We Are Psychologically Wired to Fool Ourselves
Or, why you cannot win a game of chicken by logic
đ Hey there! My name is Abhishek. Welcome to a new edition of The Sunday Wisdom! This is the best way to learn new things with the least amount of effort.
Itâs a collection of weekly explorations and inquiries into many curiosities, such as business, human nature, society, and lifeâs big questions. My primary goal is to give you some new perspective to think about things.
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Today, letâs talk about psychology. Yeah, itâs been quite a while. More precisely, letâs talk about self-deception.
Letâs accept it, all of us deceive ourselves. We lie to ourselves through our teeth. Our minds habitually distort (or ignore) critical information. We routinely engage in what we call wishful thinking, we bury our heads in the sand, and once in a while we drink our own Kool-Aid.
If you donât believe me, tell me, why do smokers (but not non-smokers) choose not to hear the dangerous effects of smoking? Why do people systematically underestimate their risk of contracting COVID-19? And why do most people believe they are better drivers, leaders, managers than the average?
Sigmund Freud believed self-deception is a (somewhat unconscious) coping strategy or defence mechanism â a way for our ego to protect itself, and for us to preserve our self-esteem. In other words, we have a habit of repressing painful thoughts. (Whatâs Freudâs lifelong obsession with repressed feelings?)
Remember Jack Nicholsonâs âYou canât handle the truth!â from A Few Good Men? Yeah, Nicholson is our subconscious trying to save us from the hard truth. Our egos and self-esteem are fragile and need to be shielded from distressing information â like the fact that we didnât get that promotion because we arenât good enough, and not because of office politics. We are like that fox in Aesopâs fable, and the grapes are sour when we canât have them.
This sounds plausible except for one thing. Information is the lifeblood of the human brain, so why would evolution design our brains this way â making it ignore or distort valuable information? If the goal is really to preserve self-esteem, a better way would be to simply make the brainâs self-esteem mechanism more robust (or should I say antifragile) to threatening information.
If evolution is the best possible outcome after millions of trial and error, we canât possibly say that evolution didnât know what it was doing. Because then self-deception would be like trying to reduce a fever by putting the thermometer in cold water. The temperature would read low, but it wonât stop the fever.
We do deceive ourselves, but unlike what Freud and the likes assumed, self-deception isnât inward-facing, defensive, and self-defeating. Itâs rather outward-facing, manipulative, and self-serving.
In his book The Strategy of Conflict, Thomas Schelling talks about âmixed-motive gamesâ that people play, where their interests partially overlap but also partially diverge. Therefore, players have an incentive to cooperate, but at the same time they are also at odds with each other.
If this sounds familiar, itâs because Schelling talks about the games we play in real life â where we have to cooperate but also compete, sometimes at the same time. For example, while making a deal, we have to cooperate with our counterpart so that we can make the deal, but also compete so that we are the one who benefits the most from it.
Mixed-motive games are what our minds are built for. But having said that, they can sometimes incentivise strange, counterintuitive behaviour. Schelling explains this with the game of chicken.
A game of chicken is played between two rednecks in their cars. The players race toward each other at full speed (like Jason Statham and Vin Diesel in Fast & Furious 7) and the player who swerves first loses the game. Itâs a fun way to get seriously injured (or die) for nothing, but traditionally speaking itâs a game of bravado. But if you really want to win, you have to do something extremely stupid.
What could be more stupid that agreeing to play such a game in the first place? Itâs removing your steering wheel from your car and waving it at your opponent while you are seconds away from crashing into them at full speed. This way, theyâll know that youâre locked in, dead set, hell-bent, and have completely lost your mind â irrevocably committed to driving straight through no matter what. At this point, unless they want to die, your opponent will have to swerve first. In other words, mixed-motive games contain the kind of incentives that reward self-deception.
In common sense, itâs better to have more options and more knowledge. Yet, as Schelling argues, sometimes limiting or sabotaging ourselves is the winning move. To be clear, thereâs no value in actually sabotaging ourselves per se. The value lies in appearing to sabotage ourselves, thereby convincing other players that weâve sabotaged ourselves.
In a game of chicken, you donât win because youâre unable to steer, but because your opponent believes youâre unable to steer. In The Dark Knight, the Joker doesnât get an upper hand when he meets the mob because he has a bomb, itâs because the mob believes he would blow himself up along with them, you know because heâs the Joker and can literally do anything.
