From Meryl Wilsner, the acclaimed author of Something to Talk About, comes Mistakes Were Made, a sharp and sexy rom-com about a college senior who accidentally hooks up with her best friend’s mom. Tallerico, Brian. "Timmy Failure: Mistakes Were Made movie review (2020) | Roger Ebert". rogerebert.com . Retrieved June 6, 2022. From the critically acclaimed author of Something to Talk About comes Meryl Wilsner's Mistakes Were Made , a sharp and sexy rom-com about a college senior who accidentally hooks up with her best friend’s mom. Listeners will have a devilishly grand time with this rambunctiously robust performance by stellar narrators Quinn Riley and Stephanie Németh-Parker." - AudioFile Magazine (Earphones Award Winner) The overly sanctimonious, self-righteous tone of the book was a total turn-off. For the most part, I felt that it really condemned the people in the examples of self-justification that Tavris wrote about. Even though she had a good point, I feel that most of the situations are more complex than she made them out to be.

Michael Shermer, in the Scientific American, wrote that Tavris and Aronson brilliantly illuminate the fallacies that underlie irrational behavior. [2] Prejudices emerge from the disposition of the human mind to perceive and process information in categories. "Categories" is a nicer, more neutral word than "stereotypes," but it's the same thing. Anderson, Samantha (July 5, 2018). "Disney's live-action Timmy Failure adaptation filming at Cloverdale Fairgrounds - Surrey Now-Leader". The Surrey Now News-Leader . Retrieved July 22, 2018.If you look up a dictionary definition of ‘evil politician’ it wouldn’t be too surprising if there was a picture of Hitler. But even if you had the chance to interview Hitler in the bunker just before he popped his pill, it is very unlikely that he would have admitted that he had made many (any) mistakes. It is also unlikely that he would think that anything he had done was either wrong or bad. No, he would have the (to us) remarkable perspective that not only he had done good (and probably not just ‘on balance’) and had acted in the best interests of the future of all humanity, but that one day people would even realise that he was as wonderful as he had always thought himself. I think we (or perhaps just I) find this hard to accept, because we like to believe that deep down the people we consider to be evil know they are bad. If only the world was so simple. Festinger explained this all-too-human need to justify past actions as driven by something he termed "cognitive dissonance" - the state of tension that occurs whenever we hold two "cognitions" (ideas, beliefs, opinions) that contradict each other. Erin Bennett came to Family Weekend to get closer to her daughter, not have a one-night stand with a college senior. In her defense, she hadn’t known Cassie was a student when they'd met. To make things worse, Erin’s daughter brings Cassie to breakfast the next morning. And despite Erin's better judgement—how could sleeping with your daughter’s friend be anything but bad?—she and Cassie get along in the day just as well as they did last night. Wilsner’s steamy, fast-paced secret-lovers contemporary romance features fully realized queer protagonists and secondary characters...It’s not a romantic comedy, but definitely has humor, as well as great dialogue and hot sex scenes." - Library Journal Both authors are respected researchers in the field of social psychology. A field that is no stranger to dramatic overstatement (to say the least). But also, a field that produces some of the most denuding, insight producing, and frankly, disturbing findings of all the sub fields of psychology.

