The Folly of Fools (22 page)

Why show such a positivity bias? Young people would be wise to pay attention to reality—both positive and negative—the better to make the appropriate responses later. Avoiding negative information seems risky on its face—negative events may have as big an effect on one’s interests (inclusive fitness) as positive ones. By contrast, in old age it hardly matters what you learn, but greater positive affect is associated with stronger immune response, so you may be selected to trade a grasp of reality for a boost in dealing with your main problem, that of internal enemies, including cancer. A positivity bias sacrifices attention to and learning from negative stimuli the better to enjoy strong immune function now. If you haven’t learned to spot an external enemy by now, chances may be low that you will learn to, and in the meantime you can enjoy a positive mood and immune response. Grandchildren may admire Gramps and Grandma because nothing seems to faze them, but Gramps and Grandma are living in positivity land—they may scarcely know the difference.

It is an interesting coincidence that although people’s implicit bias in favor of youth over old age hardly changes with age (as measured by an IAT)—from twenty to seventy, they favor young over old—by our forties, our
explicit
bias in favor of youth (what we say we care about) declines until at exactly sixty, people start to say they think older is better than younger. Like everyone else, they implicitly associate youth with positive features, but they start preaching the opposite at roughly the same time they display the old-age positivity bias.

Note that the positivity effect requires no suppression of negative information or affect. The bias occurs right away. People simply do not attend to the negative information, do not look at it, and do not remember it. Thus, the possible negative immune effects of affect suppression do not need to arise. This must be a general rule—the earlier during information processing that self-deception occurs, the less its negative downstream immunological effects. At the same time, there may be greater risk of disconnect from reality, since the truth may be minimally stored or not at all.

Given what I have just said, the question arises of why old people are often perceived as being cranky or grumpy. This appears to result from an entirely independent mechanism, which sometimes cancels out or overwhelms the positivity bias. With increasing age, for reasons that are not entirely clear, people suffer greater deficits in their inhibitory abilities, that is, their ability to stop behavior under way that they may wish to stop. Since people often wish to inhibit behavior that will be seen as socially inappropriate, it is not surprising that with increasing age comes exactly that, increasingly socially inappropriate behavior. This includes discussion of private material in public, more frequent overt expressions of prejudice and stereotype, greater difficulty taking the perspective of another, and more off-target verbosity (“Don’t get me started!”). Perhaps many of these traits are later described or rationalized by saying that Gramps sure is “cranky” today.

AN IMMUNOLOGICAL THEORY OF HAPPINESS

All of this work is consistent with an immunological theory of human happiness in which a finely tuned immune system purring along at near-peak efficiency with hardly a target in sight would be experienced internally as a highly enjoyable state. Even such variables as absence of food (hunger) or water (thirst) must be at least partly aversive because of their negative effects on the immune system. At the very least, it must be true that as the brain looks outward and acts to increase inclusive fitness in part by increasing happiness, then surely the same must be true when looking inwardly.

According to this view, the brain is split between outward-directed and inward-directed activity. In the outside world, many features are stationary and predictable—the shape of your bedroom, the location of food in your refrigerator, the way to work, etc. Within this world, of course, there is important variation: a predator appears, a food source, a possible mating opportunity, a hole in the street, for all of which you are selected to make appropriate responses. You have an internal reward/punishment system that goads you in appropriate directions.

Now imagine the whole thing all over for the internal system. Your brain looks inward and sees many constant features—feet and hands farther from it than the trunk, a particular circulatory system through which almost all chemicals must ultimately pass, including those produced by the brain to regulate downstream chemical activity. But in this world also live (in principle) hundreds and even thousands of species of parasites, at the moment just a few, perhaps, but taking particular configurations that need to be countered. The brain may receive or note signals that a major infection is under way in the lower left abdomen but miss the fact that a core of parasitic cells resides in the right big toe and are capable of generating the primary attack.

One important distinction concerns consciousness. We are highly conscious of interactions outside our bodies but highly unconscious of interactions within the body. Why? Part of it is that many signals to self need no consciousness, but one wonders why we are so unconscious of parasitic interactions—for example, failing to appreciate the meaning of “sickness behavior” or the value of more sleep.

Despite its importance, almost no attention has been directed toward measuring the correlates of immune function with such major components of individual fitness—or reproductive success—as survival, fecundity, physical attractiveness, and so on. The comparative work has all been done in birds. Here the pattern is clear. A greater natural immune response to some kind of challenge is positively associated with survival in nature and in the lab, and the effect size is relatively large—18 percent of variation in survival is explained by immune variation, while the closest competitor, degree of bodily symmetry, explains only 6 percent of variance in survival.

How is optimism related to immune function? A number of studies have shown a positive correlation between optimism and health outcomes, immune function, and survival. A recent study is especially striking. Law students were assayed five times throughout the year both for optimism regarding their studies and for a major immune parameter. Within a student’s year, high optimism was associated with high immune function, but when comparing students, there was no effect; that is, optimistic students were not more likely to have stronger immune systems. Although psychologists almost uniformly assume that mood affects immune system, the reverse is equally plausible. With your immune system at near-top efficiency, you should feel happy, positive, and optimistic.