But it canât be faked. Joker was the Joker. He didnât fake it. When youâre playing chicken, it wonât do much good to yell at your opponent, âHey, Iâve torn off my steering wheel!â They wonât believe you until they see youâve actually done it. The best way to convince others we believe something is to actually believe it.
Politicians are great examples. The social pressure on their beliefs is enormous. Politicians, at least the successful ones, donât really lie â they regurgitate their own self-deceptions. Why else do you think Trump promised to build a wall?
In conclusion, we humans must self-deceive. Those who refuse to play such mind games are at a disadvantage. Thus, we are often wise to ignore seemingly critical information and to believe easily refuted falsehoods (think anti-vaxxers, far-right conservatives, and far-left liberals) â and then to prominently advertise our distorted thinking because these are winning moves. Evolutionarily speaking, the better we deceive ourselves, the better we deceive others.
Study the Present
How a once-dismissed idea became a leading technology in the Covid vaccine race. Whether mRNA vaccines succeed or not, their path from a gleam in a scientistâs eye to the brink of government approval has been a tale of personal perseverance, eureka moments in the lab, soaring expectations â and an unprecedented flow of cash into the biotech industry.
RELATED: This is what scientists know about the Delta variant so far. It has multiple mutations that appear to make it 40 to 60 percent more transmissible than Alpha, the variant first identified in Britain, which is itself estimated to be about 30 to 50 percent more transmissible than the original coronavirus. In Australia, security cameras even documented a transmission that occurred between two people passing each other in a shopping mall.
India is an artificial entity. This is one of the oft-repeated urban myths that sometimes pops-up in conversation even among many educated, well meaning Indians is that India as a nation is a British creation. This urban myth is not accidental. It was deliberately taught in the British established system of education.
RELATED: In Indiaâs current situation, the colonial model of citizenship has come back with a vengeance. For the makers of Indiaâs constitution, who strove to create democracy in a country that had long been regarded as unfit for it, the promise of self-rule was that a personâs interests were not predetermined. Rather than being divined on the basis of oneâs identity, they would instead be formulated and reformulated in politics. The democratic ideal enabled the idea of majorities and minorities to be ever changing, constantly subject to alignment and realignment. Such a vision could liberate individuals from prior associations and allegiances, and create new loyalties.
This is how India has established a presence and stake in Antarctica. Indian scientistsâ experiments have brought us new knowledge in fields ranging from microbial studies to radio astronomy, geology to climate science. There are Antarctica stories these scientists can tell. But theirs are also stories of that ancient human endeavour: scientific inquiry.
For years, western-backed efforts aimed to disarm the countryâs irregular militias. But the Talibanâs advances and the accelerated departure of foreign troops have convinced Afghans whose homes are threatened, and the officials who have to protect them, that they need more people to pick up guns and fight. Militias are forming around the country, many encouraged, financed or even called up by the government itself.
RELATED: US-led forces ousted the Taliban from power in Afghanistan in 2001. The Taliban entered direct talks with the US in 2018, and President Joe Biden has said the American pull-out is justified as US forces have made sure Afghanistan cannot become a base for foreign jihadists to plot against the West again. However, former Afghan President Hamid Karzai told he believed the Nato and US military mission there had failed in defeating terrorism and extremism. He called on both the Afghan government and the Taliban to âsit down and talk as soon as possible for peaceâ.
French thought once dazzled the world â what went wrong? A telling example of this crisis of French thought is the discussion of the integration of post-colonial minorities from the Maghreb â one of the burning issues in contemporary French politics. The roots of this question lie in the universality of the French model of citizenship, and the deeply held assumption of the beneficial quality of French civilisation for humankind. Because of their belief in the emancipatory quality of their culture, French progressives consistently advocated a policy of assimilation in the colonies, and largely ignored the racism and social inequalities produced by their own empire.
My Directive
Only bad things happen quickly. All the happiness-producing processes in our lives take time, usually a long time: learning new things, changing old behaviours, building satisfying relationships, raising children. This is why patience and determination are among lifeâs primary virtues.
Quote to Note
Good guys donât always win, especially when they are divided and less determined than their adversaries. The desire for liberty may be ingrained in every human breast, but so is the potential for complacency, confusion, and cowardice. And losing has a price.
â Madeleine K. Albright, Fascism: A WarningÂ
Talk to Me
Do you agree with what I said, or do you think otherwise? Send me counters, comments, questions, and your favourite memes. đ¤đ¤
Until next Sunday,
Abhishek đ