I'd have to include this little gem in that list. You definitely want to be on stable footing when you read this thing. If not, than hide the sharp objects and designate a trusted friend to be at the ready to talk you down when it hits you how hopelessly self delusional all us humans actually is. In this book we see the the trail of self-justification through the territories of family, memory, therapy, law, prejudice, conflict, and war. MRI scans confirm that when we are confronted with dissonant information, the reasoning areas of our brains all but shut down. And it's not only politicians who indulge in self-justification. For which of us, on buying the more expensive appliance, has not then spent weeks kidding ourselves the cheaper model would have been unreliable or downright dangerous?But how do we square two dissonant cognitions when one of them is the belief that we are decent people and the other is the knowledge that we have inflicted pain on an innocent victim? One of the psychological insights that has been messing around with my mind lately is the idea that if you ask someone who is studying to become a doctor why one of their fellow students is also becoming a doctor they are likely to say that it is obvious that that person is virtually made to be a doctor. In fact, they are likely to think that virtually everyone else in their course is there because they are almost constitutionally designed to become a doctor. But if you ask the person themselves why they are becoming a doctor they are likely to say that they are in the course more or less by accident. That there have been a network of lines that intersected and by a series of coincidences they have ended up here. And this is not just true of people’s understanding of those around them when it comes to career choices – but virtually everything else they do too. The tendency is for us to greatly over-rate what others do as being a manifestation of their ‘essential nature’ and what we do as being an unpredictable consequence of arbitrary and random forces. When Cassie Klein goes to an off-campus bar to escape her school’s Family Weekend, she isn’t looking for a hookup—it just happens. Buying a drink for a stranger turns into what should be an uncomplicated, amazing one-night stand. But then the next morning rolls around and her friend drags her along to meet her mom—the hot, older woman Cassie slept with. Andreeva, Nellie (May 18, 2023). "Disney Removes Dozens Of Series From Disney+ & Hulu, Including 'Big Shot', 'Willow', 'Y' & 'Dollface' ". Deadline . Retrieved May 23, 2023.

Naïve realism" - the "inescapable conviction" that we all have, that we see things as they really are. If someone has a different opinion they obviously aren't seeing things clearly. Imagine (just imagine) living in a 360 degree wrap around lie in which we falsely perceive ourselves as heroic victims to our own needless and profound detriment (let the finger pointing begin). Sounds pretty bad right. That is what's at stake here. But fear not, there is a pathway out of the matrix*. As I mentioned. Encountering the material in this book is very growth engendering. The book is literally a partial antidote to the poison it describes. But be warned, the antidote burns as it goes down.

A frothy blend of heart, humor, and steam, this story about accepting love and embracing the unexpected will stay with readers far beyond its happily ever after. A vibrant, intoxicating romance." - Ashley Herring Blake, author of Delilah Green Doesn't Care She didn’t say more, too busy ogling the woman. She hadn’t gotten her fill from across the bar, apparently. It was even better up close, the woman’s pale skin somehow glowing even in the low light. Her eyes were strikingly blue—thin eyeliner making them stand out even more. In case your wondering who those blind, tortured souls are who think and behave in such insane, self delusional and amoral ways. It's you, me and everyone else we know. In other words, everyone. Basically, the reasoning parts of our brain shut down when confronted with “dissonant” information, and the emotion circuits light up. "These mechanisms provide a neurological basis for the observation that once our minds are made up, it is hard to change them."

Reasoning areas of the brain "virtually shut down" when we are confronted with dissonant information, and emotion circuits light up when consonance is restored. Basically, this shows that there is a neurological basis for the fact that once we make up our minds, it is pretty hard to change them.Ask any kid who wallops a younger brother. "I'm decent, but I hit him," the argument runs, "therefore he must have deserved it." It's the most vicious of circles. Aggression begets self-justification, which begets more aggression, and thus do the authors lead us, one small step at a time, down the road to Abu Ghraib and to all those deeds throughout the ages whose doers were never the monsters we'd prefer them to be but just decent people like us. She used a lot of logical fallacies. Her pet metaphor of the "pyramid" is just another version of the slippery slope fallacy. And she heavily relied on either-or logic to support her claims. This was by far the best book I have read in quite a few years. Highly recommended. It was so informative and engaging that I think I wore out my welcome reading it out loud to anyone who was nearby. I was going to go into this elaborate robot “ does-not-compute” comparison to illustrate the nature of cognitive dissonance, but then I figured that I'd leave it to Lucille Bluth. Ultimately, I think that Tavris's conclusions about self-justification are probably correct, but her argument was flawed. There were a number of things that put me off from this book. Here's my list of gripes: