How People Use Self-Deception to Stay Positive in Challenges

A new theory states that self-deception helps people remain motivated when faced with difficult situations.

A philosophy team from Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) and the University of Antwerp. They both analyzed the role self-deception plays in day-to-day life and the strategies people use to mislead themselves.

In the study the researchers describe four strategies used to stabilize and protect the positive personal image. In their view, self-deception helps people to stay positive in difficult situations.

Four strategies of self-deception

All people mislead themselves, and are often at that.

For example, if a father is convinced that his son is a good student. Then if the son scores bad grades, he may first say that the subject isn’t that important or that the teacher didn’t explain the topics properly.

How People Use Self-Deception to Shield Themselves from Unpleasant Realities

The researchers refer to this strategy of self-deception and the reorganization of beliefs. In their article, they outline three more common strategies that come into play even earlier. That was to prevent unpleasant facts from reaching you in the first place.

This includes choosing facts through meaningful action: people avoid places or persons that might bring problematic issues to their attention, such as the parent-teacher conference. Another tactic is to deny the facts by questioning the credibility of the source. As long as the father gets to know about his son’s academic problems only indirectly and does not see the grades, he can ignore the problems.

The last strategy is what the researchers call generating facts from an: For instance, if the kind mathematics teacher gently suggests that the son is not coping, and the father would have expected a proper explanation in case of difficulties of his child’s academics, he may interpret the considerable kindness and the gentle description as a positive assessment of his son’s abilities.

The researchers reported all four strategies as typical psychological thinking tendencies. Self-deception is neither unreasonably nor harmful to people in the short term, but always in the medium and long term. In stable times, sticking to proven observations is beneficial and deeply ingrained in human evolutionary behavior.