9.5: Self-serving Biases

Although there will always be people ready to exploit our emotions to further their ends, emotions and needs can lead us to reason badly without any help from anybody else. They can lead us to fool ourselves to avoid unpleasant facts about ourselves or the world. We cannot be effective thinkers if we won’t face obvious facts, or if we seriously distort them. We will study some of the mechanisms of self-deception at great length later, but we should take a brief look at some of them now.

Wishful Thinking

We engage in wishful thinking when we disregard the evidence and allow our desire that something be true to convince us that it really is true. Do you remember all the people who went to church on Easter Sunday during the Covid-19 pandemic? For many of them, their desire to believe that they were safe overrode all the evidence to the contrary (to deadly results). True believers in a cause are especially prone to wishful thinking, but we are all susceptible, and in its more minor forms, it is common.

The human tendency to wishful thinking is one reason why claims by pseudoscientists, advertisers, and others are accepted even when there is little evidence in their favor. There are many examples of this, and you can probably think of some from your own experience. For example, smokers find evidence that smoking is harmful to be weaker than nonsmokers do. People often greatly overestimate their chances of winning at games of chance or of winning a lottery (we will see later that the chances of winning a large state lottery are almost infinitesimally small).

Defense Mechanisms

Defense mechanisms are things we do, typically unconsciously, to keep from recognizing our actions, motives, or traits that might damage our self esteem or heighten anxiety. Most defense mechanisms involve self-deception.

Rationalization

Rationalization is a defense mechanism in which a person fabricates “reasons” after the fact to justify actions that were really done for other, less acceptable, reasons. We are all familiar with cases where people (probably even ourselves, if we think back on it) come up with a good “reason” for cheating on an exam or a diet, failing to do their homework, continuing to smoke despite their resolution to quit, or lying to a friend. Few of us like to view ourselves as dishonest, so, if we do cheat a customer or lie on our tax return, we are likely to rationalize it: everybody does it, they had it coming, they would have cheated me if they’d had half a chance, I really needed the money, and I’ll never do it again.

Repression

In the previous two chapters, we studied the tricks memory can play. One of the easiest ways to avoid having to think about something is to simply forget it. It is unclear how frequent repression is. As we noted in the previous chapter, some childhood events (e.g., sexual assault) may be so traumatic and disturbing that people repress them. In recent years claims about repressed memories of childhood abuse have attracted a good deal of attention, but there is also some evidence that this occurs less often than people think, and some scientists think that many such reports are really cases of “false-memory syndrome.”

The important points here are that repression does seem to occur sometimes, but it is an empirical question how often it does. We can’t answer such questions by taking a vote or by going with our gut feelings. We can only answer them by a careful consideration of the relevant evidence.

Denial

Denial is a refusal to acknowledge the existence or actual cause of some unpleasant feature of ourselves or the world. Here unacceptable impulses and disagreeable ideas are not perceived or allowed into full awareness. Denial is a defense mechanism that is far from rare. For example, it is common for those with serious drug or alcohol problems to deny (even to themselves) that they really have a problem (“I could quit any time I wanted to”). Often those close to the person engage in denial concerning these issues too. We have all engaged in denial at some point, whether it be a refusal to accept responsibility for the consequences of our actions or a steadfast inability to accept a foreseeable tragic outcome, such as the immanent death of an ill loved one.

Self-deception

Self-deception occurs when someone fools themselves into believing something that is not true. For example, many people have unrealistically high opinions of themselves. People often engage in self-deception to boost their ego or enhance their self-esteem, but they may do so for other reasons as well. For example, a mother may be unable to believe that her son has a drug problem, even though she has found syringes in his room several times.

Wishful thinking, rationalization, and denial shade off into one another, and we won’t worry about making fine distinctions among them. It is an empirical question just how widespread they are, but there is good evidence that they are common. What is clear is that they pose problems for clear and accurate thought. They all lead us to ignore what is really going on, which means that we can’t reason about it clearly.

The Lake Wobegon Effect

A large majority of adults in this country think that they are above average in a variety of ways, and only a very small percentage think that they are below average. For example, a survey of a million high-school seniors found that 70% rated themselves above average in leadership skills, while only 2% felt they were below average. And all of them thought that they were above average in their ability to get along with others. Most people also think of themselves as above average in intelligence, fairness, job performance, and so on through a wide range of positive attributes. They also think they have a better than average chance of having a good job or a marriage that doesn’t end in divorce. This finding has been called the Lake Wobegon effect, after the fictional town of Lake Wobegon in Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion, a place where “the women are strong, the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.” (We would be engaging in denial here if we failed to acknowledge that Keillor was creditably accused of sexual harassment and fired from Minnesota Public Radio – it is unfortunate this concept bears the name of one of his creations).

Self-serving Biases

All these factors can promote self-serving biases. We will see many examples in later chapters, so one example will suffice now. People have a strong tendency to attribute their successes to their own positive features (good character, hard work, perseverance) while attributing their failures to external conditions beyond their control (bad luck, other people didn’t do their share of the work). “I did well on the first exam because I’m bright and I studied really hard.” “I did poorly on the second exam because I felt sort of sick, and besides the exam wasn’t fair.” As we will see, we aren’t usually so charitable with others. “I was late to work because the traffic was really bad.” “Sam was late to work because he just can’t get it together to organize his time.”

Emotions are an important part of life, in many ways the most important part. But as we have seen in this chapter, they can also cloud our reasoning in ways that are harmful to others, and to ourselves.