What will people look like centuries from now? How will they act? What race and gender roles that we take as natural today will be the same or different in the far future? In this insightful look into the future Carol Tavris, one of today’s most prominent social scientists and psychologists, considers how blinded we all are to the influences of the times in which we live.
Carol Tavris is a social psychologist, writer, teacher, and lecturer. Her book, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by ME), was coauthored with Elliot Aronson and applies cognitive dissonance theory to a wide variety of topics, including politics, conflicts of interest, memory (everyday and “recovered”), the criminal justice system, police interrogation, the daycare sex-abuse epidemic, family quarrels, international conflicts, and business. She is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association as well as a Charter Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science. Her honors and awards include the Distinguished Media Contribution Award from the American Association of Applied and Preventive Psychology (for her book The Mismeasure of Woman), the Media Achievement Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the Distinguished Contribution to Women’s Health Award from the APA Conference on Women’s Health, and an award from the Center for Inquiry for contributions to skepticism and science.
This lecture was recorded on May 30, 2015 at a conference called “In the Year 2525: Big Science, Big History, and the Far Future of Humanity” (May 29–31, 2015) as part of the Distinguished Science Lecture Series hosted by Michael Shermer and presented by The Skeptics Society in California (1992–2015).
