Carol Tavris attributes the origins of her inclination to independent thinking and skepticism to her parents, Sam and Dorothy, nonreligious Jews who encouraged debate and questioning. “The thing I like best about the Jewish tradition,” her secular father would say, “is that it encourages argument—including with God. Maybe especially with God!” Both of her parents were feminists and social activists. Dorothy herself became a lawyer at the age of 21, becoming a role model for Carol and teaching her the goals of feminism. Carol’s parents encouraged her to ask questions about anything, from household rules to religion. They gave her books about courageous, remarkable women who were activists and pioneers in their fields, and her father taught her poetry and storytelling.
Her undergraduate studies in comparative literature and sociology—heavily influenced by Freudian theory in those days—did not satisfy her inclination for scientific inquiry. One year into her postgraduate work, she discovered a love for the scientific process and abandoned comparative literature, ultimately obtaining a Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of Michigan.
While still a doctoral student, she started working with the just-launched magazine Psychology Today. This experience set the direction for her future career, because she discovered there that, for her, writing about science would be much more personally satisfying than having a traditional academic career in doing science. At Psychology Today, she met another psychologist-editor, Carole Wade, who would become her co-author on The Longest War: Sex Differences in Perspective (1977/1984), which took an interdisciplinary approach to the age-old question of why gender inequality exists. In 1987, they published an introductory psychology textbook, Psychology, the first text to mainstream gender and culture and to feature basic principles of critical and scientific thinking. (A shorter version, Invitation to Psychology, followed.) That influential textbook has been in print ever since—as of 2020, through 13 editions.
Tavris’s first major trade book, Anger: The Misunderstood Emotion, was published in 1984, and brought good psychological science to bear on many popular but unvalidated ideas—such as the notion that expressing anger reduces it, or that suppressing anger causes ulcers. In 1992, Tavris wrote The Mismeasure of Woman, a science-based defense of equality feminism, the view that women are neither inferior nor superior to men. The title was a tribute to Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man, as both books showed how societal prejudices can affect research. Tavris’ multi-disciplinary book debunks myths about male and female brains, gender differences in abilities, PMS and other popular beliefs. In 2007, she and the world-famous social psychologist Elliot Aronson published Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts, which explores how cognitive dissonance leads people to justify their own mistakes and harmful decisions and to hold onto beliefs and practices long after the evidence shows they should be abandoned. (The book was updated in 2015 and again in 2020.) Their colleagues in the skeptic world often enjoy referring to Mistakes Were Made as the “bible” of skepticism, because it explains why giving people important evidence that they might be wrong—as skeptics are forever doing—so often backfires.
Tavris’s latest book, Estrogen Matters, written with oncologist Avrum Bluming, is another example of her determination to bring the best science to bear on complex issues of great importance to public health—even when, perhaps especially when, that science calls into question a widely held paradigm or an ideological position. In this book, the authors assess and debunk the paradigmatic belief that estrogen causes breast cancer. As their publisher describes it, the book is “a compelling defense of hormone replacement therapy, exposing the faulty science behind its fall from prominence and empowering readers to make informed decisions about their health.”
Carol Tavris’s articles, book reviews and op-eds have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the TLS (formerly, the Times Literary Supplement), Skeptical Inquirer and other publications. In 2014, she began writing a column for The Skeptic under the heading The Gadfly. A Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, she has received numerous awards for her efforts to promote science and skepticism, including an award from the Center for Inquiry’s Independent Investigations Group; an honorary doctorate from Simmons College for her work in promoting critical thinking and gender equity; the Bertrand Russell Distinguished Scholar, Foundation for Critical Thinking, Sonoma State; and the Media Achievement Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.
Dr. Tavris, although you haven’t worked as a researcher at a university, your position in the academic world is very strong. Your name figures on a list of the 50 greatest living psychologists. Eminent scholars pay heed to your views. What is the source of your influence?
I think you exaggerate, but to the extent I have any influence, I attribute it to my efforts to persuade with evidence (and humor), to avoid dogmatism and admit changes in my thinking, and to write as clearly as I can about complex issues. You can’t persuade if you write in impenetrable jargon. Though maybe you persuade some people that if they can’t understand you, you must be very smart!
