Hidden Brain - Useful Delusions

Episode Date: April 5, 2021

Podcast hosts are used to being the ones asking the questions. This week, though, we’re going to flip that script, and put Shankar in the guest seat. We’ll hear a recent interview he did with Krys Boyd of the public radio show Think from KERA in Dallas. The discussion revolves around Shankar's latest book, Useful Delusions, and how self-deceptions can bind together marriages, communities, and even entire nations.

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. It's one of the most common tropes in Hollywood. It seems the tables have turned, Mr. Powers. The classic turning of the tables. When the person at the bottom of the heap suddenly has all the power. When I left you, I was but alone. Now I am the master. Or the unassuming guy with glasses ends up being the superhero.

You mean you think I'm Superman? I'm willing to bet my life on. Lois, you are priced. There's a reason the storytelling technique is so popular. It allows characters to break out of the box we've put them in. It allows us to see them in a new light. Today, we decided to turn the tables on me. We're going to bring you a conversation I had with Chris Boyd,

host of the public radio show Think at KERA in Dallas. She'll be interviewing me about my most recent book, Useful Delusions. This week on Hidden Brain, the delusions that keep couples happily married, the rituals that help patients heal, and the self-deceptions that hold nations together. Lots of bad things can come from our failure to accept reality. We find ourselves in denial of our bad habits, we fall for cons, we make choices based less on facts than on what we wish to be true.

It seems like evolution might have done away with our tendency for self-deception a long time ago. Since that hasn't happened, it's worth asking, are there benefits to our sometimes slippery grasp on the truth? From Keira Indalist, this is Hank, I'm Chris Boyd. Journalist Shankar Vianantam is host of the Hidden Brain podcast.

As a guy who prides himself on seeking truth through the objective and rational assessment of facts, he has been curious about the ways we all side-step reality from time to time, seeing what we wish to see as individual actors and as members of groups. So he's that up to understand why we do it, and discover that sometimes fooling ourselves can be good for us.

He explains all this in his book, Useful Delusions, the Power and Paradox of the Self-Deseaving Brain. Shankar, welcome back to Think. Thank you so much, Chris. I'm delighted to be here. The genesis of this reporting was actually a true crime story that seemed to make no sense to you. Tell us about Donald Lowry and how he managed to have his victims showing up to defend him. It's a fascinating story. Donald Lowry was a balding, middle-aged man living in a very small town in Illinois.

And over a period of a couple of decades, he invented various characters, young women whom he called angels. He invented their personas. And then wrote love letters in their voices to thousands of men across the United States. Some of these love letters were sent to these men over a period of years, sometimes decades. The members, the men who received these letters were said to be part of a group that Don Lowry called the Church of Love. And over the course of many years, these men who often wrote back to the women whom they thought were writing to them, sometimes fell in love with their correspondence and believed they had found their soulmates. The most remarkable part of the story is not the con itself, but when the con was unmasked and Don Lowry was brought to trial on charges of mail fraud.

Some of the members of the Church of Love were so upset that the operation was going to be shut down that they showed up at a courtroom in peoria to defend down lorry to keep the con going and i found this such an amazing story that when the con is revealed the marks show up to defend the con man that it prompted me to look deeper at the nature of self deception yes so you thought was it possible this con had done something beneficial for the people who got scammed? Exactly. Now, there were a variety of people who reacted in different ways.

There were people who reacted in the very predictable way of being upset that they had gotten conned, and they were outraged to down Lowry. But at his trial, there were numerous people who testified for both the defense and the prosecution who said that the letters from these angels had kept them from depression. A couple of people said the letters had saved them from suicide. And so it prompted me to rethink my views about this very strange story and ask myself at least for some members, is it possible that some elements of the Church of Love did play a salutary role?

We should talk about a bias many of us hold against people we see as having engaged in self-deception or having been conned. You say the ability to not be self-deceiving is not necessarily a sign of great intelligence, it's a sign of privilege. That's right. So when I first thought about the story of the Church of Love, I looked at it I think the way most of us would look at that story from the outside, which is we think about the people who fell for the scorn as being deluded fools, gullible people Simpletons perhaps and and you know I certainly had those views about the members of the Church of love

But it's I got to know some of them and interview them and greater depth I started to have more compassion for them. I started to understand the life circumstances that prompted them to compassion for them. I started to understand the life circumstances that prompted them to turn to such a con and to believe in it. And then I started to ask myself the question, is this true of my own life? When I experience vulnerabilities, when I experience anxieties, if there are things that greatly worry me, things that I have no control over, do I start to reach for beliefs in some ways that soothe my own anxieties, that in some ways relieve me from my fears and my worries? And I found that I do this too, and there's a wide variety of psychological research that shows that when we are in the grip of fear or terror or anxiety or loneliness, we are far

more likely to reach for beliefs that allow us to cope. There's the old proverb, there are no atheists in the foxhole. And I think that sums up the idea that in some ways when you're outside the foxhole, when you don't have bullets whizzing over your head, it's easy to look down with contempt at the beliefs that people come up with in those situations. But you and I, to actually be in that situation ourselves, many of us might turn to very similar delusions. I think a lot of people might be listening and still thinking, well, that happens to other people, but I have a firm grasp on reality.

