Ego defences

 Abstraction

Abstraction involves trying to ignore or suppress the source of anxiety so that it no longer seems to exist.

All the ego defences discussed in this section aim, or aim primarily, at abstraction.

1

Denial

Denial, probably the most basic of ego defences, is the simple refusal to admit to certain unacceptable or unmanageable aspects of reality, even in the face of overwhelming evidence.

An example of denial is a physician who ignores the classic signs and symptoms of a heart attack—crushing central chest pain radiating into the left arm, associated with sweating, shortness of breath, and nausea—and casually carries on with his game of golf.

(...)

In her classic of 1969, On Death and Dying, the psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross introduced a model of bereavement commonly referred to as the Five Stages of Grief. The model describes, in five discrete stages, a process by which people react to grief and tragedy, especially terminal illness or catastrophic loss.

The five stages are:

Denial

Anger

Bargaining

Depression (or grieving), and

Acceptance.

Just as people might move back and forth between the stages, often at speed, so they might get stuck in one of the earlier stages, failing to come to terms with their loss.

The model has been criticized on a number of grounds, but Kübler-Ross did emphasize that all five stages need not occur, or occur in the given order, and that reactions to illness, death, and loss are as diverse as the people experiencing them.(...)

It is none other than Sigmund Freud (d. 1939) who first formulated the concept of denial as an ego defence. His daughter Anna Freud (d. 1982) thought of it as an immature ego defence, first, because it is mostly used in childhood and adolescence, and, second, because its continued use into adulthood leads to unhealthy or unhelpful behaviours and a complete failure to engage or come to terms with reality.(...)

An ego defence that is closely related to denial is negative hallucination, which is the failure to register uncomfortable sensory stimuli, for instance, the failure to see something that ought to have been seen, hear something that ought to have been heard, or feel something—like crushing chest pain—that ought to have been felt. Thus, a common occurrence in conversation or in a social setting is for a person to ‘edit out’ a challenging or contradictory remark. The person momentarily goes blank, and then carries on as though the thing had never been said. The ability to hear, or at least register, painful truths is one of the many pre-requisites of being a good listener.

2

Repression

Repression can be thought of as ‘motivated forgetting’: the active but unconscious forgetting of unacceptable drives, emotions, ideas, or memories.

Unsurprisingly, repression is often confused with denial: but whereas denial relates to external stimuli, repression relates to internal, that is, mental, stimuli. Nonetheless, the two ego defences often work hand in hand, and may be difficult to disentangle—as in the following, harrowing case. (...)

Freud thought of repression as the basic ego defence, since it is only when repression is fragile or failing that other ego defences come into play to reinforce and rescue it. In other words, repression is an essential component or building block of the other ego defences. To understand this better, let’s look at an example of the ego defence of distortion, which is the reshaping of reality to suit one’s inner needs. A teen who got dumped by her boyfriend no longer recalls this episode (repression), and comes to believe that it was she who dumped him (distortion). As you can see, the distortion not only builds upon but also buttresses the repression.

Repressed material, though out of the conscious mind, is no less present, and can (and usually does) resurface in disturbing forms. Beyond an obvious lack of insight and understanding, the inability to process and come to terms with repressed material is associated with a range of psychological issues such as anxiety, irritability, insomnia, nightmares, and depression; maladaptive and destructive patterns of behaviour such as anger and aggression in the face of reminders—such as Tumbling Woman—of the repressed material; and any number of superimposed ego defences.

‘Neurosis’ is an old-fashioned term that describes the various forms in which repressed material can resurface (anxiety, irritability, and so on). In Studies on Hysteria (1895), Freud with his colleague Josef Breuer formulated the theory according to which neuroses have their origins in deeply traumatic and consequently repressed experiences..(...)

The mental operation of suppression is similar to repression but with one critical difference, namely, that the ‘forgetting’ is conscious rather than unconscious. Thus, suppression is the conscious and often rational decision to put an uncomfortable (although, clearly, not totally unacceptable) stimulus to one side, either to deal with it at a more opportune time or to abandon it altogether on the grounds that it is not worth dealing with.

As it is a conscious operation, suppression is not, strictly speaking, a form of self-deception, but rather the conscious analogue of repression. Needless to say, suppression is much more mature than repression, and, as with all conscious operations, tends to favour much more positive outcomes.

