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Carol Tavris is such a legend, and so fun. Carol has worked as a social psychologist for decades and written several fascinating books. Today, we spend most of our time talking about the book she coauthored with Elliot Aronson called Mistakes Were Made, But Not By Me: Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts.

BUT, we also talk about anger, which is related, and happens to be the topic and the title of another one of Carol’s books.

For starters, though, we get into cognitive dissonance, why it’s so hard for us to see our own blind spots, and why self-justification is generally more powerful and dangerous than an explicit lie. Carol breaks down the pyramid of choice that can lead us, step by step, to a place we never thought we’d wind up. In doing so, she helps us understand our own behaviors and motives better. And she helps us to see others more clearly.

Toward the end of our conversation, Carol shares some fascinating findings about anger and catharsis that turn a few assumptions on their head. And after our conversation wraps, I’m reading a bit more directly from Carol’s book about this.

Mistakes Were Made, But Not By Me: Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts

Anger: The Misunderstood Emotions

ELISE:

It’s so nice to meet you. I know we’ll talk a little bit about anger and catharsis as part of this conversation and the collective rage that sure is at a really fun boiling point, but I also just want to say that with mistakes were made, are you tired of talking about that book? So relevant always. I have a whole notetaking for my book situation and I have 35 pages of notes. It was one of those books as I was doing the notes, I was like, I’m just retyping the whole.

CAROL:

Someone came up to me once at a book signing with all these little post-it notes and flags. This one, this page. Thanks.

ELISE:

I mean, I feel like, I don’t know if you feel like this is true, and I count myself in this I guess, but we just don’t write books we used to. It makes me so sad. There’s so many books that should be articles, whereas I feel like your book is 40 articles more maybe.

CAROL:

Thank you.

ELISE:

So I know you recently you wrote, was it 2020? I guess you were looking somewhat at our future and anticipating it, but here we are. I almost feel like although everything that you guys wrote and the revisions to the book still resonates. Well, obviously we’ve tipped farther into polarization and I guess what you would call dissonance, right? There’s just such a divide in our culture right now and none of us can understand how the other side could possibly feel the way that they do, but your work just puts a bow on it. So congratulations. Thank you.

CAROL:

Thank you. I had to laugh. David French of The New York Times did an op-ed the other day, and I’m thinking, don’t you understand cognitive dissonance, sir? Because basically what he said is how come when our side does something evil, cruel, illegal, wrong, I moral or fattening, we excuse it, but when the other side does exactly the same thing, they’re villainous, stupid, cruel, intolerant and so forth, the same behavior when we do it is excused, and when they do it, it’s typical of them. And that’s cognitive dissonance just in your face.

ELISE:

Yeah, it’s such a tidy and theory and a fascinating book because of the ways in which you string all of its variations to together, including what I think is this. You could also call it the theory of blind spots, which is this foundational awareness that this is in many ways an unconscious action, and we do not realize we cannot see our own hypocrisy. We think we’re telling the truth. We think that we have a really stable understanding of reality. So why are we structured to do that? I know you’re not an evolutionary biologist, but why?

CAROL:

Well, I’m an adjunct evolutionary biologist. I’m adjacent an evolutionary biologist adjacent. I guess that would be the term. No, I’ve actually been a lot in evolutionary biology and in fact, I mean when I talked to Elliot about this, Elliot Aronson, he really is the king of cognitive dissonance and my go-to guy when I’m in a state of dissonant decision making about anything, Elliot, what do I do now? So okay, I say this to Elliot all the time, so it’s the big question. Why are we built with all these foolish blind spots, cognitive biases, the confirmation bias? Why are we designed to see and notice and remember only the information that we agree with and ignore and minimize and forget information that we don’t like that disputes what we believe. So something that universal and that powerful, we both think must have really had some evolutionary benefits.

And as he puts it, cognitive dissonance reduction is what lets us sleep at night, and that is a functional thing for small tribes, small communities, sharing a belief is unifying and motivating. You don’t want in your small little band of 30, 29 different opinions about something unless you’re Jewish, of course, in which case you have 35 different opinions. But still the idea is that there is a strong benefit to shared beliefs that make us feel at home in the world, rooted in the world, confident and motivating in what we do every day. We don’t want to have to stop and think about the benefits of brushing your teeth every morning. You want to do it. You don’t want to be open to dissonant information about toothbrushing in the morning. So it has many benefits. It links us to others like us. It motivates us to pursue the beliefs that we hold, to continue doing the work that we do, and the confidence that we’re doing it the best and right way, that our beliefs are the healthiest and most functional and so forth.

