Dan Putman

Dan Putman The Courage to Admit Mistakes

What follows are two sections from chapter 1 in a potential book, Psychological Courage. The book, if done, would be an extension and elaboration of my paper, “Psychological Courage,” published in 1997 in Philosophy, Psychiatry and Psychology. The potential audience is the educated person. It is written to avoid the jargon of philosophy and at the same time tries to avoid the “fad-of-the-day” junk so common these days. At the time of submission to the Notebook, I have not yet done the footnotes for these sections. There may also be typos.

2. Courage and Self-Justification

During the court-martial of Lieutenant William Calley for his role in the slaughter of innocent civilians at My Lai, his psychiatrist reported that the lieutenant came to regard the Vietnamese people as less than human. . . . Social psychologists have learned that people do not perform acts of cruelty and come out unscathed. I do not know for sure how Lieutenant Calley (and thousands of others) came to regard the Vietnamese as subhuman, but it seems reasonable to assume that, when we are engaged in a war in which, through our actions, a great number of innocent people are being killed, we might try to derogate the victims in order to justify our complicity in the outcome. We might poke fun at them, refer to them as “gooks,” dehumanize them; but, once we have succeeded in doing that, watch out— because it becomes easier to hurt and kill “subhumans” than to hurt and kill fellow human beings.[1]

Now let’s talk about some techniques people use to dodge the truth; let’s review a map, so to speak, of psychological cowardice. Imagine buying a new car and investing a good deal of your savings to do so. Just your luck, a month later Consumer Reports does a detailed and careful study of your car and finds it to be one of the worst models of the year in terms of performance and safety. Moreover, you soon read in the paper that another independent evaluation has found the same thing. You did not do your homework. How will you treat that negative evidence? You are not usually a dishonest person. Will you say, “Well, I goofed. I may have made a poor investment. I’ll just have to live with it.” Or might you say something like “Those independent evaluators really aren’t so independent, you know. They often have ties to companies they promote.” Or “Yeah, there’s been some problems with that model but mine is different (somehow).” This tendency to justify actions in which we have a great deal invested has been spelled out in a powerful way in social psychology by what is called “cognitive dissonance theory.” In this section I want to specify the courage it takes to deal with dissonance in an honest way.

Simply put, cognitive dissonance theory says that when we have two “cognitions” that clash with each other (dissonance) the state of tension produced demands some resolution. Generally the more time, energy or money you have invested in the situation, the greater the tension. There is little cognitive dissonance between two conflicting mathematical ideas you happen to have (unless of course you’re a mathematician). But enormous dissonance would exist if you thought your spouse was a trustworthy person and you now have evidence of infidelity. Dissonance is a deeply-embedded aspect of human life because thoughts and actions on which we base our lives are frequently challenged by contradictory evidence.

How do people deal with dissonance? One way is to face the truth and act appropriately. But that may be the exception. As above, we do not want to admit mistakes. Two other ways that avoid dissonance without facing reality are 1) downplay the disturbing cognition or 2) add cognitions in order to weaken the disturbing one. For example, imagine dissonance caused by smoking or adultery. Downplaying the disturbing cognition would mean saying things to yourself like “The evidence about smoking is really mixed” or “one fling is not the same as being unfaithful.” If this strategy is successful then the tension is reduced between the cognitions “I am a rational person” and “I smoke” or between “I love my spouse” and “I just had sex with another person.” The importance of the cognition about smoking or sex is lowered, thus allowing both cognitions to co-exist in the mind. This can also be done by relabeling the disturbing cognition, which is simply a shorthand way of downgrading it. So “heavy smoker” becomes “moderate smoker” and “adulterer” becomes “man going through mid-life crisis.”

The strategy of adding new cognitions might take the form of “Yes, smoking is dangerous but I like to live on the edge” or “Reducing my anxiety by smoking is well worth the danger.” In the case of the affair it might be “Yes, I was unfaithful but variety is critical to keeping a long-term relationship going” or “Sex with someone else will improve the sex life in our marriage.” These justifications are not direct attacks on the evidence or the worth of the dissonant ideas. Instead, they act like a “bridge” between the two cognitions and reduce dissonance by accepting both but trying to weld them together. “I am rational and I am doing a dangerous thing in smoking but reducing my anxiety is worth it” ties the first two cognitions together and reduces dissonance.

Habits may or may not be involved in the dissonance problem. But there is one habit (or lack thereof) that is always important here and that is how we deal with dissonance. Children can learn early on that getting out of a problem by ignoring evidence or by adding fake or exaggerated ideas can make them feel better. For example, “My parents think I am a good person” and “I just kicked the neighbor’s dog” can be justified by “The dog deserved it because. . . .” (added cognition) or “It wasn’t really a ‘kick.’” (downplay disturbing cognition). You hear this sort of excuse constantly from children. Good parenting will help children avoid this tendency and help reinforce dealing with dissonance honestly. Learning to face the truth courageously is a very important habit for development of a child’s full potential. Otherwise, self-justification can easily become a habit. Children grow up thinking that dodging evidence or making up excuses is how to deal with difficult or tension-producing situations in life. Bluntly put, this behavior as a child is a blueprint for psychological cowardice as an adult.