Let’s look at a concrete example of suppression. A pair of friends who are holidaying in a larger group start arguing, so ferociously that they fall out with each other. The next day, they put their differences to one side and behave as though nothing had happened so as not to cast a cloud over the group and ruin everyone’s holiday. That day, they share some good times and special moments, and, by evening, it has become safe enough to bring up the argument and put it behind them. By dealing with their argument in this way, the pair have deepened rather than undermined their friendship.

3

Dissociation

The basic form of dissociation, isolation of affect, involves a separation (or ‘dissociation’) of thoughts and feelings, with the feelings (the ‘affect’) then removed from conscious attention to leave only the thoughts.

Isolation of affect is probably most evident when someone refers to an emotionally loaded event or situation in a casual, matter-of-fact, or otherwise dispassionate way. This can be called for in certain circumstances, for example, in providing the distance and objectivity that a physician needs to make optimal decisions about the care of her patients. But too much detachment neither makes for a good physician, and, as with most psychological processes, detachment is best if it can be conscious and pragmatic rather than rigid and defensive.

Isolation of affect is very common. When I catch it in conversation, I often find myself interjecting with something like, ‘Wait, hang on, what did you just say?’ Other forms of dissociation, while much more dramatic, are also much less common, and can take one of several sometimes overlapping forms such as amnesia, possession trance, or stupor. These rarer forms are serious enough to count as mental disorders, and are referred to in diagnostic manuals as ‘dissociative disorders’. They are usually precipitated by a highly traumatic event, leading to a disruption in the normally integrated functions of consciousness, memory, and identity.

In dissociative amnesia, the person suffers a loss of memory, most commonly for the period surrounding the traumatic event. Dissociative amnesia, or something closely resembling it, has long been recognized.

Already in the first century, the naturalist Pliny the Elder remarked:

Nothing whatever, in man, is of so frail a nature as the memory; for it is affected by disease, by injuries, and even by fright; being sometimes partially lost, and at other times entirely so.

In possession trance, the person reacts to the traumatic event by entering into a dissociative state, in which her identity is replaced by that of another agency such as a ghost, spirit, or deity. In many cultures, certain forms of trance are recognized and even exalted as expressions of religious fervour or manifestations of the divine. Therefore, possession trance should only be seen as problematic, or potentially problematic, if it is not a normal feature of the person’s culture or sub-culture.

In dissociative stupor, the person reacts to the traumatic event by becoming mute (speechless) and stuporous (motionless), failing to respond to stimuli such as the human voice, bright lights, or extremes of hot and cold. Dissociative stupor—that is, stupor in reaction to a traumatic event—is but one form of stupor, and the medical team ought to consider and rule out other causes of stupor such as severe depression, schizophrenia, and organic brain disease.

A fourth kind or pattern of dissociative disorder is dissociative fugue, in which the person embarks on an unexpected journey that may last for up to several months. During this journey, there is memory loss and confusion about personal identity or even assumption of another, entirely different identity. When the fugue comes to an end and the person returns to her normal self, the memory of the journey is usually lost.

* * *

Denial is, of course, an important element of any dissociative disorder. Although often described in the psychiatric literature in terms of a ‘compartmentalization of experience’, dissociative disorders are, arguably, no more than an extreme form of denial. As our journey into self-deception has begun to reveal, ego defences do not, for the most part, exist in splendid isolation, but involve a great deal of overlap between mutually reinforcing ego defences. Ours is a very dirty business.

4

Intellectualization

Isolation of affect—the dissociation of thoughts and feelings, followed by the removal of the feelings from conscious attention—is closely related to intellectualization.

In intellectualization, the uncomfortable feelings associated with a problem are kept out of consciousness by thinking about the problem in cold, abstract, and esoteric terms.

A ambitious medical student once asked me whether she should take up a career in academic medicine, despite (or so it seemed) having already made up her mind on the matter. After raising some arguments in favour, I raised some arguments against, including that the vast majority of people engaged in medical research never go on to make a significant breakthrough. As she did not seem to be taking this argument on board, I asked her to name just one major breakthrough in psychiatric research in the past fifty years. Instead of naming one, or accepting that there had not been any, she resorted to questioning the definition of a breakthrough and even the value of making one—which may have been legitimate things to do, had she first accepted, or at least entertained the idea, that there had not been any.

