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

by Shankar Vedantam

But the brilliance of our newest mental faculties has caused many intelligent people to believe a startling untruth—that logic and rationality are all that matter. Many of us—and I long counted myself among this group—believe that the world would be a better place if we could simply use reason and rationality to solve every problem. What this worldview fails to comprehend, what I failed to comprehend, is that reason and logic might well be the pinnacle of our mental faculties, but they are only the newest settlements atop a much larger, ancient city. That older city, often invisible, remains.

To create a world that produces the best in human beings, we must certainly be informed by reason, rationality and science, but we must also deploy the insights of logic using aspects of our minds that are prone to storytelling, symbols—and self-deception.

Consider this: In 2007, a street musician wearing a baseball cap stood next to a trash bin outside a Washington, DC, subway station, and started playing the violin. Over the next forty-three minutes, he played six pieces of classical music as more than a thousand commuters passed by. Almost all ignored the fiddler and hurried past; just twenty-seven people stopped to listen. The musician was, in fact, Joshua Bell, one of the most celebrated violinists in the world. Some of the Washington commuters who rushed past without stopping might have paid hundreds of dollars to listen to Bell play in concert halls. During his street performance, Bell collected a grand total of thirty-seven dollars and twelve cents, not counting a twenty from one person who actually recognized him. The violin he was playing—the Gibson ex Huberman, a Stradivarius crafted in 1713—cost a little under four million dollars. The Washington Post set up the stunt, and published a story about it. In many ways, this was the other side of the coin of Penn and Teller’s charade about expensive water: If people foolishly pay too much for ordinary water that is dressed up to appear fancy, people foolishly fail to recognize genius when it isn’t presented in a fancy package. The subtext of the Washington Post story was that people were fools to miss out on a chance to listen to great music. The story resonated with people. It won a Pulitzer Prize. But the story missed a great psychological truth: The music you hear w...

The late film critic Roger Ebert wrote that Gates of Heaven had given him “more to think about” than any other film he saw. He watched the movie at least thirty times, and considered it one of the ten greatest films ever made. Ebert said it was an “unclassifiable film . . . an underground legend, a litmus test for audiences, who cannot decide if it is serious or satirical, funny or sad, sympathetic or mocking.”

I stumbled on him for a story I was reporting for the radio show This American Life. (In the piece that was eventually broadcast, titled “Jesse’s Girl,” Joseph asked to be identified by his middle name, Jesse.) From

In 1979, the psychologists Lauren Alloy and Lyn Abramson decided to test this question on patients with one of the most common metal illnesses—depression. They wanted to see if these people were in fact less connected to reality than people who were healthy. The researchers set up an experiment. Subjects with and without depression were asked to press a button next to a blinking green light. Volunteers were asked to judge how much influence their button pressing had over the light’s blinking. Traditionally, people suffering from depression were thought to harbor an unrealistically negative view of the world—a delusional negativity was seen to be the cause of their despondency. Alloy and Abramson were surprised to find depressed people showed a “surprising degree of accuracy” in judging how the blinking light was affected by their manipulation of the button. Meanwhile, the non-depressed subjects consistently overrated their ability to control the blinking light. In other words, the gap between the groups was not caused by the healthy group seeing reality clearly and the depressed people seeing the world with delusional pessimism. No, the “healthy” group had a delusion of control while their “unhealthy” counterparts were seeing reality clearly. The subtitle of the psychologists’ paper was “Sadder but Wiser.” Subsequent studies in settings far more consequential than labs with blinking lights have reinforced Abramson and Alloy’s findings: People with depression and some other...

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.

Religion seems to exert a sway not only over our mental health, but over our health in general. Multiple analyses of obituaries in major cities across the United States have found that people who are members of religious groups live on average five years longer than those who are not religious, even when controlling for other factors that influence life span, such as gender and marital status. One study that recently looked at Des Moines, Iowa, found the difference in life span between believers and nonbelievers was ten years. If that number is to be believed, not going to church in Des Moines is roughly as risky as smoking.