This is what cognitive dissonance is broadly about. But how exactly does psychological courage help when dealing with dissonance? I want to focus specifically on some results of irrationally reducing dissonance and how courage can make a significant impact.

One obvious effect of irrational dissonance reduction is to tie our hands when dealing with the real world. In this regard psychological courage includes what has also been called “intellectual courage.” What does that mean? The data from psychology indicate that irrational dissonance reduction occurs most frequently when the evidence is not completely clear. In other words, when the evidence is a matter of probability, people have the room to avoid an unpleasant truth either by downplaying it or by upgrading some comforting falsehood. A firm belief in an absolute doctrine may be highly dissonant with information in several sciences such as biology, anthropology or astronomy. These disciplines often involve concepts in time and space beyond everyday human comprehension. Can we as humans comprehend a billion years or what 200 million light-years really means? Despite the overwhelming evidence supporting these claims in the several sciences, the dissonance created by this information against a belief in which one has an enormous personal investment of meaning and energy will result very often in downplaying the disturbing cognition by any means possible. So radiocarbon dating is attacked, distance measurements are attacked in astronomy, and genetic evidence between species becomes coincidence. Dealing courageously with dissonance here is no mere intellectual game. It means going to the heart of one’s foundation for living. With increasing information in astronomy, genetics, and paleontology, this is a struggle millions are going through today. It simply takes incredible courage to look honestly at your basic beliefs, no matter what they are. Admitting we might be wrong not only means going against a social mirror in which our image may be well-formed; it means in this case reflecting honestly about my place in the universe and whether my life means something. Examining this issue or modifying our understanding if it can be one of the most difficult psychological challenges a human being faces.

Because dissonance reduction means avoiding truth another important practical result is that the options for future decisions become narrowed. How? By downplaying evidence or adding false or exaggerated cognitions, the range of choices becomes focused not by reality but by the set of ideas needed to avoid the issue. For example, if an act of spousal abuse creates significant dissonance in the abuser, the abuser may justify it by claiming the spouse deserved it or the act wasn’t really that bad. When similar situations arise in the future it will be easier to justify further abuse because the groundwork has already been laid. It’s already been established that the spouse deserves it and a range of actions has already been deemed acceptable in the abuser’s mind. Around the world the same mechanism often functions with acts of prejudice. A habit of avoiding responsibility for results of your actions becomes acceptable and future acts divorcing the self from responsibility can fit a pattern established earlier. That pattern may well have originated with the original need to reduce dissonance.

Dissonance reduction can thus be a major factor in justifying cruelty toward others. Such situations in one degree or another occur in everyone’s life. Most people consider themselves to be decent human beings. But imagine you have a harmful thought about someone and enjoy it, or imagine getting a good feeling out of seeing someone else hurt. Both of these are dissonant with “I am a good person.” How do we deal with such facts about our inner life? A little psychological courage allows us to face such thoughts and feelings honestly, admit weaknesses in ourselves, and look for genuine reasons why such feelings and thoughts occur. But it is all too easy to slip into self-justification. A classic example of this mentioned by Aronson is the study done after the killing of the students on the Kent State campus during the Vietnam War. People in the area (and elsewhere) believed all sorts of rumors to justify the dissonance between their self-image (“I am a good person who does not believe in killing innocent people”) and the fact that they wanted to justify the shooting of the students. The students shot were supposedly covered with lice, they all had syphilis, etc. All the rumors were false but they made people comfortable by reducing dissonance.

Dissonance reduction through distorting our concepts is unbelievably pervasive and common and so completely irrational that, were it not for the devastating consequences, it would be comical. Consider the following experiment by psychologists Keith Davis and Edward Jones. They convinced a group of students to volunteer for an experiment and then asked them one by one to watch another student being interviewed. They knew nothing about the character of the student being watched. No matter what they actually thought after watching the interview, they were told by the experimenter to tell the student they saw interviewed that he was shallow, untrustworthy and dull. What is amazing about the experiment is that, even though the observing students knew full well that they did not have any prior knowledge of the person being observed, after telling him harmful things about his character based on no evidence whatsoever, a later survey of the observers showed that they convinced themselves that the person really was shallow, untrustworthy and dull. After all, they were good people and they had to say some pretty terrible things to this person so, obviously, he must have deserved it.

