavris

“Consider the famous syllogism "All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore Socrates is mortal." So far, so good. But just because all men are mortal, it does not follow that all mortals are men, and it certainly does not follow that all men are Socrates.”

— Carol Tavris

No one really knows human nature, men as well as women, who has not lived in the bondage of marriage, that is to say, the enforced study of a fellow creature.

— Carol Tavris

There are plenty of good reasons for admitting mistakes, starting with the simple likelihood that you will probably be found out anyway-by

— Carol Tavris

“Is the brain designed to make us flare in anger when we think we are being attacked? Fine-but most of us learn to count to ten and find alternatives to beating the other guy with a cudgel. An appreciation of how dissonance works, in ourselves and others, gives us some ways to override our wiring. And protect us from those who can't.”

— Carol Tavris

“And thus they selectively remember parts of their life, focusing on those parts that support their own points of view.”

— Carol Tavris

“Happened to them. And the more confident they became, the more sensory details they added to their false memories ("the place smelled horrible").22 Researchers have created imagination inflation indirectly, too, merely by asking people to explain how an unlikely event might have happened. Cognitive psychologist Maryanne Garry finds that as people tell you how an event might have happened, it starts to feel real to them. Children are especially vulnerable to this suggestion.23 Writing turns a fleeting thought into a fact of history, and for Wilkomirski, writing down his memories confirmed his memories. "My illness showed me that it was time for me to write it all down for myself," said Wilkomirski, "just as it was held in my memory, to trace every hint all the way back."24 Just as he rejected the historians at Majdanek who challenged his”

— Carol Tavris

A president who justifies his actions to the public might be induced to change them. A president who justifies his actions to himself, believing that he has the truth, is impervious to self-correction.

— Carol Tavris

“To show how memory changes to fit our story, psychologists study how memories evolve over time: if your memories of the same people change, becoming positive or negative spending on what is happening in your life now, then it's all about you, not them. This process happens so gradually that it can be a jolt to realize you ever felt differently.”

— Carol Tavris

“During McCarthyism, teachers feared for their jobs if they belonged to a left-wing group. Today teachers fear for their jobs if they hug a crying child. As in all moral panics, an accusation is enough to destroy a person's life. Hysteria trumps evidence.”

— Carol Tavris

“The scientific method is designed to help investigators overcome the most entrenched human cognitive habit: the confirmation bias, the tendency to notice and remember evidence that confirms our beliefs or decisions, and to ignore, dismiss, or forget evidence that is discrepant. That's why we are all inclined to stick to a hypothesis we believe in. Science is one way of forcing us, kicking and screaming if necessary, to modify our views.”

— Carol Tavris

“For some of the large indignities of life, the best remedy is direct action. For the small indignities, the best remedy is a Charlie Chaplin movie. The hard part is knowing the difference.”

— Carol Tavris

“In sports as in child rearing, marital arguments, or tantrums, the same laws of learning apply; when an emotion is encouraged and the rules permit it, it is perpetuated, not 'drained.' ... An emotion without social rules of containment and expression is like an egg without a shell: a gooey mess ...”

— Carol Tavris

“When anger is not trampling roughshod through our nervous system, it is sitting sullenly in some unspecified internal organ. "She's got a lot of anger in her," people will say (it nestles, presumably, somewhere in the gut), or, "He's a deeply angry man" (as opposed, presumably, to a superficially angry one). If anger isn't released, it "turns inward" and metamorphoses into another creature altogether.”

— Carol Tavris

“Doubt is not the enemy of justice; overconfidence is.”

— Carol Tavris

“When it comes to food, there are two large categories of eaters, those who do not worry about what they eat but should, and those who do worry about what they eat but should not.”

— Carol Tavris

“[Sexual] fantasies, like children, are most interesting to the people who have them.”

— Carol Tavris

“Baseball lasts as long as it takes. Like life, like love, baseball exists in real time.”

— Carol Tavris

“Rebels and dissidents challenge the complacent belief in a just world, and, as the theory would predict, they are usually denigrated for their efforts. While they are alive, they may be called 'cantankerous,' 'crazy,' 'hysterical,' 'uppity,' or 'duped.' Dead, some of them become saints and heroes, the sterling characters of history. It's a matter of proportion. One angry rebel is crazy, three is a conspiracy, 50 is a movement.”

— Carol Tavris

“Even irrefutable evidence is rarely enough to pierce the mental armor of self-justification.”

— Carol Tavris

“The second-sweetest set of three words in English is 'I don't know.'”

— Carol Tavris

“Severe initiations increase a member's liking for the group.”

— Carol Tavris

“Depression is not 'anger turned inward'; if anything, anger is depression turned outward. Follow the trail of anger inward, and there you will find the small, still voice of pain.”

— Carol Tavris

“The individualism of American life, to our glory and despair, creates anger and encourages its release; for when everything is possible, limitations are irksome. When the desires of the self come first, the needs of others are annoying. When we think we deserve it all, reaping only a portion can enrage.”

— Carol Tavris

“No one seems to have learned, or can remember, the magic words that calm people when they are frightened or threatened: "I'm sorry; I didn't see you; are you all right?" The inability to speak these words, I observe, goes right along with a propensity for mindless insults.”

— Carol Tavris

“The difference between the Japanese and the American is summed up in their opposite reactions to the proverb (popular in both nations), "A rolling stone gathers no moss." Epidemiologist S. Leonard Syme observes that to the Japanese, moss is exquisite and valued; a stone is enhanced by moss; hence a person who keeps moving and changing never acquires the beauty and benefits of stability. To Americans, the proverb is an admonition to keep rolling, to keep from being covered with clinging attachments.”

— Carol Tavris

“Many books in popular psychology are a melange of the author's comments, a dollop of research, and stupefyingly dull transcriptions from interviews.”

— Carol Tavris

“A fan without a team is like a hog without truffles - she has nothing to root for.”

— Carol Tavris

“Of course, if you photograph the behavior of women and men at a particular time in history, in a particular situation, you will capture differences. But the error lies in inferring that a snapshot is a lasting picture. What women and men do at a moment in time tells us nothing about what women and men are in some unvarying sense - or about what they can be.”

— Carol Tavris

“The history of the women's movement in America follows a consciousness-amnesia cycle.”

— Carol Tavris