The Folly of Fools (6 page)

A very interesting finding emerged when those taking the tests were stockbrokers (105 men and 2 women) whose firms provided data both on internal evaluation and on salaries paid. In both cases, those with a higher illusion of control did worse. They were evaluated by their superiors as being less productive and, more important, they earned less money. Cause and effect is not certain, of course. But if the direction of effect were such that poor performers responded to their own failure by asserting greater control over external events, then they would be blaming themselves more for failure than success, contrary to the well-documented human bias to rationalize away one’s failures. The alternative scenario then seems much more likely—that imagining one has greater control over events than one actually has leads to poorer performance: being a worse stockbroker. Note the absence of a social dimension here. One has no control over the movement of markets and scarcely much knowledge. There seems little possibility to fool your superiors along these lines when they can measure your success easily and directly. It is not at all clear that such an illusion in other situations may not give some social benefits—or even individual ones, as in prompting greater effort toward achieving actual control.

It is interesting to note that lacking control increases something called illusory pattern recognition. That is, when individuals are induced to feel a lack of control, they tend to see meaningful patterns in random data, as if responding to their unfortunate lack of control by generating (false) coherence in data that would then give them greater control.

The Construction of Biased Social Theory

We all have social theories, that is, theories regarding our immediate social reality. We have a theory of our marriages. Husband and wife may agree, for example, that one party is a long-suffering altruist while the other is hopelessly selfish, but disagree over which is which. We each have a theory regarding our employment. Are we an exploited worker, underpaid and underappreciated for value given—and therefore fully justified in minimizing output while stealing everything that is not nailed down? We usually have a theory regarding our larger society as well. Are the wealthy unfairly increasing their share of resources at the expense of the rest of us (as has surely been happening) or are the wealthy living under an onerous system of taxation and regulation? Does democracy permit us to reassert our power at regular intervals or is it largely a sham exercise controlled by wealthy interests? Is the judicial system regularly biased against our kinds of people (African Americans, the poor, individuals versus corporations)? And so on. The capacity for these kinds of theories presumably evolved not only to help understand the world and to detect cheating and unfairness but also to persuade self and others of false reality, the better to benefit ourselves.

The unconscious importance of biased social theory is revealed most vividly perhaps when an argument breaks out. Human arguments feel so effortless because by the time the arguing starts, the work has already been done. The argument may appear to burst forth spontaneously, with little or no preview, yet as it rolls along, two whole landscapes of information lie already organized, waiting only for the lightning of anger to reveal them. These landscapes have been organized with the help of unconscious forces designed to create biased social theory and, when needed, biased evidence to support them.

Social theory inevitably embraces a complex set of facts, which may be only partially remembered and poorly organized, the better to construct a consistent, self-serving body of social theory. Contradictions may be far afield and difficult to detect. When Republicans in the US House of Representatives bemoaned what the Founding Fathers would have thought had they known a future president (Clinton) would have sex with an intern, the black American comedian Chris Rock replied that they were having sex not with their interns but with their
slaves
. This of course is an important function of humor—to expose and deflate hidden deceit and self-deception (see Chapter 8).

False Personal Narratives

We continually create false personal narratives. By enhancing ourselves and derogating others, we automatically create biased histories. We were more moral, more attractive, more “beneffective” to others than in fact we were. Recent evidence suggests that forty- to sixty-year-olds naturally push memories of negative moral actions roughly ten years deeper into their past than memories of positive ones. Likewise, there is a similar but not so pronounced bias regarding nonmoral actions that are positive or negative. An older self acted badly; a recent self acted better. I am conscious of this in my own life. When saying something personal, whether negative or positive, I displace it farther in the past, as if I am not revealing anything personal about my current self, but this is especially prominent for negative information—it was a former self acting that way.

When people are asked to supply autobiographical accounts of being angered (victim) or angering someone else (perpetrator), a series of sharp differences emerges. The perpetrator usually describes angering someone else as meaningful and comprehensible, while victims tend to depict such an event as arbitrary, unnecessary, or incomprehensible. Victims often provide a long-term narrative, especially one emphasizing continuing harm and grievance, while perpetrators describe an arbitrary, isolated event with no lasting implications. One effect of this asymmetry between victim and perpetrator is that when the victim suppresses anger at a provocation, only to respond after an accumulation of slights, the perpetrator sees only the final, precipitating event and easily views the victim’s angry response as an unwarranted overreaction.

There is also something called false internal narratives. An individual’s perception of his or her own ongoing motivation may be biased to conceal from others the true motivation. Consciously, a series of reasons may unfold to accompany actions so that when they are challenged, a convinced alternative explanation is at once available, complete with an internal scenario—“but I wasn’t thinking that at all; I was thinking . . . ”

Unconscious Modules Devoted to Deception

Over the years, I have discovered that I am an unconscious petty thief. I steal small objects from you while in your presence. I steal pens and pencils, lighters and matches, and other useful objects that are easy to pocket. I am completely unconscious of this while it is going on (as are you, most of the time) even though I have been doing it for more than forty years now. Perhaps because the trait is so unconscious, it appears to have a life of its own and often seems to act directly against my own narrow interests. I steal chalk from myself while lecturing and am left with no chalk with which to lecture (nor do I have a blackboard at home). I steal pens and pencils from my office, only to offload them at home—leaving me none the next day at the office—and so on. Recently I stole a Jamaican principal’s entire set of school keys from the desk between us. No use to me, high cost to him.

