Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction
- 1 Homo credens: the believer
- 2 Deceiving ourselves: you can't always know what you want
- 3 Deceiving each other: the techniques of sincerity
- 4 “It's beyond my control” and other moral masquerades
- 5 To thine own self be true?
- Further reading
- References
- Index
2 - Deceiving ourselves: you can't always know what you want
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction
- 1 Homo credens: the believer
- 2 Deceiving ourselves: you can't always know what you want
- 3 Deceiving each other: the techniques of sincerity
- 4 “It's beyond my control” and other moral masquerades
- 5 To thine own self be true?
- Further reading
- References
- Index
Summary
Every man has reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone but only to his friends. He has other matters in his mind which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself and that in secret. But there are other things a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.
(Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground)In Chapter 1 we saw how self-deception took root in the human mind so as to enable us to be better able to persuade others. These others, equipped with their cheater-detection skills, are well tuned to spot a phoney performance and so automatic, unconscious mechanisms become essential to our chances of being convincing. The most convincing storytellers believe their own stories, persuading themselves of their sanity, consistency, reasonableness and virtue. This requires that internal contradictions, what psychologists call cognitive dissonance, get neatly ironed out. Cognitive dissonance theory suggests that we confabulate when confronted with awkward knowledge (I know smoking can give me cancer) that clashes with behaviour (and yet I smoke) in order to alleviate the tension. The tension does not come simply from the fact of inconsistency; rather, it is triggered more broadly by threats to our reputation or self-image. As the psychologist Elliott Aronson (1980) concluded, we deceive ourselves specifically when confronted with evidence that we are not “nice and in control”.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Deception , pp. 37 - 62Publisher: Acumen PublishingPrint publication year: 2008