Producer: Alright, this is Full PreFrontal, welcome back. We’re here to expose the mysteries of executive function. I am here with our hoist Sucheta Kamath.

Good morning, Sucheta, good to be with you as always. Looking forward to today’s conversation. You know, as I understand it, I mean, this is a podcast about executive function but you’re going to talk about Henry David Thoreau. I don’t – help me understand that.

Sucheta Kamath: Yes, good morning to you, Todd, it’s great to be here with you, and yes, I am going to open up by talking about Thoreau, a gifted writer as well as a naturalist. Henry David Thoreau is considered the father of environmentalism and here are some beautiful lyrical quotes that Thoreau has said: “What would human life be without forests, those natural cities? What we call wilderness is civilization other than ours.” He saw endless beauty in nature and encouraged all of us to preserve it. So it probably will be a surprise if I told you that Thoreau once set a major fire which burned down 300 acres of wood near Walden Pond.

Producer: Wow, I did not know that.

Sucheta: Yes, so this infamous incident happened on April 30th, 1844 when Thoreau and his friend went fishing and they in fact had not brought a lighter with them or matchsticks and they borrowed it from a fisherman who was returning, and in an attempt to light fire, of course, this accident happened. The interesting thing is not that he lit the forest on fire, but two months later, literally by June 21st, Thoreau was ready to put down his mistakes behind him and he made a journal entry. He was a ferocious writer and he journaled a lot, and there he wrote that, “A fire, without a doubt, an advantage on the whole,” and he continued to say that, “When the lighting burns a forest, its director makes no apology to man. I was but his agent.” So Todd, in a nutshell, Henry David Thoreau uses a self-justification to excuse himself from this little bit grave mistake that he committed.

Another interesting, as the story continues, six years down the road, he had another journal entry that he made on May 31st in 1850 when he actually had no remorse about what had happened. He wrote that, “I once set fire in the woods.” He goes on, “Hitherto,” which means ‘earlier’, “I had felt like a guilty person. Nothing but shame and regret, but now, I settled the matter with myself shortly. I said to myself: ‘Who are these men who are set to be the owners of these woods and how am I related to them?’ I have set fire to the forest but I have done no wrong therein, and now, it is as if the lightning had done it. These flames are but consuming their natural food.” So you see, Todd, even Henry David Thoreau had this uncomfortable feeling that he harbored for so many years, that he considered himself to me a good person but he did something terrible and he couldn’t reconcile with it, and took a long time for him to come to this conclusion or this self-forgiving statement that, “I did what nature wanted me to do in its first place.”

So this Thoreau story ties really well with what we’re going to talk about today with our guest. My guest today is a renowned social psychologist, Dr. Carol Tavris who is the co-author with Dr. Elliot Aronson of Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me}: Why we justify foolish beliefs, bad behaviors, and hurtful acts. In this book, they explain why people don’t change their minds or recognize the harm they have inflicted or give up useless practices simply because the evidence says they should. She is going to shed some light about this process or this idea of cognitive dissonance which will help our listeners a lot. Dr. Tavris has written hundreds of articles, essays, book reviews, and op-eds on topics in psychological sciences which have appeared in New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, the Times Literary Supplement, Scientific American, etc. She also currently writes a column for Skeptic called Gadfly which is very interesting. I highly recommend everybody to check it out. She is extremely well-known in her field and her honors and awards include a 2014 Media Achievement Award from SPSP, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, an honorary doctorate from Simmons College in 2013, and a Distinguished Media Contribution Award from the American Association of Applied Preventative Psychology.

She is a brilliant mind and a kind and generous soul. I can’t wait to have a conversation with her.

Producer: Yeah, it promises to be interesting. Now that I understand what you will be talking with Carol about, the story about Thoreau makes – is interesting, I have to think about that a little more, it’s so fascinating. So this promises to be a pretty interesting conversation. Looking forward to it, so let’s get right to it.

Here is Sucheta’s conversation with Carol Tavris.

Sucheta: Welcome to the show, Carol. I am so very excited to have you. You were receiving the Media Achievement Award in 2014 at the SPSP Conference and I was in the audience, and I cannot believe I’m here talking with you, so welcome.