The psychological and immune systems are deeply intertwined, cause and effect go in either direction, and it is hardly possible for one system to react without affecting the other. For reasons that are not always obvious, self-deception appears to have strong immune effects, usually according to the rule more self-deception, lower immune strength, but occasionally, more self-deception, better immune function.

This field is still in its infancy. Some interesting things are known, but much more remains to be found out. Which levels of information suppression are associated with what immune effects? And what chemicals are common to the brain and the immune system, leading to important trade-offs between the two? And what questions do we not even know enough to ask?

CHAPTER 7

The Psychology of Self-Deception

H
ow do we achieve our various self-deceptions? If not in precise mechanistic terms, then in psychological ones, what are the psychological processes that help us achieve self-deception? We both seek out information and act to destroy it, but when do we do which and how do we do it? To give an answer to this, we need to trace the flow of information from the moment it arrives until the moment it leaves, that is, is represented to others. From the “rooter to the tooter,” as we say for pigs. At every single stage—from its biased arrival, to its biased encoding, to organizing it around false logic, to misremembering and then misrepresenting it to others, the mind continually acts to distort information flow in favor of the usual good goal of appearing better than one really is—beneffective to others, for example. Misrepresentation of self to others is believed to be the primary force behind misrepresentation of self to self. This is way beyond simple computational error, the problems of subsampling from larger samples, or valid systems of logic that occasionally go awry. This is self-deception, a series of biasing procedures that affect every aspect of information acquisition and analysis. It is systematic deformation of the truth at each stage of the psychological process. This is why psychology is both the study of information acquisition and analysis and also the study of its continual degradation and destruction.

One important fact is worth stressing at the outset. Self-deception does not require that the truth and falsehood regarding something be simultaneously stored—as in our example of voice recognition (Chapter 3). Falsehood alone may be stored. As we saw for the old-age positivity bias (Chapter 6), the earlier the information is shunted aside—or indeed entirely avoided—the less storage of truth occurs and the less need there will be for (potentially costly) suppression later on. At the same time, since less information is stored, there are greater potential costs associated with complete ignorance. As time after acquisition increases, the choice between suppressing and retaining the truth should be more subtle and complex. The study of exactly how these conflicting forces have played out over time is a completely open field whose exploration will be most revealing.

In what follows, I begin with a review of some of the biasing that takes place during information processing. This is by no means an exhaustive look but more an impressionistic one of the ways in which various psychological processes support a deceptive function. This may include biases in predicting future feelings. Especially important are the roles of denial, projection, and cognitive dissonance in molding deceit and self-deception.

AVOIDING SOME INFORMATION AND SEEKING OUT OTHER

However much we champion freedom of thought, we actually spend much of our time censoring input. We seek out publications that mirror or support our prior views and largely avoid those that don’t. If I see yet another article suggesting the medical benefits of marijuana, you can trust me to give it a careful read; an article on its health hazards is worth at best a quick glance. Regarding tobacco, I couldn’t care less. The scientific facts were established decades ago and it has been years since my last cigarette. So this bias in my attention span is both directly adaptive—I smoke marijuana, so I am interested in its effects—and serves self-deception, because I hype the positive and neglect the negative, the better to defend the behavior from my own inspection and that of others.

A lab experiment measured this kind of bias precisely by confronting people with the chance that they might have a tendency toward a serious medical condition and telling them a simple test would suggest whether they were vulnerable. If they applied their saliva to a strip of material and it changed color, this indicated either vulnerability or not (depending on experimental group). People led to believe that a color change was good looked at the strip 60 percent longer than did those who thought it would be bad (actually the strip never changed color). In another experiment, people listened to a tape describing the dangers of smoking, while being asked to pay attention to content. Meanwhile, there was some background static and the subjects had the option of decreasing its volume. Smokers chose not to decrease the static, while nonsmokers lowered the level, the better to hear what was being said.

Some people avoid taking HIV and other diagnostic tests, the better not to hear bad news. “What I don’t know can’t hurt me.” As expected, this is especially likely when little or nothing can be done either way. It is also not surprising that those who feel more secure about themselves are more willing to consider negative information. In short, we actively avoid learning negative information about ourselves, especially when it can’t lead to any useful counteraction and when we feel otherwise insecure about ourselves. Self-deception is here acting in service of maintaining and projecting a positive self-view.

In many situations, we can choose what to concentrate on. At a cocktail party, we could overhear two conversations. Depending on which views we wish to hear, we may attend to one conversation instead of the other. We are likely to be aware of the general tenor of the information we are avoiding but none of its details, so here again biased processes of information-gathering may work early enough to leave no information at all that may later need to be hidden. In one experiment, people were convinced that they were likely—or highly unlikely—to be chosen for a prospective date. If yes, they spent slightly more time studying the positive rather than negative attributes of the prospective date, but if no, they spent more time looking at the negative, as if already rationalizing their pending disappointment.