by Ian Leslie
There is something amusing about this, and of course, self-deception is the source of much of our greatest comedy. From Malvolio to Mr Pooter, through David Brent to the X-Factor auditions, we love to laugh at the gap between the way people present themselves and the way they really are. Perhaps this is because we instinctively recognise that all of us need a little self-deception to get by.
Asked for a shorthand definition of sanity, you would probably say it had something to do with being free of illusions. When we think someone’s in danger of going mad we say they’re ‘losing touch with reality’. For most of the twentieth century, this was an axiom of the mental health profession too. A report commissioned by the American government in 1958 concluded that, ‘The perception of reality is called mentally healthy when what the individual sees corresponds to what is actually there . . . Mentally healthy perception means the process of viewing the world so that one is able to take in matters one wishes were different without distorting them to fit those wishes.’ In 1988, Shelley Taylor and her collaborator Jonathon Brown published a paper which turned this wisdom on its head.
As a young psychologist Taylor worked with people who had suffered severe trauma or tragedy, such as rape victims or cancer patients. Interviewing them wasn’t easy; Taylor describes it as ‘a wrenching way to make a living’. The worst part of it was that Taylor couldn’t help but notice how some patients developed self-deceiving fictions about their future. She would hear a cancer patient state with utter confidence that he would never get cancer again, even as she knew from his medical records that he would almost certainly die of the disease. But Taylor gradually realised that the patients who maintained these unrealistically optimistic beliefs were the ones most likely to make the fullest return to mental health. They may have been telling themselves lies, but the lies worked.
This led her to investigate the role that self-serving fictions play in the lives of the healthy and happy amongst us, rather than just the traumatised. She arrived at a startling conclusion: the normal human mind works with a pronounced positive filter on reality. ‘At every turn,’ Taylor writes, ‘[the mind] construes events in a manner that promotes benign fictions about the self, the world, and the future.’ We routinely over-estimate ourselves and – because other people are the only standard which we have to go by – underestimate others.
What Taylor calls ‘positive illusions’ fall into three broad categories. The first is an exaggerated confidence in our own abilities and qualities. These ‘illusions of superiority’ are extremely sticky: although people are very willing to believe that other people are prone to them, they can’t help but think they’re different. Emily Pronin calls this the ‘bias blind spot’. She gave a group of psychology students a booklet describing eight common self-deceptions (or cognitive biases) and, after they’d read it, asked them to rate how susceptible they were to each bias compared to the average person. Each rated themselves as less affected by biases than other people. The strange, recursive loop of self-deception doesn’t stop there: in a follow-up study Pronin explained to the subjects how and why they might have displayed this bias, but despite this they still insisted their self-assessments were objective, while the self-assessments of others would probably be biased.
The second class of positive illusion is unrealistic optimism; our over-confidence extends to feelings about how we will fare in the future. When students are asked to envision what their future lives will be like, they say they’re more likely than their classmates to graduate top of the class, get a good job, high salary, and give birth to a gifted child – and less likely to have a drinking problem, get divorced, or suffer from cancer. In the short term, we tend to over-estimate how likely we are to lose weight, give up smoking, or complete difficult tasks. In one study, subjects predicted how quickly they (or others) would complete various work projects, and whether they would meet their deadlines. They were over-optimistic about themselves, and over-pessimistic about others. The reason for this seemed to be that their own good intentions loomed much larger in their minds than rational assessment of their own past behaviour. Our inflated sense of potential is underpinned by our tendency towards self-absorption.
The third category is an exaggerated sense of control. We’re prone to imagine that through our physical dexterity we can affect things we patently can’t – when rolling the dice in a game of craps, people throw harder when they want high numbers and softer for low numbers – and we tend to think our decisions are shaping the world even when they’re not. In one experiment, a group of successful professionals were placed in front of computer screens on which a line flickered up and down in imitation of a stock market index like the FTSE 100. The subjects were asked to press a series of buttons which, they were told, may or may not affect the progress of the line. Afterwards they were asked to estimate their effectiveness at moving the line. Many of them were convinced that they had made the line go up. In reality, the buttons had no effect whatsoever on the line. (The subjects in this test were all traders at an investment bank.)
When bad things happen we’re much less likely to take responsibility for them. To illustrate how reluctantly people assume blame, Shelley Taylor quotes from drivers’ explanations to police:
‘As I approached an intersection, a sign suddenly appeared in a place where a stop sign had never appeared before. I was unable to stop in time to avoid an accident.’
‘The telephone pole was approaching. I was attempting to swerve out of its way when it struck my front end.’
