Elliot Aronson Quotes

Science is a form of arrogance control.

Aronson's first law: People who do crazy things are not necessarily crazy.

The person who is easiest to brainwash is the person whose beliefs are based on slogans that have never been seriously challenged.

Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human. Society is something in nature that precedes the individual. Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god. Aristotle Politics, c. 328 BC

... the more similar a person seems to you in attitudes, opinions, and interests, the more you like the person. Opposites may attract, but they don't stick.

Thus, if passionate love is like cocaine, then companionate is more like a glass of fine wine - something delicious and pleasurable, but with fewer health palpitations and less mania.

What do Hitler's inner circle, Nixon's close advisers, and NASA administrators have in common, aside from the fact that they made terrible decisions? Each was a relatively cohesive group isolated from dissenting points of view.

News is a form of entertainment.

My favorite book on cognitive dissonance is Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson.

The ten instincts and cognitive psychology. Our thinking on the ten instincts was influenced by the work of a number of brilliant cognitive scientists. Some of the books that completely changed our thinking about the mind and about how we should teach facts about the world are: Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational (2008), The Upside of Irrationality (2010), and The Honest Truth About Dishonesty (2012); Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (1997), The Stuff of Thought (2007), The Blank Slate (2002), and The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011); Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) (2007); Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011); Walter Mischel, The Marshmallow Test (2014); Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner, Superforecasting (2015); Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal (2012); Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis (2006) and The Righteous Mind (2012); and Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What Isn’t So (1991).

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

When two people produce entirely different memories of the same event, observers usually assume that one of them is lying. […] But most of us, most of the time, are neither telling the whole truth nor intentionally deceiving. We aren’t lying; we are self-justifying. All of us, as we tell our stories, add details and omit inconvenient facts; we give the tale a small, self-enhancing spin; that spin goes over so well that the next time we add a slightly more dramatic embellishment; we justify that little white lie as making the story better and clearer – until what we remember may not have happened that way, or even may not have happened at all. […] History is written by the victors, and when we write our own histories, we do so just as the conquerors of nations do: to justify our actions and make us look and feel good about ourselves and what we did or what we failed to do. If mistakes were made, memory helps us remember that they were made by someone else.

For example, a teenager may dread going to school with a pimple on his forehead or on a bad hair day because "everyone will notice". Thomas Gilovich and his associates have found, however, that such worries are often greatly exaggerated.

An appreciation of the power of self esteem helps us understand therefore why people who have low self esteem or who simply believe they are incompetent in some domain are not totally overjoyed when they do something well why on the contrary they often feel like frauds

We remember the central events of our life stories. But when we do misremember, our mistakes aren’t random. [...] memory researchers love to quote Nietzsche: "‘I have done that,’ says my memory. ‘I cannot have done that,’ says my pride, and remains inexorable. Eventually – memory yields.

Dissonance theory also exploded the self-flattering idea that we humans, being Homo sapiens, process information logically. On the contrary: If the new information is consonant with our beliefs, we think it is well founded and useful: "Just what I always said!" But if the new information is dissonant, then we consider it biased or foolish: "What a dumb argument" So powerful is the need for consonance that when people are forced to look at disconfirming evidence, they will find a way to criticize, distort, or dismiss it so chat they can maintain or even strengthen their existing belief. This mental contortion is called the "confirmation bias

All of us have hard decisions to make at times in our lives; not all of them will be right, and not all of them will be wise. Some are complicated, with consequences we could never have foreseen. If we can resist the temptation to justify our actions in a rigid, overconfident way, we can leave the door open to empathy and an appreciation of life's complexity, including the possibility that what was right for us might not have been right for others.

