Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain

by Shankar Vedantam

one reason people cling to false beliefs is because self-deception can sometimes be functional—it enables us to accomplish useful social, psychological or biological goals. Holding false beliefs is not always the mark of idiocy, pathology or villainy.

We need hope in order to function, but the world gives us endless reasons not to be hopeful. For most people on the planet, to forswear self-deception is to invite despair and dysfunction.

If we are to roll the Sisyphean boulder up and down the hill, as required for our survival and the well-being of our progeny, it isn’t helpful to feel our lives are useless or unimportant. This is why, in every culture around the world, people reach for beliefs that tell them that their lives have purpose and meaning.

human thriving is deeply reliant on the workings of the ancient brain. For all the contempt the rational brain might have for its irrational and illogical counterparts, the new and the old systems in the brain are inextricably yoked together. We can no more tear them apart and discard one of them than we can destroy sewer lines, power grids and water supplies and still expect a city to produce great plays and scientific discoveries.

Our minds are not designed to see the truth, but to show us selective slices of reality, and to prompt us toward predetermined goals. Even worse, they are designed to do all this while giving us the illusion that we are seeing reality. We can believe that we are thinking clearly, acting rationally and fighting for the truth, even as we are beguiled into seeing what is functional for our groups, our families and ourselves—and imagining it to be the truth.

People who wish to maintain friendships are generous in taking the other person’s point of view, lavish with compliments and slow to criticism. Each of those things involves complicities of deception and self-deception.

We evolved to be a social species, so it should not be surprising that we come hardwired to modulate our views in order to fit in with those around us, to get along with others.

most people tell about one lie per day.

“A lot of the lying is this lying because we don’t want to hurt other people, or we want to go along with what they want to think and what they are feeling,” she says. “It’s a domain of kindness to those we care about. It’s not that we don’t value honesty, it’s that we value something else more. The something else could be the other person’s feelings, your feelings of loyalty toward them.”

Natural selection isn’t really interested in the truth. It is interested in what works. And your odds of survival are better when you see the world through rose-tinted glasses.

The placebo has been part of the physician’s toolkit since the earliest days of medicine. Plato noted a physician’s power to heal through “words and phrases.” In Mesmer’s time, placebos were commonplace. Thomas Jefferson once confided that “one of the most successful physicians I have ever known has assured me that he used more of bread pills, drops of colored water, and powders of hickory ashes, than of all other medicines put together.”

substantial numbers of people who suffer from depression get better in clinical trials when they are given antidepressants. But lots of patients in these trials also get better when they receive sugar pills.

one of the best predictors of positive outcomes in psychotherapy was not the kind of therapy being administered, but the bond of trust that exists between doctor and patient.

A great deal of the suffering caused by disease is caused by our own reactions to illness: Our anxiety and worry about the ailments we have, and what it means to be sick.

Very stoic concept

Kaptchuk has conducted studies showing that placebos can be deliberately used to cure patients. Some of his more groundbreaking work explores the idea that the placebo effect can be harnessed even when a patient is explicitly told that they are being given placebos. Again, this underlines something easily overlooked—when you get a prescription for pills, it isn’t just the pills that do the curing. It’s everything else, too—your visit to the doctor, the effort it took to make an appointment, the drama of the doctor’s waiting room, the ability of the doctor to listen attentively to you, the medical center’s efforts to put you at ease. Even when you are told you are getting a placebo, meaning there is no chemical substance that is acting upon your body, all of the other elements of drama are still intact—and ought to still work.

In the case of serious medical conditions where the placebo effect can do good—and even save lives—it is not a stretch to call the placebo the most benevolent of lies. The medical ethicist Howard Brody has called the placebo “the lie that heals.”

Long before modern medicine was invented, long before humans arrived on the planet, animals suffered injuries and fell sick. Swordfish and tortoises didn’t have CT scans and X-ray machines. So the brains of animals did what brains everywhere are designed to do—they used what they had around them to make do. For many species, especially social species like elephants, wolves and chimpanzees, algorithms in the brain learned, through trial and error over millions of years, to prompt creatures to turn to the loving care of others when confronted by illness or injury. Doing this did not constitute a cure, at least in the way we define cures. But it probably increased the odds of survival. A baby elephant that turned to her mother in distress was more likely to survive than a baby elephant that chose to go off by herself, or was ignored by her kin. Over time, aspects of the brain that caused animals to turn to others for help, to trust others in times of need—and that prompted caregivers to deliver comfort and protection to loved ones—were conserved. This is why every person knows today, when they or their children are sick, that illness and injury can draw families and communities together. The ancient algorithms in the brain that tell us to turn to others for help, that draw others to our aid, these do not go away simply because we now have high-tech hospitals and powerful drugs. This is why, all over the world, people crave from their doctors what we always crave in the face o...

