Kidding ourselves : the hidden power of self-deception

 Introduction

Imagine putting on a white coat and being told that it belongs to a doctor. Now imagine putting on the same white coat and being told that it belongs to a painter. What difference would this make for you?

If you said, “None,” consider yourself well down the road of self-deception. When participants in an experiment were asked to do exactly this, the result was eye-opening: when told they were wearing the coat of a doctor, their ability to pay attention increased sharply. But when told it was a painter’s coat, this improvement vanished. The effect lay entirely in their perception of the coat.

This book is about the power of mental behavior like this, the unconscious alterations we make in the process of perceiving the world and all that is in it, including ourselves. As the Irish philosopher George Berkeley noted more than two centuries ago, we have no direct access to our physical world other than through our senses. And though these senses may be remarkably acute—the nose of the average human being can detect ten thousand different odors—they are easily misled. Accidentally step on your friend’s foot, and it will hurt. But let your friend believe that you intentionally stepped on her foot and, research has shown, it will hurt even more. The injury is the same, but the perceptions are different.

Much of this work goes on in the mind’s backyard, where it is rarely glimpsed and seldom acknowledged. We all do things for reasons we are unaware of. Studies have shown that we will tip the waitress more on a day that is sunny, smile when the boss walks into the room, and “like” what other people like on websites such as Facebook—not because we necessarily seek to be copycats or brownnosers or big tippers, but because our behavior is influenced by what Carl Jung has described as “events of which we have not consciously taken note.”

Since these subliminal influences pass unnoticed, the real reasons behind our human responses often elude us. In their absence, we drum up plausible explanations, which are frequently mere rationalizations, to explain why we’ve done the things we’ve done and seen the things we’ve seen. We create, in short, our own cover stories. These then serve as a kind of lens through which we filter our experience of the world. They may produce a distorted sense of reality, but that distortion can serve a vital function, often by making the world appear to be a rational, predictable place that we can control.

My interest in this subject was sparked, in part, by a previous book I had written, Why We Make Mistakes. In the course of writing it I found that, time and again, many of our errors could be chalked up to various delusions we all carry with us. Most of us, for instance, secretly believe we are immune to many of life’s risks. Divorce, cancer, heart attack—these are things, we tell ourselves, that happen to other people. And so we make the mistake of engaging in the very behaviors that produce the outcomes we would like to avoid. Doctors, for example, tend to believe that they are impervious to the diseases they treat. So they don’t wash their hands nearly as often as they should. As a result, infections spread, hospital stays lengthen, and patients get sicker—all because doctors deceive themselves about their own immunity.

After researching a good deal of this behavior, I began to wonder why it persists. If delusions like this are so bad for us, why do we still engage in them so prolifically? And why wasn’t this propensity for self-delusion weeded from our genetic garden a long time ago?

These questions launched me on a three-year odyssey, the result of which you now hold in your hands. This trip has taken me to some strange places and subjects: casinos and stock markets and bordellos (they have more in common than you think); voodoo deaths and exorcisms. It led me to Benjamin Franklin, to Alfred Hitchcock, and even to the bedroom of Marilyn Monroe.

Along the way, I discovered again and again not only how potent self-deception can be, but, more importantly, just how good we are at it. We engage in self-deception so seamlessly, across so many aspects of our lives, that it seems to be an inherent human quality—a built-in shock absorber that allows us to adjust to life’s stresses and strains not by altering ourselves, but by altering our perceptions. Indeed, self-deception appears to be a universal quality, found not only in humans, but in animals as well. Even the lowly rat, for all its cunning, is prone to astonishing acts of self-deception.

We kid ourselves in myriad ways, with a wide spectrum of results. We lie in a hospital bed after surgery and watch the painkiller drip slowly through the IV tube, never realizing that the mere act of watching makes the drug all the more effective. Or we get dressed up on Saturday evening for a night on the town, never realizing that we systematically deceive ourselves about our own sexual attractiveness. Or, more commonly, we simply believe deep down that our judgment is better than the other guy’s and that we will, as a result, pay less than he will for almost anything—a flawless smile, a new iPad, even a trip to the moon.