These are all very gratifying beliefs to hold and it is unpleasant when they are challenged, let alone challenged sufficiently that we should let them go. And I think for most of human history, that really was an efficient way to live. But what has happened of course in the last few centuries is that if we’re not open to discrepant unwanted information that happens to be correct, we become unable to change our direction and change our minds. So as with all things, all things in life, the thing that is a great benefit can also bring us great problems.

ELISE:

And when you think about this current moment in time and we won’t dig into politics et cetera quite yet, and the escalation of wars across the globe, I mean it’s totally wild, but what is the acceleration point? What’s your best guess at the acceleration point? Is it that within social media and all this discordant forms of information, people can find confirmation for sort of any idea and it leads us all into these weird alleys and tangents? You can confirm any instinct. Is that what’s happening?

CAROL:

I do think that the arrival of social media has exploded all of this in alarming directions. Exactly as you say, you can find anybody to believe you or to influence you on any single thing with a parent information you want to know about it. Look at Pizzagate, look what they’re doing to children and so forth. See, the thing that sells, the thing that motivates the most is fear. Fear. Mel Brooks, in the 2000 year old man, when he was asked what was the main form of transportation and 2000 years ago, he said, fear and fear, it is the thing. And when you think of all the things that people today are frightened of, climate change, the unfamiliar people coming that you have never met before and you don’t know anything about them, we are as primate bands, afraid of the unfamiliar. I think one of the reasons for the huge gap between people who live in urban areas and people who live in rural areas in an urban area, you see every kind of ethnic and religious group 30 times before lunch.

But in a rural community where homogeneity is the norm, the unfamiliar is unfamiliar, and it’s frightening. Now, if you attach that frightening unfamiliarity to the things you are already anxious and frightened about, my family, my work, my income, my health climate change, which I’m not. So I mean the conservative way of dealing with these fears is to say they don’t exist. We’re not even going to say the word climate, but that’s one way of coping is I’m not going to listen. I’m not going to hear the other. Of course, is the famous step one of any authoritarian playbook. Let’s make people afraid. Let’s tell them who they’re afraid of and let’s get rid of those frightening people. Sadly, that has been a human disposition from the get go.

ELISE:

Yeah, no, I mean we’re certainly wired for this, and now it’s like watching all of our strings get pulled and the manipulation machine, the algorithm drive us down these dark alleys while none of us realize really the way that we’re being hijacked. Right. Let’s talk about dissonance theory and the self-justification that you write about that’s so helpful, which is you write, this is why self-justification is more powerful and more dangerous than the explicit lie. It allows people to convince themselves that what they did was the best thing they could have done. In fact, come to think of it, it was the right thing, and in this context, you’re talking about conscious lying when someone’s like, I don’t want to get in trouble, so I’m going to fudge the truth, or I’m going to deceive and not tell my partner that I slept with someone in Chicago. Whatever it is, you’re consciously lying, and the point that you guys make in the book is that self-justification is a very different process in which you are looking to confirm your own distortions.

CAROL:

It’s lying to yourself

ELISE:

So

CAROL:

That you don’t have to realize that you were wrong, mistaken, mean, cruel, corrupt, any of those bad things. I mean, Augusto Pinoche says, I sleep like a baby. I save the country from communism and chaos. There were a few thousand people I killed, but look, it was all in the service of saving the country. We see that on a national scale here too, of course,

ELISE:

And you use this metaphor falling down the pyramid or falling down the mountain that these are sort of small steps that people take where their integrity starts to get a little wobbly, and then the instinct is to self justify and say, oh, taking that trip from the drug rep was really in service to my patients. I’m not out of integrity here. Even if I do note that I’m writing more prescriptions for this particular asthma inhaler, right? This is the slow slide, and we don’t recognize that we’re even shifting until

CAROL:

Ever.