But you remind us that every second our eyes are opening, are open. We're experiencing some kind of self-deception. Yeah, so when we think about delusion and self-deception, I think we think about it at the level of these large cons or the level of conspiracy theories. And, you know, we certainly can talk about self-deception and delusion at the level of conspiracy theories, but in some ways it helps to actually take a step back and look at much more everyday examples of how our brain operates. I mentioned the example in the book that in any given moment you know our eyes taken about a billion bits of information, but if all this information was actually transmitted to the brain we actually would very quickly get overwhelmed by the amount of information coming in. And so our brains engage in a significant amount of filtering. By the time the information

actually gets to the brain it's been reduced a thousand fold, only a million bits of information actually get to the brain. And then the brain actually processes only about 40 bits of this of these million bits of information. So out of the billion you began with, the brain basically is processing about 40. And this is how all of us look out and see the world. Now an engineer might say what has happened is in fact a profound delusion because what you see, what your experience of sight is in fact so far distant from the reality that's coming flooding into your eyes. But from a functional perspective, this is exactly how the brain needs to operate. The brain has learned through many, many millions of years of evolution that in some ways all this filtering

while it might not show us reality is actually quite functional. Let me give you another example. I just finished eating some food that was really delicious and I realized as I was chewing my food that the experience of deliciousness is itself a delusion because of course food itself does not have taste, sugar does not taste sweet. Those are experiences and perceptions that are layered on to the sensations coming from our tongue by the brain. So you could argue that the brain in some ways is inventing the experience of sweetness when we eat something sweet or we eat something delicious.

But you can see again how this can be very functional. The delusions we have about what we are eating can prompt us in the direction of certain kinds of foods, which of course is why our brains are designed to perceive taste in the first place. I've been endlessly fascinated by the research that finds that the people who are most accurately understanding reality tend to be people who are clinically depressed. What does that suggest about the value of self-deception, at least in some cases, to mental health? This has been a long-standing debate in the field of mental health, Chris. And I think for many years people believed that when you're suffering from an illness, you're seeing the world sort of delusionally, that you're seeing the world, if you have depression, for example, or anxiety, that you're seeing the world with a delusional pessimism, for example. But studies over the last 20 or 30 years have challenged this, and if anything, they find almost the opposite, that people with depression and

anxiety and some other mental disorders might in fact be seeing the world more accurately than people who are quote unquote mentally healthy. Part of what it means to be mentally healthy in other words might be that you're able to take in, you know, distressing information, information about threats or dangers that you don't ignore that information, but that you don't let yourself get overwhelmed by that information. Part of being mentally healthy might involve looking at the world through roast into glasses. And of course, this coincides with a lot of other research that has found that in many ways as people cope with various setbacks that they have in life, let's say someone loses a family member

or suffers a grievous illness, over what follows over the next several months is not necessarily an accurate perception of all that they have lost, but a process of grieving, a process of coping, that in some ways sets aside the tragedy that's happened, sets aside the trauma that's happened, puts it back into a corner of your mind to allow you to go on with the rest of your life. And when that doesn't happen, when the trauma continues in some ways to occupy much of our minds,

we call those mental illnesses. We say this person is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. This person can't let go of the traumatic memories that have happened to them. And we think of being mentally healthy now as helping this person in some ways put the traumas behind them, put them out of sight from their regular perception. You profile a high-end hotel manager here, guy named Jose Trevinio, who is great at his job. a high-end hotel manager here, guy named Jose Trevinio, who is great at his job, in part because he's a master at deception. How does that deception require the buy-in from customers?

Well, I think, as I started to look at these concentric circles of self-deception, I started again with sort of these very basic ideas of how the brain operates, but then you start to go up in these concentric circles and you see that something like customer service often involves vast acts of both deception and self deception. Many of us sort of expect courteous service when we are, you know, sitting as passengers in a plane or we are pulling up at a drive-through window or you're showing up at a resort somewhere

or you go to a restaurant, we expect courteous service. And of course, that's not unreasonable for us to expect courteous service. But the people providing us those courteousies are being asked to provide courteous service, not just to us, but to multiple people for many, many hours of the day. And I don't know when the last time you tried to be courteous to everyone, kind to everyone, interested in what they had to say for eight hours at a time. To smile at everyone you meet, for eight hours at a time, to be polite, to be deferential,

to everyone you meet for many hours on stretch. Anyone who's tried to do this understands that this is actually very difficult to do. It's not what comes naturally, and customer service in some ways involves suppressing the natural urges we might have to, you know, a customer comes up and makes a bizarre request. You know, we might be inclined to tell the customer, you know, that's a ridiculous request and you're an idiot for making it. But of course, we would lose our jobs if we did that.

And so we come up with deceptions and we come up with ways to hide how we might truly feel. Now, there's also self-deception involved here because when you go to a restaurant, part of what you're paying for is in fact, the courteous service. You're paying for these courteacies, but there's a fiction that what is being transacted is not someone's deception in exchange for your money.

What's being trans, well, you believe that what's being transacted is just this act of courtesy between two people. And so there's both self-deception and deception, and I would argue that for much, much of the time, this is actually a good thing, because if you look at workplaces that are marked by rudeness where people simply say what's on their mind, these are not workplaces that are healthier workplaces or happier workplaces. In fact, we all are better off when we mind our manners, which is, of course, exactly what our mothers taught us many, many years ago.

How can self-deception be good for our relationships? So this might be yet another concentric circle around the idea of self-deception. So when it comes to our intimate relationships, for example, Chris, imagine for a second that you could visit every single couple getting married in the United States this year. And you asked each couple on their wedding day, what are the odds you think you're going to get divorced? Now if they were purely rational creatures, logical creatures, if we expected people to give logical and rational answers to everything, people would look at the statistics and say

about half of all marriages and in divorce. There's no reason to think that I'm particularly special. And so there's about a 50-50 chance that I'm going to get divorced. Very few people on their wedding day are going to say that. I suspect that in many ways if they said that, they're probably not the kind of people who would get married. Because in some ways getting married involves the leap of faith that believes that you're in this relationship forever. And I think in many ways, the self-deception that we have about our partners, the beliefs that we have about our own feelings towards our partners, in many, many cases, this is functional.

If we actually saw our partners and friends and colleagues for exactly who they are all the time, we might judge them somewhat harshly. We might, in fact, decide in the risk benefit or the cost benefit analysis that the costs outweigh the benefits. And many of us might decide that, you know, we don't want to be in those relationships anymore. So allowing these relationships to function for long periods of time often requires some acts of self-deception, where you preferentially focus on the things that are good in the relationship

and preferentially ignore the things that are bad in the relationship. This is especially true when it comes to friendships. I mean, imagine the last time you talked with a friend where you simply told your friend everything that was on your mind, good and bad. Most of us will recognize that when it comes to our friends, we preferentially focus on the good, say encouraging things, hopeful things, positive things, and we expect the same in return. Coming up after the break, I talk about one of the most useful delusions in my own life. You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam.

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. This week, we decided to share an interview I did with KERA's program Think. Here's the host of that show, Chris Boyd. We're about to hear one of the most popular recurring sketches of the comedy duo, Ki and Peel, from the Obama era. Jordan Peel plays it very straight as Obama, just saying the kinds of things the president might have said. Keegan Michael Key is his anger translator who is telling us all what Obama really thinks.

First off, concerning the recent developments in the Middle Eastern region, I just want to reiterate our unflinching support for all people and their right to a democratic process. Hey, all y'all dictators out there, keep messing around and see what happens. Just see what happens. Watch! Shankar, do we all suppress our true feelings most of the time? So I think it's interesting when the people who don't suppress that true feelings most

of the time, we don't actually have very positive things to say about them. I mean, it's interesting, most of us say that we greatly value truth tellers and we value the truth, but ask yourself what it's like to be around someone who simply tells you what's on their mind all the time. Most of us would actually find that to be an unpleasant experience. And so yes, I do think that in quote unquote civilized society, you know, most of us find ways to present what we say in a way that our audience is able to hear it.

Now, certainly we expect that from people who are our presidents and managers and leaders, we expect people who are in positions of authority not simply to spout off on whatever thought they have in their head, but to actually consider carefully to weigh what it is that they're saying, to think about what the consequences of their words might be. Now, we don't think of those necessarily as delusions, but in some ways these are, in

some ways, perversions of the truth. We're changing the truth. We're shading the truth in order to present it in a way that people will be able to hear us properly. And as I said a second ago, organizations that don't do this, leaders that don't do this, who simply voice whatever's in their heads, these are not people who we applaud as truth tellers, these are people who often come across as rude or cruel. They're often people who do not get support in workplaces.

Years ago I called a friend and it sounded like I'd awakened her and I said, I'm so sorry that I wake you up and she just said, yes, which was true. And somehow I got my feelings hurt by that. And all of us, what's interesting here Chris is that your friend might have been too sleepy to have actually massed the truth and so she simply said what was on her mind. But in some ways all of us expect this of our friends. When you go to a friend and basically say, my life is terrible, you don't expect your friend to tell you, yes, your life is terrible because in fact,

you've made terrible life choices. You expect your friend to sort of say, I'm really sorry to hear that. How can I help? What can we do to make things better? If you have a friend who's going through a divorce, you know, you don't go and tell your friend, the truth is your life is probably over as you know it

and things are going to be miserable for you for a long time. No, you tell your friend, I'm sure everything's going to be okay and I'm sure you're going to get back on your feet pretty soon. We expect this of the people who are our friends. In fact, people who don't do this simply stop being our friends. So if we look at self-deception in service to optimism as an adaptive response, we need to consider why it's adaptive. It turns out evolutionary mechanisms care a lot less about us seeing the world accurately

than they care about us being alive and able to procreate. That's exactly right. I mean, when you think about it, you know, the average human lifespan, you know, it used to be 25 or 30 years, you know, a few centuries ago. But even now, even though it's extended quite a bit, let's say it's 75 or 80 years. In the larger story of the human presence on planet Earth, 75 or 80 years is almost nothing. Humans have been around for tens of thousands of years, and our individual lives are puny. Each of us is just one individual among 708 billion people on the planet. And this planet of ours is just one tiny planet in a solar system,

and the sun that we have in our solar system is one of millions of solar systems in our galaxy, and that galaxy is one of maybe two trillion galaxies in the known universe. And so our individual lives are actually very, very, very puny, almost entirely and easily forgotten and forgettable. Now this is not a useful attitude to be able to clearly see how insignificant we are, is not a useful attitude when it comes to waking up in the morning and putting on our clothes and getting on our Zoom calls and doing all the things we have to do.

And so all over the world in every culture, people have come up with ways to make their lives more palatable, to give their lives a sense of purpose, to give their lives a sense of meaning. This is especially true, I think, when it comes to our relationship with our children. You know, when the relationships between parents and children, our relationships that are usually marked by great heaps of delusional thinking. I know that when my own daughter was born, I thought of her as being the most special child in the entire universe, you know, the most, the ultimate miracle beyond all miracles. And I think many parents experience this when a child is born to them. They think that this child has to be the most special child in the

history of the entire universe. Now, logically, that can't possibly be true. It can't possibly be true that millions of people can simultaneously think that their children are the most special children of all the other children out there. But this is a very useful delusion to have, because parenting turns out to be costly, time-consuming, difficult, frustrating, often irritating, and our delusional beliefs about our children buffer us against the challenges of parenting. They allow us in some ways to deal with the body blows that parenting often delivers to us. Here's another example of why it is in our evolutionary history.

Evolutionists thought fit in some ways to implant in our minds delusions, powerful delusions that our children are extraordinary and special. I've always thought that might play into the fact that we really fear kidnapping to an extent that is not at all borne out by the rates at which it happens. I would take nothing away from the tragedy that it does happen at all, but most children are really not at risk of this at any point in their lives. But we all think this kid is so perfect who wouldn't want this child? Yes, and I think many of us go overboard

in order to protect our children, and this can sometimes harm our children, it can harm us and it can harm our children. In fact, there are examples down history of people's love for their children, not just leading them astray and leading their families astray, but leading entire nations astray. You can see how this delusional love can produce sometimes things that are problems.

But the underlying reason that you have the delusional belief in the first place is that it performs a certain functional role. One of the central messages of my book is that when we think about delusions, we're often so focused and so intent on the content of the delusions, and we're often so upset by the content of the delusions, that we don't stop to ask the deeper psychological question, what purpose is it serving? What is the function of this delusion? Now understanding the purpose and the function of something doesn't mean that you have to

agree with it. You can still think that it's a delusion, you can still think that something is a dangerous delusion, but understanding it gives you tools and avenues to potentially dismantle dangerous delusions and potentially also to embrace the useful ones. That brings us perfectly to the question of placebo in medicine. They seem unethical and yet if patients improve, I mean, that's the ultimate goal, right? So this is a really, really tricky, thorny, ethical question, because I think a variety of studies find that people do respond to placebo and placebo sort of broadly define, not just sort of sugar

pills, but the entire practice of going to see a doctor and visiting a mental medical facility and seeing people in these impressive gowns and all the hoopla that surrounds a medical facility are partly why as we get treated we improve that we believe that we're going to get helped and so in fact we are helped. Now the dilemma here is that medicine is known for a long time that the placebo effect works that the effect that doctors have a very powerful effect on their patients. The question is should you reach for that as a cure? In other words, instead of actually prescribing a treatment,

should the doctor take advantage of her power over the patient in order to help the patient feel better? There's not a simple answer to this question. I think it's a very complicated question, and question, and I think there are arguments to be made on both sides. Clearly, if doctors begin lying to patients all the time, just in order to elicit the placebo effect, you can see in all kinds of ways how this could damage doctor patient trust and potentially even reduce the power of the placebo effect going forward.

