Why we Deceive Ourselves


In their book, The Elephant in the Brain, the authors describe this weird aspect of deception that we practice: deceiving ourselves! That is so weird:
“If our minds contain maps of our worlds, what good comes from having an inaccurate version of these maps?”

The Sigmund Freud school of thought treats self-deception as a defense mechanism, “a way for the ego to protect itself”. The mind seeks to protect itself from anxiety and other negative emotions. Many object to this reasoning: since accurate information is so critical to our survival, surely distorting information would be dangerous. Wouldn’t the goal of protecting our self-esteem have been better achieved by making the brain’s self-esteem mechanism stronger instead?

The new school of thought explains self-deception as “primarily outward-facing, manipulative, and ultimately self-serving”. This is based on Thomas Schelling’s work on game theory:
“In a variety of scenarios, limiting or sabotaging yourself is the winning move.”
An example is the game called chicken. Two drivers race towards each other on a collision course. The player who swerves loses. Each player can keep going and hope the other guy chickens out. But if the other guy thinks the same way, neither will swerve and a collision may kill you. So what’s the winning strategy?
“Remove the steering wheel from your car and wave it at your opponent. This way, he’ll know you’re locked in, dead set, hell-bent – irrevocably committed to driving straight through, no matter what. And at this point, unless he wants to die, your opponent will have to swerve first, and you’ll be the winner.”
There’s even a term for this deliberate limiting of one’s options: “strategic ignorance”!
“The entire value of strategic ignorance and related phenomena lies in the way others act when they believe that you’re ignorant.”
Of course, this only works when you’re playing against an opponent who can “take your mental state into account”. Which is true in most social situations.

Ok, but wouldn’t it be simpler to just lie? Why deceive ourselves as well? Why not just pretend?
“There are many answers to this question, but they mostly boil down to the fact that lying is hard to pull off.”
Others can detect lies; they ask follow-up questions; it’s hard to stay consistent. Therefore, it follows:
“Often the best way to convince others that we believe something is to actually believe it.”

It doesn’t sound pretty, but it sure has a certain Spock-like logic to it…

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more