Several times, your publications shook not only public opinion but also some scientists, such as “Beware the Incest-Survivor Machine” (Tavris 1993), some publications on feminism (such as your Gadfly columns cautioning that a person can make a false allegation not because she or he is lying, but because of the normal mechanisms and confabulations of memory), and your recent book with Avrum Bluming (2018) on estrogen therapy. Which of these publications generated particularly strong support from the scientific community?
“Particularly” strong support? I have no idea. The psychological scientists who have done research on the false premises of recovered-memory therapy and the nature of “imagination inflation” in memory have been enormously supportive, because they know they are fighting to change beliefs that are widely held among laypersons. Social psychologists and criminologists who work to exonerate people who have been falsely convicted on the basis not just of DNA but because of faulty eyewitness testimony or coerced confessions have also supported my writing about their research. In the case of our estrogen book, we are contradicting another widely held paradigm, namely that estrogen causes breast cancer and thus is harmful to women entering menopause, when estrogen plummets sharply. We carefully assess those claims and present the surprising evidence that they are incorrect: On the contrary, women who begin taking hormone therapy at menopause have a remarkable reduction in the risks of heart disease, osteoporosis, and Alzheimer’s. (Full disclosure: I did not take hormones in menopause and neither Avrum nor I have taken money from any pharmaceutical company.) Many eminent physicians and medical researchers have agreed with us, but they are in the minority. For now!
You are engaged in unmasking pseudoscience in the field of psychology. Unmasking others probably doesn’t make you a lot of friends, does it? How are you and your work in exposing pseudoscience perceived by other psychologists?
My life work has indeed focused on the puzzle of “why is it that when you give people good evidence that their beliefs or practices are wrong and even harmful, they don’t thank you and agree?” Elliot’s and my book Mistakes were made (but not by me) is our effort to answer that question. Over the years, I think I’ve come to be seen as a reliable gadfly, willing to speak truth to power, even when that “truth” or point of view is unwelcome—to feminists too. Many years ago, the feminist magazine Ms. had a cover story on satanic ritual abuse, that sad but devastating moral panic that was sweeping across the USA at the time. “Believe it!” the cover blared. No, thank you, I didn’t, and won’t.
When I hear about preposterous but popular ideas that survive in spite of the good science contradicting them, I wonder how you are able to maintain a healthy emotional distance from the injustices and harms they create. Don’t they infuriate you? After all, so many of them cause real harm and human suffering.
They do infuriate and depress me. I correspond with an African American man wrongfully convicted during the daycare sex-abuse hysteria that began in the 1990s. In spite of unmistakable evidence of his innocence, the governor refuses to pardon him. All I can do is try to help him individually; support organizations that work to exonerate the innocent; and write, write, write. Sometimes I calm myself by taking the long view that human nature contains the good as well as the bad; kindness as well as cruelty; cooperation as well as competitive greed. I look at the tireless work of activists for social justice, starting with my parents, and am inspired and heartened.
Skeptics face the problem of how hard it is to get their audiences to hear and accept their arguments. How do you deal with it?
I don’t expect everyone to agree with me. I certainly don’t expect people to agree with me if they have entrenched, vested interests in a practice or belief that they have held for years. But I can hope that people who are not fully informed about an issue may be persuaded when they are given good arguments and good data. Years ago, I asked Richard McNally, the brilliant Harvard clinical psychologist who has written so powerfully about the mechanisms that lead people to believe they have been abducted by aliens (and other irrational notions), why he was willing to debate John Mack, a promoter of that very notion, in a large public forum. He told me he had no hope of changing the minds of Mack’s followers—just of giving others in the audience the critical ammunition they needed to know why those beliefs were wrong. That’s my goal as well.
Your attitude toward pseudoscience is atypical of the academic community. Many of them turn a blind eye to pseudoscience practices. Why, in your opinion, is this so?