In the pithy summary of psychologist Eliot Aronson – a disciple of Leon Festinger – the average person will go a long way to persuade themselves that ‘I am nice, and in control.’ Anthony Greenwald compressed this even further when he coined the word beneffectance to describe the normal human tendency to interpret reality so as to present ourselves as both beneficial and effective. Whenever either of these propositions are thrown into question, we are good at inventing stories that resolve the inconsistency between our actions and our self-image. Most of the time we’re not aware of doing so.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It makes it easier for us to interact and cooperate with other people if we assume that we are conscious, reasoning, reasonably nice people, and that most other people are like us (just slightly less so). If I weren’t able to deceive myself about my ability to control my destiny I’d become petrified by self-doubt. The philosopher William Hirstein has proposed that the opposite of self-deception is not self-knowledge, but obsessive-compulsive disorder: ‘Whereas the self-deceived person might say to himself “It’ll be OK if I don’t brush my teeth tonight,” the person with OCD will get up and brush his teeth again and again. The nagging thought, so easily suppressed by self-deceivers, rages out of control in OCD, cannot be ignored, must be acted on.’
There is good reason to think that our over-confidence is a trait that provided a survival or reproductive advantage and was therefore spread by natural selection. A degree of unrealistic optimism about ourselves would have helped us survive in the treacherous ancestral environment, and confidently impress potential mates. Now that we live in centrally heated houses rather than caves, we still rely on illusions to carry us through life. We imagine that having children will make us happier even though empirical studies suggest this is, at best, uncertain (anticipating our own happiness isn’t the only reason we have children, of course, but it certainly smooths the decision). We fall in love with a person we believe is uniquely suited to us, and this helps us stick with them for long enough to raise those children. We believe that though our lives on this planet will end, we will live on in another form, and – somewhat paradoxically – that helps us to live longer. Without the ability to fool ourselves we would be sadder, limper, less dynamic creatures, unwilling to meet or rise to challenges. As Shelley Taylor puts it, positive illusions are ‘the fuel that drives creativity, motivation and high aspirations’.
There is a group of pe
ople with no positive illusions, who get closer to the truth about themselves, who have a more realistic perception of their abilities, of how the future will pan out and of the amount of control they have over things. Philip Larkin described them as ‘the less deceived’. Psychiatrists call them clinically depressed. In various studies, depressed people have been shown to have a firmer grip on reality than most. They don’t have an exaggerated belief in their own competence or goodness, or remember the past with a deceptively warm glow, or over-estimate their agency in tasks of control. Severely depressed people can live with negative illusions about themselves. But the moderately depressed, in Taylor’s words, ‘appear to have more accurate views of themselves, the world, and the future than do normal people’. Psychologists call this phenomenon ‘depressive realism’. Prior to the emergence of this category of disorder most researchers and clinicians focused on how the depressed person distorts reality. As it turns out, they’re not distorting it enough.
It appears that most of us need a cushion of self-deception to protect us from the harsh edges of reality. In the words of the social psychologist Roy Baumeister, we have an ‘optimal margin of illusion’.
The actual margin fluctuates from day to day. In Joni Mitchell’s song ‘Both Sides Now’, our oscillations from illusion to reality and back again are described in exquisitely bitter-sweet poetry. In the first verse, clouds are ecstatically celebrated as ‘rows and floes of angel hair’, ‘feathered canyons’ and ‘ice-cream castles in the air’. By the second verse they have lost their lustre – they block the sun, drop rain and snow and generally get in the way of the singer’s life. Love is either ‘moons and Junes and Ferris wheels’ or ‘just another show’ made for someone’s cheap amusement. On the one side lies glorious illusion, on the other, mundane and dispiriting truth. At the end of the song, the singer reflects that though she’s looked at life from both sides, it’s the illusions that persist: ‘I really don’t know life at all’. Apart from being a beautiful song, it’s an unnervingly acute description of the normal human relationship with reality.
The Self-Deceptive Habits of Highly Effective People
Although positive illusions are very common, some people have a larger dose of them than others. As an undergraduate, the psychologist Joanna Starek had been a competitive swimmer, and she often wondered why it was that two swimmers of similar physiological abilities could achieve very different levels of success. She guessed that the more successful athletes were the ones who were better at telling themselves they were better, even when some part of them knew they weren’t.
Later, Starek and her research partner Caroline Keating decided to find out if there was something to this. They used a ‘self-deception’ questionnaire first created by two psychologists called Harold Sackeim and Ruben Gur (the same Gur who now researches fMRI lie detection). It consists of twenty rather pointed questions, including, ‘Is it important that others think highly of you?’, ‘Have you ever doubted your sexual adequacy?’ and even ‘Do you enjoy your bowel movements?’ Subjects can answer on a graded scale ranging from not at all to very much so. The idea is that nearly everyone, if they are being completely honest, will say yes to most of these questions – so the people who consistently reply with a firm ‘no’ are more likely to be habitual self-deceivers.
In the original experiment, Sackeim and Gur asked their subjects to fill out this questionnaire and then recorded them saying the words ‘Come here.’ They then played each participant a tape of lots of different people saying the same phrase, with the subject’s own version mixed in somewhere at random. Afterwards, many said they hadn’t been able to pick out their own voice on the tape. However, their physiological responses – pulse, blood pressure and perspiration showed spikes of activity at the moments when the subject’s own voice appeared in the mix. It was clear, then, that some part of the participants had recognised their own voice, even if they hadn’t consciously registered it. This is the essence of self-deception – the ability to hold two contradictory beliefs, but to allow only one of them into consciousness. The subjects who were unable to recognise their own voice were the ones who scored highly on the self-deception questionnaire.
