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 role cognitive dissonance has on people and how they see both the world and themselves. The book, first published in 2007, was updated and revised for a second edition in 2015 and a third edition in 2020, with a new last chapter on the Trump phenomenon: "Dissonance, Democracy, and the Demagogue." According to Tavris and Aronson, cognitive dissonance allows us to justify our mistakes and harms, keeping us from conscious awareness that we even made any, and thereby allows us to live with ourselves. This is how even "charlatans, scammers, and tyrants sleep at night." Given a choice between accepting information that we don't want to hear and justifying outdated beliefs or hurtful acts, most people choose self-justification.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 and then cannot end a war, 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. Tavris and Aronson use a pyramid metaphor to explain how self-justification can lead people far down a path they might never have imagined for themselves. Because of the need to reduce dissonance after we make a decision, once we have done so we become less able "to think skeptically and scientifically about it." Our attitudes now change to be consistent with our behavior, and we may end up far away from people who took a different path. Gender, feminism, and women's studies Tavris began writing about women's status and gender differences in the 1970s. Her book with Carole Wade, The Longest War: Sex Differences in Perspective "[examines] the scientific evidence for and against many beliefs about women and women's lower status