Outwitting Ourselves

There is a barrage of new findings currently being published by psychological researchers. It's even sort of a golden age, as constantly-improving brain-scanning techniques allow neuroscientists and psychologists to probe deep into the brain and make connections between our behaviors and our brain states.

One area that has yielded some fascinating findings is the manner in which we can be deceitful. We all know that honesty is the best policy—we've had this message handed to us throughout our lives by parents, teachers, and religious leaders. Yet every one of us has to admit to behaving deceptively at times. Why do we do this? Primarily to fool others, to take advantage of them. We often find ourselves in competition with other people—for food, sex, winning games, etc.; and we want to win. If we strut around in a posturing manner, we may hoodwink our competition into concluding that we're much more gallant and fierce-some than we really are. We've gotten the upper hand, before any real competition has begun.

An interesting twist on this game is that we're really not quite as dishonest as we appear to be, because we're not always intentionally deceitful. Sometimes we do it because we've deceived ourselves first. We tell ourselves lies, in order that our lies to others don't seem to be quite so unscrupulous. If we ourselves believe this stuff, others will be more likely to swallow it, and we won't feel all that guilty.

But how can we be so disingenuous, and how do we manage to live with ourselves, when we deceive other people and ourselves as much as we do? If we know that honesty is the best policy, won't our conscience tend to bother us? Well, if we've fooled ourselves into believing our own falsehoods, we don't even realize we're being dishonest.

What's the mechanism going on here? How can we not comprehend that we've duped even ourselves? (Of course, we don't do this all the time, or our lives would be phony and unreal.)

It all begins with our senses, which have evolved to give us a very accurate view of reality. If not, we'd probably not survive, and evolution would have done away with humans long ago. So our senses provide us with a good sample of the world. The problem occurs in the brain. Our ultimate perception of our world is what our brain makes it out to be—what it decides all those electrical signals delivered to the brain mean. Accuracy is not maintained if the signals get degraded or scrambled. And accuracy is lost in the process of making memories. How?

Much of our conception of our world is based on memories. Something happens. We perceive it in some manner, and then stash it in memory—to later retrieve it when we need it. The experiences we have range all over the place—from good to bad, painful to thrilling, sad to joyful, scary to comforting. Our brain will sometimes distort our memory of these experiences—by making them more to our liking. We repress painful memories, create false memories, sugar coat memories, and choose to notice only those things that feed our biases.

These distortions of our memories are often unconsciously formed, so that our conscious mind—unaware of the falsification of a memory—hangs onto it, as if it were valid. We've outwitted ourselves, and in the process, we may fool others as well.