Another effect of suppression is the production of displacement activities. As classically described in other animals, these are irrelevant activities often seen when two opposing motivations are simultaneously aroused. Since neither impulse can express itself, the blocked energy easily activates irrelevant behavior, such as a twitch. For this reason, displacement activities in primates reliably indicate stress. For example, I once tried to slip a minor lie by a female friend at a bar and saw my left arm twitch involuntarily. Since we had by then been dating for some time, her eyes shot at once to the twitching arm. A few months later, the situation happened again, only with the roles reversed. If this had been a tennis match, the referee would have said on each occasion, “Advantage, your opponent.”
Nervousness is almost universally cited as a factor associated with deception, both by those trying to detect it as well as by those trying to avoid it, yet surprisingly enough, it is one of the weaker factors in predicting deception in scientific work. This is partly because, with no ill effects of having their deception detected, many experiments do not make people nervous. But also in real-life situations (for example, criminal investigations), being suspected of lying can make you nervous regardless of whether you lie and, perhaps more important, because we are conscious of our nervousness as a factor, suppression mechanisms may be almost as well developed as the nervousness itself, especially in those experienced in lying. And as we saw earlier, the effects of cognitive load involved in lying are often opposite to those of nervousness.
The point about cognitive load (and pitch of voice) is that there is no escape. If suppressing your nervousness increases pitch of voice, then trying to suppress that effect may only increase pitch further. If it is cognitively expensive to lie, there is no obvious way to reduce the expense, other than to increase unconscious control. Mechanisms of denial and repression may serve to reduce immediate expense, but with ramifying costs later on.
Separately, it is worth pointing out that cognitive load has important effects across a broad range of psychological processes, according to the rule that the greater the cognitive load, the more likely the unconscious processes will be revealed. For example, under cognitive load, people will more often blurt out something they are trying to suppress and will more often express biased opinions they are otherwise hiding. In short, cognitive load does more than slow down your responses—in a whole host of ways, it tends to reveal unconscious processes. These predominate when conscious degree of control is minimized because of cognitive load.
Verbal details of lies can also be revealing. Excellent work, aided by computer analysis, has demonstrated several common verbal features of lies. We cut down on the use of “I” and “me” and increase other pronouns, as if disowning our lie. We cut down on qualifiers, such as “although.” This streamlines the lie, lowering both our immediate cognitive load and later need to remember. A truth teller might say, “Although it was raining, I still walked to the office”; a liar would say, “I walked to the office.” Negative terms are more common, perhaps because of guilt or because lies more frequently involve denial and negation.
It is difficult to measure the frequency with which lies are detected in everyday life. Interviews of people in the United States show that they believe their lies are detected 20 percent of the time and that another 20 percent may be detected. Of course, the 60 percent of lies they feel are successful may contain some detections where the detector hides his or her knowledge of the deception.
SELF-DECEPTION IS OLDER THAN LANGUAGE
How biologically deep is the subject we are discussing? Many people imagine that self-deception is, almost by definition, a human phenomenon, the “self” suggesting the presence of language. But there is no reason to suppose that self-deception is not far deeper in evolutionary history, as it does not require words. Consider self-confidence, a personal variable that others can measure. It can be inflated to deceive them, with self-deception making the act more plausible. This feature probably extends far back in our animal past.
In nature, two animals square off in a physical conflict. Each is assessing its opponent’s self-confidence along with its own—variables expected to predict the outcome some of the time. Biased information flow within the individual can facilitate false self-confidence. Those who believe their self-enhancement are probably more likely to get their opponent to back down than those who know they are only posing. Thus, nonverbal self-deception can be selected in aggressive and competitive situations, the better to fool antagonists. Much the same could be said for male/female courtship. A male’s false self-confidence may give him a boost some of the time. A biased mental representation can be produced, by assumption, without language. Note, of course, that self-deception tends to work only with plausible limits to self-inflation.
The above is meant to demonstrate that in at least two widespread contexts—aggressive conflict and courtship—selection for deception may easily favor self-deception even when no language is involved. There are undoubtedly many other such contexts, for example, parent/offspring. On top of that, as we shall see, very clever recent work demonstrates in monkeys forms of self-deception that are well-known in humans: a consistency bias, for example, as well as implicit in-group favoritism, both being shown by the same kinds of experiments that reveal them in humans. As we shall see, men are more prone to overconfidence than are women, just as expected, and in rational situations such as stock trading, where fooling others is rarely involved, men do correspondingly worse.
Self-confidence is an internal variable and thus especially prone to deception. I can inflate my apparent size by muscling up, but this is fairly obvious to observers, and increasing my apparent symmetry, another important variable, is very difficult to achieve. But pretending to be more confident than I am is more easily achieved and more strongly selects for self-deception, especially when self-confidence may be as important as apparent size in predicting aggressive outcomes. Thus, I believe that overconfidence is one of the oldest and most dangerous forms of self-deception—both in our personal lives and in global decisions, such as going to war.
