The media today is full of people who have lived a life of a lie.
Elizabeth Holmes is a biotech entrepreneur who in 2015 was named the youngest richest woman due to her hard work and work. He is now facing 20 years in prison for fraud.
Similarly, there is one Anna Sorokin, alias Anna Delvey, who pretended to inherit a fortune from Germany and then swindled New York high society out of millions of dollars. And then there’s Simon Hewitt, aka Simon Leviv, the so-called Tinder scammer.
What all these people have in common is not that they lied to others, but they also lied to themselves. Each of them believed that their actions were somehow justified, and against all odds, they believed that they would never be caught. From time to time he appeared not only to deny the truth personally but also dragged others into his scams.
This type of behavior is said to be a relatively rare phenomenon, limited to a few extreme situations. But self-deception is incredibly common and may have been exposed for some personal gain.
We lie to ourselves to protect our image, which allows us to act immorally with a clear conscience. According to the latest research, self-deception evolved to help convince others. If we begin to believe our own lies, it becomes much easier to convince other people.
More than the scams that have made headlines in recent years, this research can explain questionable behavior in many areas of life. By understanding the various factors that contribute to self-deception, we can try to figure out when it can influence our own decisions and prevent us from being misled.
Ego protection
Any psychologist will tell you that scientifically studying self-deception is a headache. You can’t ask someone if they are deceiving themselves or kidding themselves, because it happens unconsciously. As a result, related experiments are often very complex.
Let’s start with the research of Zoe Chance, associate professor of marketing at Yale University in the US. In a groundbreaking experiment in 2011, he showed that many people unconsciously resort to self-deception to satisfy their egos.
He asked a group of participants to take an IQ test with a list of answers printed at the bottom of the page. As expected, this group performed significantly better than those whose answers were not printed on the copy.
However, he did not seem to admit how much he relied on the ‘cheat sheet’, i.e. the duplicate copy, as he said that he performed similarly in answering 100 more questions without the answer sheet. Will demonstrate. Somehow they had convinced themselves or deluded themselves that they knew how to solve problems without any help.
To confirm this result, Chance repeated the entire experiment with a new group of participants. This time participants were offered monetary compensation for correctly predicting their outcome on the second trial and penalized for overconfident claims. If participants were aware of their behavior, this incentive might be expected to reduce their overconfidence.
In fact, the offer and the penalty did nothing to reduce the participants’ inflated self-esteem because they still tricked themselves into thinking they were smarter because they knew they would lose money. . It turns out that his ideas about himself were real and surprisingly strong.
It is not difficult to understand how this can be seen in real life. A scientist may feel that his results were real despite the use of fake data. A student may believe that he has secured a place in a prestigious university despite cheating in an examination.
Moral seriousness
The use of self-deception to improve self-image has been seen in many other cases recently. For example, Uri Genezy, professor of economics at the University of California, San Diego, in the US, has recently shown how self-deception can help us justify potential conflicts of interest in our work.
In a 2020 study, Geniezi asked participants to take on the role of investment advisors or clients. Counselors were presented with two different options, each of which implied different risks and benefits. They were also told that if the customer chose either of the two investments, they would get a commission.
In a series of experiments, counselors were informed of this potential reward at the beginning of the experiment, before they considered the various options. When they were apparently choosing the best option for the customer, they were more likely to choose the option that was favorable to them.
In the rest of the tests, however, the counselors were told about this potential reward only after they had been given some time to weigh the pros and cons of each. This time nobody let the prize sway their decision and stuck to their goal of giving the best advice to the customer.
The fact that knowledge of the personal benefit only affected participants’ judgments in the first situation suggests that their self-deception was unconscious, Genezi says, adding that he considered the benefits and risks without realizing the bias. Changed the way they calculated so they could feel they were still working in the best interest of the clients.
Otherwise it would have required a complete conversion of heart, and then it would have been more difficult for one to justify oneself. In such a case, he says, “they cannot convince themselves that they will act morally.”
Genezi says that self-deception in this way is a way of protecting our moral sense.
“It means we can continue to see ourselves as good people even though our actions show otherwise,” he said.
This form of self-deception may be more appropriate in the case of financial advisors. But Genezi believes it could also be important in private health care. He says that despite good intentions, a doctor may unconsciously deceive himself into thinking that the most expensive treatment is the best for the patient, without recognizing his own self-delusion.
Convince yourself, convince others
Perhaps the most surprising result of self-deception concerns our conversations with others.