Self-justification probably also played a role in the famous Milgram experiment in which people were told to shock a learner up to 450 volts for wrong answers. ( No shocks were actually received but the “teachers” clearly thought they were.) You are a good person yet you just shocked an innocent man with 100 volts. It must be OK—he didn’t say anything. At 150 volts the man cries out. What to do? I’ve committed myself to this experiment and said I would do what I was told and, besides, it’s not my responsibility. It’s the guy in the white coat giving orders. With such dissonance-reducing reasons, over 50% of the participants shocked an innocent man with progressive 15 volt increments up to 450 volts. These include going through times of screaming and begging for release by the victim and, for the last 100 volts or so, total silence in the adjacent room, a clear indication that the “learner” might be unconscious or dead.

In Milgram’s book and the film of the experiment you can see psychological courage as well as moral courage in action. At 150 volts, when the person first cries out, many “teachers” hesitate and Milgram’s assistant says to go on. Many refused and Milgram’s assistant says “You have no choice.” Some of the teachers then said, “Yes, I have a choice. I refuse.” Some succumbed to further pressure but many held their ground. What is happening here? First, moral courage plays a major role because these people stood up for the protection of an innocent person against the social pressure of the experimenter. But psychological courage permeates this setting also. Each and every one of those participants had to make a choice: either face the results of their actions honestly or accept a dissonance-reducing excuse so they could maintain a positive self-image while continuing to obey the experimenter. To face the facts honestly meant admitting to themselves what exactly they were doing. It meant looking bad in front of the experimenter (who was the mirror in this limited setting) and taking a blow to their projected self-image. Psychological courage meant finding the strength to face themselves without using excuses. Without psychological courage moral courage would not have been a live option.

Sometimes the effect of self-justification in limiting future actions has a different kind of social pressure added to it. The courage needed for self-honesty can be opposed by powerful political forces. A classic example often given is the Vietnam War in which new cognitions were constantly added to justify the dissonance of “good leadership” as opposed to “sending innocent young men to be killed for no good reason.” When these added cognitions were made as public claims (e.g., the threat of Communism taking over all of southeast Asia), future actions became narrowly focused in order to be consistent with the stated justification. Now, undoubtedly, some people genuinely believed such justifications but for many others it was a useful way both to reduce dissonance for their own actions and to continue public support, with the result being an even narrower range of choices in the future. While preserving self-image ahead of all else played an important role both for Milgram’s “teachers” and for some leaders during Vietnam, what the latter added was the threat of public humiliation and political failure. All people in public office face this possibility—the potential conflict between personal integrity and a positive self-image. I would argue that, in a democracy, the courage to avoid irrational self-justification may be the source of much positive leadership in a society. Conversely, the lack of this virtue can easily lead to loss of public trust and to actions which can devastate those over whom one has power. And all because the image must be protected at all costs.

Psychological courage builds a positive cycle of self-confidence and self-esteem. Once you know you can face a truth squarely, you develop more confidence to do so in the future and you trust yourself more. The word “self-esteem” is often abused today but in the context of this book it means specifically a positive self-image that is based on self-honesty. Self-esteem may or may not be built on great ability or significant achievements in the world. But the one challenge every one of us faces is the truth about ourselves. Accepting that truth and working with it is an achievement millions never reach.

The relationship of self-esteem to dissonance-reduction is complex but important for understanding psychological courage. As you might guess, people with high self-esteem experience more dissonance when they behave in a stupid or cruel way. After all, they have a strong, well-established self-image and they just acted like a fool or worse. Conversely, people with a low self-image experience much less dissonance when they act cruelly or stupidly. Again, the reason is not hard to understand. Their actions more closely match their self-image. This difference has results in practical behavior. Persons with low self-esteem find it easier to commit cruel or stupid acts whereas people with high self-esteem resist more. Just how important this factor is has been shown in an experiment by Aronson and Mettee, an experiment which in itself poses some ethical problems. They predicted that even a temporary blow to a person’s self-esteem would make it easier for the person to do an unlawful or unethical act. They had a group of students take a personality test. Randomly, one third were told the results showed they were mature, deep and interesting people. Another third were told it showed they lacked maturity, were shallow and needed to live more interesting lives. The final third was told nothing. Then the whole group was put in an experiment by another psychologist which they thought was totally unrelated to the personality test. It was a card game involving betting and money in which cheating was easy and thought to be undetectable and cheating could clearly lead to winning. The results followed exactly from what they were told on the personality test. Those who received information that lowered their self-esteem cheated much more than the others. Those who got the positive information cheated least and the group told nothing fell exactly between.

Courage thus seems “easier” for people who have high self-esteem and high self-confidence. This goes for courage of all types. But keep in mind two provisos here. High self-esteem and high self-confidence can be a facade, especially in our capitalist system in which sales are rarely made by people who don’t look confident. Looking confident may have little to do with how one really feels about one’s self. Second, overconfidence can be a significant problem. A danger of any virtue is that, once established, it is taken as a given. So, for example, the genuine and caring physician may be so confident in her character that she begins to ignore her mistakes. After all, she is genuine and caring. Likewise, the habit of facing dissonance honestly may, in an odd way, become such a given that laziness sneaks in the back door. Courage is never easy and, when it appears to be so, we may be most in danger of losing it.

