to interviews and observations." One reason she chose social psychology rather than comparative literature as her career was that she "liked the idea of testing ideas for their relative validity" and of being in a field whose research had immediate beneficial applications for people's private lives, relationships, and society. Career Tavris took a year off from graduate school to write for a new magazine, Psychology Today. She returned to the magazine after receiving her Ph.D. and stayed for the next four years. She met Carole Wade, her future co-author, while writing for the publication; the two of them taught one of the first courses in women's studies at San Diego State University, and out of that teaching collaboration, they wrote The Longest War: Sex Differences in Perspective, an interdisciplinary approach to the age-old question of why gender inequality exists. In the 1980s, Tavris joined Carole Wade in writing an introductory psychology textbook, Psychology. It "was the first to explicitly and systematically integrate principles of critical thinking" into the introductory psychology course, along with mainstreaming research on gender and culture, with the goal of making the field more inclusive. Wade and Tavris also published Invitation to Psychology, a shorter version of their main textbook. As of 2015, Psychology is in its 11th edition and Invitation its 6th. Tavris's first major trade book, Anger: The Misunderstood Emotion (1982, revised 1989), brought social-psychological research to light on many of the pop-psych, Freudian-based ideas about anger that were and are prevalent but wrong: such as that it is healthier, physically and psychologically, to "ventilate" anger than to "suppress" it. On the contrary, she showed, repeated venting rehearses anger, raises blood pressure, and often makes the other person angry back at you. In ways typical of her lifelong approach, she brought skepticism, data, and critical thinking to her evaluation of this and many other beliefs about anger. In her chapter on anger in social movements, she took as her main examples the efforts to promote women's rights and civil rights, and the role of anger in igniting the pursuit of justice. Cognitive dissonance A more recent 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,