What's The Difference Between Tavris And Aronson

Reflections
“But there is a big difference between a guilty man telling the public something he knows is untrue (“I did not have sex with that woman”; “I am not a crook”) and that man persuading himself that he did a good thing. In the former situation, he is lying and knows he is lying to save his own skin. In the latter, he is lying to himself. That 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.” (14)
Tavris and Aronson posit that self-justification is more dangerous than lying because it gives us the power to lie to ourselves. When we begin to convince
Even when we are confronted with evidence that we were wrong, we tend to believe in our wrong point of view even more. We criticize the evidence or dismiss it entirely. The authors give multiple examples of this, from failed political moves to mistaken police actions. Once again, we must reduce the dissonance caused by this contrary evidence and, since we cannot accept it without admitting we were wrong, we convince ourselves that the evidence is wrong. Through this, we preserve our self-image and hold on to the belief that comforts us: the belief that we were right.
The authors also use the term “naive realism” to explain this process. Naive realism is the belief that we are truly objective and others who do not see things the same way as us are irrational and unreasonable. Since we believe we are objective, any evidence that suggests that we were mistaken and did not see things as they truly were cannot be true. We have to reduce the dissonance between our objectivity and our mistaken portrayal of something. Once again, we choose to hold to the belief that we are objective and dismiss the idea that we were
Therefore, we will do what it takes to preserve these attachments. Evolutionary psychologists argue that ethnocentrism - the belief that our own culture, nation, or religion is superior to all others - aids survival by strengthening our bonds to our primary social groups and thus increasing our willingness to work, fight, and occasionally die for them.” (70)
In this chapter, the authors discuss prejudice and how this is an effect of reducing cognitive dissonance. These prejudices are our “blind spots” that allow us to maintain the belief that we are just people even though we treat others badly for something such as their race or gender. We usually do not know we are being prejudiced because we have convinced ourselves that the beliefs we have about this group are objectively true. Since we have treated this group badly in the past or perhaps seen people we regard highly mistreating this group, we must justify it