Born Liars (16 page)

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.

This effect works both ways. Observers often assume that because somebody is good at something (say, public speaking) then they will probably be good at something else (say, governing). In organisations where it's not crystal clear who is contributing what – that's to say, most organisations – over-confident people tend to get promoted quicker and further. This is because they send out more ‘competence cues': they talk louder, speak more assertively, make emphatic gestures – and we tend to assume these things mean they must be good at their job. A feedback loop is created: they get promoted, which makes them more confident, which spins them further up the hierarchy. Then these people hire and promote other people in their own image, until the boardroom table is populated by self-assured people who speak well and are possessed of a rock-solid – and often unjustified – confidence in the wisdom of their own decisions.

In time though, the over-confident and under-competent get found out, don't they? Not necessarily. Over-confident people are more likely to take risky decisions, and as long as they're not insanely risky, there's a good chance some of them will pay off, especially if the conditions in which they're operating are favourable – a booming industry or rising market. In these situations, their failures are written off as bad luck and their successes attributed to innate brilliance. As a result, they acquire superstar status and the salary to go with it. Only if they're unlucky does something so catastrophic happen as a result of one of their decisions that they can't escape the blame. Such catastrophes can arise when two exceptionally over-confident sets of people collide with one another.

On the evening of 15 November 1532, the Spanish explorer Francisco Pizarro led a small band of weary men down a mountain in the northern highlands of Peru and into the town of Cajamarca. In the town square, he explained his plan. The Inca emperor, Atahualpa, was to meet them there the next day, ostensibly to open a negotiation over land and gold, and he would be surrounded by his vast armies. This, said Pizarro, would be the perfect moment to capture the emperor and hold him to ransom. Exactly what Pizarro's troops thought about this plan is unrecorded, but they were a long way from home and many miles from their nearest countrymen, so had little option but to set up camp in the square and try to get some rest before the next day. As night fell the Spanish saw something beautiful and terrifying: thousands of flickering lights surrounded the town, as if the night sky had been draped over the mountains. Each light was a campfire, lit to warm members of Atahualpa's army. In an attempt to keep spirits from breaking, Pizarro's brother Hernando told the men he estimated there were forty thousand Incas, though all knew there were at least twice that number. The Spanish numbered one hundred and sixty-eight. Not one of them slept that night.

In the morning, Pizarro ordered his troops to conceal themselves in forts around the square and wait for his command. From their hiding places they watched as a wide river of Inca soldiers advanced slowly down the mountain towards the town. After several long hours they heard voices raised in song, and hundreds of Inca warriors filed into the square, the sun glinting off their jewellery. Atahualpa himself was carried in on a litter lined with brightly coloured parrot feathers, bedecked with gold and silver plates and hoisted by eighty chieftains in ceremonial dress. The watching Spanish soldiers felt sick with fear, some urinating involuntarily. They could hardly have been more certain that they were about to meet violent deaths.

After a brief meeting with the Spanish priest, during which Atahualpa angrily rejected a demand that he and his people should convert to Christianity, Pizarro gave the order to attack. The Spaniards sounded trumpet blasts, opened fire from their clumsy but noisy guns, and rushed out of their hiding places. Many of them were riding horses, which the Incas had never seen before. Stunned by the noise and the horrifying spectacle of half-men, half-beasts bearing down on them at tremendous speed, Atahualpa's warriors panicked, dropped their weapons and fled. As they did so, they ran into each other and piled on top of one another, making them easy prey to the Spaniards who ran them through with their swords. Amidst the bloody chaos, Pizarro captured the emperor. He held Atahualpa to ransom for eight months and extracted a staggeringly large haul of gold in return for his freedom. After taking delivery of it, he reneged on his promise and executed him. The Incas – who had been obeying Atahualpa's orders from captivity – were utterly reliant on the man they revered as a sun god. His death left them frantic and disunited, making subsequent Spanish victories much quicker and easier.

The battle of Cajamarca was perhaps the most astonishing upset in the history of warfare; at least seven thousand Incas were killed by fewer than two hundred Spanish fighters. It was decisive in the European conquest of the Americas, and thus a pivotal point in the biggest and most significant migration in human history. It was made possible by the superior technology of the Spanish – swords made of steel, clumsy but terrifying guns – and by their horses. But that it was embarked upon at all, given the wildly asymmetric nature of the contest, is a tribute to Pizarro's powers of persuasion; he had to convince his men that such a victory was remotely possible in order to stop them fleeing or rebelling when they glimpsed the extent of Atahualpa's army. And before that, he had to persuade himself.

From this side of history, Pizarro's optimism looks visionary. In the face of his adversary's overwhelming numerical superiority he saw something that nobody else could see – that a shock and awe strategy might enable his tiny band of
conquistadors
to overcome the massed ranks of Incas. But what if he'd been wrong?

Three hundred and fifty years later, at the Battle of Little Bighorn, General Custer, perhaps inspired by the legendary tale of Pizarro's victory, led his force of six hundred and seventy-five men into battle against three thousand Indians with a cry of, ‘Hurrah boys, we've got them!' Custer's army was annihilated and the general himself was killed. In retrospect, Custer was a disaster waiting to happen. His sole talent was for recklessness; he had finished thirty-fourth and last in his class at West Point, and later was nearly expelled from the army on two occasions for misconduct. But when the Civil War came, what one officer called his ‘desperate gallantry' caught the eye of the generals. He was promoted, found himself at the forefront of some dramatic victories, and capped a glorious war by receiving the Confederate flag of truce at Appomattox. In his own mind, he was a brilliant as well as fearless leader of men, rather than a man who had ridden his luck further than he had any right to expect.