Self-Deception: Warrior Mind Podcast #195

This Warrior Mind Podcast is based on the post “Delusion and Peak Performance.” 

The purpose of this Warrior Mind Podcast is to make you aware of the disastrous effect that self-deception can have on achieving your goals and personal success.

Self-deception, also known as lying to yourself or self-delusion. It is the process of denying or rationalizing away the relevance, significance, or importance of opposing evidence and logical argument.

Self-deception involves convincing oneself of a truth (or lack of truth) so that one does not reveal any self-knowledge of the deception.

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Self-deception is the process of misleading ourselves to accept claims about ourselves or others as true or valid when they are false or invalid. Self-deception, in short, is a way we justify our beliefs about ourselves and others. .

Self-deception calls into question the nature of the individual, specifically in a psychological context and the nature of “self”. Irrationality is the foundation upon which the argued paradoxes of self-deception stem, and it is argued that not everyone has the “special talents” and capacities for self-deception.

However, rationalization is influenced by a myriad of factors, including socialization, personal biases, fear, and cognitive repression. Such rationalization can be manipulated in both positive and negative fashions; convincing one to perceive a negative situation optimistically and vice versa. In contrast, rationalization alone cannot effectively clarify the dynamics of self-deception, as reason is just one adaptive form mental processes can take.

It can moreover be argued that current psychology’s attempts to study processes, mechanism, and functions of self-deception often suffer from inadequate explications of the very concept of self-deception, and that the concept of rationality at work in such studies is not unproblematic either. In effect, such studies perhaps do not even succeed in showing that the phenomenon exists at all.

People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains….This overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. –“Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments,” by Justin Kruger and David Dunning Department of Psychology Cornell University, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology December 1999 Vol. 77, No. 6, 1121-1134.

In How We Know What Isn’t So, Thomas Gilovich describes the details of many studies which make it clear that we must be on guard against the tendencies to

   1. Misperceive random data and see patterns where there are none;

   2. Misinterpret incomplete or unrepresentative data and give extra attention to confirmatory data while drawing conclusions without attending to or seeking out disconfirmatory data;

   3. Make biased evaluations of ambiguous or inconsistent data, tending to be uncritical of supportive data and very critical of unsupportive data.

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