Starek and Keating invited forty members (twenty men and twenty women) of the swimming team at a college in upstate New York to complete Sackheim and Gur’s questionnaire. As an extra test, the swimmers were also asked to look through a stereoscope as pairs of words, in which one was designed to be positively or negatively charged for them, and one neutral (for example fear-hear, lose-nose, or medal-pedal), were flashed simultaneously to their left or right eyes. As we’ve seen, perception is to some extent the servant of our desires, and previous studies had shown that the brain will often deal with this potentially confusing double-vision by picking the word the subject wants to see. The more often the swimmers screened out the negative words and saw only the positive ones, the higher their self-deception score. When Starek and Keating matched the overall scores from both tests against the results of the swimmers in competition, they found a clear correlation between the tendency to self-deceive and qualification for national championships. The swimmers who were good at lying to themselves were consistently swimming faster in big competitions. In her subsequent paper, Starek noted that what she and other psychologists call ‘self-deception’ is called ‘championship thinking’ by sports coaches.
The link between self-deception and over-achievement isn’t restricted to sport. It’s been shown that people who are talented self-deceivers are more likely to be successful at school or in business than those who aren’t. Sometimes people will persuade themselves and others that they believe in something that will be true, even if it isn’t yet; a study of American students showed that the ones who dishonestly exaggerated their grade averages in interviews subsequently improved their grades up to the level they claimed at the time.18
Such overreaching doesn’t just benefit those who enjoy it; it is an engine of economic growth and human betterment. In The Theory Of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith describes ‘a poor man’s son, whom heaven in its anger has visited with ambition’. The man looks around him and admires the wealth and luxury of the rich, their palaces, carriages and retinue of servants. Regarding himself as naturally lazy, he thinks that ‘if he had attained all these, he would sit still contentedly, and be quiet, enjoying himself in the thought of the happiness and tranquillity of his situation.’ Enchanted by this distant idea, he devotes his life to the attainment of it. But the serenity he foresees is an illusion, a trick. He becomes wealthy, but he has to work so hard that he can never relax. ‘Through the whole of his life, he pursues the idea of a certain artificial and elegant repose which he may never arrive at, for which he sacrifices a real tranquillity that is at all times in his power.’ The man’s self-deception has brought him real achievements however, and even more significantly, it has benefited society. ‘It is this deception,’ says Smith, ‘which rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind’:
It is this which first prompted them to cultivate the ground, to build houses, to found cities and commonwealths, to invent and improve all the sciences and arts, which ennoble and embellish human life; which have entirely changed the whole face of the globe, have turned the rude forests of nature into agreeable and fertile plains, and made the trackless and barren ocean a new fund of subsistence, and the great high road of communication to the different nations of the earth.
The economic historian John V.C. Nye has argued that countries become economically stagnant when their business people become too rational and sensible. Every dynamic economy needs its share of what Nye calls ‘lucky fools’; over-optimistic entrepreneurs who are prepared to take irresponsible risks. It’s certainly true that without people prepared to ignore the prevailing wisdoms, disregard public information and follow their instincts, many of our biggest innovations and creative leaps forward wouldn’t have happened. Every year thousands of people with vaulting
ambitions start new companies in full awareness that the odds are against them achieving the kind of world-changing success of which they dream. Most fail, or settle for something less, but a few of those companies become Apple or Starbucks or Dyson. We write symphonies and novels that are unlikely to be any good, and search for the secret of human life in the knowledge that everyone else has tried and failed. Just occasionally, somebody under such an illusion writes Catch-22, composes the Eroica Symphony, or discovers DNA. As George Bernard Shaw observed, ‘Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people.’
Of course, exceptionally over-confident people are also the ones most likely to leave behind some wreckage in their wake. The psychologist Ellen Langer had her subjects play a betting game in which cards were drawn entirely at random and the players had to bet on whose card was highest. Each subject played against both a well-dressed, self-assured opponent (the ‘dapper’), and a shabbily dressed, boorish opponent (the ‘schnook’). Her subjects took far more risks against the schnook. They thought, ‘I’m better than he is, I can win this’. The game was pure chance, and the participants knew it. But their high confidence in one area ( ‘I’m better than that schnook’) irrationally spilt over into another ( ‘I’ll draw better cards’). This fluidity is a key mechanism of over-confidence and it helps to explain why, in 1990, the top executives at AOL and Time Warner decided that they could run each other’s businesses (the merger proved to be one of the biggest blunders in business history) or why, in the decade leading up to 2008, many bank executives concluded that if they were competent at borrowing and lending then they would also be good at gambling on the capital markets.