Given these provisos, the courage to face our own weaknesses and faults is genuinely enhanced if we are confident in our own strength of character. This too has important implications for child-rearing. “Self-esteem” as unconditional love has its role for a young child but eventually it should have something to do with what a child does. Very few children will be great athletes or intellectual stars, but all will face the challenge of knowing themselves and acting with (or without) integrity. If a child can be encouraged and supported to face his or her own weaknesses and to deal with them honestly, the child can begin a path to high self-esteem that is deserved, regardless of whether our economic and social system recognizes great external achievements. Such external achievements definitely deserve recognition but many who do achieve external success have little courage when it comes to facing themselves, their weaknesses, and their fears. Regardless of whatever else parents may help their child achieve, to guide a child to a life of integrity is surely the greatest moral legacy parents can leave behind them.

3. Courage and Self-Deception

A ship owner was about to send to sea an immigrant ship. He knew that she was old, and not over well built at the first; that she had seen many seas and climes, and often had needed repairs. Doubts had been suggested to him that possibly she was not seaworthy. These doubts preyed upon his mind, and made him unhappy; he thought this should put him to great expense. Before the ship sailed, however, he succeeded in overcoming these melancholy reflections. He said to himself that she had gone safely through so many voyages and weathered so many storms that it was idle to suppose she would not come safely home from this trip also. He would put his trust in Providence, which could hardly fail to protect all these unhappy families that were leaving their fatherland to seek for better times elsewhere. He would dismiss from his mind all ungenerous suspicions about the honesty of builders and contractors. In such ways he acquired a sincere and comfortable conviction that his vessel was thoroughly safe and seaworthy; he watched her depart with a light heart, and benevolent wishes for the success of the exiles in their strange new home that was to be; and he got his insurance-money when she went down in mid-ocean and told no tales.[2]

Self-justification can be seen as one form of a larger human phenomenon-self-deception. If we reduce dissonance by irrational means, the reason we do it is because we know a conflict exists. This knowledge may or may not be conscious but our emotional state of tension gives away the fact that we are aware of the dissonance. How often do people in full awareness reduce dissonance by irrational means? For example, going back to the smoking case, how common is it for people to say: “Yes, I smoke and know about the evidence showing how dangerous it and I know I am a rational person. I will downgrade the evidence knowing full well that my view is an exaggerated one whose only purpose is to allow me to continue smoking.” The answer to the previous question is: Never. Why? Because if you knew that your downgrading of the evidence was designed only to let you keep smoking, the whole point of doing it would be lost and dissonance would not be reduced. In order to be successful in irrationally reducing dissonance you have to some degree convince yourself that your distortion of the evidence or your added cognition (“movie stars smoke; it must be OK”) is true. Yet the rational you, the you who goes through life trying to make the best and most rational decisions, knows that it is not true. You know at some level that you are reducing dissonance simply to maintain the smoking habit. This co-existence of truth and lying to yourself is the heart is what is called self-deception.

In the last fifty years philosophers have spent quite some time discussing self-deception. I want to pick out certain areas that are directly relevant to psychological courage. In an excellent analysis of this issue the philosopher Mike Martin has distinguished five tactics of self-deception. They also can be viewed as levels or degrees of self-deception, though in fact they often permeate each other. Utilizing these divisions is helpful for looking at how each and everyone of us can deceive ourselves in daily life and how courage can help us face the truth.

The tactic of “willful ignorance” can be viewed as the lowest level of self-deception. Willful ignorance is keeping ourselves unaware of some information which we know would disturb us. Whether we do this or not again comes back to preserving a certain safe self-identity. For example, if you think there might be a problem with your car and you don’t have a lot of spare money at the moment, there’s a good chance you will ignore the problem, perhaps for a long time. But, despite the financial and time problems involved in fixing it, it is unlikely that you would actually deceive yourself about it. A somewhat dated term in psychology still fits here. You “suppress” the information but the information is still available to you. You might well admit that you are lax about looking into it but you can accept the truth.

This stage in self-deception is important because at this level you still have not developed a series of full-blown lies or cover-ups. It is at this stage that psychological courage early on can prevent a much greater problem later. A person needs to be emotionally aware when he or she begins to avoid information. Ask yourself: Why am I doing this? Am I trying to hide something? What emotions or what part of my self-image am I trying to protect? There is a particular emotion—a variation of fear—that fleetingly announces to you that you need to keep yourself ignorant. Courage involves being aware of that feeling, asking yourself some honest questions, and ultimately facing reality.

