Human self-deception makes our job difficult for another reason: no one wants to believe in its existence, and it is something which people seem only to accept at a shallow, theoretical level.fn8 People are much more comfortable attributing the success of a business to superior technology or better supply-chain management than to an unconscious, unspoken human desire. Perhaps that’s because we patently need a level of self-delusion to function as a social species.fn9 Imagine a world where we had no capacity for deception, and where people on dates directly asked prospective partners about
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