But you can also see that doctors who merely tell us when we go and see a doctor, here's what the last three peer reviewed studies said that I have read. Here's what I think we should do. Here's a medication, go home and let's see what doctor. You know, here's what the last three peer reviewed studies said that I've read. Here's what I think we should do. Here's a medication, go home and let's see what happens and let's see if your results fall in line with the clinical trials. This is not sort of what we often want to hear when we go to a doctor because part of why we go to a doctor or a physician or we turn to anyone for help when we're suffering from an illness is we're turning to another human being. We're basically saying, I'm frightened, I'm lonely, I'm afraid, help me. Reach out your hand to me.

And this is why, in medical schools all over the world, increasing emphasis is being paid on what happens at the patient bedside. The relationship between doctor and patient is not incidental to the outcomes of medicine. It's essential to the outcomes of medicine, it's essential to the outcomes of medicine. How might something like the placebo effect influence how well our cars work for us? Yes, the placebo effect, of course, is based on the idea that if you believe that your doctor is going to do well and you've gone to a very good doctor and the doctor is giving you the latest medicine, you're going to get better. If that's sort of the premise of the placebo effect that the rituals and practices around the practice of medicine are

partly what make us better. The question arises, can this actually affect us in all kinds of other ways? In other words, when we go to a fancy restaurant, for example, are we partly influenced by how fancy the restaurant is as we judge whether the meal is tasty or not. Researchers have conducted studies on this. When you give people wine to drink and you have a bottle of wine that costs $10, but you pour the wine into a bottle that is marked at and priced at $90. In other words, you're drinking $10 wine, but it's poured out of a $90 bottle. People will sometimes perceive that wine as being superior to the original $10 wine. In other words, knowing that this is a $90 wine or believing it's a $90 wine tells

you that it's a better wine than wine that's $10, but it's not just a logical inference you're making. You're actually subjectively experiencing the wine is better. Maybe you take more time to savor it because you're spending so much money on your wine. It turns out the same thing affects a variety of other consumer and customer products. There have been instances, for example, of different cars that have been manufactured on the very same manufacturing plant, but they are marketed and branded by companies and sold on the different brand names, sometimes for very different prices, with one of them being sold for thousands of dollars more than the other. And some studies have found that the more expensive cars with the better brand names

in fact perform better over their lifetimes, which is really mysterious because these are the same cars as the less expensive cars that are sold under the less fancy brand name. And the reason that has been advanced is that the reason this happens is that when you spend more money to buy a more expensive car, when you buy a brand-name car with a very fancy title or a fancy name, you're going to take better care of that car. You're going to drive it more carefully. Maybe you park it more carefully. Maybe you find sheltering or a garage where you can park your car because you don't want it to be affected by the elements.

You change the oil more regularly. You maintain the car much better. Over the course of several years, your beliefs, your actions on the car in some ways mean that the car is actually going to last longer. So two identical cars that are manufactured in exactly the same way, but one of them in some ways has more of the placebo effect attached to it. The car with the better placebo effect might in fact turn out to be the more reliable car. And in some ways this is very much like what we said a second ago in terms of relationships.

The fact that I believe that I'm in a good relationship, that I have a delusional belief about the relationship, that might be one of the ingredients that makes my relationship good. I think we usually imagine that we're just looking at the world and reacting to the world. The premise of my book is that the ways we respond to the world shape how we interact with the world and then shape the outcomes we see in the world. Okay, what is naive realism? And how does that play into the ways we judge the actions and perceptions of other people? Naive realism is a phenomenon that affects all of us, Chris,

when we look out at other people. We imagine that we can sort of put ourselves in their shoes and very quickly ask, what would we do in that situation? So in other words, when I look at your actions, I believe I have a very clear understanding of why it is that you're doing what it is you're doing. We'd fail to see all the ways in some ways in which we ourselves are constrained by our own subjectivity, our own limits of being creatures that are embodied inside a single mind. As a result of this, we often fail to exercise the empathy that we might

otherwise exercise. So when we see people pursue delusional beliefs or engage in self-deception, it's easy to sit in judgment of those people, because when you look at them from the outside, through the lens of naiv realism, you tell yourself, I would never do that stupid thing if I was in their shoes. You imagine that you're outside of that experience. Now of course, this goes back to the idea we talked about, there being no atheists in the foxhole. When you're outside the foxhole, it's easy to imagine that people who turn to beliefs

about supernatural powers are being foolish. Because you imagine I am too rational, I am too logical, my mind works so much better than these simpletons, I would never do that. And naive realism convinces us that we would not fall prey to the same biases. Of course many of us realize that when we ourselves are in positions of great vulnerability, we turn to such beliefs ourselves. I should just mention one personal story here, because something occurred something happened to me a few months ago that I think it's very germane to this.

I was traveling a few hours from my home in Washington, DC. And I suffered a retina detachment. I suffered an impact right below my eye. And over the course of the next 24 hours, the retina, which is the film that allows you to see, you know, it's essentially the photographic film behind your eye that allows you to see, the retina started coming off its hinges.