I disagree with the assumption in your question. The “academic community” is very large, after all, and “pseudoscience” covers a lot of territory. I would say that most academic scholars and psychological scientists are profoundly critical of pseudoscience—if by that you mean homeopathy or astrology or any of the many marketing gimmicks that flourish in the absence of any data to support their claims. But it is true that academics, like anyone else, will be inclined to turn a blind eye to evidence that they could be wrong about what they do or about a belief they hold—especially if they have a conflict of interest, intellectual or commercial, regarding that practice or belief. That is why, in the USA, the breakdown of the former academic firewall between empirical research and its commercial application is such a danger for science. Scientists used to think it was unseemly to profit from their research; the great Jonas Salk, on being asked if he would patent his polio vaccine, said, “Can you patent the sun?” Now scientists think it’s stupid not to profit from their discoveries. But when any scientific or pseudoscientific practice—such as facilitated communication or pop-psych methods of self-improvement or even well-intentioned workshops designed to eliminate prejudice and sexual harassment—is making money for its practitioners, they will almost certainly be inclined to reject, minimize or dispute disconfirming evidence.
Not only is making money from research a big problem for academics, but also publishing that research. Much research is financed from taxpayers’ money, and yet if those same taxpayers want to know the research results, they have to pay for them, and not with a small fee. Access to the content of one article is a minimum of $10. The open science movement places great emphasis on open access to research results. What’s your opinion on the subject?
I favor open science, if research is not self-published without peer review. It’s not just the taxpayers who have to pay a lot to get the information; it’s also the researchers, who often have to pay thousands of dollars out of their own pockets to get their work published. This is a disgraceful situation that is very damaging to the dissemination of scientific information.
Ignoring and even falsifying research results due to the financial interest we discussed earlier is a big problem and everything indicates that it affects even outstanding scientists. In 2019, as many as 26 of the articles by legendary psychologist Hans Eysenck (notably those on the relationship between personality, smoking and cancer) have been described as “unsafe” (King’s College London 2019) and a total of 61 his works have been submitted for retraction or correction (Marks 2019). What do you think about this matter?
I am unfamiliar with the specifics of the Eysenck retractions, so I have no idea if his publications were fraudulent, misguided, or unconsciously biased. Efforts to revisit old studies are worthy, to see which have held up and which would not pass muster today. But today’s researchers face harsher pressures than I imagine was true in Eysenck’s time: As I’ve said, when researchers are under extreme pressure to publish or perish—to publish any old thing rather than an investigation that took thought, time and effort—that increases the chance of fraud, cutting corners and manipulating statistics to make them seem more impressive than they are.
One of the very important issues you raise in your work is the gap between science and psychotherapy. One problem you have addressed concerns the many kinds of “therapies” that are not evidence-based, often promoted by people untrained in scientific methods or even basic psychology. But even good, empirically validated forms of psychotherapy have problems: In one study (Jonsson et al. 2014), it was found that only 3% of all studies on the effectiveness of psychotherapy included monitoring of negative side effects. In another, it turned out that most of the research is conducted by researchers who do not declare a conflict of interest (Lieb et al. 2016), yet another meta-analysis of meta-analysis studies showed that only 7% of all studies contain convincing evidence confirming the effectiveness of psychotherapy (Dragioti et al. 2017). The picture that emerges from these and many other works is not very optimistic. What are your views on this subject?
Thank you for bringing me up to date on this complex issue! Since I try not to talk from ignorance, I really should shut up on this question, but it is certainly interesting and got me to thinking. It is so difficult to measure the many factors involved in psychotherapy in addition to the methods used: complexity of client’s problem (spider phobia? paranoid personality disorder?), what “effectiveness” means, what “negative side effects” are, the fact that no client can be his or her own control, and, most of all, the resistance or inability of so many clients to change. The harms of psychotherapy have been noted since the 1950s, what one eminent clinical psychologist colleague of mine calls “the dirty little secret of the field.” However, while I am not optimistic that people can change significantly in psychotherapy, I do think that many can benefit from the chance to speak openly with an informed and experienced listener, without feeling they are being judged. Sometimes the relief of learning that they are not crazy, “abnormal,” or “sick” is therapy enough. Finding the right therapist, however, is not always easy. Especially today, given the article you told me about—Donald Meichenbaum and Scott Lilienfeld’s (2018) claim that there are over 600 different therapeutic modalities currently available. Becoming an informed consumer of psychotherapy is difficult, but people who are looking for help should start by checking a therapist’s credentials, experience and references. A university clinical psychology program might also be a place to start for getting referrals.