On the other hand, language certainly greatly expanded the opportunities for deceit and self-deception in our own lineage. If one great virtue of language is its ability to make true statements about events distant in space and time, then surely one of its social drawbacks is its ability to make false statements about events distant in space and time. These are so much less easily contradicted than statements about the immediate world. Once you have language, you have an explicit theory of self and of social relationships ready to communicate to others. Numbers of new true assertions are matched by an even greater number of false ones.
A very disturbing feature of overconfidence is that it often appears to be poorly associated with knowledge—that is, the more ignorant the individual, the more confident he or she maybe. This is true of the public when asked questions of general knowledge. Sometimes this phenomenon varies with age and status, so that senior physicians, for example, are both more likely to be wrong and more confident they are right, a potentially lethal combination, especially among surgeons. Another case with tragic consequences concerns eyewitness testimony—witnesses who are more mistaken in eyewitness identification and more confident that they are right, and this in turn has a positive effect on jurors. It may be that a rational approach to the world is nuanced and gray, capable of accommodating contradictions, all of which leads to hesitancy and a lack of certainty, as is indeed true. An easy shortcut is to combine ignorance with straight-out endorsement of ignorance—no signs of rational inquiry but, more important, no signs of self-doubt or contradiction.
NINE CATEGORIES OF SELF-DECEPTION
We begin with simple cases of self-inflation and derogation of others. We consider the effects of in-group feelings, a sense of power, and the illusion of control. Then we imagine false social theories, false internal narratives, and unconscious modules as additional sources of self-deception.
Animal self-inflation routinely occurs in aggressive situations (size, confidence, color) as well as in courtship (same variables). Self-inflation is also the dominant style in human psychological life, adaptive self-diminution appearing in both animals and humans as an occasional strategy (see Chapter 8). Much of this self-inflation is performed in the service of what one psychologist aptly called “beneffectance”—appearing to be both beneficial and effective to others. Subtle linguistic features may easily be involved. When describing a positive group effect, we adopt an active voice, but when the effect is negative, we unconsciously shift to a passive voice: this happened and then that happened and then costs rained down on all of us. Perhaps a classic in the genre was the man in San Francisco in 1977 who ran his car into a pole and claimed afterward, as recorded by the police: “The telephone pole was approaching. I was attempting to swerve out of the way, when it struck my front end.” Perfectly legitimate, but it shifts the blame to the telephone pole. And self-bias extends in every direction. If you question BMW owners on why they own that brand of car, they will tell you it had nothing to do with trying to influence others but will see others as owning one for exactly that reason.
Self-inflation results in people routinely putting themselves in the top half of positive distributions and the lower half of negative ones. Of US high school students, 80 percent place themselves in the top half of students in leadership ability. This is not possible. But for self-deception, you can hardly beat academics. In one survey, 94 percent placed themselves in the top half of their profession. I plead guilty. I could be tied down to a bed in a back ward of some hospital and still believe I am outperforming half my colleagues—and this is not just a comment on my colleagues.
When we say we are in the top 70 percent of people for good looks, this may be only our mouths talking. What about our deeper view? A recent methodology gives a striking result. With the help of a computer, individual photos were morphed either 20 percent toward attractive faces (the average of fifteen faces regarded as attractive out of a sample of sixty) or 20 percent toward unattractive ones (people with cranial-facial syndrome, which produces a twisted face). Among other effects, when a person tries to quickly locate his or her real face, the 20 percent positive face, or the 20 percent negative one, each embedded in a background of eleven faces of other people, he or she is quickest to spot the positive face (1.86 seconds), 5 percent slower for the real face (2.08 seconds), and another 5 percent slower for the ugly one (2.16 seconds). The beauty is that there has not been the usual verbal filter—what do you think of yourself?—only a measure of speed of perception. When people are shown a full array of photos of themselves, from 50 percent more attractive to 50 percent less attractive, they choose the 20 percent better-looking photo as the one they like the most and think they most resemble. This is an important, general result: self-deception is bounded—30 percent better looking is implausible, while 10 percent better fails to gain the full advantage.
I hardly need the above result to convince myself, because if I am in a big city, I experience the effect almost every week. I am walking down the street with a younger, attractive woman, trying to amuse her enough that she will permit me to remain nearby. Then I see an old man on the other side of her, white hair, ugly, face falling apart, walking poorly, indeed shambling, yet keeping perfect pace with us—he is, in fact, my reflection in the store windows we are passing. Real me is seen as ugly me by self-deceived me.
Is the tendency toward self-inflation really universal in humans? Some cultures, such as in Japan and China, often value modesty, so that if anything, people might be expected to compete to show lack of self-inflation. Certainly in some domains modesty rules, but in general it seems that one can still detect tendencies toward self-inflation, including self over other in terms of good and bad. Likewise, as in other cultures, inflation often applies to friends, who are seen as better than average (though less strongly than self in some cultures and more so in others).
