Read the rest of Part One.The Toolbox of Self-Deception, Part I
To thine own self be true. But only some of the time.
Below, the first of three parts on the ubiquitous nature of self-deception in daily life:
It was a Wednesday in late October, and I had to teach at 10:30. Usually, this meant a morning behind a closed office door, but this was the day of my university's health fair. Apparently, I could get a $40 gift card just for getting my vital signs checked. Between learning how to lower my cholesterol and scoring a free bloomin' onion, I figured I would just about break even. But I was in for a rude surprise: one of my test results was borderline "abnormal."
There had to be some innocent explanation, I told myself. The room where the screening took place was hot and crowded. Things were busy enough that someone could've transposed digits or confused samples. The presidential election was approaching, and I had stayed up too late the night before, reading online polls.
I even cajoled the nurse into taking another measurement, despite the look she gave me that said, Buddy, everybody thinks the numbers are wrong, but they never are. The second measurement wasn't much better.
Still, I didn't buy it. I went straight from the health fair to my research methods class, where–as any of the students who took notes can attest–I spent the first 10 minutes using my experience to illustrate the concept of measurement error. That'll teach them to mess with me, I figured.
Why did I go to such lengths to refute objective information–information that was intended solely for my benefit? Because it was threatening. People do this all the time. We bend the facts to fit our self-image, perpetuating a view of ourselves that is often more positive than accurate.
Read the rest of Part Two.The Toolbox of Self-Deception, Part II
To thine own self be true. But only some of the time.Below, the second of three parts on the ubiquitous nature of self-deception in daily life; click here for Part I.
When you stop to think about it (and that's what we psychologists are trained to do), we enlist an impressive array of cognitive tactics and behavioral gambits in the daily effort to feel good about ourselves. We carry around a veritable toolbox of self-deception, including well more individual tools than I can catalog here. What follows is but a sampling of the more common strategies we employ in the daily pursuit of positive self-regard...
3. Illusions of Control
Ever play the lottery? I'll admit that I buy tickets when the jackpot gets to nine figures, an interesting phenomenon in and of itself: as if $100 million would be life-altering, but $75 million isn't worth my effort.
Rationally speaking, it's hard to explain why anyone ever buys lottery tickets. But buy them we do, and part of the reason lies with another of our feel-good strategies: illusions of control. We convince ourselves that the randomness of life doesn't apply to us. Others may be unable to manage their own destinies, but somehow we think we can.
Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer ran a study in which she either gave people a raffle ticket or let them choose one. When she then tried to buy the tickets back, those who had been allowed to select their own held out for four times as much money as those who were simply handed a ticket.
Just putting thought into, for example, which lotto numbers to play is enough to make us more optimistic–as if our intellect were so profound that it somehow gives us better odds than all those idiots with lousy numbers.
Illusions of control also explain why, even after being reminded that divorce rates hover at 50 percent, respondents in one study by the late Ziva Kunda, a psychologist at Canada's University of Waterloo, estimated that their own marriage had only a 20 percent probability of dissolving. Or why, in a recent survey on the real estate website Zillow.com, half of homeowners said their house had held its value or even appreciated during a year when nationwide sale prices dropped 9 percent. Or why we're able to assure ourselves that we will escape the documented side effects of a given medical treatment–you know, the ones that are muttered in hurried tones at the end of pharmaceutical commercials.
Read the rest of part three.The Toolbox of Self-Deception, Part III
To thine own self be true. But only some of the time.Below, the third of three parts on the ubiquitous nature of self-deception in daily life; click here for Part I and here for Part II.
When you stop to think about it (and that's what we psychologists are trained to do), we enlist an impressive array of cognitive tactics and behavioral gambits in the daily effort to feel good about ourselves. We carry around a veritable toolbox of self-deception, including well more individual tools than I can catalog here. What follows is but a sampling of the more common strategies we employ in the daily pursuit of positive self-regard...
5. Downward Social Comparison
So, associating ourselves with successful and accomplished others is always the way to go, right? Not so fast. What if those others are thriving in the very areas where we're faltering? The novelist may revel in the feats of her neighbor the musician, but the best-selling book of her cousin may bring on crippling envy. And what if we can't even use the better-than-average effect? What if we run up against irrefutable evidence that we're actually not better than average? In such cases, we often resort to downward social comparison, viewing our attainments alongside those of the least successful individuals we know.
Think about the last time you were handed back an exam, whether days or decades ago. If you're like most of the test takers I know, one of your first reactions was to wonder what the average score was. Or to ask your friend how she did. Or maybe even to sneak a peek at the score of the guy sitting down the row from you.
A study by Joanne Wood and colleagues at the University of Waterloo shows downward social comparison in action. Participants were given a series of tests, and then some, chosen at random, were told they had succeeded, while others, also chosen at random, were told they had failed. The participants' next task was to select a test for their unseen partner in a separate room–a test that they would score for the partner. Those who thought they themselves had done poorly assigned their partner the most challenging test to muddle through.