Self-deception is such a potent force that its effects have been shown to rival those produced by many modern medical treatments, from powerful narcotics and cholesterol-lowering drugs, to some of the most widely used surgical procedures in the world. But this force is not always for the good; under certain circumstances self-deception can cause us physical harm and, in rare cases, even death.

For thousands of years self-deception has been seen as a fault. Wise men dating back to Demosthenes have warned against the perils of self-deceit, and with good reason: denying reality can lead to disaster.

In recent years, though, a more nuanced understanding of self-deception has emerged. Research across a variety of fields points to a common finding: that the ability to kid ourselves is not only innate, it’s often positive. Self-deception may actually be an evolutionary gift that allows us to adapt and persevere even when—and perhaps especially when—the odds are against us. It affords us a kind of psychological undercoating that provides essential but often elusive qualities—things like hope, confidence, and a sense of control—that allow us to persevere, create, and succeed.

These qualities are so vital that many researchers now regard self-deception as a facet—and not a flaw—of our evolutionary development, enabling us to adapt to a rapidly changing environment filled with uncertainty. Indeed, delusion and well-being often go hand in hand. Numerous studies have shown that medical patients who adhere to their treatment—even when that treatment is phony—have better health outcomes than those who don’t. Other studies indicate that people with optimistic illusions may underestimate how long a job will take—but they are more productive than their more “realistic” colleagues.

Put slightly differently, it’s not so much the approach that counts—it’s our expectation that it will work. Expectation is a powerful force. It’s so effective that half of American doctors admitted in a recent survey that they prescribe sham treatments to their patients on a regular basis—not because the medications work, but because we believe they will work. And often enough, they do. We put on a “doctor’s” coat and—voilà!—we act more like a doctor (or at least more like we expect a doctor to act). Or we see a drug being administered and—voilà! again—our pain ebbs away. Or someone hands us a “lucky” golf ball, and, you guessed it—voilà!—our putting performance actually improves.

One of the dirty little secrets of human psychology is that the real thing often works no better than the fake. Fake acupuncture, fake surgery, fake medicine—all have been shown to be astonishingly effective. Even lucky golf balls work, at least some of the time. But the power, of course, isn’t in the golf balls or the pills or the scalpels; it’s in us.

If this book has an overarching message, that’s it. We all want to believe that we control the direction of life’s pinball. And who knows, maybe some of us do. For the rest of us, though, a little self-delusion is usually required. But that’s all right; the things we believe in may be imaginary, but the results they produce can be real. It doesn’t matter whether we actually do have the world on a string, so much as that we believe we do. That’s the hidden power that comes from kidding ourselves.

***

Enduring the Blizzard

No man is happy without a delusion of some kind.

—CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE

As a young man, Ray Bradbury got used to rejection. He had known since the age of twelve that he wanted to be a writer, but wanting and being are two different things. While he was still a teenager, Bradbury began sending his stories off to publishers, who promptly sent them back. In 1935, he would later recall, he received a blizzard of rejection slips. The flurry continued into 1937, and then on into ’38. He got so many rejection slips that several walls of several rooms of his house were covered with them. This was during the Great Depression, and money was scarce. Bradbury was so poor that he didn’t have an office or even a telephone. So when the phone rang in the gas station right across the alley from his house, he once told an interviewer, “I’d run to answer it.”

Still, he persevered. He spent at least four hours a day, every day, writing, and he wrote on the material he happened to have on hand: butcher paper. By his own account, Bradbury produced a thousand more “dreadful” short stories, which were also rejected in turn. Then, during the 1940s, his stories began to sell. He sold his first short story in 1941, and he published his first novel in 1947. Then, in 1953, came his masterwork: Farenheit 451. It sold over ten million copies worldwide and secured for Bradbury a reputation as a preeminent writer of science fiction. In the years to come he would write even more, completing some twenty-seven novels and more than six hundred short stories, as well as scripts for movies and television.

Shortly before his death in 2012 at the age of ninety-one, Bradbury reflected on his success, and zeroed in on his ability to endure the snowstorm of rejection.

“The blizzard doesn’t last forever,” he wrote, “it just seems so.”