Dr. Carol Tavris: Well, I’m very happy to be talking with you too.

Sucheta: Thank you. Well, before we get started, would you take a minute to tell our audience about yourself and give them a quick overview of your work?

Dr. Tavris: Well, I would be happy to. I’ve had a very unusual career, in a way. I got my PhD in Social Psychology many years ago at the University of Michigan, but my interest always was in being a science communicator and really bringing good research to bear on a lot of the popular notions in our culture that are widely held but wrong, and of course, when you do that as a scientist, one of the great mysteries to me is why it was that people didn’t say, “Why, Carol, thank you so much for this incredible interesting information about anger. You mean when I ventilate my anger, it isn’t going to make me feel wonderful? It’s going to make the other person angry at me? Thank you so much for giving me the science of the research on anger.” They were more likely to tell me what I could do with my research if you get my meaning, and this has always been an interesting question to me, is why don’t we want to know the best information, the most useful information to give up ideas that we once thought were useful but now, we know better? So that’s really been my quest as a social psychologist, as a writer, and as a student of critical and scientific thinking, and a very entertaining and challenging career it’s been.

Sucheta: And you have a very entertaining and a beautiful way of explaining very difficult topics and people will soon know what I mean. So let me start with your focus in this most recent book which is Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me) which you co-authored and you talked about the concept of cognitive dissonance. Can you tell us what cognitive dissonance means and why does it exist at a psychological level?

Dr. Tavris: Absolutely, I will, but first, when you said this was co-authored with some anonymous person, my co-author is Elliot Aronson who is one of the greatest social psychologists of the 20th century as chosen by his peers. He is a brilliant social psychologist who has always been interested in bring social science research into the real world, and he was a student, a graduate student, with Leon Festinger in the 1950s when Festinger came up with this theory of cognitive dissonance. What it simply means – you hear this term now everywhere in the news and people use it all the time, sometimes they’re right in their descriptions – cognitive dissonance simply means the discomfort we feel, the mental discomfort we feel when two ideas clash with  one another, are inconsistent with each other, or when our behavior is inconsistent with our  belief. That’s the dissonant part of it. Festinger said that cognitive dissonance is so mentally uncomfortable, it’s like being hungry or thirsty. We are motivated to reduce it, to put those two ideas in consonance or in harmony. The classic example he gave is a smoker. Smokers know that smoking is stupid, hazardous, and dangerous to your health, so if you are a smoker, you have to do one of two things to resolve that dissonance. You have to quit smoking and make your behavior consonant with your understanding that smoking is bad for you, or you have to justify smoking. You have to dismiss the evidence that it’s really harmful. You remember your Aunt Hilda who lived to be 112 and smoked every day. You will, as in one study of pregnant women, who said, “Well, I’m smoking but I smoke less than I did so my baby will be okay.” So that’s what dissonance is. It’s an uncomfortable mental feeling that we work actively to resolve to make our beliefs harmonious and we have many clever ways of doing that.

Sucheta: So when you feel this discomfort, it’s basically a contradiction that we feel about our beliefs about who we are and then what we have done or experienced is not in sync with it, and it’s not like if a friend of mine and I go to see La La Land, and she said she loved the movie and I say I hated the movie, that won’t create a cognitive dissonance, correct?

