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

Lying is one of our higher capacities developed by evolution. In someway, helps us survive in certain situations.

Thus, self-deception has two functions: in the first place, it allows to deceive others in a better way (since nobody 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 taken priority, in many cases using manipulation as a fundamental tool (see any deal). That does not mean that manipulation and lying are two similar concepts, but probably when you sign a contract with a company nobody tells you "we really just want your money."

On the other hand, self-deception is a way of preserving our self-esteem and is somewhat related 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 model, worry, as the core of generalized anxiety disorder, would fulfill the function of avoiding exposing oneself to the "down", in the change from going from experiencing a positive emotion to becoming experiencing a negative emotion (something like “since problems are an unavoidable part of life, if I am worried when everything is going well, I am prepared for when things are going wrong). It is, in short, a form of emotional repression.

Worry also reduces the discomfort of the presence of a problem, as it is an attempt to cognitively resolve it. As I worry about a problem, I feel like I am doing “something” to solve it, even if it doesn't actually solve it, thus lessening my discomfort at not actually addressing the problem. Hypochondria on the other hand is a way of masking a trait egocentric (the patient is so self-centered that he thinks everything happens to him). In biological terms this means that our brain is lazy.

Self-deception is a patch that evolution put on us by not being able to 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 at the same speed as the world we live in.

For example, the term cognitive dissonance de Festinger refers to the discomfort caused by being 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 that it is not or that it did not have good reasons to be carried out.

• You may be interested: "False self-confidence: the heavy mask of self-deception"

Its application to self-esteem

Let's explain this: the self-esteem or value 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 to modify it. However, our brain, which is very clever and resistant to change, says “why are we going to modify little things in our lives, face reality that hurts or scares us, taking risks such as leaving work, talking to a certain person about a very uncomfortable topic, etc., when in your Instead we can rethink this and tell ourselves that we are fine and thus avoid suffering, avoid situations that will make us more uncomfortable, avoid the 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 of our brain). In psychological terms it means that our behavior and our cognitive processing have a style personal and difficult to modify to deal with environmental aspects for which we are not prepared.

Most of the heuristics that we use to think habitually cause biases or errors and are aimed at preserving 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 depressed person's speech is so consistent that the people around him can internalize it as well. But patients with depression are also not immune to other forms of self-deception, far from 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 that we can believe, if they are not the product of self-deception and avoidance, are only a small part of the various factors, functions and causes that we can perceive.

For example, personality disorders are ego-syntonicIn other words, the traits do not cause discomfort in the patient, so he considers that the problems he has are caused by certain circumstances of his life and not by his 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 her ego, just as a paranoid person does not consider his degree of vigilance as pathological.

• You may be interested: "Low selfsteem? When you become your worst enemy"

To do?

Many concepts in psychology can be pigeonholed into self-deception or avoidance. The most common thing in any psychological consultation is that patients perform avoidance behaviors about which they deceive themselves so as not to assume that they are avoiding. A) Yes the problem is perpetuated through powerful negative reinforcement.

Consequently, it is necessary to define our ideal self and evaluate that definition rationally, finding out what things are controllable and modifiable, and what are not. On the former it is necessary to propose realistic solutions. Regarding the latter, it is necessary to accept them and resignify their importance. However, this analysis requires letting go of avoidance and self-deception.