By the way, recent work has located an area of the brain where this kind of self-inflation may occur. Prior work has shown that a region called the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) seems often to be involved in processing self-related information. Even false sensations of self are recorded there, and the region is broadly involved in deceiving others. One can suppress neural activity in this region (by applying a magnetic force to the skull where the brain activity takes place), deleting an individual’s tendencies toward self-enhancement (while suppression in other regions has no effect).
An extreme form of self-adulation is found among so-called narcissists. Though people in general overrate themselves on positive dimensions, narcissists think of themselves as special and unique, entitled to more positive outcomes in life than others. Their self-image is good in dominance and power (but not caring or morality). Thus, they seem especially oriented toward high status and will seek out people of perceived status apparently for this reason. Though people in general are overconfident regarding the truth of their assertions, narcissists are especially so. Because they are overconfident, narcissists in the laboratory are more likely to accept bets based on false knowledge and hence lose more money than are less narcissistic people. They are persistent in their delusions as well. They predict high performance in advance, guess they have done well after the fact when they have not, and continue to predict high future performance despite learning about past failure—a virtuoso performance indeed. Calling someone a narcissist is not a compliment—it suggests someone whose system of self-enhancement is out of control, to the individual’s disadvantage.
Derogation of Others Is Closely Linked
In one sense, derogation of others is the mirror image of self-inflation; either way, you look relatively better. But there is an important difference. For self-inflation, you need merely change the image of yourself to achieve the desired effect, but for derogation of others, you may need to derogate an entire group. Exactly when would we expect this to be advantageous to you? Perhaps especially when your own image has been lowered—suddenly it becomes valuable to deflect attention onto some disliked group—so that by comparison, you do not look as bad as they do.
This is precisely what social psychology appears to show—derogation of others appears more often as a defensive strategy that people adopt when threatened. Contrast two sets of college students who have been told (at random) that they scored high or low on an IQ test. Only those scoring low later choose to denigrate a Jewish woman (but not a non-Jewish) woman on a variety of traits. Apparently association with intellectual achievement is sufficient reason to denigrate the woman if one’s own intellectual powers are in doubt. Likewise, the same “low scorers” (as they are told they are) are more likely to complete “duh” and “dan” as “dumb” and “dangerous” when subliminally primed with a black face. So let us say that there is some evidence that I am stupid (in fact, fictitious). I apparently lash out by denigrating members of allegedly intelligent groups (against which there may be other biases) while calling attention to negative stereotypes of allegedly less gifted ones. Incidentally, the derogation does make me feel better afterward, as measured by an interview, so the act may fool me as well.
As we shall see later (Chapter 11), derogation of others—including racial, ethnic, and class prejudices—can be especially dangerous when contemplating hostile activity, such as warfare.
In-Group/Out-Group Associations Among Most Prominent
Few distinctions bring quicker and more immediate psychological responses in our species than in-group and out-group—almost as much as, if not sometimes more than, for self and other. Just as you are on average better than others, so is your group—just as others are worse, so are out-groups. Such groups, in and out, are pathetically easy to form. You need not stoke Sunni or Catholic fundamentalism to get people to feel the right way; just make some wear blue shirts and others red and within a half-hour you will induce in-group and out-gro
up feelings based on shirt color.
Once we define an individual as belonging to an out-group, a series of mental operations are induced that, often quite unconsciously, serve to degrade our image of the person, compared with an in-group member. The words “us” and “them” have strong unconscious effects on our thinking. Even nonsense syllables (such as “yaf,” “laj,” and “wuhz”), when paired with “us,” “we,” and “ours,” are preferred over similar syllables paired with “they,” “them,” and “theirs.” And these mechanisms can be primed to apply to artificial groups, experimentally created—those with different-colored shirts, for example. We easily generalize bad traits in an out-group member while reserving generalization for good traits performed by an in-group member. For example, if an out-group member steps on my toes, I am more likely to say, “He is an inconsiderate person,” though with an in-group member I will describe the behavior exactly: “He stepped on my toes.” In contrast, an out-group member acting nicely is described specifically—“she gave me directions to the train station”—while an in-group member is described as being “a helpful person.” Similar mental operations serve to derogate others compared to self. Even minor positive social traits, such as a smile, are imputed unconsciously more often to in-group members than to out-group ones.
This bias begins early in life, among infants and young children. They divide others into groups based on ethnicity, attractiveness, native language, and sex. By age three, they prefer to play with in-group members and also begin to display explicit negative verbal attitudes toward out-group members. They also share with adults a strong tendency to prefer groups to which they have been randomly assigned, to believe that their own group is superior to others, and to begin to treat out-group members in a harmful fashion.
The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life Page 3