In 2018, Helen Pluckrose, James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian exposed their large-scale hoax in an attempt to ridicule what they called “grievance studies” (News at a glance 2018). In their opinion, many of the people who study minority groups that are targets of discrimination have become intellectually “corrupt,” using clouds of jargon to disguise the emptiness of their ideas. Pranksters? Whistle blowers warning us against the invasion of science by ideology? Or maybe hooligans who tried to tear down important ideas? You are a feminist. What are your feelings about this incident and its consequences?
Overall, I loved what they did. Whistle-blowing pranksters. Of course the recipients of their satire would be embarrassed, upset and angry. Feminism has nothing to do with my answer; I’ve been as critical of unintelligible, jargony writing by feminists as by antifeminists. In fact, long ago at Psychology Today we reported a similar prank that had been played on leading psychology journals, which accepted a nonsensical article in jargon rather than the very same article written in clear English.
Let’s talk about social psychology for a while. When you started your career working for Psychology Today, you witnessed a period that can fairly be called the golden era of social psychology. You interviewed Stanley Milgram (Tavris 1974), and you wrote about the most famous experiments of that era. Today, the integrity of many of them is being called into question. Gina Perry in her book Behind The Shock Machine questions the value of Milgram’s experiments (Perry 2013). What do you think about her work?
Gina Perry discovered some important flaws in Milgram’s method, notably the problems regarding debriefing and the research protocol. But I disliked her book immensely, as I explained in a review for the (London) TLS (Tavris 2014). To me she was doing “gotcha” journalism, trying to bring Milgram down for the sensational story of it, but without any understanding of the context of the times in which he did his work, and, for that matter, without an understanding of what social psychology is about and why so many of its findings distress people. Her tone is often snide and disparaging, attributing feelings and motives to him that reflect her own dislike of the man (and complete unawareness of what it must have been like for him, a white Jewish man, no matter how brilliant, to be at Yale, with its quotas against Jews and entrenched anti-Semitism). “Deep down,” she wrote, “something about Milgram makes us uneasy”—precisely: the evidence that situations have power over our behavior. Perry insists that people’s personalities and histories influence their actions, but Milgram never disputed that fact; his own experiments showed that many participants resisted. Perry tracked down one of the original subjects in the experiments, called Bill, who tried to explain to her why the studies were so valuable and why he did not regret participating, although he was one of those who went on to the end. Bill told her that people often say to him, “Nobody could ever get me to do anything like that.” “Well, guess what?,” he told Perry. “Yes, they can.” That, of course, is the moral of the Milgram story, but Perry failed to get it. She didn’t believe Bill. That’s why the Milgram experiment, unlike the prison “study,” remains a crucial and powerful contribution to the field.
As you mention the prison study, it is impossible to avoid discussing serious criticism raised over the Stanford Prison Experiment by Haslam and Reicher of Zimbardo’s methods and claims back in 2003 and recently refreshed by Thibault Le Texier in his 2018 book and in a 2019 journal article. And Susannah Cahalan’s (2019) book The Great Pretender casts doubt on the veracity of the experiment by David Rosenhan, years ago in the 1970s, involving sending pseudo-patients to psychiatric hospitals in the USA. This high-profile experiment commonly associated with the anti-psychiatry movement has ushered in revolutionary changes in the treatment of mental illness. What do you think about the discoveries made by these critics of “classic” studies?
The Stanford prison “experiment” was never a study and never an experiment; it was, as Leon Festinger called it at the time, a “happening.” Neither was Rosenhan’s work; it wasn’t a scientific investigation of any kind—it was more of a gimmick to make a point that he already knew he wanted to make. (True scientists must be prepared to have their evidence disconfirm their hypotheses.) But Zimbardo’s message was one that social psychologists supported and therefore welcomed—that the roles people are called upon to play can supersede their personal wishes and personality traits—and so, unfortunately, many set aside their discomforts with it as good psychological science. (In my intro-psych textbook with Carole Wade, we always reported the problems with the prison study, knowing how many instructors taught it in their classes.) And Cahalan’s brilliant book is long overdue. Again, at the time, many academics suppressed their discomforts with Rosenhan’s methods and alleged “findings,” because he, like Zimbardo, was a famous guy—at Stanford, no less. Rosenhan’s claims fit the goals of the anti-psychiatry movement, as you note. But he had nothing to do with the “revolutionary changes in the treatment of mental illness” that you mention. Those had more to do with the development of anti-psychotic and antidepressant drugs than with the closing of mental institutions, which were often warehouses for suffering patients for whom there was no treatment.
