Carol Tavris

Carol Tavris is an American social psychologist, writer, and lecturer. She studied sociology and comparative literature at Brandeis University before earning a PhD in social psychology from the University of Michigan in 1971. Her career has included editorial work at Psychology Today, teaching at the New School for Social Research and UCLA, and decades of writing psychological science for general readers.

Her books repeatedly test familiar beliefs against research. Anger: The Misunderstood Emotion challenges the idea that venting is necessarily healthy, while The Mismeasure of Woman examines how assumptions about gender shape research and public debate. Her prose is direct and skeptical, built to make psychological concepts useful without turning them into slogans.

With Elliot Aronson, Tavris wrote Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me), first published in 2007 and revised in later editions. The book uses cognitive dissonance to explain how people defend bad decisions, reshape memories, and preserve a flattering view of themselves. Its examples range across politics, relationships, medicine, and criminal justice. Tavris has also written Psychobabble and Biobunk and co-written Estrogen Matters with oncologist Avrum Bluming.

Start with Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me). It is the clearest introduction to her central concerns: why evidence so often loses to self-protection, and what it takes to recognize an error before justification hardens around it.