Self-deception and avoidance: why do we do what we do?

Sometimes, self-deception can be a way to temporarily protect one's self-esteem.

Lying is one of our higher capacities developed by evolution. In a way, it helps us to survive in certain situations.

Thus, self-deception has two functions: first, it allows us to deceive others in a better way (since no one lies better than those who lie to themselves), 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's not to say that manipulation and lying are two similar concepts, but probably when you sign a contract with a company nobody tells you "actually we just want your money".

On the other hand, self-deception is a way of preserving our self-esteem and is related in a 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 modelFor example, according to the contrast avoidance model, worry, as the core of generalized anxiety disorder, would serve the function of avoiding exposure to the "downer," the shift from experiencing a positive emotion to experiencing a negative emotion (something like "since problems are an inevitable part of life, if I'm worried when things go well, I'm prepared for when things go bad). It is, in short, a form of emotional repression.

Worry also reduces the discomfort of the presence of a problem.It is an attempt at cognitive resolution of the problem. While I worry about a problem, I feel that I am doing "something" to solve it, even if I do not actually solve it, thus diminishing my discomfort by not actually dealing with the problem. Hypochondriasis on the other hand is a way of masking an egocentric trait (the patient is so self-centered that he/she believes that everything happens to him/her). In Biological terms this means that our brain is lazy.

Self-deception is a patch that evolution put on us when it could not make us more intelligent or capable to face certain external demands. Or rather, it is due to the inability of the human species to evolve and change as fast as it does. change at the same speed as the world in which we live..

For example, Festinger's term cognitive dissonance refers to the discomfort we feel when we are inconsistent 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. we give an apparently reasonable explanation for a past action that is not or that had no good reason to be performed.

Its application to self-esteem

Let's explain this: self-esteem, or the evaluation we make of ourselves based on how we are, what we do and why we do it, produces discomfort if it is negative.

Discomfort is an adaptive emotion whose function is to rethink what is wrong in our life in order to modify it. However, our brain, which is very smart and resistant to change, says "why are we going to modify little things in our life, face reality that hurts or scares us, take risks like quitting our job, talk to a certain person about a very uncomfortable subject, 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 are mechanisms for reducing 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 and hardly modifiable style to cope with environmental aspects for which we are not prepared.

Most of the heuristics we use to think habitually cause biases or errors and are oriented to preserve our self-esteem. It is said that depressed people tend to be more realistic since their cognitive processing is not oriented to maintain a positive self-evaluation. In fact, for this reason depression is contagious: the depressive person's discourse is so consistent that people around them can internalize it as well. But patients with depression are not immune to other forms of self-deception eithernor can they escape 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 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 we may perceive.

For example, personality disorders are egosyntonicthat is, the traits do not produce discomfort in the patient, so he/she considers that the problems he/she has are due to certain circumstances in his/her life and not to his/her 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 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.

What to do?

Many psychology concepts can be pigeonholed into self-deception or avoidance. The most common in any psychological consultation is for patients to engage in avoidant behaviors about which they are self-deceptive in order not to assume that they are avoiding. Thus 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. For the former, it is necessary to propose realistic solutions. Regarding the latter, it is necessary to accept them and redefine their importance. However, this analysis requires detachment from avoidance and self-deception.