Well, you know what that metaphor, the pyramid of choice as we call it, has turned out to be a really powerful metaphor because what it shows, it’s not exactly the slippery slope where you slide down something because it shows that it’s more step by. It’s more of a cognitively active process down each side of the pyramid. Because the point is that when people are at the very top having to make a decision, they may make the decision impulsively. They read a newspaper article and they say, okay, that person’s guilty. No, that person’s innocent. Whoever the celebrity is that day, it’s almost an impetuous thing. I read this story and it leaves me to think this person’s guilty, but the minute we make any first step off the pyramid of a decision or a belief, it makes the next step cognitively easier. I cheated once on that exam, but it was just temporary.

I really needed that grade, and if I failed this test, my parents will never speak to me again and my cat will leave me, and all the disastrous things will happen. So the next time you’re faced with cheating, you have cheated and you justify it because everybody cheats and I need the grade, and it’s no big deal. It’s not a great mortal sin, but now the next time you have a chance to cheat, you’ve already done the mental work of justifying it, so it’ll become easier to do, and each time you are faced with that kind of moral choice, it’s going to be easier and easier for you to stay on the first step to the path you chose until over time it’s such an entrenched self-justification that it seems normal and inevitable to you, and you do not see how far apart you now are from the people who went down the pyramid in the opposite way.

No cheating is a violation of group norms. It’s not a victimless crime, it’s not a correct thing to do. People who cheat should be punished. Now you’re pretty far apart from those people. So it’s a powerful metaphor because it indicates how active that process of self-justification is, and you see it best often when we see people behaving and what we think is a kind of intensely crazy way, we are seeing them at the bottom of that pyramid of decision. We’re not seeing their first step. The people who were having rage attacks on airplanes toward other people wearing masks, that was not the first time they saw somebody else wearing a mask and they disagreed about masking. That was a point of many steps toward that behavior

ELISE:

And in a political sphere. I want to ask you about the visible self-justification that happens that is certainly not a victimless crime. I mean, cheating isn’t a victimless crime either, but that it’s how you look at these politicians and you walk back their Twitter feed and you’re like weird hypocrite. How are you embracing the very thing that you so vehemently hated not that long ago, but you just watch sort of these small moments begin to build until suddenly they’re unrecognizable, clearly, still somehow recognizable to themselves, but for anyone who’s watching at a distance, it’s like watching subtle someone who’s losing a pound a week and then you see them a year later and they’re 52 pounds lighter. It’s a dramatic transformation from afar that probably feels

CAROL:

Yes. How is it that your Aunt Matilda is now wearing a pro Trump t-shirt saying He can grab my pussy anytime? I mean, how did she get to

ELISE:

That?

CAROL:

How did she get to that? How did she

ELISE:

Get there?

CAROL:

A woman who presumably once opposed men grabbing women. So yes, it’s true. It is the frog boiling and water situation, I think too. I will say one other interesting thing in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk assassination, because this is a big difference. Obviously the Trump world, people are using this, an example of how left wing violent murderers they have, of course conveniently ignored the right wing political murderers, including of Democrats, of innocent people and so on. So we can say, okay, this is classic dissonance where if our side does it, it’s justified, and if their side does it, they’re murderous bastards, we can, but I think what we also have to see what’s happening in our country now is that that status, that view on the right is part of a conscious, explicit playbook to demonize Democrats, which has been going on for some 20 years, well since nude Gingrich. Don’t compromise with them, don’t talk to them, don’t have breakfast with them. They’re evil, they’re demons, they’re devils and so forth. And so he started off that pyramid quite a long time ago, and we’re seeing the net result of the demonizing of an opposing party. Both sides do this in our horrifying politicized polarization today.

ELISE:

Yeah, one of the first sentences of the book is it seems like eon since Republican nominee, Bob Dole described Bill Clinton as my opponent, not my enemy, but in fact, he made that civilized remark in 1996. So yeah, it’s been a 30 year slide.

CAROL:

It’s interesting, in the first book, that first trade book I wrote on anger, I talked about how manners, manners keep anger in check so that the language, the senate language, my esteem colleague from the great state of Rhode Island, you’re fighting with your esteemed colleague from Rhode Island, but the language was meant to be civil and civilized. Well, now that’s gone. Now that’s gone. We do not have civil and civilized senators in the way we once did.