Dr. Tavris: Oh, I’m so glad you raised this. Yes, it does raise a cognitive dissonance. In fact it’s why couples, over time, if they have different movie preferences, their movie preferences are going to sort of start sliding downwards each other, if you will. Yes, you will have dissonance; you’ll think wait a minute, I thought my friend was a great judge of movies. What is the matter with her? Or you may decide, hmm, okay, I see her point. Maybe it wasn’t as good a movie as I thought. But what you’re right about here is that it’s not an important kind of dissonance, generally, unless of course, you’re in the movie business and you really value your judgement of movies. What Elliot Aronson did that was a brilliant advance about dissonance theory is that he showed that dissonance is more important, most important, we are most motivated to reduce it when the dissonance affects something central to our sense of ourselves. So movies, not such a big deal but if you see yourself as a kind person, a generous person, a smart person, a competent person, and now, I give you some evidence showing you did something hurtful, you did something foolish, you botched up something that works, you’re holding a belief, for example, the old belief that vaccines cause autism, you’re holding a belief that’s wrong, now, you are likely to feel the sharp sting of dissonance. I’m smart and you tell me I did something foolish, you just go away with your silly argument. The person in that kind of dissonance has a choice: I can accept this information, this wound to my self-esteem and my self-concept or I can dismiss the evidence and continue doing what I’m doing. What do little kids say when they’re fighting? Okay, two little brothers are fighting and the mother comes out and says, “Stop fighting,” and what do the kids say? ”He started it. Me? I was just standing here. He came over and hit me on the head.” No, which is I’m a good little boy, I didn’t start this, he started this, and this way, I get to see myself as a good little boy and understand that my behavior was not my fault. There was a wonderful letter that someone wrote to me about a mother who took her two and a half year old little girl to the park and gave her a bunch of little stickers to play with and draw with and everything, and then the mother said to her little girl, “Honey, look, there’s another little girl over there. Would you like to share your stickers with her?” And the child thought about it and said, “Hmm, that little girl doesn’t like stickers, mommy.” Okay? Notice, I get to be a good little girl and keep my stickers. That’s how dissonance works and that, by the way, is how early it starts. We want to preserve our views of ourselves as being smart, kind, ethical, and competent, and when we get information that is dissonant with that self-concept, it takes a lot for us to accept that evidence and learn from it. The easier solution is to ignore the evidence, to forget it or minimize it, or decide it’s your fault and not mine.

Sucheta: So can we take this example of a child and how the child comes to understand how to fulfill a request? What do you see the relevance of this cognitive dissonance in the context of learning and education where teachers have to constantly give feedback to a child about his “incompetence,” or point out some mistakes, how does the child learn to navigate that pressure or this dissonance that he feels about when the self-worth is not fully even formed?

Dr. Tavris: This is a brilliantly important question, of course, and it goes to the heart and soul of something in child-rearing and in education. One of the problems, in a way, in our culture is the notion that American culture tends to foster that smartness and competence is something you just have. You’re born with it and if you have it, it means you’re smart, and if you don’t have it, it means you’re stupid. Now, of course, this is nonsense. Everybody knows at some level that the only way you become competent, the only way you learn something is by failing, it’s by making mistakes. You don’t start out as a ballet dancer or a piano player, or a physicist by going from zero to 100 in one second, you know? You have to learn along the way and you will make mistakes along the way. Now, what social psychologists have found is that the only dissonance that occurs is that if I think that making a mistake means that I’m stupid, if I think making a mistake means I’m stupid, I’m going to deny that I made a mistake. It’s more important for me to feel I’m smart, but if I feel that making a mistake just means that’s what you do on the way to learning, then making a mistake isn’t dissonance; it’s how we learn. Every scientist understands this, you’ll do an experiment and a lot of them will fail, and in those failures is important information. We’ve learned what isn’t so, and so that’s really the crucial lesson for children to understand, that we all make mistakes. That’s how we learn. That necessary in business, in government, in our everyday relationships. That’s the goal to understand and it’s why an understanding of cognitive dissonance really does give us insight into how to control this and do better. We have a lot of mental biases and blind spots that I know that you have discussed in your interviews with others, and you can’t do anything about an optical illusion. An optical illusion is built into how the optic system works, but when we understand the blind spot that cognitive dissonance gives us, we really can take steps to control it and to live with it in a more constructive way.

Sucheta: And you described this, the point of resistance that we all have within ourselves, that means in the learning context, which I see from my work, that if a child who is having difficulty learning to learn which is learning to manage himself, manage his goals, manage his time, manage his own relationship through the educational system, he has a process that he has to come up with to say, if I am competent and then if the world is giving me feedback that I am not performing well, then there’s something wrong with the world. So this is the kind of kid who will say, “I don’t like my teacher. I don’t like the homework,” or “The room was too hot,” or “The teacher is unfair,” and then that leads to, parents sometimes, inappropriately or unknowingly intercepting by complaining about the teachers through the administrators, or excusing the child from the assignment, calling the assignment stupid, and then you just mentioned that it doesn’t stop there. It goes into all the way, even the careers, like politicians, right?