Here’s another example of intellectualization. After being discharged from hospital, a middle-aged man who had almost died from a heart attack spent several hours a day on his computer researching the various risk factors for cardiovascular disease. He typed out long essays on each of these risk factors, printed them out, and filed them in a large binder with colour-coded dividers. After that, he became preoccupied with the vitamin and mineral contents of various kinds of food and devised a strict dietary regimen to ensure that he took in the recommended amounts of each and every micronutrient. Despite living on a shoestring budget, he spent a great deal of money on a high-end steamer on the basis that it could preserve vitamins through the cooking process. But not once did he consider cutting back on his much more harmful thirty-a-day smoking habit..

* * *

The focus on abstract notions, trivial footnotes, and peripheral digressions belies a sort of ‘flight into reason’. The emotionally loaded event or situation is thought of in terms of an interesting problem or puzzle, without any appreciation of its emotional content or personal implications. Instead of coming to terms with the problem, or just having a good cry, the person may split hairs over definitions; undermine reasonable assumptions, facts, and arguments; and cloud her mind with nebulous arguments and abstruse minutiæ. But by failing on purpose to see the bigger picture, she also fails to reach the appropriate conclusion or conclusions—which, as with our medical student or heart attack victim, may hit her very hard in five, ten, or thirty years’ time.

Intellectualization is typically associated with poor reasoning, especially informal fallacy. The person may, for example, raise irrelevant or trivial objections, reject an argument on the basis of a bad example or exceptional case, or use exact numbers to talk about inexact or abstract notions. I discuss formal and informal fallacies at much greater length in Hypersanity—but from our discussion here it is already clear that sound reasoning is not simply a matter of intelligence.

5

Rationalization

Intellectualization, with its barrage of pseudo-rational activity, is easy to confuse with rationalization, which is the use of feeble or far-fetched arguments to skirt over something that is difficult to accept, or to make it more palatable.

A person who has been rejected by a love interest convinces herself that he rejected her because he did not feel up to her standards, and, moreover, that the rejection is a blessing in disguise insofar as it has freed her to find a more suitable partner.

The first rationalization—that her love interest rejected her because he did not feel up to her standards—is a case of skirting over something that is difficult to accept, sometimes called ‘sour grapes’. The second rationalization—that the rejection has freed her to find a more suitable partner—is a case of making it more palatable, also called ‘sweet lemons’.

Here’s another example. A teenager who fails to secure a place at a leading university tells herself that the university is sexist (sour grapes), and that taking a gap year to re-apply is a precious opportunity to travel and see the world (sweet lemons).

The teenager uses these rationalizations to reduce the psychological discomfort of holding contradictory beliefs or thoughts (‘cognitions’), on the one hand the cognition that she is smart and ready enough to get into the university of her choice, and on the other hand the cognition that she failed to do so.

Alternatively, she could have reduced this so-called cognitive dissonance by revising her self-image (‘I am not so smart or prepared as I thought’), but, on the whole, finds it less disturbing to rationalize, that is, to undermine or discount, the cognition that is inconsistent with her self-image.

In When Prophecy Fails (1956), Leon Festinger, a social psychologist, discusses his experience of infiltrating a UFO doomsday cult whose leader had prophesied the end of the world. When the end of the world predictably failed to materialize, most of the cult members dealt with the dissonance that arose from the cognitions ‘the leader said that the world would end’ and ‘the world did not end’ not by ditching the cult or its leader, as you might expect, but by rationalizing that the world had been saved by the strength of their faith.

Smokers typically experience a high level of cognitive dissonance with respect to their habit. To decrease this tension, they might (1) quit smoking, or (2) deny the evidence that links smoking to life-threatening conditions such as emphysema and lung cancer, or (3) rationalize their smoking so as to make it compatible with competing cognitions such as ‘I want to live a long and healthy life’ or ‘I am a rational person who makes sound, evidence-based decisions’.

Here are some of the rationalizations that smokers commonly use:

Smoking’s my only way of coping.