ELISE:

Wasn’t it Newt Gingrich too, who insisted that everyone should maintain their sort of home state status and not move their families to Washington DC and therefore not enroll their kids in school together and not see each other at basketball practice and cut down any Venn diagram or overlap of social exposure where people would maybe come to expand their minds or change their minds, God forbid, or come to compromise.

CAROL:

It used to be some of the staunchest Republicans and staunchest Democrats came together for a cause. Well, they certainly did for the gay marriage Act in California here and in the environmental protection a little long time ago. That was the idea of compromise.

ELISE:

So when you think about two and the sections, the chapters about law enforcement are so fascinating and something I think that we all experience from afar, which is that once you’ve decided, once you’ve picked up a 14-year-old kid and determined he must be the one who murdered his sister, and you pursue this path and extort an illegal confession, and that even then people are like, I don’t care what the DNA evidence says, he was

CAROL:

In the room. He was in the room somewhere helping the guy who was the real criminal.

ELISE:

Yeah. So what can you talk about that extreme level of dissonance and what’s happening cognitively? It was so interesting to read. I mean, I just assumed, oh, there must be poorly incented cops, or there must be some quota. There must be some alternate reward for pursuing these false convictions. But no, it’s the real cognitive dissonance, right? There’s no way I’m wrong despite the evidence.

CAROL:

There’s no way I’m wrong. What’s the matter for you? I’m the guy with a white hat. My job is to put these guys in prison, and I just did that. Now, why are you yelling at me?

What I do wrong? Well, you put the wrong guy in prison. No, I didn’t. He was guilty of something. No. So one of the most interesting things in writing this book was the realization that there are corrupt cops, there are incompetent therapists, there are lousy doctors. There are people who, there’re mean they’re corrupt, they’re unkind, whatever we want to call them, but it’s the vast majority of people in the middle who are self-justifying, who are really the ones we want to worry about in this respect. I mean, one of the sort of aha moments for us in our book was the realization that our greatest problems don’t come from bad people who do bad things. We know they’re bad and we know the bad things they’re doing. It’s from the good people who justify the bad things they do to preserve their belief that they’re good, competent professionals.

It’s the surgeon who you’re telling me, I’ve made a mistake. I’m a doctor. Doctors don’t make mistakes by exaggerating some, of course admit that they will do make mistakes. So that’s really the dilemma. The DA who said in her book, who was really puzzled, puzzled to realize that he could have been wrong, it’s a shock to the system. We think, well, why is it so hard for them to say? Isn’t it gratifying to say, I mean, it’s awful. We put the wrong guy in prison, but now we can get the real criminal. Now we can really get justice done here. Isn’t that good to know? Isn’t it good to know that we can correct this miscarriage of justice, but it’s so much deeper for them to think I did that, and it’s why for me, in finding the few rare stories that end each chapter of someone coming to terms with how devastating their mistake was that I personally really felt from the inside how shattering that is.

The psychotherapist who woke up in the middle of the night in a sweat that her patients who had remembered that their fathers were in satanic ritual abuse cults and eating babies, and she said, how did I buy into that belief? I thought, well, it’s not one of my clients now. It turns out that it’s hundreds, and so here’s a therapist coming to terms with what in fact was the devastation of the recovered memory epidemic of that time, or the DA saying, how do I live with myself having deprived a man of 30 years, Vivian Gornick saying at the age of 65, I blamed men all my life for my bad relationships. Wait, I had something to do with those bad relationships,

ELISE:

Right? I’m the common denominator in all of those bad relationships.

Yeah, yeah. I know it’s so hard. I love Carl Jung. I don’t know. You might not, but it is blind spot shadow work, right? It’s owning all those parts of ourselves that we don’t want to see, and so we project onto the other and then defend against them so vehemently to the death, even though when you’re watching your aunt spin into Trump land and wondering what’s happened, you can see it from a distance. We can all spot. We can all clearly see each other’s blind spots. We can all see the mental calculations happening for someone to feel that they can maintain that moral position or that they can be the person who they profess to be or that their personality structure and their ego is intact and aligned, what do you think punctures it? I know there are some solutions, but it’s so tricky in part because of exactly what you’re talking about. It’s one thing to cheat your way through college and reassess your life and feel pretty uncomfortable and terrible about the means by which you accomplished your ends. It’s another thing to feel like you were promulgating violence at the capitol or that you’ve betrayed your own moral code that’s had implications for the world, right?

