Book Excerpt: Why Do We Insist on Lying to Ourselves?

Fernando Kaskais

May 31

Visual: Igor Stevanovic/500Px Plus via Getty Images

Self-deception is part of the human condition, and psychologists have long studied our ignorance of our own ignorance.

THE PREVALENCE OF SELF-DECEPTION is truly staggering — and long studied. In regard to our personal health, for example, most people in one 1995 analysis believed they live a healthier lifestyle and have a longer lifespan than their peers. In an even earlier study, around 90 percent of people in the U.S. believed they were better-than-average drivers. In social skills, 70 percent of high school students considered themselves above average in leadership, and on their ability to get along with others, 25 percent blatantly put themselves in the top 1 percent, according to data collected by the College Board in 1976.

Likewise, people tend to exaggerate their popularity and inflate the number of their friends. In academic and job performance, 87 percent of Stanford MBA students rated themselves better than their average peers, and over 90 percent of faculty members placed themselves in the top half in teaching ability in a 1977 survey. The same can be said for lawyers who think they can win a case or for stock traders who consider themselves to be the best in the business.

Self-deception often compels us to attribute successes to our own effort, skills, or intelligence, but we tend to excuse our failures as due to external causes or problems on the part of others. "Mistakes are made," we may claim when things don't go well for us, instead of stating the simple fact, "we're wrong," or "we've flunked." Even when there is nobody to lay blame on, we may still look for a scapegoat: We split ourselves into past and present personalities, then claim that our past self didn't do so well, but our present selves are doing much better. We are new people now.

Clearly, many people are unable to recognize, much less admit, the ceiling of their own capabilities. Otherwise, how could most be above average — to a degree that the very term "average" has lost its statistical meaning?

Psychologists have been engaged in a major effort to understand self-deception since the 1990s. One of the notable studies was done by Justin Kruger and David Dunning at Cornell University. The duo recruited 65 regular human "guinea pigs" — psychology undergraduates — and asked them to estimate their abilities in answering questions about humor, grammar, and logic before they knew their real scores.

As it turned out, participants who did poorly rated themselves far higher than their actual performance. This cognitive distortion was the worst for those in the bottom quarter, who overrated themselves by more than 45 percent to be near the 60th percentile.

Kruger and Dunning published the research in a 1999 paper titled "Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments." This ignorance of one's own ignorance came to be known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, or, more pedantically, meta-ignorance.

But if deceiving ourselves won't do us good, why do we still do it?

WE SHOULDN'T BRUSH OFF self-deception too quickly. It appears that it evolved for a major benefit: self-healing. Praying to gods for a cure to a disease is practiced in virtually all cultures. Sometimes, "miracles" do happen through the intervention of a mythic "divine power" — or so some people believe. Perhaps more familiar to those of us who live in industrialized societies are placebos, widely known to reduce physical or mental symptoms.

Placebos through psychological processes such as Pavlovian conditioning, social learning, memory, and motivation can affect our mental state. This may in turn activate the genetic, immunological, and neural responses that are unleashed by real drugs with actual biological effects. That's why inactive substances, words, rituals, signs, symbols, or treatments, if perceived as beneficial to our condition, can trigger a placebo effect.

Placebos are known for improving a range of conditions, including sleep, mood, a variety of diseases, and sex lives. Pain researchers have found that one of the primary pathways through which placebos work is kindling hope, which in turn can reduce anxiety. This activates the dopamine-mediated reward center in the brain, reducing a patient's pain. When used with an effective drug (such as the painkiller remifentanil), placebos may further enhance the drug's potency.

The placebo effect can be so strong that at times it may be stronger than the effect of the active ingredients in medicines. For example, the medicinal effect of antidepressants accounts for about 25 percent of improvement in patients with moderate symptoms, whereas the response to placebo (including spontaneous remission) accounts for up to 75 percent. Intriguingly, placebos may still work even when patients are informed that they are being treated with a placebo or a sham procedure...

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