There’s nothing else to do.

What’s the point of living if I can’t enjoy life?

Only heavy smokers are at any real risk.

That’s fine, everyone’s got to die someday.

Everyone’s got to die from something or other, so it might as well be this.

The first three rationalizations are instances of sour grapes, and the last three of sweet lemons.

* * *

For the story, ‘sour grapes’ derives from one of the fables attributed to Æsop (d. 564 BCE), The Fox and the Grapes.

One hot summer’s day a Fox was strolling through an orchard till he came to a bunch of Grapes just ripening on a bine which had been trained over a lofty branch. ‘Just the thing to quench my thirst,’ quoth he. Drawing back a few paces, he took a run and a jump, and just missed the branch. Turning round with a One, Two, Three, he jumped up, but with no greater success. Again and again he tried after the tempting morsel, but at last had to give it up, and walked away with his nose in the air, saying: ‘I am sure they are sour.’

For the poor fox, the cognitive dissonance arises from the cognitions ‘I’m an agile and nimble fox’ and ‘I can’t reach the grapes on the branch’; and the rationalization—which is, of course, a form of sour grapes—is ‘I’m sure the grapes are sour’. Had the fox gone for sweet lemons instead of sour grapes, he might have said something like, ‘In any case, there are far juicier grapes in the farmer’s orchard.’

* * *

Rationalization is used to great comedic effect in Voltaire’s satirical masterpiece, Candide (1759). The novella is an attack on Leibniz’s philosophy that the world is the best of all possible worlds, embodied by Candide’s tutor Professor Pangloss, who rationalizes a succession of tragic events so that they are in keeping with Leibniz’s philosophical optimism.

In Chapter 4, Candide chances upon Pangloss, now reduced to the condition of a beggar. Pangloss, it turns out, contracted a venereal disease, leaving him covered in scabs and coughing violently.

Upon seeing his old tutor in so diminished a state, Candide ‘inquires into the cause and effect, as well as into the sufficing reason that had reduced [Pangloss] to so miserable a condition’.

P: Alas ... it was love; love, the comfort of the human species; love, the preserver of the universe; the soul of all sensible beings; love! Tender love!

C: Alas ... I have had some knowledge of love myself, this sovereign of hearts, this soul of souls; yet it never cost me more than a kiss and twenty kicks on the backside. But how could this beautiful cause produce in you so hideous an effect? ...

P: Oh my dear Candide, you must remember Pacquette, that pretty wench, who waited on our noble Baroness; in her arms I tasted the pleasures of paradise, which produced these hell torments with which you see me devoured. She was infected with an ailment, and perhaps has since died of it; she received this present of a learned Franciscan, who derived it from the fountainhead; he was indebted for it to an old countess, who had it of a captain of horse, who had it of a marchioness, who had it of a page, the page had it of a Jesuit, who, during his novitiate, had it in a direct line from one of the fellow adventurers of Christopher Columbus...

C: O sage Pangloss ... what a strange genealogy is this! Is not the devil the root of it?

P: Not at all ... it was a thing unavoidable, a necessary ingredient in the best of worlds; for if Columbus had not caught in an island in America this disease, which contaminates the source of generation, and frequently impedes propagation itself, and is evidently opposed to the great end of nature, we should have had neither chocolate nor cochineal...

* * *

Human beings are not rational, but rationalizing animals. They find it frightening to think and painful to change, because thought and change threaten the beliefs that make up their sense of self.

Given this state of affairs, any tectonic shift in a person’s outlook, any major realignment with the truth, is only ever going to occur, if at all, by small increments.

A possible accelerator is, in fact, a deterioration in the person’s life circumstances, so severe that it overwhelms her ego defences and leaves her in the depressive or undefended position..

Hide and Seek

The Psychology of Self-Deception

Neel Burton

Positive illusions

The philosopher Peter Zapffe (d. 1990) argued that the human capacities for reason and self-awareness break with nature, giving us more than we, as a part of nature, are able to carry or bear. So as not to go mad, 'most people learn to save themselves by artificially limiting the content of consciousness.'

If people limit the content of consciousness, they also fill it with less than the truth. In particular, most people think more highly of themselves than is warranted: they have an inflated sense of their qualities and abilities, an illusion of control over things that are mostly beyond them, and a misplaced optimism about their prospects and outcomes.