CAROL:

The greater the harm you’ve caused, the greater the consequences of your mistaken belief. Thousands of children getting measles now,

Many more deaths from measles than whooping ka. The greater the consequences of your mistaken belief of your flawed practice or theory of the harms that you’ve caused, even as you have justified them along the way, the greater the disaster, the greater the need to justify your role in it. That is why I mean, it’s much easier to apologize for nicking a candy bar from a store than from embezzling 500. You know what I’m saying here? It’s why it’s not just doubling down. It’s tripling down and quadrupling down because it is going to be too difficult to say why I was wrong. I’m so sorry. What was I thinking? This is why what often happens in the aftermath of rate social errors is they just fade away. They fade away. Nobody stands up and says, as an organization, a professional organization say, or in some organized way, boy, this was something we promulgated in medicine, and it turns out it was wrong.

So let’s inform you everybody of where we went wrong because this is now the best evidence and the best information for you. I happen to be living through this in a way with a book that I wrote with a blooming called Estrogen Matters because 22 years ago, the Women’s health initiatives scared women to bits with the idea that estrogen causes dementia and heart attack and will shorten your life and cause breast cancer and many other things. All of that’s wrong. All of it’s wrong, and we’ve been waiting patiently for them to have another press conference saying, sorry, we scared you ladies, so sorry, apologies. So this happens in medicine too. They have not had any call for a public reassessment of guidelines in medical practice. So there’s no area in which once the belief gets into the drinking water that it becomes easy to get it out. So what happens then over time typically is well, as we often say, the first critic is a crank, and the second are two cranks. The third is a conspiracy, and the fourth is we knew it all along. Those are the stage.

We knew it all along, and those people, there’s no public atonement, there’s no public announcement. There’s no public apology for the most part. I mean public apology in a way that is not just a true apology, but a correction of an idea or a program or something to go forward. So people just forget that was then we had this fed in medicine. We had this fad in psychotherapy. Where did all the multiple personality disorder cases go? It used to be they were on every TV show. They’ve just gone, the disorder got renamed. They’re still practicing it quietly. That’s what happens.

ELISE:

Yeah, and you offer a few examples in the book post apartheid South Africa. You don’t write about Germany, but there was some sort of collective acknowledgement of whoa, the most, theoretically, the most logical, ethical, rational group of people led going right down that pyramid until suddenly they’re executing millions of people and justifying it. But you are right. We just have very few examples of anyone willing to say, oh, shit, we really messed up.

CAROL:

So Truman is an interesting example of this because obviously they did post-war major reassessments of what had happened and what went wrong and efforts to atone for the huge sin of the Holocaust, but it wasn’t the perpetrators. It was the next generation. It was the next generation. That’s what has to happen. It’s almost never the perpetrators themselves who will come to a point of correction or admission, whether it’s a district attorney’s office in the Central Park five case, as you know, it was Robert Morgenthal who was not involved in the first round of prosecutions. He came in, looked at the whole story and said, we’re reopening this just for these. So it has to be somebody who was not initially involved in the original mistakes, whether at a national level or at a personal level or at a professional level. Those are the ones who have to come in and say, we’ve looked at this whole issue and here’s where everybody went off the rails, which here may not happen.

ELISE:

I know. I mean, you think about this political moment that we find ourselves and the prevalence of far right thinking among young men. It’s hard to imagine or see a future in which particularly, I guess we’ll see what happens in the next few years in terms of harm, but it’s terrifying to think that you have an entire nation from 18 to 80 that will feel culpable. I mean, we’ll see. I guess what happens, it’s pretty scary though, right?

CAROL:

It’s very scary, and I would say in line with that, the one thing that people on the left can do, and by left, I mean it’s a huge spectrum.

ELISE:

I would include the center in the left at this point. Exactly. Yeah.

CAROL:

But that’s one place we’d better start and we’d really better start assessing. It says, where did Democrats go wrong? What did Democrats miss? Let’s start with correcting what the democratic response should be and where it failed. What was the message that we were not conveying? How did we lose the working class? What were we focusing on that we should not have been focusing on? What did we miss? I mean, one thing we missed was that the Democrats were in bed with big corporations just as Republicans were, and so it’s not that they’re evil and we were saintly. I say we because it’s probably clear I’m a Democrat or I don’t know what I’m anymore. Truly, it’s a radical centrist. How about that?