The second tactic of self-deception is called “systematic ignoring.” Initially this might look like the previous one but there is one important difference. Here the evidence is apparent; you are not keeping yourself separate from ever knowing the information. It’s all there but you refuse to acknowledge it. We use at least two techniques to keep ourselves from admitting such truths. The first has been called “blocking,” perhaps in therapeutic terms, “repression.” Quite simply we keep the information out of our conscious awareness. As Martin notes, part of this is preventing the information from becoming the focus of attention. It’s OK at the margins of our thought because there it can be ignored. But it must at all costs be prevented from becoming the central focus of attention. In most cases it is simply easier to block it altogether. But, in certain situations or certain conversations, the information may be forced on us and then our best maneuver is to try to keep it in the margins. Imagine Brian is deceiving himself about his career success. A person who chooses any career does not choose failure; he invests himself in it, often a great deal of himself. But not everyone is successful and admitting that can be one of the most difficult moments in a person’s life. Some willful ignorance by Brian clearly could help avoid the issue. But if the job evaluations or the results of interaction with others clearly make the point, more drastic measures would have to be taken. Evidence must be systematically ignored and blocking it would be a major way to do this. If it did come up, keeping the evidence of failure at the margins of thought would allow Brian to focus attention on harmless areas and keep the facade of success alive.

A second related technique for systematically ignoring truth is through distraction. Brian has learned that, when he begins to think about his lack of success in his profession, he can dodge the problematic areas by distracting himself with other ideas—perhaps meaningless statistics or personal relationships developed in his job or maybe his planned vacation. In conversations with others he becomes a master at distracting the conversation to other topics. Other people may think of him as a superb conversationalist but part of the reason is that he has become an expert at switching topics in an interesting way because there are some places he does not want to go. Keep in mind that “distraction” in this sense does not mean avoiding issues for rational reasons. After all, personal lives are not the property of the general public and distracting or changing topics may well be justified in many cases. (The media loves to confuse genuine privacy with the “need” to hide something.) In discussing self-deception the term means avoiding areas because you do not want to face them. It is a way to avoid being honest with yourself.

Psychological courage is a significantly more difficult virtue here. The initial moment of fear, which can lead a person to remain ignorant, has become a terror that must be covered up. The root of the terror is the fear of psychological annihilation. The individual feels that admitting the truth would be so devastating that the self could not survive. Unlike the issues discussed in later chapters, self-deception is not something people usually consider as a subject for therapy or counseling. Perhaps the biggest help in overcoming this level of self-deception is friendship. I will discuss the importance of friendship in some length in the last chapter but at this point the key is that a close friend is not threatening. A close friend is a type of counselor for self-honesty—someone who, because you trust them, can actually guide you into territory which would otherwise terrify you. Ultimately, you must decide to go there yourself and to be strong enough to avoid blocking or distraction. But this is a journey made much more bearable by someone else being with you.

The third tactic of self-deception is “emotional detachment.” This is not so much a different level as it is an effect that accompanies other degrees of self-deception. The noticeable characteristic here is an emotional coolness or aloofness when ideas are brought up which a person wants to hide from herself. For example, if a parent is deceiving herself about her child in some way, perhaps about his behavior as an adolescent, when that topic rises in consciousness or in conversation with others, she will maintain emotional distance from it. The reason is straightforward. Emotions engage us with the world around us, whether it be love, anger, admiration or any other emotion. An emotional response to evidence about her son’s behavior would force the parent to engage in it in a way that would force the issue to consciousness. As long as intellect can be cut off from feelings, we can compartmentalize events or ideas in a way that keeps us safe from any unpleasant implications. Emotions are a form of recognition. Anger, sorrow, frustration or love in response to her son’s actual behavior makes self-deception much more difficult. The lie’s transparency is exposed. So emotional detachment is critical in both remaining deliberately ignorant and in systematically ignoring a truth.

Psychological courage in dealing with this tactic means being willing to engage the truth emotionally. It is possible that this aspect of courage may “precede” in a way the courage to actually face the truth. The hidden truth always has certain emotional connotations. For example, refusing to face the son’s behavior may exist because of a feeling of loss or failure on the parent’s part. The initial engagement with the idea involves some negative emotion which the person does not want to feel. Emotional detachment is a way of avoiding that feeling. Courage can come into play by admitting into our bodily sensations emotions which we are afraid to face. There is a moment, especially early on in the self-deceptive process, when the person is fleetingly aware of that negative emotion prior to the intellect blocking and compartmentalizing the information. The moment of courage lies in that moment. If the self-deception has become habitual then there may be very little leeway for recognizing any emotion. But many times self-deception does leave a tiny crack open for the true emotion to appear, however briefly. Avoiding emotional detachment and accepting ownership of that emotion is another variant of psychological courage.