And at a certain point, if it detaches completely, you will lose sight in the eye altogether. And I have a family history of retinal problems, so I knew what was happening, and I could see, in some ways, my vision disappearing literally before my eyes. I was very far from home. I didn't know how to find a doctor. I was really frightened. When I finally managed to find an eye surgeon,

he very kindly opened his practice for me at 9 o'clock on a Tuesday night. He diagnosed me with a retina Detachment and said, you know, we need to wheel you in to get surgery within the next several minutes. You're gonna lose your eye otherwise. At that point, I didn't have time to weigh the pros and cons. I didn't have time to look up reviews and see if this person was a good doctor or a bad doctor. And I did what all of us do in positions of great vulnerability, I put all my faith and trust in this doctor. Now as it turned out, he was a brilliant surgeon and he ended up saving my eye for which I'm profoundly grateful.

But imagine for a second that he had not been a brilliant doctor. Let's imagine that he had been a shalatin. Would it have been any less likely for me to put my faith in him? And I would argue the answer is no, because my faith did not arise because of what he did, my faith arose because of what I was going through. I was going through a period of great vulnerability, a period of great fear, trusting him made me feel better, which is why I reached out to him. Expand this in all kinds of different ways and you can see why people sometimes gravitate to beliefs that are false, to demagogues and false prophets, it's not so much because of the demagogues and false prophets,

it's because of their own inner vulnerabilities. My guest journalist, Shankar Vidantham, is host of the Hidden Brain Podcast. We're talking about his latest book, Useful Delusions, The Power and Paradox of the Self-Decieving Brain. useful delusions, the power and paradox of the self-deceiving brain. Coming up, why it's so hard for us to let go of our self-deceptions. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This week we are bringing you an interview I did with Chris Boyd for KERA's program Think.

It's centered around the things I learned while researching my latest book, Useful Delusions. Our conversation led us to a movie filled with rich psychological insights the world I created for you. I'm seeing my health. I'm seeing deceit. But in my world, you have nothing to fear. All right, Shankar, in that scene, I mean, we've watched the whole movie and realized lots of people actively contributed to the deception that Truman, Jim

Carrey's character, fell for. And we feel like though, maybe he should have suspected earlier, except that would have forced him to give up on believing in a lot of good things in his life, right? That's right. So the premise of the Truman show is that Truman is a part of a reality show, except he's the only one in the reality show who doesn't realize he's part of a reality show, except he's the only one in the reality show who doesn't realize he's part of a reality show. So his wife, his best friend, and his colleagues, and co-workers, and everyone who lives in

his town, they're all actors, and he's the only one who doesn't understand or know that he is part of this reality show. What makes the deception very difficult to pierce is that in order to pierce the deception, Truman not only has to see through the deception, but he has to give up his emotional relationships with all the people in his life. He has to recognize that the wife he loves is in fact not, or somebody who he should love, that his best friend is not his best friend, that his co-workers and colleagues and neighbors are in fact actors. And this is very painful and true men in some ways is a wonderful,

the true men show in some ways is a wonderful account for why it is that even when deceptions are unmasked, many of us sometimes are unwilling to let them go. The reason is not because we are foolish, it's not because we are stupid or that we're idiots, it's because that those beliefs, those delusions, those self-deceptions are now tied up with things that have become very emotionally important to us. And to challenge those self-deceptions means also challenging the relationships that have become vitally important to us. Now, in the little clip that you played that Chris, I would argue that the creator of the Truman show was in fact being not just deceptive, but unethical

in sort of the argument that he was making to Truman. I am not suggesting that we should deceive one another really nilly and say that it's a good thing that we're deceiving one another. That's not at all the point of the book. But I am saying that in some ways, if in some way self-deception is truly intended for the benefit of the person who you are intending to deceive or for your own good, there's an argument to truly intended for the benefit of the person whom you are intending to deceive or for your own good, there's an argument to be made for it. So the doctor who basically withholds

from the terminal patient, the fact that she is gonna die in two weeks time and basically says, you know, things look pretty grim, but let's see how it goes. I would argue that that doctor is doing the humane thing. The doctor is not doing the unethical thing. Now, other people might disagree and say, even there, the doctor's obligation is just to tell the truth,

you know, the brutal truth. But certainly it is the case that when the doctor deceives the patient in order for the doctor to gain, there is no question that that is unethical. If the doctor lies to the patient and says, I think you're going to live for another two years, so let's enter into a business venture together where you're forking over a bunch of money to me. That's not deception or self-deception with the patience good in mind. That's sort of straightforward, that's being a con man,

that's being a scumbag. That's not the kind of deception that I'm talking about in the book at all in terms of deception that we might want to honor or potentially protect. Yeah, I have been thinking about the ways that our personal self-deception could potentially hurt other people, but it also our tendency for self-deception explains that as a white person who really wants to live my life in anti-racist ways, I've been convinced by the research into unconscious bias that says, you know, I may have thoughts that don't reflect my values, but they still exist within me. On the other hand, it's always so hard to to think of yourself as belonging to this system that is abusive and really hurts people of color in this country. Can you talk about why it's so hard for us? Does self-deception play into our denial of racism?

