Carol Tavris

Carol Anne Tavris (born September 17, 1944) is an American social psychologist and feminist. She has devoted her career to writing and lecturing about the contributions of psychological science to the beliefs and practices that guide people's lives, and to criticizing "psychobabble," "biobunk," and pseudoscience. Her many writings have dealt with critical thinking, cognitive dissonance, anger, gender, and other topics in psychology.

Tavris received a B.A. in comparative literature and sociology from Brandeis University and a Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of Michigan. She has taught psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles and the New School for Social Research. She is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. Tavris was also a member of the editorial board of Psychological Science in the Public Interest. Her articles, book reviews, and op-eds have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, The Times Literary Supplement (TLS), Scientific American, and other publications. Her column "The Gadfly" in Skeptic Magazine ran from 2014 to 2024.

Early life In an interview with The Skeptics Society, Tavris described her early life. She grew up in Los Angeles, California, with her parents, Sam and Dorothy Tavris, secular Jews who promoted and practiced critical thinking and equality for women. She was encouraged to argue and discuss everything with them, from household rules to religion. Her parents gave her books about successful women—ranging from Phillis Wheatley to Susan B. Anthony—and her father taught her poetry and storytelling. Her grandparents were Russian Jews who emigrated to Chicago in 1910. Her mother, who earned a law degree at 21, became the sole breadwinner of the family in 1956 when Tavris’s father died suddenly. Tavris was 11 years old.

Cognitive dissonance Another area of focus for Tavris is cognitive dissonance, a theory first developed by Leon Festinger and later advanced by his student, Elliot Aronson, into a theory of self-justification. Cognitive dissonance is the state of discomfort one feels when two beliefs, or a belief and behavior, contradict each other, or when a deeply held belief is disconfirmed by evidence. Written with the social psychologist Elliot Aronson, Tavris and Aronson's book, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts, delves into the effect cognitive dissonance has on people and on how they see both the world and themselves. Given a choice between accepting information that we don't want to hear and justifying outdated beliefs or hurtful acts, most people choose self-justification. Indeed, Tavris says, "the more we pride ourselves on our intelligence and our competence, the stronger our commitment to an ideology or philosophy of life... the harder it is to accept evidence that we might be wrong." Mistakes Were Made explains how cognitive dissonance applies in all domains of life, including presidents who start a war and then cannot end it, prosecutors who cannot accept that they put innocent people in prison, therapists who adopt the latest fad and cannot let it go when it proves unhelpful or harmful, quarreling couples who cannot understand the other person's point of view, and all the rest of us who find it difficult or impossible to give up a belief shown to be dated or wrong.

She co-authored the book Estrogen Matters with Avrum Bluming, a medical oncologist and emeritus Clinical Professor of Medicine at University of Southern California, in 2018; it was revised and updated in 2024. It refutes the claim that hormone replacement therapy is an unsafe treatment for postmenopausal women or those with a history of breast cancer. The book cites flaws in the methods and findings of the Women’s Health Initiative, whose claims about hormone therapy the authors describe as “misleading in the extreme”.

Tavris identifies as an equality feminist (in contrast to the strains of feminism that have promoted notions of female superiority or inherent differences in psychology and abilities). For Tavris, feminism and science are not incompatible; on the contrary, she regards the scientific method as a way to "further the goals of feminism, and feminism is a way of improving science." Tavris has long believed that science and critical thinking are "the major tools we have for assessing which ideas are better than others and of forcing ourselves to let go of ideas that don’t work." In this goal, she maintains, skepticism – a willingness to question received wisdom, to demand good evidence, to be willing to hold even our own ideological beliefs up to scrutiny – is an essential ally. So, she would add, is a sense of humor.

Personal life Tavris was married to the actor Ronan O'Casey until his death in April 2012.

She has testified as an expert witness in several court cases where evidence against a defendant was based on pseudoscientific, unvalidated psychological ideas, and she was an advisor for the National Center for Reason and Justice, an advocacy group that was devoted to fighting false allegations and wrongful convictions.

On August 21, 2010, Tavris was a special guest at the 10th Anniversary Gala by the Independent Investigations Group and received an award for contributions to skepticism and science. On May 10, 2013, she received an honorary doctorate of letters from Simmons College, and on February 27, 2015, she received the Media Achievement Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. On July 27, 2016, she received the Bertrand Russell Distinguished Scholar award from the Foundation for Critical Thinking at Sonoma State.