A fourth tactic in self-deception is “self-pretense.” This is beyond (in a sense) willful ignorance and systematic ignoring because at this stage the person accepts the evidence or truth of the situation but covers up the implication with excuses and false justifications. In the above example, yes, the son has stolen many times and hurt some innocent people. But the police have always had it in for him and that group he hangs around with led him astray. He is not responsible for his actions because his father was too strict and he is just rebelling. Now, whether or not there is any truth in these claims is irrelevant because the purpose of their expression is to prevent what the son is doing from coming to full consciousness in the mother. Why? Again, for the two reasons discussed above. If the mother accepts fully what the son is doing, her fear is that the image of herself she has maintained will be annihilated. It is likely she has publicly expressed these excuses and publicly attempted to maintain the false image of her son. Admission at this point involves both an admission of personal and social failure. Moreover, the emotions that would have to be faced would be traumatic. Any parent can relate to what she would feel. At this point in the process courage is catching yourself before expressing the excuse and then choosing to live without them. Since it is likely that self-pretense is often a follow up to willful ignorance and systematic ignoring, courage becomes more difficult because a pattern has been laid down.

Self-pretense blends into the deepest stage of self-deception, a level which I consider one of the most dangerous mental conditions in the world in terms of harming innocent people. Martin calls this stage “rationalization” which confuses it somewhat with other tactics in self-deception. Perhaps a better term for it would simply be “intellectual delusion.” At this level the person not only puts forth excuses and false justifications but actually comes to believe them. Then, as the phrase says, anything goes.

First, however, an important proviso. Keep in mind that we are talking about self-deception. Frequently people lie or make excuses because of external threats—loss of a job, for example. In such cases the degree of self-deception is often minimal. Frank may know full well, for example, that he is not putting in the time he should on those engineering designs. But in order to keep his job he lies about it. This is dishonesty but it probably is not self-deception. For the straightforward liar, telling the truth and refusing to make excuses under conditions such as Frank’s would fall more under moral courage. In such cases it’s unlikely (but possible) that Frank would actually come to believe what he says because he knows full well why he is lying—to save his job. The relationship between lying to others and lying to yourself can have many forms. Lying to others can be completely separate from lying to yourself, i.e., the person would simply be a “liar”. Lying to others can be partially tied into lying to yourself, e.g., the hypocrite who puts out a false front to people and partially believes it himself. Hypocrisy is closely tied to self-pretense with the addition that the hypocrite usually advertises in some way a false positive image. Most hypocrites, however, are not totally delusional about the truth. At the delusional level lying to others is completely linked to self-deception.

It’s at this last level that self-deception is most dangerous. National political leader John Smith has had to do some lying to get into office and, once there, has had to make some deals to stay there, deals that have hurt several innocent people. At first John simply avoided thinking about what happened. After all, he had won and times were good. He couldn’t afford the emotional involvement and, politically, he had to be “above” that anyway. Then, after several constituents and the press started to bring the issue to awareness, John began making excuses and justifications. Wasn’t it true, after all, that, while some people were hurt, what he did was good for the nation overall? And what choice did he really have? John only half-heartedly believed these claims; he knew what he did was a self-serving political maneuver but the justifications seemed to be selling OK to the public. And they did keep him in office with a positive image. Then a strange thing began to happen. John began to believe his own excuses and justifications. What served John’s interests really was good for the country and he really had no other choice. Now, having lost a reality check completely, John realized that tapping the phones of his enemies was a great idea for the security of the nation and that nothing kept order like having troops use maximum force against those protestors. John’s justifications were all straightforward. Other people had the odd feeling that John was lying somehow, that all this was a front but, when they looked at John, he seemed sincere. People can spot hypocrites; John didn’t seem like a hypocrite. He believed what he said.

This scenario I would argue has been played out time after time in history by political and religious leaders who have come to believe their own justifications. It is incredibly dangerous because the individual in power can then justify anything because he has become completely habitualized to deceiving himself. Surely God wants me to ask for the savings of elderly people and my investment of that money in a palatial home reinforces the glory of God. Surely that other ethnic group is truly evil and what choice does one have with true evil except to obliterate all of it? Humans have been known as “rational animals” but, given history, perhaps we should be known as the “self-deceptive animals.” How many humans can actually do what we have done to each other and be fully aware of it intellectually and emotionally? A few with antisocial personality disorder already have the interpersonal emotions blunted but I would venture to argue that the vast majority of the cruelty done to others is performed by people who have progressed by degrees to a deep level of self-deception. At such a level psychological courage is rarely an issue because such courage requires a goal defined by truth and, without an internal reality check, no image of truth exists to counter the lie. Delusional people can actually include within their scheme at times a false kind of courage— a kind of “courage” to do the destructive act. (It took “courageous leadership” to send the militia into that village.) This is yet another front for self-deception. Genuine psychological courage is extremely relevant in less profound stages of self-deception. Those fleeting moments of truth and honest emotions are doors through which we can choose to enter. If society can come to praise such courage and reinforce it, perhaps we will have less cases of abuse of power by deeply self-deceived individuals.