ELISE:

It’s like Scott Galloway’s podcast, raging moderates.

CAROL:

Yes, yes, exactly. There you have it. We’re all at a loss for words, and I will say the right is too, because there’s so many conservative conservatives who hate Trump and who hate what he’s been doing. They’re adrift in the ocean as well. So the point being the opposition needs to be really clear in what it’s opposing, why it’s opposing it and what it proposes instead, and it should start with our own culpa. It’s interesting in the last chapter of the book where we have Republican versus Republican in talking about Trump, and if we hadn’t kind of run out of room, I mean it was such a good example, certainly with Mussolini and the Pope as the historical brilliant alliance in which each was using the other until the Pope realized he’d been used. It was so parallel to Trump and the Evangelicals, but we could have done a chapter on Democrat versus Democrat too. It could have, the Democrats have not been shy about silencing critics of democratic beliefs and policies, trolling them, suppressing them, making sure they get fired. But pets have much to atone for in my view. Agree.

ELISE:

Yeah. I’ve watched many of my friends in the last four years in particular betray their own values in ways again that are a blind spot. Calling out a genocide by calling for a genocide is a bit of cognitive dissonance and so on and so forth. It’s wild to watch people just get so outside of their own ethical code and you just hope, I hope that they can own it. That really is the only way, right? Is to own your own behavior and work to integrate it rather than deny it.

CAROL:

It is. It absolutely is. It’s painful. Elliot said something to me once I thought was very wise. He said, people will go a long way to avoid pain, psychological pain, emotional pain. He said, don’t welcome it. You’ll learn from it. Sit with it, sit with it, and it will teach you something. The first edition of our book did not talk about the other side of dissonance instead of the people who are self-justifying and getting rid of it that way. There are people who can’t reduce dissonance

And therefore beat themselves up all the time with regrets and recriminations, and if only is what a stupid person I am and how could I have done, how could I have done? Yeah. And I said, shouldn’t we be talking about them too? And he said, well, with the first edition of this book, I want people to get self-justification. That’s where the real social as well as personal harms come. But then the next time around, he did want us to have a chapter on the people who can’t let go of regret and recrimination because that is important too. And so that’s where that language sit with the pain. He said, dissonance helps us sleep at night, but sometimes sleepless nights are called for, and I love that. I think that’s exactly right. If we are able in those dark, sleepless night moments to use them to say, what might I have done wrong here? Where did I go off the trail?

ELISE:

Where did I miss? Yeah,

What’s the story that opposes mine and are there parts of it that I can understand is also true? I want to talk quickly about catharsis and anger since I know you love talking about anger too, because I think this is such an important insight. This is a study from Michael Kahn who was a graduate student in the clinical psychology department at Harvard, and he designed an experiment that would illustrate the benefits of catharsis, right? This was the belief that if you vented your anger, if you fully expressed it at its target appropriate or not, that you would release the emotion and the findings were wild counterintuitive, and yet in the context of dissonance theory, they make so much sense. Can you talk a little bit about that? I think it also explains to some extent the escalating violence that we’re seeing.

CAROL:

Absolutely, and I’m happy to do that because it represents one of the few intellectual occasions in my life when I’ve not only been right, but I actually predicted this, which is a funny story. If we are right about something, at least we have to grab it and celebrate it. Okay, so

ELISE:

Here,

CAROL:

Khan’s Research Khan was psychoanalytically trained, and the notion following Freud was that anger is a natural emotion. It fills you up like steam in a teapot, and if you don’t release it, it will cause ulcers. It will cause stress. It’ll cause physical problems. It’s healthier psychologically and physically to ventilate your anger when you’re angry. Okay? Now, as a social psychologist, I realize that in that construction, nobody is thinking about where the anger goes when you have ventilated it on the other person. If you’re angry and running around your living room venting, so that’s fine, but if you’re yelling at someone you love or you’re yelling at in the street, that person’s going to respond to you. And whether or not it feels cathartic that is beneficial will not just depend on what you’ve done, but on how the other person responds. If the other person says, honey, I had no idea you were so angry at me.