Dr. Tavris: Yes. This is very important, what you have just said, because many educators have observed this terrible massive change in our American educations system where this came from some – I don’t even know when it started, maybe in the 80s or 90s with the notion that self-esteem is the most important thing for children to have, and so therefore, you must give them positive feedback all the time, every second. Now, children are not fooled when you tell them they have done well on something and they know they haven’t, what kind of feedback are you giving them? That’s not useful to them in any way. Real self-esteem comes from succeeding at a task you’ve set yourself – I shouldn’t say ‘real self-esteem.’ People don’t have to succeed in the world in some materialistic way, to have good self-esteem and to feel worthy, but I’m talking about the – give everybody an A, tell everybody they’re equally good.

Sucheta: Or not give grades at all.

Dr. Tavris: Or not give grades at all.

Sucheta: Acceptable and excellence or something like that.

Dr. Tavris: That’s right. Yeah, everything is good. If everything is good, then there’s nothing to be learned and children lose the joy of discovering what is interesting and useful to know, not for the reward, not for the praise, not for the gold star, but for the intrinsic pleasure of learning something. So this is the difference between teaching children that we love them, that they’re good and valuable human beings in the world, and giving children honest feedback about what they are doing that helps them learn and improve. I think many educators have really confused these two things and as a result, we are seeing a generation of college students who have such thin skins that if you go to give them feedback on something they had written or an assignments, they feel they are personally being attacked. “You’ve hurt my feelings.” I haven’t hurt your feelings. I’m telling you that you can’t write a sentence. When I was starting out as a young editor at Psychology Today, many years ago, I would turn in an article and my beloved editor, the first one, he handed it back to me. There was not one sentence that did not have his red pen on it. See how long ago that was? Red pen.

Sucheta: Red pen.

Dr. Tavris: Not even track changes. It was a red pen. I mean, there wasn’t a word left untouched by him and he says the goal will be for you to get fewer and fewer red marks from my pen, and it was crushing but boy, did it teach me, and so I lament kind of this current situation in so many places where teachers are afraid to give truthful, honest, constructive, feedback just because the students will be offended, will grade them down, or rate them down. That’s the importance of the difference. You as a human being versus what you have done on this assignment or this job? We all make mistakes, in work, in family life, in our relationships, we all hurt people, we all have done badly at something, we’ve all screwed up and we need to – what cognitive dissonance teaches us is that we need to learn to be able to say, “When I make a mistake, that’s a mistake but I remain a good person.” Now, what do I do to fix the mistake? We separate the action from the self-concept.

Sucheta: And this brings me back to the context of executive functions, so there are three fundamental cognitive components which is working memory, room where we do this maneuvering of thought process, and then impulse control, that means controlling yourself or holding yourself back before you jump to conclusions, and third is that mental flexibility, taking perspective on a situation from somebody else’s point of view or even a point of view of you from a future self point of view, and what is your understanding and experience based on your research, what kind of cognitive limitations create more pressure on our quick resolution to cognitive dissonance in the wrong direction, in an unfavorable way?

Dr. Tavris: Well, what you’ve just describe would be the ideal antidotes to the usual way that people reduce dissonance. That is if you’re not mindful of how dissonance works, if you’re not mindful that when you are given information that you really don’t want to hear, that you’re going to be inclined to dismiss that information, how can you think better, solve problems better, and plan for the future better? So let me go back one step in the way dissonance works. Because our minds are disposed to remember and see information that confirms our beliefs, I’m sure you have discussed this in your show, this is called a confirmation bias, it’s a normal bias. Have you discussed this?

Sucheta: I haven’t discussed it yet, no, not with any speakers yet.

Dr. Tavris: Ah, alright, well –

Sucheta: If you could shed some light, that would be great.