The psychological factors behind the placebo effect in medicine are, in fact, around us all the time. They shape nearly every decision we make as consumers, whether it is clicking to buy something on Amazon, or seizing upon a great deal at a thrift shop. In fact, modern economies rely heavily on a secret ingredient: Storytelling. When you buy a diamond ring, or you sell shares in a company, or you accept money in exchange for a service, you are trading in stories.

“price-placebo effect,” a phenomenon where people who pay more for something experience the thing differently than if they pay less. It doesn’t just explain subjective differences, such as how much we enjoy our glass of chardonnay, but objective differences, like how many puzzles we solve when we pay full price for a drink, or how well a more expensive Toyota Corolla is seen to perform compared to a cheaper duplicate.

The dance of complicity between deception and self-deception often works best when neither party acknowledges it.

The ancient Greeks used to describe two very different ways of thinking—logos and mythos. Logos roughly referred to the world of the logical, the empirical, the scientific. Mythos referred to the world of dreams, storytelling and symbols. Like many rationalists today, some philosophers of Greece prized logos and looked down at mythos. Logic and reason, they concluded, make us modern; storytelling and mythmaking are primitive. But lots of scholars then and now—including many anthropologists, sociologists and philosophers today—see a more complicated picture, where mythos and logos are intertwined and interdependent. Science itself, according to this view, relies on stories. The frames and metaphors we use to understand the world shape the scientific discoveries we make; they even shape what we see. When our frames and metaphors change, the world itself is transformed.

The two sides of the brain are intertwined and interdependent. The rules of the game are inextricably woven into tactics of how to play the game. In order for logic and rationality, for logos, to achieve its vision of a better world, it needs to work with mythos, the world of stories, symbols and myths.

As the comedian George Carlin once said, “Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?”

People with depression and some other disorders often see reality more clearly. What’s more, these studies have shown that as depressed people respond positively to treatment—as they get better—they actually become more prone to self-deception, to delusions of control and confidence.

In a survey of psychological work on the subject, they concluded that positive illusions were a necessary ingredient for mental health and psychological well-being: “A great deal of research in social, personality, clinical and developmental psychology documents that normal individuals possess unrealistically positive views of themselves, and exaggerated belief in their ability to control their environment, and a view of the future that maintains that their future will be far better than the average person’s . . . Furthermore, individuals who are moderately depressed or low in self-esteem consistently display an absence of such enhancing illusions.” The researchers concluded that the presence of positive illusions led to “higher income, higher motivation to work, more goal seeking, more pragmatic action, more daily planning and less fatalism.”

A wide array of research shows that people who are delusionally optimistic tend to outlive people with more realistic attitudes.

Benjamin Franklin once offered the advice, “Keep your eyes wide open before marriage—and half-shut afterward.”

neurologists have actually unveiled brain processes that cause some of these self-deceptions. When we are in love, brain changes literally impair our critical thinking ability (which is why it can be difficult to argue a sixteen-year-old out of a crush). Interestingly, the same changes can be triggered by maternal love, which can be even more unreasonable. The positive illusions about the personalities and traits of those we love the most lead us to be, in a very literal sense, blind to their flaws. Psychologists call this the “love-is-blind bias.”

Dunning-Kruger Effect, the tendency for people who are really bad at something to think they are good at it.)

reality is being distorted by hidden systems in the brain. But what is most interesting is that reality is being distorted in systematic ways to cause us to reach particular conclusions. In other words, these are not merely errors, they are biases designed to lead us to predetermined goals. When such biases are shared by large numbers of people, they can produce events that change the course of history.

Our hopes, needs and desires shape what we see in the world.

Our senses are flooded with information. We literally do not have the cognitive power to process all of this data, and so our brains take a shortcut. They discard most of the information, and focus attention on a small subset of the data. This is one reason we fall for illusions in psychological experiments.

Long before psychologists and neuroscientists began investigating the brain systematically, at least two groups of laypeople realized they had a lot to gain by studying the mind: magicians and con artists. Magicians understood that even when people think they are paying close attention to something, the limitations of the brain prevent them from taking in most of what is really going on. They discovered that the brain is a story-generation machine, and therefore vulnerable to narratives—and red herrings. They realized that our expectations powerfully shape what we see, and that by manipulating those expectations, they could control how we think and what we see. Like magicians, con artists and charlatans have long understood that the human capacity for understanding and rationality is “bounded,” that our capacity for logic and reason is hemmed in by our hopes and fears. For thousands of years, swindlers and hucksters have been using the machinery of the self-deceiving brain to turn us into marks.

