Mistakes Were Made - Carol Tavris [118]
7 Lenny Bruce (1966), How to Talk Dirty and Influence People. Chicago: Playboy Press and New York: Pocket Books, pp. 232–233.
8 Steven Kull, director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes ( PIPA) at the University of Maryland, commenting on the results of the PIPA/Knowledge Networks poll, June 14, 2003, “Many Americans Unaware WMD Have Not Been Found.”
9 Drew Westen, Clint Kilts, Pavel Blagov, et al. (2006), “The Neural Basis of Motivated Reasoning: An fMRI Study of Emotional Constraints on Political Judgment During the U.S. Presidential Election of 2004,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 18, pp. 1947–1958.
10 Charles Lord, Lee Ross, and Mark Lepper (1979), “Biased Assimilation and Attitude Polarization: The Effects of Prior Theories on Subsequently Considered Evidence,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37, pp. 2098–2109.
11 Doris Kearns Goodwin (1994), No Ordinary Time. New York: Simon & Schuster/Touchstone, p. 321. (Emphasis in original.)
12 In one of the earliest demonstrations of postdecision dissonance reduction, Jack Brehm, posing as a marketing researcher, showed a group of women eight different appliances (a toaster, a coffeemaker, a sandwich grill, and the like) and asked them to rate each item for its desirability. Brehm then told each woman that she could have one of the appliances as a gift, and gave her a choice between two of the products she had rated as being equally appealing. After she chose one, he wrapped it up and gave it to her. Later, the women rated the appliances again. This time, they increased their rating of the appliance they had chosen and decreased their rating of the appliance they had rejected. See Jack Brehm (1956), “Postdecision Changes in the Desirability of Alternatives,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 52, pp. 384–389.
13 Daniel Gilbert (2006), Stumbling on Happiness. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
14 Robert E. Knox and James A. Inkster (1968), “Postdecision Dissonance at Post Time,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 8, pp. 319–323.
15 Katherine S. Mangan (2005, April 1), “A Brush With a New Life,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, pp. A28—A30.
16 For example, see Brad J. Bushman (2002), “Does Venting Anger Feed or Extinguish the Flame? Catharsis, Rumination, Distraction, Anger, and Aggressive Responding,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 28, pp. 724–731; Brad J. Bushman, Angelica M. Bonacci, William C. Pedersen, et al. (2005), “Chewing on It Can Chew You Up: Effects of Rumination on Triggered Displaced Aggression,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 88, pp. 969–983. The history of research disputing the assumption of catharsis is summarized in Carol Tavris (1989), Anger: The Misunderstood Emotion. New York: Simon & Schuster/Touchstone.
17 Michael Kahn’s original study was “The Physiology of Catharsis,” published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 3, pp. 278–298, in 1966. For another early classic, see Leonard Berkowitz, James A. Green, and Jacqueline R. Macaulay (1962), “Hostility Catharsis as the Reduction of Emotional Tension,” Psychiatry, 25, pp. 23–31.
18 Jon Jecker and David Landy (1969), “Liking a Person as a Function of Doing Him a Favor,” Human Relations, 22, pp. 371–378.
19 Benjamin Franklin (2004), The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (introduction by Lewis Leary). New York: Touchstone, pp. 83–84.
20 Ruth Thibodeau and Elliot Aronson (1992), “Taking a Closer Look: Reasserting the Role of the Self-Concept in Dissonance Theory,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 18, pp. 591–602.
21 There is a large and lively research literature on the “self-serving bias,” the tendency to believe the best of ourselves and explain away the worst. It is a remarkably consistent bias in human cognition, though there are interesting variations across cultures, ages, and genders. See Amy Mezulis, Lyn Y. Abramson, Janet S. Hyde, and Benjamin L. Hankin (2004), “Is There a Universal Positivity Bias in Attributions?