Lyndon Johnson was a master of self-justification. According to his biographer Robert Caro, when Johnson came to believe in something, he would believe in it “totally, with absolute conviction, regardless of previous beliefs, or of the facts in the matter.” George Reedy, one of Johnson’s aides, said that he “had a remarkable capacity to convince himself that he held the principles he should hold at any given time, and there was something charming about the air of injured innocence with which he would treat anyone who brought forth evidence that he had held other views in the past. It was not an act… He had a fantastic capacity to persuade himself that the ‘truth’ which was convenient for the present was the truth and anything that conflicted with it was the prevarication of enemies. He literally willed what was in his mind to become reality.” Although Johnson’s supporters found this to be a rather charming aspect of the man’s character, it might well have been one of the major reasons that Johnson could not extricate the country from the quagmire of Vietnam. A president who justifies his actions only to the public might be induced to change them. A president who has justified his actions to himself, believing that he has the truth, becomes impervious to self-correction.

Children learn to justify their aggressive actions early: They hit a younger sibling, who starts to cry, and immediately claim, "But he started it! He deserved it!" Most parents find these childish self- justifications to be of no great consequence, and usually they aren't. But it is sobering (0 realize that the same mechanism underlies the behavior of gangs who bully weaker children, employers who mistreat workers, lovers who abuse each other, police officers who continue beating a suspect who has surrendered, tyrants who imprison and torture ethnic minorities, and soldiers who commit atrocities against civilians. In all these cases, a vicious circle is created: Aggression begets self-justification, which begets more aggression.

Half a century ago, eminent psychologist Elliot Aronson conducted a series of experiments suggesting that we’re often more sensitive to gains and losses in esteem than the level of esteem itself. When someone always supports us, we take it for granted—and can discount it. But we regard someone who began as a rival and then became an enthusiastic supporter as an authentic advocate.

Elliot predicted that if people go through a great deal of pain, discomfort, effort, or embarrassment to get something, they will be happier with that "something" than if it came to them easily.

If you want advice on what product to buy, ask someone who is still gathering information and is still open-minded. And if you want to know whether a program will help you, don't rely on testimonials: Get the data from controlled experiments.

Their thinking challenged many notions that were gospel in psychology and among the general public, such as the behaviorist's view that people do things primarily for the rewards they bring, the economist's view that human beings generally make rational decisions, and the psychoanalyst's view that acting aggressively gets rid of aggressive impulses.

Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me), de Carol Tavris y Elliot Aronson.

Ludzie są skłonni do zapamiętania wiarygodnych argumentów, które wspierają ich stanowisko, i niewiarygodnych argumentów na rzecz stanowiska przeciwnego. Zapamiętanie niewiarygodnych argumentów na rzecz swego stanowiska lub argumentów wiarygodnych, które wspierają stanowisko przeciwne, wzbudziłoby dysonans (zaczerpnięto z: Jones, Kohier 1959). Powyżej opisany proces wyjaśnia prawdopodobnie znany fakt, że w takich zagadnieniach, jak polityka i religia ludzie, którzy są mocno zaangażowani, nie będą prawie nigdy spostrzegać rzeczy tak, jak my je widzimy (we właściwy sposób!), bez względu na to, jak silne i wyważone mogą być nasze argumenty.

What is the book (or books) you’ve given most as a gift, and why? Or what are one to three books that have greatly influenced your life? Books that influenced me the most: The Transformed Cell by Steven A. Rosenberg Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me) by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! by Richard P. Feynman If you could have a gigantic billboard anywhere with anything on it, what would it say? Are there any quotes you think of often or live your life by? Well, assuming it’s a big billboard, I’d lobby for the following: “The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”—Bertrand Russell “For the great enemy of truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived and dishonest—but the myth—persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the clichés of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.”—John F. Kennedy “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”—Albert Einstein “If you set a goal, it should meet these two conditions: 1) It matters; 2) You can influence the outcome.”—Peter Attia

Understanding how the mind yearns for consonance, and rejects information that questions our beliefs, decisions, or preferences, teaches us to be open to the possibility of error. It also helps us let go of the need to be right.