Thank you for telling me, will a trip to Tahiti make amends? Okay, you’re going to be real glad that you ventilated your anger. But usually the other person annoyingly says, oh yeah, let me tell you. I’m so angry at you. You fill in the blank. So K learned in that study that when he gave people the opportunity to express their anger at the person who had insulted or annoyed them, they became angrier at that person, didn’t get rid of it, and what he showed really is that when we express anger, we are not getting rid of it. We are rehearsing it, and if you have ever talked to anybody going through an angry experience such as a divorce or any frustrating thing, what do they do? They tell you over and over how justified they are in being angry at so-and-so, and with each telling, they are remembering more bits to the story that warrant their anger.

They are practicing all those legitimate grievances they have against the person with no space to consider their own role in that conflict. So in that first book I wrote was about the conditions under which catharsis works. All right? Here are the conditions. One, the degree of your ventilation warrants the crime. So if you get over hysterical at somebody, enraged at somebody for some minor infraction, you’ll feel pretty bad about it. The other person responds positively and in a way to try to solve the problem that you’re both feeling. The conditions are less important than the final one. When you ventilate anger anonymously so that the other person doesn’t know who you are and cannot retaliate, you will feel more catharsis than if you’re talking right to the person. The person knows who you are and can respond in kind. I wrote this before the internet and what is the internet, but a giant anonymous rant where people can impulsively immediately say any angry thing on their mind without thinking about it or assessing what they’ve said. I used to say there’s two reasons to express anger. One is to make yourself feel better momentarily, and the other is to solve the problem that’s caused the anger. We are seeing the first people who feel virtuous and moral and courageous and brave for using insults and vehement against their perceived or real enemies, but it’s not solving the problem.

ELISE:

In this example, they feel catharsis and do they feel any need to self justify or everyone loses?

CAROL:

Well, no. If I read something that really angers me so I dash off an enraged half literate comment, okay, I’m not even editing it. I’m so angry. Okay, I feel good. That was fun. Okay, done posted nothing to justify nothing one way or another. So that’s why we see a proliferation of that kind of impulsive rage response when you aren’t anonymous and when the other person can say to you, well, actually, you know what? You’ve got it all wrong. You’ve misunderstood me. That’s not what I intended, and how dare you? I’ve done this and gotten pie in my face, which doesn’t make me want to respond more kindly either to have a reasonable conversation, and I think that’s where we are. People are arguing from a space of self-righteous. I’m right. I’m entitled to be angry. Anger is good. I’m an American, the American way. All that it does from all the research from Michael Kahan right on in social psychology and clinical psychology, is that the angrier that people are the angrier, they get it. It doesn’t make you feel better for the most

ELISE:

Part, no. If anything, it just seems to hit a ripple and then suddenly you’ve blown someone up anonymously or not on Instagram, and it’s like that person is left to either respond or royal or seethe, and the self-justification cycle is off to the races.

CAROL:

The other thing that happens, there was a charming study after Michael Kas by a social psychologist studying schoolchildren elementary school children who were in this experiment. Another child insults the children and the children are given a chance to do nothing at all to respond in kind to the insulting student, say something mean or evil back. The third group of children were given an explanation or the angry child’s behavior, you know what? His parents are going through a divorce. He’s probably pretty sad these days. He really wasn’t angry at you. He’s probably really upset. So, okay, so you have these three ways of dealing with somebody who’s been angry at you. The first group who did nothing were pretty much fine. The second group who were encouraged to retaliate sort of felt better, but they didn’t like the child and they didn’t wish to play with the child again in the future. First group felt okay, but they didn’t like the child. It was only the third group who both lost their feeling of anger and who did not also feel hostile toward that child. I mean, there’s a really important moral lesson here on the power of understanding someone else’s behavior before you sound off an anger.

ELISE:

Yeah, that’s a profound truth, and I wish more people were talking about dissonance theory because I think it humanizes what’s happening, and I think there’s a massive difference, even though they’re both really hard to stomach between cynicism, which is maybe evil, people doing evil things consciously and hypocrisy, which is blind spots in action, it doesn’t mean that it’s not also enraging, but I think the more that we can understand the apparatus that’s making that happen, the more understanding we can maybe bring. I mean, certainly what we’re doing is not working.