According to this theory, self-deception allows us to appear more confident in what we say, which makes us more persuasive. For example, if you’re trying to sell something dubious and you really believe it’s a high-quality deal, you better justify it even if the evidence says otherwise.
This hypothesis was first proposed decades ago, and a recent article by Peter Schwardman, assistant professor of behavioral economics at Carnegie Mellon University in the US, provides strong evidence for the idea.
Like Chance’s study, Schwardman’s early experiments began with IQ tests.
Test results were not given to participants. But after the test was over, they were asked to rate their performance on how they thought they had performed. They then took a persuasion test in which they had to appear in front of a jury of fictitious employers and convince the panel of their intellectual prowess, if the judges believed they were the smartest of the group. They will likely be entitled to a reward of US$16.
Some people were told about the persuasion task before they self-rated their performance, while others were told about it afterwards. As hypothesized, Schwardman found that the item changed their ability ratings. Those who knew in advance that they would have to convince others were more confident in expressing their own performance ratings than those who did not know.
The knowledge of the need to convince others made them think they were smarter when they really weren’t.
He described it as a kind of ‘reflex’ (involuntary action). Importantly, Schwardman’s experiments showed that self-deception produced better results. Unfounded overconfidence actually increased people’s ability to convince fictitious employers.
Favoritism
Schwardman has seen a similar process in debates. In these types of events, participants are given a topic and then given 15 minutes to present their position and arguments for or against it. During the debate, the decision is made on how well they have presented their point of view.
Schwardman examined the participants’ personal views on the background of the problems. Before they are assigned their topic and position or when they begin to prepare their arguments and then after the discussion.
They found how self-deception evolved to help us persuade others. He saw how people’s opinions changed when they were asked to speak for or against a topic.
“Their private imaginations shifted to the topic that was given to them only 15 minutes before, so that they could convince others with their arguments,” Schwardman says.
After the discussion, participants also had the opportunity to donate a small amount of money to charities chosen from a long list of possible organizations. Schwardman found that he was more likely to select organizations that fit the argument he presented, even though he had initially selected them that way.
Many of our concepts are formed this way. In politics it may happen that an activist who is asked to campaign on a particular point actually convinces himself that this is the only point of view, not because he has understood the facts. have carefully reviewed, but simply because they have been asked to do so. Schwardman believes that similar factors are behind much of the political polarization we see today.
Delusions of grandeur
All of these ways show that our brains can trick us into believing things that aren’t true. Self-deception allows us to exaggerate our opinion of our abilities so that we believe we are smarter than the person around us.
This means that we ignore other people’s perceptions of our actions, so that we believe that we are generally acting in a moral way. And by deceiving ourselves about the truth of our thoughts, we appear more confident in our own opinions, which in turn can help us persuade others.
We may never know what was really going on in the minds of Holmes, Sorokin or Hewitt and other fraudsters, but it is easy to speculate how certain mechanisms were working within them.
At the very least, it seems that these forgers had an unusually high opinion of their own abilities and thought that they had a right to get what they wanted, and what they were doing. were blithely ignoring the potential ethical implications of
It seems that Holmes in particular was so confident in his product that he continued to try to justify its use with misleading data. Against all evidence, he testified at trial that ‘big medical device companies like Siemens could easily duplicate what we’ve done.’ And they did nothing wrong.
Schwardman agrees that some scammers are incredibly fed up with their lies. They say that some even show genuine anger when asked, which can be hard to call fake. “Maybe it’s a sign that they really believe their lies,” he says.
It would be interesting to know that the desire for social status appears to increase the tendency of people to be self-deceptive. For example, when people feel threatened by others, they overestimate their abilities. It may be that the greater the risk, the greater the self-delusion we may indulge in.
Most of the time our self-deception can be harmless and invisible, allowing us to feel relatively a little more confident. But it’s always at the top of these trends, especially if we’re making life-changing decisions. For example, you avoid deluding yourself about the dangers of taking shortcuts in your current job, or the chances of success in a major career change.
A good way to avoid biases of all kinds is to consider the ‘opposites’ of your conclusions. The technique is as simple as it sounds: you try to find all the reasons why you think Why might be wrong, as you may be asking yourself.
Several studies show that it leads us to think more analytically about a situation. In laboratory tests, this systematic reasoning is more effective than simply asking people to ‘think rationally’.
This is only possible if you accept your flaws of course. The first step is to identify the problem. You may think you don’t need this advice, that self-deception only happens with others while you’re completely honest with yourself. If so, then this may be the biggest deception for you.