I read your very positive review of Barbara Ehrenreich’s (2010) Smile or Die in which she lays down an unprecedented challenge to the foundations of positive psychology. Would you say you share similar views on positive psychology?
Absolutely I do. I adored her sharp-witted, justified takedown of Martin Seligman’s overblown promises and self-promotion, and I wrote a similar critique of positive psychology and Seligman’s (2018) work in my review of his book The Hope Circuit for the Wall Street Journal (Tavris 2018).
It is indeed a ruthless assessment. However, many researchers have worked in this contemporary paradigm of positive psychology, or at least they are perceived to be its representatives. As a result of their work, a number of interesting and noteworthy concepts were created, for example, the concepts of flow by Csikszentmihalyi (1990) or Kobasa’s hardiness (Kobasa 1979). Do you treat all these achievements like the work of Seligman?
Of course not! Positive psychology has had much to contribute. I object only to the oversimplification and commodifying of many of its ideas. Flow is good, grit is good, hardiness is good—but they have exceptions and limitations; and efforts to market them to, say, improve student performance in school often turn out to be less successful than hoped. In April 2019, thanks to the efforts of psychologist James Coyne, PLOS ONE retracted an article about mindfulness (Gotink et al. 2015) after concluding that the authors had failed to acknowledge their commercial interests in the research, made errors of analysis, and, in Coyne’s words, had written an “experimercial” pushing their institute’s own products and services.
Your review contains a description of the cooperation between APA represented by Seligman and the US Army. This leads me to ask a question which many psychologists avoid answering: the implicit support for the activities of psychologists improving interrogation methods in the first decade of the twenty-first century. What is your opinion about this case?
The complicity of some American psychologists and the APA with the CIA’s “war on terror,” by facilitating and justifying the torture of prisoners, is the reason I resigned from the APA as soon as this report was made public.
The revelations of scholarly fraud we discussed, the absence of representativeness in psychological studies, methodological carelessness resulting in studies that are essentially non-replicable, lack of access to raw data, and other problems have led people to speak openly of a crisis in psychology as a science. Yet many scientists deny this is the case. What is your opinion—are we really in the midst of a crisis, and if we are, what are its root causes?
I think it’s time to put a moratorium on the inflammatory word “crisis.” I’ve never known a time when science in general, and psychological science in particular, has not faced serious problems—internal divisions as well as external pressures. Crises are eternal; their contents change. The criticisms of our field are important and justified, but we need a social-psychological analysis of why so many non-replicable, poorly thought out studies became so popular. They are easy to do; you can do them quickly; they don’t require substantive theoretical grounding; you can do a bunch of them to beef up your CV (unfortunately, that’s important for young scholars on the road to tenure, but the result is that quantity of publications dwarfs their quality); university IRB’s love them because they don’t seem harmful to anyone; and conflicts of interest—with funders keeping an eye on findings—are widespread. In short, external pressures to publish a lot of papers rather than original contributions created this latest “crisis” of imagination and method. As my dear friend and coauthor Elliot Aronson puts it, doing the original experimental work of demonstrating the mechanisms of cognitive dissonance was hard (“and fun!” he always adds), but showing that dissonance works on Thursday as well as Tuesday is easy.
As far as I know, Elliot Aronson and researchers from his generation observed behavior of the participants of their experiments. Roy Baumeister with his collaborators (2007) and Dariusz Doliński (2018) in the replication of their study showed that psychology (social psychology in particular) has become a science of self-reports and finger movements—by which I mean the shift from direct observation of behavior, widely regarded as an advance in the development of scientific methodology, to introspection. The popularity of the Mechanical Turk among scientists seems to confirm this tendency. Do you think that this shift could be the reason that some research findings work only on Thursday but not on Tuesday?
Yes.
Working on Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) had to be an extremely rewarding process for you, and also as an experience of collaboration with the legendary social psychologist Aronson. Could you tell our readers a bit about him and his views, something that we can’t find in his books?
