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

by Shankar Vedantam

When Lowry’s scheme was unmasked, and he was brought to trial on charges of mail fraud in 1988, members of his love letter subscription service came to a courthouse in Peoria, Illinois—to defend him.

It was as though deceiver and deceived were in it together, bound by a pact of complicity. I

“You’re not hurting my feelings,” Cornell responded. “You’re hurting my friends.”

that for at least some members, the Church of Love had provided a valuable service?

A disturbing question popped into my head: Could self-deception ever lead to good outcomes?

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.

Believing what we want to believe and seeing what we want to see, I slowly came to understand, is less a state of mind, or a reflection of one’s intelligence, and more a response to one’s circumstances. Foregoing self-deception isn’t merely a mark of education or enlightenment—it is a sign of privilege.

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.

This flood of data is compressed a thousand times, and only one million bits of information are sent to the brain via the optic nerve. The brain keeps just forty bits of this data, and discards the rest. As the cognitive psychologist and author Donald Hoffman explains, this is like taking an actual book, compressing the chapters into Cliffs Notes, then taking those notes and throwing away nearly everything until you are left with a blurb.

It turns out there are excellent reasons for your eyes and brain to do all this filtering. Indeed, to see reality clearly would leave us worse off, not better. Our eyes and brain are not in the truth business; they are in the functionality business, and it turns out that discarding nine hundred and ninety-nine million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and sixty bits of data out of every billion is extremely functional.

goal: Your brain has been designed to help you survive, to forage for opportunities, to get along with mates and friends, to raise offspring to adulthood, and to avoid feelings of existential despair. From the perspective of evolution, objective truth is not only not the goal, it is not even the only path to the goal.

logic. For example, when our scientific instruments show us that reality is not as it seems—that an earth that looks flat is actually spherical—we have the capacity to overrule what feels true in favor of what we know to be true.

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. Not only is it still with us, it plays a vital role in many aspects of survival, reproduction and adaptation. The invisible city establishes the boundaries of what we see and what we fail to see. If reason and logic tell us how to play the game, the invisible city defines the rules of the game. It is the template, over which the skyscrapers of reason and rationality loom.

Rather than seek to annihilate self-deception and all it represents, a better goal would be to think carefully about what it does, and ask ourselves how we can work with it. In other words, we ought to care less about whether something is simply true or untrue and ask more complicated questions: What are the consequences of self-deception? Whom does it serve? Do the benefits justify the costs?

I am always saying “Glad to’ve met you” to somebody I’m not at all glad I met. If you want to stay alive, you have to say that stuff, though.

“Sometimes,” Trevino says, “this can be as simple as ‘How are you?’ in the hallway.” It’s about projecting warmth, sincerity and generosity, about being

kind and friendly to people even when your own feelings might pull you in the opposite direction. Trevino calls this “the people thing”—the ability to make customers feel cared about no matter the circumstances, and no matter how you might really feel. Another word for it would be “deception.”

but “emotional labor.”

What we fail to see is how it involves innumerable acts of deception on the part of providers and self-deception on the part of consumers. And customer service is only the professional version of what is expected of us all. We are taught to speak politely to each other, to proffer verbal lubrications that can ease the frictions of interpersonal contact.

Studying them carefully helps us understand how the dance between those forces shapes our thinking and behavior.

“How are you?” in which the person who asks doesn’t actually care, and the person who answers isn’t expected to be truthful. We say “Have a nice day” when we couldn’t care less. We say “That was a lovely dinner” even when the meal was awful. “I’m so glad you could come” sometimes means “Thank God this interminable evening is finally over!”

You knew where you stood when you spoke with The Donald, since he made his mind abundantly clear in a stream of tweets, insults and inflated claims.

If you give people different facts and ask them to share the facts with an audience, people will select those messages that are most likely to match their audience’s preexisting beliefs.