Dr. Tavris: Then your listeners need to immediately check to this to their leg, a confirmation bias is I think maybe the most important thing we need to understand about how we think because – and this was an evolutionary adaptive thing and for the most part, it still is, namely, we notice and remember, and like information that confirms what we believe, whether it is about a political candidate or something we’re doing at work, or a belief that we hold, and we are inclined to dismiss and forget, and overlook any information that disconfirms our belief. Just to use the vaccine example, it’s been shown overwhelmingly that vaccines do not cause childhood autism, so what have the people done who took a public stance that vaccines are harmful and causing autism? Some have said, “I refuse to believe the evidence. Don’t be absurd. It does cost autism.” Others have said, “Okay, alright, I’ll agree that it doesn’t cause autism, but it’s still bad. It’s still bad, it’s bad for some other reason.” See? In this way, I get to see myself as someone open enough to new evidence but I don’t have to give up the original belief. Sadly, this is how we’re disposed to do things. Once we come to a belief about something, the more time and money, and effort we put into maintaining that belief, we talk about it with our friends, we advertise it on the news, we go on a TEDTalk –

Sucheta: Take sides.

Dr. Tavris: We go on TED. We write a book and make 100 million dollars, the more investment we have in an idea or a belief, the more difficult it is going to be to give up that belief when the evidence tells us we should. That’s why cognitive dissonance is important to understand and important to counteract in terms of executive function. We do have the mental capability to overcome it, but we need to understand how hard that is. Imagine, from our book, imagine you’re a prosecutor who has put a person in prison you thought was a guilty of rape and murder, and then it turns out, 30 years later, you put an innocent man in prison. Imagine you’re a psychotherapist who bought into some dangerous fad about recovered memories of sexual abuse, a fad that ended up splitting families and causing much disaster and now, you realize you were wrong. Imagine – this realization, you know, imagine you are a doctor who believes in radical mastectomy for women with breast cancer and now you’re told, “Hey, you didn’t need to be doing that. The lumpectomy is just as effective and less disfiguring,” right? Very hard, very hard for people to admit to themselves that they did something not just wrong, but something that was harmful to others. We will put a lot of emotional investment into maintaining our views that we were right.

Sucheta: So in closing, if we don’t come to resolution or if we show any weakness and resisting this kind of dissonance, then we are going to internally collapse and we won’t be able to survive more pressure, more drama, that comes our way after we experience failures, right? So that’s why we have to kind of take quick actions and respond to such kind of pressures in some way, but unfortunately, we can, as you say, dig our heels deeper and we take a stronger stance, we can make a comeback even louder and create a lot of societal damage, so to speak.,.

Dr. Tavris: That’s exactly right, that’s exactly right. It’s why the problems we face are not just from bad people who do bad things. As we say in our book, it’s from good people who justify the bad things they do, the harms they cause, the mistakes they’ve made in order to continue believing they’re good, smart people. I mean, understanding dissonance is a form of humility control, or arrogance control. It’s a way of – I’ll repeat that: understanding dissonance is a way of helping us control our tendencies to be too self-confident, a little too arrogant, and to remind us that sometimes being wrong is the healthy way to go.

Sucheta: Thank you so much, Carol. This is a very jam-packed fully informative insightful look at cognitive dissonance and I can’t wait to have a conversation next week about how to manage or how to think differently about it now that we understand these are our human tendencies.

Before I let you go, if somebody wants to find out more about your work and reach to you, how can they find you?

Dr. Tavris: They can find me through the Social Psychology Network, SPN.org. They can find me on my Wikipedia page, and they can find my books and information about me on Amazon under any of our books.

Sucheta: Thank you so very much for coming on the show. I really appreciate your time very much.

Dr. Tavris: It’s my pleasure, thank you.

Producer: Alright. So that was Dr. Carol Tavris, what a great conversation. You know, Sucheta, as you suggested to me offline, she really is a fascinating social scientist and I really enjoyed the discussion that you all had and what she talked about with regards to cognitive dissonance, so I know that we all self-justify. I mean, Lord knows, I’ve done it, but for the first time, I understand the motivations behind it.

Sucheta: Yeah, isn’t she a wonderful speaker? My first takeaway, Todd, is that cognitive dissonance is a commonplace mental phenomenon. We all experience this internal conflict when the evidence surfaces that we have acted in a way that directly contradicts our important self-concept. That self-concept might be something like, “I’m a kind person. I’m a patient and smart, and competent person. I am a law-abiding good person, and I always act in a kind and a patient, and a smart, and competent, and law-abiding way,” but then one day, we act in a way that hurts somebody’s feelings or we do something stupid like break the law or simply demonstrate utter incompetence, this behavior of ours creates a huge mental anguish or dissonance that propels us to resolve it. As Carol mentioned, there are two way to resolve this dissonance. One is to either accept that you made a mistake or you were a fool, or you were wrong, or the second options is to rationalize or self-justify that what you did was really not that stupid or wrong and get behind it. We take desperate psychological measures to preserve our self-concept. This reminded me of the Bernie Madoff documentary, when the scandal broke off and he was arrested, people found themselves asking this question: how could he live with himself And the answer is very comfortably, in fact, because he has internally resolved the cognitive dissonance. That’s exactly how.