All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusion is called a philosopher. Ambrose Bierce

There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings. Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens

The self-decieving brain shapes our personal lives in innumerable ways. It influences our search for meaning—for companionship in the face of loneliness, for comfort in the face of illness. It shapes the way we interact with brands, and it governs many rules of interpersonal communication. When we ignore its directives, it doesn’t go away quietly. It springs back with a vengeance to undermine the plans and goals of the rational mind. It insinuates itself into our relationships, and reshapes our perceptions of reality. Its greatest power, however, is not in the way it shapes our individual behavior, but in the many ways it bends us to the call of our communities and tribes.

Rituals offer a way for human beings to deal with a dangerous and unpredictable world. They generate community, conformity and courage. Asking whether they “work” in a literal sense misses the point. They work at a psychological level, and sometimes—as in the case of the Congolese village that fought off the Hutu militants—psychological reality turns into actual reality.

people turn to such rituals because of poverty, sickness and other deeply felt needs: Rituals ward off anxiety, they connect us to our history and to our cultural moorings, they bind us to our groups. As we will later see, one of the surest ways to eliminate “meaningless” rituals is to address the source of the threat or to solve the problem that the rituals were invented to fight.

A certain level of commitment and complexity is needed for a ritual to be psychologically and socially effective. This may be why rituals often seem to become more effective as the burdens they place on participants become more intense.

Structured, repetitive behaviors can help to calm us down and to overcome anxiety.

Clinical surveys show that people often turn to rituals in times of emotional distress or trauma. Sometimes people come to rely on repetitious rituals so much that it tips over into pathology, as in the case of obsessive-compulsive disorder. As early as 1924, Freud remarked upon the striking resemblances between “neurotic ceremonials and the sacred acts of religious ritual.”

As a species, humans are not the strongest or fastest. We don’t have sharp claws or teeth. Our muscles are puny compared to many other creatures. But what we do have is each other. Early humans learned this lesson over thousands of years of evolution. This is why the self-deceiving brain prompts us to band together, fight for one another, defend each other. It regularly overrules the logic of mere self-preservation because, in our evolutionary past, standing with the tribe increased the odds our genes would survive. Millions of people, many of whom know nothing of one another, can be bonded together through “meaningless” rituals into one fearsome superorganism. Today, the same psychological forces are what bind us together as Americans or Chinese or South Africans—they are the foundation of nations.

A nation, he wrote, is a social construction—an “imagined community.” All nations are collections of stories—stories about a shared past, stories we pass on about our heroes, and stories of failure, cowardice or cruelty that we ignore or suppress.

National myths can be semi-truths or outright lies. They can be versions of invented or imagined reality. But once invented—and once millions of people collectively believe in them—they become real.

illusions, myths and false beliefs can sometimes play a functional role in our lives. The myths underpinning the nation-state are among the most dramatic of these examples. These self-deceptions are responsible for creating some of the crowning glories of human civilization.

Rational calculation doesn’t prompt people to leap between a speeding car and a child, any more than it prompted the heroes buried at Arlington National Cemetery to give their lives fighting wars in distant foreign fields. “A man does not have himself killed for a half-pence a day or for a petty distinction,” Napoleon Bonaparte once said. “You must speak to the soul in order to electrify him.”

Many world-altering movements have relied on the power of leaders to tell a convincing story of past glory, present suffering and future greatness, a story about wrongs that need to be redressed. These stories can harness something very powerful among followers, especially those from disaffected groups: They can prompt people to make great sacrifices for what Atran and other researchers call “a sacred cause.”

Trump!

A sacred cause is something that gives people a sense of higher meaning and purpose, the feeling that they are devoting their lives to something larger than themselves. It can be like fighting for a “holy land.” But it can be secular, too.

I once asked a linguist what the difference was between a dialect and a language. “Languages,” he quipped, “are dialects that have armies.”

the reason foundational myths are powerful in the first place is that they are resistant to rational analysis. Put another way, nations come into being and endure for years, decades or centuries because of the stability of their foundational myths, the ability of these stories to withstand skepticism, challenge and doubt. Of course, if the functional upside of enduring myths is cohesion, such myths also come with a downside—they can keep nations from changing and adapting in the face of radically altered circumstances.