It has been theorized that this tendency to believe our own lies—which in turn helps us lie more effectively—is the evolutionary origin of self-deception in human beings. (An organism that can deceive better would have an advantage over its competitors.)

They appear interested in what we have to say. They ooze empathy, and they put us at ease. We have positive terms to describe such people—we call them “emotionally intelligent.”

Tell all the truth but tell it slant— Success in Circuit lies Too bright for our infirm Delight The Truth’s superb surprise As Lightning to the Children eased With explanation kind The Truth must dazzle gradually Or every man be blind—

Volunteers spoken to

rudely subsequently solved fewer anagram puzzles, and demonstrated less creativity when it came to thinking up different uses for a brick.

In turn, we expect such deception from others.

She found that most people tell about one lie per day.

about three times for every ten minutes of conversation—and some lied as many as twelve times.

Many of her students flat-out claimed they never lied.

We are teaching them a deeper truth: sometimes, we have to lie in order to be kind.

Studies have shown that people who perceive their goals as attainable perform better than those who think their goals are beyond reach.

In nearly all of these cases, the same underlying mechanism is at work: It’s easy to tell the truth when things are going great, and it’s easy to be “brutally honest” to people you dislike.

“This way I had the same pain but without the dread that would have come out of it. Now does that justify lying? It’s very tough, but I recognize that it contributed to my well-being. When

Why is the goal of deliberately boosting hope and optimism not designed into every hospital and medical center? It is because we have bound ourselves in a knot of our own making: Lying is always supposed to be wrong.

The source of the healing lay not in animal magnetism, or in Mesmer’s wands or tubs, but in the drama of the cures and in the imaginations of the patients themselves.

But it is to say that some part of the benefit you get from the antidepressant or from the Mayo Clinic is about theater.

There are unspoken complicities of deception and self-deception that allow the drama and rituals of medicine to have their full effect.

Clothes: They raved about the water because that was what was expected of them. They reacted the way they were supposed to react when being served an expensive water drawn from Mount Fuji.

But when we imbue one glass of water with expectation and suggestion—that is, when we give it a good story—it changes, becoming something altogether new.

In the case of pharmaceuticals, people respond better to a new and exciting drug than they do to one that is old and familiar, even if the two drugs are basically identical.

Simultaneously, however, there is another transaction taking place, one that usually flies under the radar, but is in many ways just as powerful. It involves a series of deceptions and self-deceptions between you and a multibillion-dollar drug company. Neither of you explicitly acknowledges this second transaction. Pfizer doesn’t say, “Our drug is designed to trick you into believing you have stopped the march of time.” And you don’t say, “Viagra allows me to deceive myself into thinking I am twenty-five again.” In fact, the seduction works best when neither side

acknowledges it is happening, and when both sides believe their deceptions and self-deceptions are not deceits at all.

There was one important difference between the Geo Prizm and the Toyota Corolla: the price. The Corolla cost about two thousand dollars more than the Prizm. (Oddly, Prizms weren’t just cheaper to begin with.

Without the knowledge of the wine drinkers, however, Rangel and his colleagues arranged for the wine in the ten-dollar bottle and the ninety dollar-bottle to be identical—they both contained the ten-dollar wine.

This part of the brain, known as the medial orbitofrontal cortex, is activated when people experience pleasure. To put it another way, people seemed to be experiencing more pleasure when drinking the ten-dollar wine from the ninety-dollar bottle, than when drinking the ten-dollar wine from the ten-dollar bottle.

The point of a bottle of wine is, after all, to produce subjective pleasure. Does it really matter if this subjective pleasure is produced because the wine in two bottles is objectively different, or because people experience more pleasure when they pay extra for the same wine?

The people who drank the full-priced drink solved nearly twice as many puzzles as those who got the drink on discount. (As you might expect, volunteers in this experiment rejected the possibility that their performance was influenced by the price of the drink.) “It was amazing,” Shiv confessed to me in an interview.