You most certainly can learn a lot about Elliot from his books, starting with his superb autobiography (Aronson 2010), Not By Chance Alone—the story of how he discovered social psychology, what it meant to him (“clinical psychology is about repair; social psychology is about change”), how he balanced a life of remarkable chances—being at Brandeis when Abe Maslow was there, at Stanford when Festinger was there, at Harvard when other mentors and colleagues were there—with his own wisdom and instinct to know how to take advantage of those chance opportunities. Thus, “not by chance alone” do we create our life trajectories. And the festschrift book in his honor (Gonzales et al. 2010) contains a stunning chapter by him, as well as by his many friends and students. Personally, I can tell you that he is as brilliant, witty, and wise as he comes across in his professional writing!
Let’s take a closer look at psychology’s achievements. In your books and articles you wrote about many of them. Which of these discoveries do you consider the most important in the development of science, and why?
You should never ask this of a textbook author, because we are at a unique vantage point to see how much is being discovered across the whole spectrum of psychological science: memory. Animal cognition. The brain. Epigenetics and chimeras. The nature of sleep. Evolutionary biology. The influence of culture on every single aspect of a human being, including what we see, how we taste, how we communicate, how we behave. Emotion. Some discoveries have been transformative: social psychology’s eternal message, that we are constantly being influenced by others in our social worlds, is often unwelcome—but that doesn’t make it less true, or less of a corrective on our natural hubris that “I,” each individual, acts alone. Likewise the final death knell to the nature-nurture debate: we are products of both, and of our environments. And of our peer groups. And of chance events.
That sounds really optimistic. Which of your achievements do you consider the most important in the development of science?
None! Not being a researcher or academic, I haven’t done anything to “develop science.” All I can do is try to bring the best scientific information our field has to offer to the general public, students and colleagues, with a touch of skepticism and critical thinking as I go. I am most proud of my small efforts to slow the recovered-memory bandwagon, which harmed hundreds and possibly thousands of families; but Beth Loftus, Deb Poole, Steve Ceci, Maggie Bruck and many other psychological scientists were making the greatest empirical contributions. That is why their published contributions will live and continue to be cited, but mine were largely of and for their times.
What are the greatest challenges facing psychology in the twenty-first century?
Making sure that researchers have the academic freedom to investigate what they want and report what they find—without fear of censure, condemnation, student protest and pressures to shut up and conform.
Do you think that young people have opportunities to develop a career as an independent thinker, as you did, in the modern world?
Yes.
Is the scientific community open to people who want to work independently?
Yes and no. Yes, if the scholar writes and publishes an important, persuasive, well-researched book—such as Judith Rich Harris’s (1998) brilliant The Nurture Assumption. No, because scientists can all too readily dismiss the ideas of someone who doesn’t have the degrees and prestige that they do. Many of Harris’s academic critics dismissed her arguments solely because she was an academic outsider—never mind that being an outsider was precisely what gave her the insights and perspective they lacked. She had the last laugh on them.
What advice would you give to those who decide to chart a path similar to yours?
My particular path was too idiosyncratic, too much a product of its time, to be a model for anyone else. The world always needs young people who are independent thinkers, but you can be an independent thinker in any occupation. If you are asking whether it is possible to have a career as a self-employed writer and scholar, then obviously the economic challenges are significant; every artist and writer needs an income. I would advise anyone interested in being a science writer to get an advanced degree and acquire a deep understanding of the methods of science, the uses and misuses of statistics, and of the particular field of science they enjoy, because with training and credentials comes greater acceptance—and a greater ability to understand and criticize new discoveries and debunk foolish ideas. We need science writers with such backgrounds more than ever, inundated as we are with studies about mental and physical health. When, in 2002, the Women’s Health Initiative published its alarming “findings” that hormone therapy for women in menopause increases the risk of breast cancer, not one science writer, including the excellent ones at our leading newspapers, noted that the risk was not statistically significant and not even medically meaningful. Not one! Unfortunately, most media don’t employ science writers any more, and it’s very difficult to have a financially secure career solely as a writer. So the question is: what occupation will be stimulating and satisfying and allow you independence of investigation and thought? When, after getting my Ph.D., I was worried about not taking an academic job, as I had been trained to do, and instead was deciding whether to work for a magazine, my beloved mentor Robert Kahn said to me, “Social psychology needs good writers, too.”