Producer: Yeah, no, I get it now, and like I said to you before, I was puzzled as to why we’re going to talk about Henry David Thoreau when we kicked off this episode, but we were talking about cognitive dissonance, so I guess it would be really helpful for me if you could explain how to connect cognitive dissonance to executive function skills and frankly, learning in general.

Sucheta: Yeah, Todd, this is the second important takeaway: all those listeners are tuning in to find out ways to executive functions affect daily competence, daily execution, and this topic that Dr. Tavris talked about is really, really extremely relevant to all those who are involved in learning and education. New learning, for example, Todd, requires processing of novel information with great deal of focus, exploring learning methods, and effortful problem solving. On top of that, what is inherent to learning is committing mistakes. In fact, becoming skilled or skilled at something, or acquiring mastery of something requires the courage to accept and evaluate mistakes that you have made along the way. Most learners are open to this natural and organic process of learning and they don’t mind redoing the work or correcting the path of learning. Only circumstances where the process of learning clashes with the student’s self-concept is when the student actually believes that making a mistake is stupid and that he is stupid for making the mistakes. In these circumstances, cognitive dissonance creates the big blind spot in the learner’s desire and capacity for self-improvement. The end result is, these students might be unknowingly blocking others from giving honest feedback to them or they may be robbing themselves from the pleasure of discovering that is built into learning. In my clinical experience, students with executive dysfunction tend to suffer from impulsivity and in inflexibility and this creates a fixed mindset. A concept described by a Stanford researcher Carol Dweck, her research shows that the students with fixed mindset often put limits on their achievement. Their minds are filled with interfering thoughts about failure or they often are preoccupied with the worry that people will find out about their incompetence and will conclude that they are not as smart as they appear. These behaviors eventually interfere with the student’s overall self-advocacy. That’s at least what I see. These students become reluctant to share their concerns or weaknesses with others, and they do not ask for any help either easily or eagerly, and above all, they do not take suggestions well, and you can imagine, this is not the student who is going to succeed at learning because learning, as I mentioned earlier, inherently requires you to accept and work around mistakes.

Producer: I got it. So what’s the role of self-confidence here? I mean, just as her book suggests, Dr. Tavris warns us about the dangers of too much self-confidence.

Sucheta: Yeah, Todd, Carol’s words struck a chord with me. She said, “Each and every society is threatened not just by its bad citizens who do bad thing, but from its good citizens who justify the harm they cause in order to continue to believe that they are good and smart people.” So important for us to ponder over. The essential ingredient for a better society is for the so-called good people to acknowledge that they can and do cause harm. Smart and confident members of society without an ounce of self-doubt or without humility have to entertain the possibility that they can make blunders, are equal danger to society, so more invested these good people are in that self-belief that ‘I’m a good person,’ harder it is for them to give up the idea that they could possibly do any harm, and so changing our ways takes time and effort. We need to get our toolbox fitted with the right tools to bring upon self-change, but our personal biases or blind spots and self-protective mechanisms may make it hard for us to look at our own behaviors and attitude objectively. That’s why understanding cognitive dissonance can help. It is a powerful tool for arrogance control, as she mentioned, or self-righteousness control.

So maybe from this podcast, listeners might be reminded that being wrong is natural and admitting it is healthy.

Producer: Boy, there’s a lot of people out in the world that could benefit from understanding this conversation that you and Dr. Tavris had. What a – it’s a very common tale, I’m afraid, of what you were just talking about. Fascinating stuff.

Alright, well, that’s all the time we have for today and on behalf of our host Sucheta Kamath and all of us at Cerebral Matters, thank you for tuning and we look forward to seeing you next week on Full PreFrontal.