Self-deception And Avoidance: Why Do We Do What We Do?
Lying is one of our superior abilities developed by evolution. In someway, helps us survive in certain situations.
Thus, self-deception has two functions: firstly, it allows us to deceive others in a better way (since no one lies better than someone who lies to themselves), which is especially useful in an era where the ability to relate to others (social intelligence) has acquired priority, in many cases using manipulation as a fundamental tool (see any business). That doesn’t mean that manipulation and lying are two similar concepts, but probably when you sign a contract with a company, no one tells you “we really just want your money.”
On the other hand, Self-deception is a way of preserving our self-esteem and is somewhat related to avoidance. Yes, self-deception is a form of avoidance. And what do we avoid?
We avoid negative emotions in the most creative ways you can think of. For example, according to the contrast avoidance model, worry, as the core of generalized anxiety disorder, would fulfill the function of avoiding exposure to the “down”, the change from experiencing a positive emotion to experiencing a negative emotion (something like “how problems are a part inevitable of life, if I am worried when everything is going well, I am prepared for when things go wrong). It is, in short, a form of emotional repression.
Worry also reduces the discomfort of the presence of a problem, since it is an attempt at cognitive resolution of it. While I worry about a problem, I feel like I am doing “something” to solve it, even if I don’t actually solve it, thus reducing my discomfort at not actually dealing with the problem. Hypochondria, on the other hand, is a way of masking an egocentric trait (the patient is so focused on himself that he believes that everything happens to him). In biological terms this means that our brain is lazy.
Self-deception is a patch that evolution put on us by not being able to make us more intelligent or capable of facing certain external demands. Or rather, it is due to the inability of the human species to evolve and change at the same speed as the world we live in does.
For example, Festinger’s term cognitive dissonance refers to the discomfort caused by being incoherent between our values and our actions. In this case we resort to self-deception to explain our actions.
Rationalization is another form of self-deception in which we give a seemingly reasonable explanation for a past action that it is not or that it did not have good reasons for being carried out.
Its application to self-esteem
Let’s explain this: the self-esteem or assessment we make of ourselves based on how we are, what we do and why we do it, causes discomfort if it is negative.
Discomfort is an adaptive emotion whose function is to rethink what is wrong in our lives in order to modify it. However, our brain, which is very smart and resistant to change, says “why are we going to change little things in our life, face realities that hurt or scare us, take risks like quitting work, talking to a certain person about a very uncomfortable topic, etc., when instead we can rethink this and tell ourselves that we are fine and thus avoid suffering, avoid situations that are going to make us more uncomfortable, avoid fear…”
Self-deception and avoidance They are mechanisms to reduce energy expenditure that the brain should use to modify connections, translated into behaviors, attitudes and traits (whose neurobiological substrate belongs to many equivalent and very stable connections in our brain). In psychological terms it means that our behavior and our cognitive processing have a personal style that is difficult to modify to deal with environmental aspects for which we are not prepared.
Most heuristics that we use to think habitually cause biases or errors and are aimed at preserving our self-esteem. It is said that depressed people tend to be more realistic since their cognitive processing is not oriented towards maintaining a positive self-evaluation. In fact, for this reason depression is contagious: the depressed person’s speech is so consistent that the people around them can internalize it too. But Patients with depression do not escape other forms of self-deception either much less avoidance.
As Kahneman said, we humans tend to overestimate our importance and underestimate the role of events. The truth is that reality is so complex that we will never fully know why we do what we do. The reasons we may believe, if they are not the product of self-deception and avoidance, are only a small part of the various factors, functions and causes that we can perceive.
For example, personality disorders are egosyntonic, that is, the traits do not cause discomfort in the patient, so they consider that the problems they have are due to certain circumstances in their life and not their personality. Although the factors for evaluating any disorder seem very explicit in the DSM, many of them are not easy to perceive in an interview. A person with a narcissistic disorder is not aware that everything he does is aimed at increasing his ego, just as a paranoid person does not consider his degree of vigilance pathological.
To do?
Many psychology concepts can be pigeonholed into self-deception or avoidance. The most common thing in any psychological consultation is for patients to perform avoidant behaviors about which they deceive themselves so as not to assume that they are avoiding. So the problem is perpetuated through powerful negative reinforcement.
Consequently, it is necessary to define our ideal self and evaluate that definition rationally, finding out which things are controllable and modifiable, and which are not. Regarding the former, it is necessary to propose realistic solutions. Regarding the latter, it is necessary to accept them and re-signify their importance. However, this analysis requires getting rid of avoidance and self-deception.
