Our brains are built to act in our self-interest while at the same time trying hard not to appear selfish in front of other people. And in order to throw them off the trail, our brains often keep “us,” our conscious minds, in the dark. The less we know of our own ugly motives, the easier it is to hide them from others. Self-deception is therefore strategic, a ploy our brains use to look good while behaving badly.
Polite Conspiracy
Silent agreements to avoid uncomfortable truths.
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What was most interesting was that across all the cultures, lying was of a particular type. ... The lying showed a pattern that, based on prior work, could be explained by only one thing—people rarely made up a high-paying number. Instead they simply reported the higher roll of the two. You can practically hear the rationalizing.
For example, consider a narrow river valley below a high dam, such that if the dam burst, the resulting flood of water would drown people for a considerable distance downstream. ... Surprisingly, though, after you get to just a few miles below the dam, where fear of the dam’s breaking is found to be highest, the concern then falls off to zero as you approach closer to the dam! ... That’s because of psychological denial: the only way of preserving one’s sanity while looking up every day at the dam is to deny the possibility that it could burst.
Most of your meetings will end with a compliment. It feels good. They said they liked it! Unfortunately, they’re almost certainly lying.
The statements that make people mad are the ones they worry might be believed. I suspect the statements that make people maddest are those they worry might be true.
Anyone who has worked in a formal organization—even a small one strictly governed by detailed rules—knows that handbooks and written guidelines fail utterly in explaining how the institution goes successfully about its work. Accounting for its smooth operation are nearly endless and shifting sets of implicit understandings, tacit coordinations,and practical mutualities that could never be successfully captured in a written code.
In the last few centuries, liberal thought developed immense trust in the rational individual. It depicted individual humans as independent rational agents and has made these mythical creatures the basis of modern society. Democracy is founded on the idea that the voter knows best, free-market capitalism believes that the customer is always right, and liberal education teaches students to think for themselves. It is a mistake, however, to put so much trust in the rational individual.
The agent does not want to come right out and call you a fool. So she merely implies it—perhaps by telling you about the much bigger, nicer, newer house down the block that has sat unsold for six months. Here is the agent’s main weapon: the conversion of information into fear.
That is a very smart move. Researchers have found that merely asking people to assume their initial judgment is wrong, to seriously consider why that might be, and then make another judgment, produces a second estimate which, when combined with the first, improves accuracy almost as much as getting a second estimate from another person. The same effect was produced simply by letting several weeks pass before asking people to make a second estimate. This approach, built on the “wisdom of the crowd” concept, has been called “the crowd within.”