The Folly of Fools (12 page)

For example, black and white people are similar in their explicit tendency to value self over other, blacks indeed somewhat more strongly so. But when it comes to the implicit measures, whites respond even more strongly in their own favor than they do explicitly, while blacks—on average—prefer white over black, not by a huge margin but, nevertheless, they prefer other to self. This is most unexpected from an evolutionary perspective, where self is the beginning (if not end) of self-interest. To find an organism valuing (unrelated) other people more than self on an implicit measure using generic good terms, such as “pleasure” and “friend,” versus bad, such as “terrible” and “awful,” is to find an organism not obviously oriented toward its own self-interest.

This has the earmarks of an imposed self-deception—valuing yourself less than you do others—and it probably comes with some negative consequences. For example, priming black students for their ethnicity strongly impairs their performance on mental tests. This was indeed one of the first demonstrations of what are now hundreds of “priming” effects. Black and white undergraduates at Stanford arrived in a lab to take a relatively difficult aptitude test. In one situation, the students were simply given the exams; in the other, each was asked to give a few personal facts, one of which was their own ethnicity. Black and white students scored equally well with no prime. With a prime, white scores were slightly (but not significantly) better, while black scores plummeted by nearly half. You can even manipulate one person’s performance in opposite directions by giving opposing primes. Asian women perform better on math tests when primed with “Asian” and worse when primed with “woman.” No one knows how long the effect of such primes endures, nor does anyone know how often a prime appears: how often is an African American reminded that he or she is such? Once a month? Once a day? Every half-hour?

The strong suggestion, then, is that it is possible for a historically degraded and/or despised minority group, now socially subordinate, to have an implicit self-image that is negative, to prefer other to self—indeed, oppressor to self—and to underperform as soon as they are made conscious of the subordinate identity. This suggests the power of imposed or induced self-deception—some or, indeed, many subordinate individuals adopting the dominant stereotype regarding themselves. Not all, of course, and the latter presumably are more likely to oppose their subjugation since they are conscious of it. In any case, revolutionary moments often seem to occur in history when large numbers of individuals have a change in consciousness, regarding themselves and their status. Whether there is an accompanying change in IAT is unknown.

FALSE CONFESSIONS, TORTURE, AND FLATTERY

A few more forms of induced self-deception are worth mentioning. It is surprisingly easy to convince people to make false confessions to major crimes even though this may—and often does—result in incarceration for long periods of time. All that is required is a susceptible victim and good old-fashioned police work applied 24/7: isolation of the victim from others, sleep deprivation, coercive interrogation in which denial and refutation are not permitted, false facts provided, and hypothetical stories told—“we have your blood on the murder weapon; perhaps you woke in a state of semiconsciousness and killed your parents without intending to or being aware of it”—with the implication that a confession will end the interrogation when, in fact, it will only begin the suspect’s misery. People differ in how susceptible they are to these pressures and in how much self-deception is eventually induced. Some go on to create false memories to back up their false confessions—with no obvious benefit to themselves.

There is also a kind of imposed self-deception that could be considered
defensive
self-deception. Consider an individual being tortured. The pain can be so great that something called disassociation occurs—the pain is separated from other mental systems, presumably to reduce its intensity. It is as if the psyche or nervous system protects itself from severe pain by objectifying it, distancing it, and splitting it off from the rest of the system. One can think of this as being imposed by the torturer but also as a defensive reaction permitting immediate survival under most unfavorable circumstances. We know from many, many personal accounts that this is but a temporary solution and that the torture itself and utter helplessness against it endure long afterward as psychological and biological costs. Of course, there are much more modest forms of disassociation from pain than those of torture—such as a mother distracting her child by tickling him or her.

A relatively gentle form of imposed self-deception is flattery, in which the subordinate gains in status by massaging the ego or self-image of the dominant. In royal courts, the sycophant has ample time to study the king, while the latter pays little attention to the former. The king is also presumed to have limited insight into self on general grounds; being dominant, he has less time and motivation to study his own self-deception.

Imposed self-deceptions are sometimes involved in “cons,” deliberate attempts to extract resources through deception (Chapter 8). For example, in one situation, the con artist’s success depended on him inducing in his victim the conviction that they knew each other already. This was accomplished by wrapping his arms around the shoulders of his (male) victim, and saying, “What have you been up to, old bean?” The victim, if deferential, may quickly create a memory of when they might have met, supplying facts that the con artist can use later as evidence that they did indeed know each other.

One form of induced self-deception is widespread and
very
important. The ability of leaders to induce self-deception in their subjects has had large historical effects. As we shall see in Chapter 10, false historical narratives widely shared within a population can easily be exploited to arouse sentiments in favor of war. At the same time, political success often may turn on the ability of leaders to arouse the belief in people that something is in their self-interest when it is not.

FALSE MEMORIES OF CHILD ABUSE

In the late 1970s and the 1980s, the emerging evidence of the sexual abuse of children and women set off two epidemics of false accusations, with immense costs to innocent people who were either imprisoned or tried for nonexistent crimes, or publicly accused and shamed. All of these consequences were based on the implantation of false memories, a case of imposed self-deception with large social costs.

The two epidemics were linked. One claimed a high incidence of past childhood sexual abuse in women—discovered only through “recovered memory therapy,” a variety of techniques specifically designed to elicit such memories (or create them). Women went to see a therapist for other reasons, with no past memory of abuse, and emerged convinced that they had been subjected to repeated, sustained abuse. Suggestions from the therapist, leading questions, hypnosis in an effort to retrieve the memories—these were some of the tools that managed to instill what turned out to be false memories.