Absolutely. It plays into our denial of all manners of different kinds of biases and prejudice. There's no question about it. And the reason is almost straightforward. The reason is it's painful to think of ourselves as being people who are biased, as people who have racial bias, or the thing that we have sexist people is painful or homophobic people. It's painful to think of ourselves that way. And it's also easy to imagine that we're outside of that world when in fact we're not. And in many ways, this particular idea is a central idea of my first book, The Hidden Brain. It's all about the power of the unconscious mind and the role of unconscious bias in shaping our daily lives.

Many years ago, the psychologist Leon Festinger infiltrated a group that believed the world was gonna come to an end on a certain day, and Festinger infiltrated the group because he wanted to see what happened when the world did not come to an end, and he fully expected that people would tell themselves, okay, I was wrong, I made a mistake, this was a delusional belief and they would let it go. But that emphatically is not what happened. When the day of judgment came and the world did not come to an end,

the people in this group came up with rationalizations of why it was the world did not end. And in fact, they said, the various steps that we took because we anticipated the world was going to end, these are the steps that headed off the world from actually ending. You know, writ large, the same phenomenon affects large groups of people. It allows people to keep their heads stuck in the sand, to close their eyes to reality.

You know, it allows political delusions to surface in all kinds of ways. And the reason, the underlying reason in all these cases is the same, sometimes seeing the truth can be deeply painful. My book is not at all making the argument that all self-deceptions are good. In many cases, it's really the wise and important and valuable thing to do to open our eyes and to see the role that we're playing and the ways in which we might harm and hurt one another, but it's also really important, I think, when we look at the delusions in self-deceptions of other people to look at them with compassion, to look at them with empathy, I would argue that in many ways we're going to be more effective dismantling dangerous delusions when we bring empathy and sympathy and compassion to bear rather than judgment.

All right, I want to go to the phones. Let's speak with Danny in Fort Worth, Texas. Hi, Danny. Hi, thanks for taking my call. I was really interested in hearing, you know, I've heard the analogy about wine and an extensive wine tasting better, but the car one stood out to me. And it made me curious if being of a higher socioeconomic class kind of enables self-deception in a way that might not be, you know, that might be a privilege over folks

who are financially struggling who don't have the same resources to engage in that same sort of self-deception. Thanks for calling. Yeah, I think that's a really interesting question, Danny. I would argue not so much that I think self-deceptions are more likely or less likely. I would just say the form that those self-deceptions take are likely to be different. And again, if you think about self-deception as being fundamentally designed to be functional, self-deceptions are filling gaps in our lives, things that we think are missing, we're filling it in with self-deception. So somebody,

for example, who's very poor, might come up with self-deceptions that reassure them that maybe the future is not going to be so grim, or they come up with beliefs that give them cause for hope and optimism, because their present lives are difficult, their present circumstances are so challenging. Somebody who's well off might not have concerns about their economic security the next week, but they may have concerns about how they're perceived, about how other people might perceive them, and their self-deceptions might indeed take the form of being blind to the ways that they might cause harm to others. So, you know, you could argue, as opposed to maybe some of these self-deceptions have more impact and certainly more impact on other people, that's entirely possible.

But I'm more inclined to think of these self-deceptions as being functional things that brains are designed to do. Regardless of where you put us, regardless of our circumstances, there are things that all of us find difficult accountants, and those are precisely the areas where self-deception is likely to flourish. You acknowledge here that religious faith can play a really positive role in people's lives, but there may still be some aspects of self-deception in that. What was the miracle of the Sun? So the miracle of the Sun, like many other religious miracles, involved large numbers of people believing that they had seen a supernatural event take place. This event took place about a hundred years ago. What's striking about this is that this was not a couple of people who had this experience.

There were many, many, a large number of people who collectively witnessed something that they thought was the hand of the supernatural, the hand of God at play. But of course, when you look a little bit deeper, what you find is that this happened at a time when large numbers of people arrived at a place believing that they were going to see a miracle. The miracle had been foretold at an earlier time. And so when they showed up, many people had come great distances, many, many miles to see something remarkable.

And so they were predisposed in some ways to see something remarkable. We see this at all kinds of different ways in all over the world right now, in different settings of people believing that they can see certain things. You know, after the 9-11 attacks, for example, there was a memorial that was held where two very bright blue lights were shown into the sky, in some ways as a, you know, as a stand-in for the twin towers that came down. And when those lights were shining in the sky, many people believed that at the peak of the lights, they could see what looked like an angel or a cross.