In summary, there appears to be a little unconscious module in me devoted to petty thievery, sufficiently isolated to avoid interfering with ongoing activity (such as talking). I think of a little organism in me looking out for the matches, the ideal moment to seize them, the rhythm of the actual robbery, and so on. Of course, this organism will study the behavior of my victim but it will also devote time to my own behavior, in order best to integrate the thievery while not giving off any clues. Noteworthy features of this little module in my own life are that the behavior has changed little over my lifetime, and that increasing consciousness of the behavior after the fact has done little or nothing to increase consciousness prior to, during, or immediately after the behavior. The module also appears to misfire more often the older I get. Incidentally, the only time I can remember getting caught is by my brother, born a year after me—we were raised as twins. We each had an ability to read deception in the other that others in the family could not match. Once when we were both in our late forties, I began to pocket his pen, but he grabbed my hand halfway to my pocket and the pen was his again.

I think I never pilfer from someone’s office when it is empty. I will see a choice pen and my hand moving toward it but will say, “Robert, that would be stealing,” and stop. Perhaps if I steal from you in front of your face, I believe you have given implicit approval. When I stole the principal’s keys, I was simultaneously handing him some minor repayment for a service performed and thinking I might be paying too much. Perhaps I said to myself, “Well this is for you, so
this
must be for me,” and he went along with the show.

How many of these unconscious modules operate in our lives? The only way I know about this one is that my pockets fill up with contraband, and I get occasional questions from friends. Stealing ideas will not leave much evidence and is very common in academia. I once wrote a paper that borrowed heavily from a well-known book, a fact I had forgotten by the time I finished the paper. Only when I reread my copy of the book did I see where the ideas had come from—these sections were heavily underlined, with many marginal notations.

It also seems certain that unconscious ploys to manipulate others in specific ways must be common. Specialized parts of ourselves look out for special opportunities in others. The value of this is precisely that two or more activities can go on simultaneously, with little or no interference. If an independent unconscious module studies for opportunities to steal or lie, it need not interfere (except slightly) with other, ongoing mental activities. We really have no idea how common this kind of activity may be.

THE HALLMARKS OF SELF-DECEPTION

In summary, the hallmark of self-deception in the service of deceit is the denial of deception, the unconscious running of selfish and deceitful ploys, the creation of a public persona as an altruist and a person “beneffective” in the lives of others, the creation of self-serving social theories and biased internal narratives of ongoing behavior, as well as false historical narratives of past behavior that hide true intention and causality. The symptom is a biased system of information flow, with the conscious mind devoted (in part) to constructing a false image and at the same time unaware of contravening behavior and evidence.

Of course, it must usually be advantageous for the truth to be registered somewhere, so that mechanisms of self-deception are expected often to reside side-by-side with mechanisms for the correct apprehension of reality. The mind must be constructed in a very complex manner, repeatedly split into public and private portions, with complicated interactions between them.

The general cost of self-deception is the misapprehension of reality, especially social, and an inefficient, fragmented mental system. As we shall learn, there are also important immune costs to self-deception, and there is something called imposed self-deception, in which an organism works unconsciously to further the interests of the organism inducing the self-deception costs on all sides, the worst of all possible worlds. At the same time, as we shall also see in Chapter 3, there is sufficient slack in the system for people to sometimes deceive themselves for direct advantage (even immunological). Before we turn to that, we will review the subject of deception in nature. There is an enormous literature on this subject and a few principles of genuine importance.

CHAPTER 2

Deception in Nature

B
efore we take a deeper look at self-deception, let us examine deception in other species. It is often easier to see patterns of importance if we cast our net of evidence widely—in this case, to include all species, not just our own. What can we learn about deception by viewing it in an evolutionary context? The evolutionary approach to deception is to study deception in all its forms while looking for general principles. So far, the forms of deception turn out to be very numerous and the principles very few. Deception hides from view, so its secrets often have to be pried out by meticulous study and analysis, of which, fortunately, there has been a lot, and several important principles have emerged that apply across species. First, there is a tremendous premium on novelty that in turn generates an enormous variety of deceptive ploys. Since novel tricks—almost by definition—lack defenses against the tricks, they usually spread quickly. This is the beginning of a so-called coevolutionary struggle between deceiver and deceived, acted out over evolutionary time. This struggle leads to complexity on both sides—to the evolution of bizarre, intricate, and beautiful examples of deception, as well as the ability to spot them. In general, but especially in birds and mammals, this evolutionary struggle also favors intelligence on both sides. Consider the simple matter of picking out an object against a background. If the object has not been selected to match the background, it should be easy to detect, differing in numerous random details. But if there has been selection to match, detection is an entirely different matter. Selection will have obliterated many of the random mismatches, leaving a much more complex cognitive problem for the observer to solve.