CAROL:

It’s very true. You see it in a way. It’s the same thing about being angry at someone who voted for Trump, say, so there’s many reasons somebody benefit voted for Trump, malevolent reasons, fascist reasons, ugly reasons, antisemitic. There’s all kinds of reasons, but then there are a whole bunch of other reasons that are far more benign that have more to do with the way the person lives in the world. I don’t necessarily want to go there on this, but these are not horrible people that don’t do good things for you. A friend of mine who had terrible COVID when she got out of the hospital, she said her democratic friends didn’t bring her soup, call her to make sure she was okay. It was her Republican neighbor who did. So to the extent that we don’t see our own blind spots in trying to understand the behavior of others, it’s like a philosopher actually said, so suppose I do what you say and put myself in the other person’s shoes, and it turns out there’s sons of bitches who want to get me.

Okay, alright. That’s one lesson you might get being empathic, but you might also find unexpected benefits. I love the story that we tell of Sarah Silverman and the dissonance she felt with Louis CK. What do we all want to do? We want to make a fast decision when we’re in a state of dissonance. Get rid of the friend or minimize what the friend did. Live with it, live with it. Have those sleepless nights if necessary. Before you decide what you want to do. There’s a world in which we can say, he is my friend and he did this bad thing, and the friend part is worth keeping, and the bad thing is worth acknowledging that it’s bad and seeing what will happen over time in terms of changing attitudes and per persuasion. That’s where the moral choice comes in. Yeah.

ELISE:

Yeah. I really like that example. It’s a very grownup perspective. That’s rare to see in our culture, right? In part because I’m sure she was judged and shamed and threatened with cancellation for not just outright condemning him as a person and distancing herself with a certain vence, and that’s to your point, what we need to own on the left of center space is that sort of violent tendency that we exhibit all the time as well. Well, this was so fun. I hope you’ll come back. This is such a rich book. There’s so much for us to explore and anger more on anger.

CAROL:

That one doesn’t go away, does

ELISE:

It? Never. No, never so animating, that’s for sure.

CAROL:

Absolutely.

ELISE:

Again, Mistakes Were Made, But Not By Me: Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts is so fascinating. It covers a tremendous amount of ground that we barely escaped the surface of. It’s by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, both legends giants. I wanted to read to you about this catharsis experiment because I think it’s so helpful to understand exactly what the machinations are inside our brains. Alright, so they write the results of the first experiment that demonstrated. This actually came as a complete surprise to the investigator Michael Kahn. Then a graduate student in clinical psychology at Harvard designed an ingenious experiment that he was sure would demonstrate the benefits of catharsis. Conn took polygraph and blood pressure measurements from college students one at a time, allegedly as part of a medical experiment. As he was taking these measurements, feigned, annoyance, and made some insulting remarks to the students having to do with their mothers.

The students got angry, their blood pressure soared in the experimental condition. The students were allowed to vent their anger by informing con’s, supervisor of this insult. Thus, they believed they were getting him in big trouble in the control condition. The students did not get a chance to express their anger. A good Freudian was astonished by the results. Catharsis was a total flop in terms of making people feel better. The people who were allowed to express their anger about kahan felt far greater animosity toward him than those who were not given that opportunity. In addition, although everyone’s blood pressure went up during the experiment, subjects who expressed their anger showed even greater elevations. The blood pressure of those who were not allowed to express their anger soon returned to normal. Seeking an explanation for this unexpected pattern discovered dissonance theory, which was just getting attention at the time and realized it could beautifully account for his results because the students thought they had gotten the technician in serious trouble.

They had to justify their actions by convincing themselves that he deserved it, thus increasing their anger and their blood pressure. I think that’s a really crystal clear example of how this works. The self-justification cycle that you need to embark on to preserve your sons of yourself as this valid, correct, morally good person, and you need to self justify the implications of doing things in the world that might harm other people. Whether those people were insulting your mom or not. Alright, friends, thank you for joining us. I loved this conversation. I will see you I next time. If you got something out of today’s episode, I would so appreciate your help spreading the word. Please rate and review the episode, follow pulling the thread on your preferred podcast platform, and share this episode with a friend who would also enjoy it. That’s how we grow this thing. It’s so helpful. Thank you.