The second epidemic was a natural outgrowth of the first. If so much unsuspected sexual abuse had been going on in the past, then surely it must be continuing in the present. In 1983 in California, teachers at a preschool were accused of the usual sexual abuse of children, but also of subjecting them to Satanic rituals involving the slaughter of pet rabbits, and even subjecting them to an airplane ride where similar activities took place. This was a common feature of both epidemics—you can impose false memories on other people but you cannot keep the newly freed memory from making up whatever it wishes. The increasingly unlikely “memories” eventually led to the collapse of these movements. But not before dozens of communities had gone through the wrenching trauma of learning that their children had been sexually abused, attacked by robots and lobsters, and forced to eat live frogs.

Some people were imprisoned for imaginary abuses, while some innocent parents had to endure the public shame of others believing they had practiced pedophilia on their own children. Alas, there was no lack of clinical psychologists willing to play the fool and testify in court that in their expert opinion, the women and children were telling the truth.

IS SELF-DECEPTION THE PSYCHE ’S IMMUNE SYSTEM?

The major alternative view of self-deception that comes out of psychology is that self-deception is defensive, whether against our primitive unconscious urges (the Freudian system) or against attacks on our happiness (social psychology). In the latter view, happiness is treated as an outcome in its own right, a part of our mental health. Thus, it is an outcome worth protecting, and for this purpose we have a “psychological immune system” to protect our mental health just as the actual immune system protects our physical health. Healthy people are happy and optimistic, feel a greater sense of control over their lives, and so on. Since self-deception can sometimes create these effects, it is directly selected to do so. We cook the facts, we bias the logic, we overlook the alternatives—in short, we lie to ourselves. Meanwhile, we apparently have a “reasonability center” that determines just how far we will be permitted to protect our happiness via self-deception (without, for example, looking ridiculous to others or becoming dangerously delusional). Why was evolution unable to produce a more sensible way of regulating such an important emotion as happiness?

Regarding the evidence, of course successful organisms are expected to feel happier, more optimistic, and more in control. They are also more likely to show self-enhancement. Does this mean that the self-enhancement is causing the happiness, optimism, and sense of control? Hardly. Depressed people show much less self-enhancement on common traits than do happier souls—they may even show self-deprecation. This is sometimes used to argue that without self-deception, we would all be depressed. This almost certainly inverts cause and effect. A time of depression is not a good time for self-inflation, especially if this inflation is oriented toward others—depression seems instead better suited to opportunities for self-examination.

Before turning to the imaginary psychological immune system, it is well to remember that the real immune system deals with a major problem common to all of life: that of parasites, organisms that eat us from the inside (see Chapter 6). The immune system uses a variety of direct reality-based molecular mechanisms to attack, disable, engulf, and kill a veritable zoo of invading organisms—thousands of species of viruses, bacteria, fungi, protozoa, and worms—themselves using techniques honed over hundreds of millions of years of intense natural selection. The immune system also stores away an accurate and large library of previous attacks, with the appropriate counterresponse programmed in advance.

By contrast, the psychological immune system works not by fixing what makes us unhappy but by putting it in context, rationalizing it, minimizing it, and lying about it. If the physical immune system worked this way, it would do so by telling you, “Okay, you have a bad cold, but at least you don’t have the flu the fellow down the street has.” Thus, the real psychological immune system must be the one that causes us to go out and fix the problem. Guilt motivates us toward reparative altruism, unhappiness toward efforts to improve our lives to diminish the unhappiness, laughter to appreciate the logical absurdities in life, and so on. Self-deception traps us in the system, offering at best temporary gains while failing to address real problems.

It is true that as a highly social species, we are very sensitive to the actions and opinions of others and can be deeply affected by them—lowering our self-opinion and our happiness—but, again, why adopt something as dubious as self-deception to solve this problem? Note that a defensive view of self-deception is congenial to an inflated moral self-image—I am not lying to myself the better to deceive you, but rather I lie to myself to defend against your attacks on myself and my happiness.

There is some slack in the system. You are also part of your own social world. The eye that beholds you could be your eye studying your own behavior. What does it see? First, your conscious act, then your unconscious self? Let us initially assume so. Can fooling this inner eye help in fooling some other part of yourself, sometimes to your benefit? I believe so. We can also try to suppress painful memories about events we cannot affect. A man’s daughter is murdered by an unknown killer: “When she died, I wrapped her memory in blankets and tried to forget it.” Presumably the recurring painful memory serves no purpose and there is no loss in forgetting. There are also various efforts to mold our consciousness that are not, by definition, self-deceptive. They can involve us in various self-improvement projects, including meditation, prayer, optimism, a sense of purpose, meaning, and control, so-called positive illusions. As we shall see in Chapter 6, one important benefit of such projects is improved immune function. Here I wish to discuss two related examples in some depth: the placebo effect and hypnosis. Both demonstrate that belief can cure.

THE PLACEBO EFFECT

The placebo effect and the benefits of hypnosis, including self-hypnosis, are examples of self-beneficial self-deception that usually requires a third party—a person in a lab coat with a stethoscope in the first case and someone swinging a watch and talking to you in a rhythmic way in the second. The “placebo” refers to the fact that a chemically inert or innocuous substance administered as if it were a medicine often produces beneficial—even medicinal—effects. This effect is so consistent and strong that all medical research trials on a new medicine routinely have a placebo control. That is, if you are testing whether a pill helps people with arthritis, you must give an equal number of people a similar-looking pill lacking the key chemical. Only if your medicine works better than the placebo can it be said to have any effect of its own. Of course it would be nice to add a third category to the analysis—no placebo, no medicine—to measure more precisely the placebo effect itself, but doctors have been slow to realize the value of doing this.