Self-deception and avoidance: why do we do what we do?
Lying is one of our superior abilities developed by evolution. In someway, it helps us survive in certain situations .
Thus, self-deception has two functions: first, it allows you to deceive others in a better way (because no one lies better than someone who lies to himself), which is especially useful in an era where the ability to relate to others (social intelligence) has acquired priority, using manipulation as a fundamental tool in many cases (see any business). That does not mean that manipulation and lying are two similar concepts, but probably when you sign a contract with a company nobody says "we really only want your money".
On the other hand, self-deception is a way to preserve our self-esteem and is related in some way to avoidance . Yes, self-deception is a form of avoidance. And what do we avoid?
The rationale for avoidance
We avoid negative emotions in the most creative ways you can think of. For example, according to the contrast avoidance model , concern, as the core of generalized anxiety disorder, would fulfill the function of avoiding exposure to the "slump", 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 ready 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 , because it is an attempt to solve it cognitively. While I worry about a problem, I feel that I am doing "something" to solve it, even though it does not really solve it, thus diminishing my discomfort by not really facing the problem. Hypochondria on the other hand is a way of masking an egocentric trait (the patient is so self-centered that he believes everything happens to him). In biological terms this means that our brain is vague.
The self-deception is a patch that put us the evolution to not be able to make us more intelligent or able to face 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 .
For example, Festinger's term of cognitive dissonance refers to the discomfort that causes us to be 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 to a past action that it is not or that it did not have good reasons to be fulfilled.
- Maybe you're interested: "False self-confidence: the heavy mask of self-deception"
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, it produces discomfort if it is negative .
Discomfort is an adaptive emotion whose function is to rethink what is wrong in our lives to modify it. However, our brain, which is very smart and resistant to change, says "why are we going to modify things in our lives, face reality that hurts or scares us, take risks like quitting work, talking to a certain person? a very uncomfortable topic, etc., when in its place we can rethink this and tell us that we are well and thus avoid suffering, avoid situations that will make us more uncomfortable, avoid fear ... ".
Self-deception and avoidance they are mechanisms of reduction of the energetic cost that the brain should use to modify connections, translated into behaviors, attitudes and traits (whose neurobiological substratum belongs to many equivalent and very stable connections of our brain). In psychological terms it means that our behavior and our cognitive processing have a personal style that is difficult to modify in order to deal with environmental aspects for which we are not prepared.
The majority of heuristics that we use to think usually cause biases or errors and are aimed at preserving our self-esteem. It is said that depressive people tend to be more realistic since their cognitive processing is not aimed at maintaining a positive self-evaluation. In fact, for this reason, depression is contagious: the speech of the depressive person is so consistent that people around him can internalize it as well. But patients with depression do not escape other forms of self-deception , much less avoidance.
As Kahneman said, human beings tend to overestimate our importance and underestimate the role of events. The truth is that reality is so complex that we will never know completely why we do what we do. The reasons we can believe, if not be 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 to say, the traits do not produce discomfort in the patient, for what he considers that the problems he has are due to certain circumstances of his life and not his personality. Although the factors to evaluate 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 as well as a paranoid person does not consider his degree of vigilance pathological.
- Maybe you're interested: "Low self-esteem? When you become your worst enemy"
What to do?
Many concepts of psychology can be pigeonholed in self-deception or avoidance. The most common in any psychological consultation is that patients perform avoidant behaviors that they self-deceive to not assume they are avoiding. A) Yes the problem is perpetuated through the powerful negative reinforcement .
Consequently, it is necessary to define our ideal self and evaluate that definition rationally, ascertaining which things are controllable and modifiable, and which are not. On the first it is necessary to propose realistic solutions. Regarding the latter, it is necessary to accept them and resignify their importance. However, this analysis requires detachment from avoidance and self-deception.