It does seem so. Whenever we find ourselves in the midst of trying to accomplish anything difficult, it often seems as if the snows will never end. The going gets tougher, the drifts get higher, and our sense of direction is all but lost. But it is at times like these when self-deception is at its most valuable. That’s because delusion can serve as a buffer between us and reality, allowing us to ride out the storm. We tell ourselves little lies to help stave off the pain and to convince ourselves, at least for a while, that what appears to be true is not, and what isn’t, is.

For this reason, success and delusion are often intertwined. People who create new things and achieve difficult ones often find it necessary to take a small holiday from reality.

“A lot of my best decisions were made in a state of self-delusion,” said Michael Lewis, author of Moneyball, Liar’s Poker,and other bestsellers. But to write those books he first had to commit what appeared to be financial suicide, walking away from a six-figure job on Wall Street in the 1980s. And for a while, it did indeed appear to be suicide. Over four years of freelance writing, his income totaled just $3,000. “When you’re trying to create a career as a writer, a little delusional thinking goes a long way.”

The key phrase here is “a little.” Wholesale delusions get you nowhere but the asylum. But trace amounts of delusion, like trace amounts of certain minerals in our diet, appear to be essential to our health and welfare, providing the key ingredient for perseverance: optimism. What seems vital is not that we always have an accurate view of ourselves and our prospects, but that we have an optimistic one. As the cognitive neuroscientist Tali Sharot has noted, “optimism may be so essential to our survival that it is hardwired into our most complex organ, the brain.” And if maintaining optimism requires from time to time that we deceive ourselves about the reality of our situation, then so be it; in the long run, the deception pays for itself.

Delusion and Productivity

CONSIDER a set of recent studies by Ying Zhang, a professor at the University of Texas, and his colleague Ayelet Fishbach at the University of Chicago. They recruited a group of people and then did what you would do when hiring a contractor to work on your house: they gave them a job to do and asked them to estimate how long it would take them to finish it. Then, they asked participants to report back when they were done. This gave the professors two key pieces of information: (1) the estimated time to finish the job and (2) the actual time it took to finish the job.

The results revealed two patterns. First, as any homeowner might guess, the estimates were optimistic: the job took longer than the participants thought it would. (This finding is not new. Previous research has shown that people consistently underestimate how long it takes to do things. This error is known as the planning fallacy, though it could just as easily be called the contractor fallacy.)

But there was a second, more interesting, result. Although the people who made the most optimistic predictions were the least accurate in terms of estimating when they would finish, they nevertheless still completed the job more quickly than those who were less optimistic. In other words, the optimistic participants were less accurate but more productive.

This finding suggests a relationship between delusion and achievement. Those with positive illusions accomplished more than those who were more realistic. But some may find this hard to swallow. As Raj Raghunathan, a colleague of Zhang’s at the University of Texas, has pointed out, realists might concede that delusional people are happier than they are, but not that they are more productive. “To most realists,” he says, “the idea that a delusional person could be more successful than a non-delusional one may appear paradoxical, unfair, and even implausible.” Yet, like Ray Bradbury, those participants who aimed high ended up achieving more than those who didn’t.

Perseverance is, in large degree, a function of perception. When faced with difficulties, studies have shown, people who doubt their abilities quickly give up, whereas people with a strong belief in their own powers will try even harder to rise to a new challenge. But these beliefs aren’t fixed; they can be easily manipulated, and manipulations can produce startling improvements.

In one well-known example, people were given false feedback—that is, they were lied to—about their performance in a competition of muscular strength. Some were told they were really strong when they were weak, and others were told they were weak when they were strong, thereby inflating or deflating each person’s sense of their own physical ability. But this illusion produced a lasting impact. When the participants were later tested on a different motor task requiring physical stamina, those whose sense of strength had been artificially boosted displayed greater physical endurance. Given a little encouragement—even false encouragement—they not only persevered, they excelled.

What is truly remarkable about this ability to deceive ourselves for our own benefit is that it takes place effortlessly, without our awareness. We switch from reality to illusion and back again to reality as easily as the driver of a car switches his headlights from high beam to low, depending on which one affords the better view of the road ahead. But unlike the driver of the car, our actions are unconscious.

Hallinan, Joseph T.

Kidding ourselves : the hidden power of self-deception