The American psychologist Elliot Aronson, who studied this phenomenon, famously assembled a discussion group of pompous, dull people. Some of the participants were made to endure an arduous selection process; others were allowed to join immediately, without expending any effort. Those who were given the runaround reported enjoying the group far more than the ones who were simply let in. Aronson explained what was happening here: whenever we’ve invested time, money or energy into something and it ends up being a complete waste of time, this creates dissonance, which we try to reduce by finding ways of justifying our bad decision. Aronson’s participants focused unconsciously on what might be interesting, or at least bearable, about being part of a deliberately boring group. The people who had invested very little effort in joining therefore had less dissonance to reduce, and more readily admitted what a waste of time it had been.

Perhaps more people would be inclined to take action if, like the stereotypical terrorist, global warming had a moustache.

A befolyásolhatóság legegyértelműbb személyiségváltozója az önértékelés. A meggyőzés célját szolgáló közlés jobban hat arra, akit az az érzés hat át, hogy nem felel meg, mint arra, aki elégedetten szemléli önmagát. Ez eléggé érthető, elvégre, ha valaki nem szereti saját magát, vélekedéseinek sem tulajdonít túlságosan nagy értéket. Ebből következik, hogy amikor gondolatait kétségbe vonják, nem fog makacsul ragaszkodni hozzájuk. Tudjuk, hogy az emberek arra törekednek, hogy ismereteik a valóságnak megfelelőek legyenek. Ha Sam a saját véleményétől eltérő közlést kap, amennyiben magas az önértékelése, el kell döntenie, hogy mikor lesz inkább igaza: ha álláspontját megváltoztatja, vagy ha továbbra is kitart az eredeti mellett. Ily módon konfliktust élhet át, ha nem ért egyet egy magas fokon hitelt érdemlő kommunikátorral. Ha viszont Samnak alacsony az önértékelése, akkor jóformán nem él át konfliktushelyzetet – miután nem tartja túlságosan nagyra önmagát, úgy érzi, jobb esélye van arra, hogy igaza legyen, ha elfogadja a közlő állításait.

Anyone who is awake nowadays knows that Republicans and Democrats seem to disagree on most issues — and neither side seems able to be persuaded by the other. Why? After analyzing the data from 44 years of studies and more than 22,000 people in the United States and Europe, John Jost and his associates86 have concluded that these disagreements are not simply philosophic disputes about how, say, to end poverty or fix schools; they reflect different ways of thinking, different levels of tolerance for uncertainty, and core personality traits, which is why conservatives and liberals are usually not persuaded by the same kinds of arguments. As a result of such evidence, some evolutionary psychologists maintain that ideological belief systems may have evolved in human societies to be organized along a left–right dimension, consisting of two core sets of attitudes: (1) whether a person advocates social change or supports the system as it is, and (2) whether a person thinks inequality is a result of human policies and can be overcome or is inevitable and should be accepted as part of the natural order.87 Evolutionary psychologists point out that both sets of attitudes would have had adaptive benefits over the millennia: Conservatism would have promoted stability, tradition, order, and the benefits of hierarchy, whereas liberalism would have promoted rebelliousness, change, flexibility, and the benefits of equality.88 Conservatives prefer the familiar; liberals prefer the unusual. Every society, to survive, would have done best with both kinds of citizens, but you can see why liberals and conservatives argue so emotionally over issues such as income inequality and gay marriage. They are not only arguing about the specific issue, but also about underlying assumptions and values that emerge from their personality traits. It is important to stress that these are general tendencies. Most people enjoy stability and change in their lives, perhaps in different proportion at different ages; many people will change their minds in response to new situations and experiences, as was the case in the acceptance of gay marriage; and until relatively recently in American society, the majority of members of both political parties were willing to compromise and seek common ground in passing legislation. Still, such differences in basic orientation help explain the frustrating fact that liberals and conservatives so rarely succeed in hearing one another, let alone in changing one another’s minds.

Confabulation, distortion, and plain forgetting are the foot soldiers of memory, and they are summoned to the front lines when the totalitarian ego wants to protect us from the pain and embarrassment of actions we took that are dissonant with our core self-images.