And of course, it might have been an optical illusion, but the reason that we see this optical illusion is because there is an underlying grief, there's an underlying vulnerability that we're trying to find a way to respond to. And again, if you're outside of that grief, if you don't share in that grief, it's easy to look down at people who are able to see those things, who are able to see, to sort of come up with these self-deceptions. When you're in these things, when you've experienced the suffering and the setback yourself, you realize how easy it is to turn to such beliefs. We've mostly talked this hour, Shankar, about self-deceptions that affect us on an individual level.

How does the process work when entire groups of people dilute themselves into believing something that's not accurate? So like all self-deceptions and delusions, you know, these can happen not just at the individual level or the interpersonal level but they can happen at the level of groups, tribes, even nations and countries. And like all of these, the other self-deceptions and delusions we've talked about, there are clearly ways in which these delusions can cause great harm, but there are also ways in which these delusions can cause great good. Let me give you a simplest example. You know, it's hard for most of us to think about nations as delusions. But of course, nations are human inventions.

Human beings have come up with a concept of nations and says, here's where the United States ends and here's where Canada begins or here's where the United States ends and here's where Mexico begins. These are human inventions, human conventions agreed upon by the people who live within a country and by the people who live outside of that country. Now, you can think of, if you think about the nation as a delusion in the way that I'm describing the word delusion, not as a negative, but just as something that was invented by the human mind, you can see all kinds of good things that nations do. When you have a natural disaster in one state, for example, people in another state will step forward to help. Someone in Maryland may say that when there's a natural disaster in Texas, I feel obliged

to help because we're all part of the same big country. You know, the resources, if one part of the country is doing well, we might send resources from another part of the country that's doing better to help the part of the country that's not doing so well. So in other words, we stand together, we help one another, we lift one another up in difficult times. These are all the ways in which nations can be very, very function and very, very powerful. Now, you can easily ask the question, can these delusions spill over into harm? And you only have to look at the very brief history of the 20th century to see all the ways in which nationalism can cause immense harm, including, and up to the point of genocide,

of groups believing so deeply, so fervently, in the delusions that they have come up with, that they're willing to fight and kill and destroy large numbers of other people You know the service of those delusions, you know I sometimes wonder you know, you know, this is The proverbial Anthropologists that comes to us from another planet. Let's say you had a the an anthropologist come to us from another galaxy You know and travels across these vast realms of space to come to this tiny little planet. And they would find something astonishing. They would find that this one species, human being, which is one species among 8 million

species on the planet, somehow believes that we have the right to divide up this planet into 190 different territories. And we believe in these territories so deeply that we're willing to destroy one another over the integrity of these territories, that we've armed ourselves with nuclear weapons, and we're willing to destroy the entire planet because we believe so powerfully in the reality of these inventions. Surely this anthropologist from another galaxy would think of this as being a delusion. Many of us, of course, don't because when you're inside a delusion, that's usually the hardest place to recognize that you're experiencing a delusion. Briefly, if we know someone else is deceiving themselves, but in a

way that might be helpful for them, do we have any obligation to correct that? I think the question is truly asked the question, who is this deception and aid off? Who is the self-deception harming and who is it helping? I think there are certain self-deceptions, you know, in the course of the last 12 months, I've come up with self-deceptions that tell me every month that the end is near, the pandemic is near, that the, you know, liberation is a month away or a few weeks away. I know many family members that have turned to religious beliefs because they have found the pandemic to be so difficult to bear and so and has produced so much grief and suffering. I don't believe it's in my place to disobey people of those self-deceptions, deceptions that in some ways help us get through the day, allow us in some ways to be kind or gentle of people. Certainly,

I think when those deceptions harm us, and especially when they harm other people, that is the time to intervene and to ask, when have these delusions tipped over to being dangerous, how can we dismantle them? Journalist Shankar Vedantam is host of the Hidden Brain podcast. His most recent book is Useful Delusions, the power and paradox of the self-deceiving brain. Shankar, it's always a pleasure to speak with you. Thank you for making time for us. Thank you, Chris. That was my interview with Chris Boyd for the show Think.

I'm really grateful to Chris and the whole team at KERA for the wonderful conversation. Learn more about that show at think.keRA.org. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Bridget McCarthy, Autumn Barnes, Ryan Katz, Andrew Chadwick, Kristen Wong, and Laura Quarelle. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. Our unsung hero today is Bill Messler.

Bill is my co-author on useful delusions. In fact, he's the one who suggested we write this book. Over the course of several years of collaboration where we worked closely together, I got to know Bill very well. He's not just a terrific science journalist and writer, but one of the kindest and most upright people I know. And I'm not just saying that because it's a useful delusion. Thank you Bill. We'll be back next week with another episode of Hidden Brain. I'll be back in the host seat. To learn more about useful delusions and to read an excerpt of the book, go to hiddenbrain.org slash books. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you next week.