For example, most people claim to compare favourably to the average road user, citizen, parent... which is, of course, mathematically impossible, since not everyone can be above average.

A couple on the verge of tying the knot is likely to overestimate the odds of having a blissful honeymoon or a gifted child, while radically underestimating the odds of having fertility problems, falling ill, or getting divorced.

The concept of positive illusions first appeared in 1988, in a paper by Shelley Taylor and Jonathon Brown entitled, Illusion and well-being: A social psychological perspective on mental health. Still today, it is commonly believed that mental health corresponds to accurate perceptions of the self, the other, and the world, but in their paper Taylor and Brown argued that the evidence suggests otherwise, and that positive illusions are characteristic of normal human thought.

Positive illusions are helpful in so far as they enable us to take risks, invest in the future, and fend off despair and depression. After all, how many people would get married if they had any real sense of what awaited them?

But in the longer term, the poor perspective and judgement that come from undue self-regard and false hope are likely to lead, sooner or later, to disappointment and failure, to say nothing of the inhibitions and emotional disturbances (such as anger, anxiety, and so on) that can derive or descend from a defended position.

Positive illusions tend to be more common, and more marked, in the West. In East and South Asian cultures, for example, people are less vested in themselves and more vested in their community and society, and tend, if anything, to self-effacement rather than self-enhancement.

Positive illusions are also more common in unskilled people, possibly because skilled people tend to assume, albeit falsely, that those around them enjoy similar levels of insight and competence. This Dunning-Kruger effect, as it has been called, is neatly encapsulated in a short fragment from the introduction to Charles Darwin’s Descent of Man (1871): '…ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge…' And, of course, it may also be that, compared to skilled people, unskilled people are more reliant on positive illusions for their self-esteem and broader mental health.

* * *

Just as it is commonly believed that mental health corresponds to accurate perceptions of the self, the other, and the world, so it is commonly believed that depression results in, or from, distorted thinking.

Cognitive distortion is a concept from cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), developed by the psychiatrist Aaron Beck in the 1960s and now routinely used in the treatment of depression and other mental disorders. Cognitive distortion involves interpreting events and situations so that they conform to and reinforce our outlook or frame of mind, typically on the basis of very scant or partial evidence, or even no evidence at all.

Common cognitive distortions in depression include selective abstraction, personalization, and catastrophic thinking:

Selective abstraction is to focus on a single negative event or condition to the exclusion of other, more positive ones, for example, ‘My partner didn't call me yesterday. He must hate me.’

Personalization is to relate or connect independent events to oneself, for example: ‘The nurse is leaving her job because she's fed up with me…’

Catastrophic thinking is to exaggerate the negative consequences of an event or situation, for example, ‘The pain in my knee is only going to get worse. When I'm reduced to a wheelchair, I won't be able to go to work and pay the mortgage. So I'll end up losing my house and dying in the street.’

Interestingly, the scientific literature suggests that, despite their propensity for cognitive distortions such as these, many people with depressed mood can also have more accurate judgement about the outcome of so-called contingent events (events that may or may not occur) and a more realistic perception of their role, abilities, and limitations—a phenomenon that is sometimes and controversially referred to as 'depressive realism'.

The concept of depressive realism originated in 1979, in a paper entitled Judgement of contingency in depressed and nondepressed students: sadder but wiser? On the basis of their findings, the authors, Lauren Alloy and Lyn Abramson, argued that people with depression make more realistic inferences than 'normal' people, who are handicapped by their positive illusions. On the face of it, this suggests that people with depression are able to see the world more clearly for what it is, while normal people are only normal in so far as they are deceiving or deluding themselves.

This is a seductive proposition for someone like me, who has long been arguing that depression can be good for us. But here's the rub: people with depression are pessimistic even in situations in which pessimism is unwarranted, suggesting that, rather than being more realistic, their thinking is merely 'differently biased', and just as rigid and distorted as that of normal people with their positive illusions.

Wisdom, it seems, consists in being able to shed our positive illusions without also succumbing to depression, although, for many, depression may be a necessary step along the way.

The Psychology of Self-Deception

Neel Burton

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