I want to close this section by asking a fundamental question about self-deception. Is it ever good? Put another way, are there times when we ought to avoid the truth, times in which psychological courage about facing the truth would not be a benefit? Philosophers have given several possible reasons why self-deception might be beneficial. I want to summarize some of these claims and clarify how psychological courage would still be a factor.

The examples designed to show self-deception in a positive light are ones in which a “greater good” is produced by deceiving yourself. This type of argument is an example of utilitarianism, a view in ethics that says each situation should be judged by the number and breadth of good consequences. The utilitarian claim here is that situations exist in which self-deception would produce more good than harm. For example, it has been argued that in some marriages deceiving yourself about your spouse’s infidelity may be better overall for the stability of the marriage and the children. Utilitarianism argues that life is neither fair nor reasonable and self-honesty in certain marriages might have more destructive consequences than willful ignorance or systematic ignoring of the truth. Another example given is a life-long friendship in which one of the friends has been embezzling small amounts from a joint business. The argument goes that, given the rarity and value of a long-term friendship, willful ignorance of the embezzling might be the best way to go.

Such cases are ones where lack of courage in facing the truth is an apparent virtue. But in these examples other options are considered worse than self-deception without evidence to support that claim. Often self-deception is simply easier. In the friendship example, on the surface it seems obvious that goods built up over a lifetime are not sacrificed easily and self-deception over one element (the friend’s siphoning off business funds) is worth it. But what is not discussed is the effect of self-deception itself on the friendship and the business. With self-deception a major qualitative difference enters the friendship. The blocking which occurs in self-deception, especially over something as important as the shared business, cannot but affect the emotional tone between the friends. What was before an open, genuine (perhaps naive) relationship is now one in which certain areas of conversation and thought are systematically blocked. If friendship means anything, it means openness and trust. The friendship is qualitatively changed in a destructive way by the self-deception. Moreover, it is not at all clear that maintaining a business with a partner who is embezzling is a good idea. In this case courage in facing this issue might lead to the loss of the friendship and the business but it might also deepen the friendship and improve the business. It’s a risk but courage is always a risk. Very often avoiding courage because of “good reasons” is a cover for fear.

The same point would hold for the marriage example. Is deceiving yourself worth it for the sake of the children? Again the utilitarians ignore what might be called the “radiating effect” of self-deception. What would self-deception about your spouse’s affair do to other parts of the relationship? Conversation? Your own shared sex life? The sharing of pains and joys in life? This is not some small isolated event. If any of these other areas in the marriage happened to touch on the truth, then they would have to papered over with a false front or else avoided. Self-deceivers cannot let their guard down or the deception fails; they have to invent a “cover story” to keep themselves and others involved in the deception. Besides, children are not stupid. They often, perhaps most of the time, recognize emotional dissonance easier than adults. Maintaining self-deception for a positive good in this case is most likely a fantasy. Psychological courage would be enormously difficult. You might lose the marriage and the children. Or, perhaps, you might regain a marriage and what a family is really about.

A better example to support avoidance of the truth has to do with what is commonly called “denial.” Traumatic news cannot be absorbed quickly and, utilitarians argue, for some people it cannot be absorbed at all. A quite common example of denial is being told of a terminal illness. An example given by the philosopher Amelie Rorty is of a doctor who is involved in a critical research project who discovers he is terminally ill. Rorty claims that deceiving himself about the illness may be completely justified so that he can continue with a positive attitude on the project he loves. Rorty’s example is really a variation on a common theme in psychology. Denial is valuable in cases such as terminal illness because it allows a person time to adjust and complete projects which may require full attention.

But denial of the truth is a temporary good at best. Certainly it takes time for us to absorb traumatic news and nothing is more difficult to accept than one’s own death. But denial is an important “stage.” Counselors attempt to help patients through this stage. Put another way, counselors (or close friends again) try to help the person be courageous. People not only have to deal with closure in external events but they should be able, if at all physically possible, to close the book on their personal relationships and deepest inner thoughts and feelings. You cannot close the book if you refuse to recognize that it will end. In Rorty’s example, perhaps the personality of the physician requires denial but I have more faith in the ability of people to face and deal with tragedies, even people with tendencies toward melancholy as Rorty says about this doctor. Her case is certainly possible but in acknowledging self-deception as good we are acquiescing in it and, in dealing with this physician, we would have to support it in conversation. This pattern of paternalism and humoring someone because they cannot face the truth is in many ways a thoroughly disrespectful way of treating an adult in his or her last days of life. Perhaps other options are available. Lack of considered options is a problem for many utilitarian justifications of self-deception.

I want to present three more examples, one a defense of self-deception because the event is trivial, another because the event is monstrous, and a third based on a society that one cannot escape. Robert Audi gives what he specifically considers a trivial or minor example of self-deception. A teacher who loves her students and wants them to like her convinces herself that one student’s hostile behavior in one of her courses is not due to actual hostility toward her but due to the student’s own insecurity. This is a more complex case than it appears since such hostility by students is at times related to insecurity. But let’s take it at face value. This seems to be a harmless case of self-deception. It does not involve traumatic or life-threatening events and seems limited to one student this teacher has in class. But even simple examples like this ignore the radiating effect of self-deception. It is unlikely that only one student in one course will display hostility or disdain for any given teacher. Any experienced teacher will run into students who simply do not like one’s style, personality, organization of material, the class, and so on. Moreover, and probably more important, outside of the classroom individuals frequently run into situations in which they very much want approval but are not given it. How is a person going to respond to such situations? The key here is that the motivation in this case, the need to be liked, is not context-specific. The teacher’s need to be liked is so intense that she deceives herself about the apparent facts of the student’s behavior. This is a character trait that will carry over into several possible situations. The most likely scenario for the teacher is that this case is not a special circumstance but an example of a pattern, a habit. So psychological courage in even small matters—one student and why he or she dislikes you—can begin to break a habit and start a positive cycle for facing reality more effectively.

People can deceive themselves about their feelings (“I am not angry”), about their skills (“I cannot do this job” or “I can fix anything”), about truth in nature (“all that evidence about the dinosaurs and the age of the earth is a hoax”), about a truth in their lives (“I am not an alcoholic”) or about truth in society (“That other ethnic group deserves what it gets”). Courage (along with much needed support) can defeat all of these. But the last two provide certain types of examples that imply psychological cowardice may be the best path at times. Consider Beth who was severely abused as a child and is now an adult. As an adult Beth’s life is very difficult but there are moments of genuine liberation through her artwork and dance classes. Beth deceives herself a great deal about what happened to her as a child. A close friend who knows Beth’s past and her current self-deception tries to work with Beth to help her understand what she is blocking. As she does so, it becomes apparent that, when Beth starts to trace a path of self-honesty, her world begins to disintegrate. The trauma of the childhood abuse is so profound and so deeply engrained in her psyche that it genuinely appears that personality disintegration may result from delving into it. Courage on Beth’s part is not an issue if there is no self left to act and the level of support needed to establish that renewed identity may be beyond the capability of not just friends but psychiatry in its current state. In such cases is it not better for Beth to have a life of self-deception that includes some moments of liberation rather than a very good likelihood of no life at all? This book is about the enormous value of psychological courage but, if the self truly is so fragile that to reach the choice-point of being courageous is itself impossible, then perhaps self-deception may be the only way to go on. My argument earlier is that a great deal of the defense of self-deception is not based on the evidence but on the fact that it is easier. But there are certainly cases where the evidence itself points to a different path.

One final example of a different sort but which I also find powerful and persuasive. Imagine being born and raised in Stalinist Russia. In the back of your mind you have a hint of what human freedom is but expression of that freedom is deadly. Simple deception is not enough to trick an astute and trained secret police force. Moreover, you never know who might report on you, so you can never afford “leakage” of your true views. You also cannot get out of the society. In this situation it may be critical that you convince yourself of the truth of the propaganda given you. Then you can tell your potential threat with a straight face that you support the fabric of lies. And, even more advantageous, you can use self-deception as a way to weasel your way into a position in which the threat is minimal and in which you would have maximum chance at food and shelter and, possibly, a good mate.

The point here is that social conditions may be so overwhelming that self-deception may be the only way to survive. Some other examples given in this regard are much weaker, e.g., convincing yourself that the product you are selling is worth something when actually you know it is not—all for the sake of surviving in this society. Clearly there are other options in this case, difficult as they may be. But that is not the situation in a blanket totalitarian society. Other values such as family, friends, life itself, might well be impossible if you did not convince yourself that government lies were truth (and that truth was a lie). Of course some of our greatest heroes on behalf of truth have combined psychological courage (accepting truth without self-deception) with the physical courage of facing death, and many have died because of that. And moral courage is a critical issue also because going along with the state almost always means implicitly cooperating in injustice and harm to other innocent people. But it is not clear how wide we should throw the moral net of courage here. Most if not all readers of this book are not, nor hopefully ever will be, in the situation of choosing death versus self-honesty. But many humans have been forced to make this choice. And the question of whether physical annihilation (along with, possibly, family and friends) by an efficient police state is worth personal self-honesty is not one resolved easily by moral arguments. As Socrates said in the Crito. “It is better to live well (meaning ethically) than just to live.” But “just living” may include some other profound goods not easily overlooked. So I leave this topic with this question for you the reader: When, really, is self-deception justified?

[1]Elliot Aronson, The Social Animal, 7th ed., p. 221.

[2]W. K. Clifford, cited in Bela Szabados, “The Self, Its Passions, and Self-Deception,” in Mike W. Martin, ed., Self-Deception and Self-Understanding, p. 156.