of the truth at each stage of the psychological process. This is why psychology is both the study of information acquisition and analysis and also the study of its continual degradation and destruction.
One important fact is worth stressing at the outset. Self-deception does not require that the truth and falsehood regarding something be simultaneously stored—as in our example of voice recognition (Chapter 3). Falsehood alone may be stored. As we saw for the old-age positivity bias (Chapter 6), the earlier the information is shunted aside—or indeed entirely avoided—the less storage of truth occurs and the less need there will be for (potentially costly) suppression later on. At the same time, since less information is stored, there are greater potential costs associated with complete ignorance. As time after acquisition increases, the choice between suppressing and retaining the truth should be more subtle and complex. The study of exactly how these conflicting forces have played out over time is a completely open field whose exploration will be most revealing.
In what follows, I begin with a review of some of the biasing that takes place during information processing. This is by no means an exhaustive look but more an impressionistic one of the ways in which various psychological processes support a deceptive function. This may include biases in predicting future feelings. Especially important are the roles of denial, projection, and cognitive dissonance in molding deceit and self-deception.
AVOIDING SOME INFORMATION AND SEEKING OUT OTHER
However much we champion freedom of thought, we actually spend much of our time censoring input. We seek out publications that mirror or support our prior views and largely avoid those that don’t. If I see yet another article suggesting the medical benefits of marijuana, you can trust me to give it a careful read; an article on its health hazards is worth at best a quick glance. Regarding tobacco, I couldn’t care less. The scientific facts were established decades ago and it has been years since my last cigarette. So this bias in my attention span is both directly adaptive—I smoke marijuana, so I am interested in its effects—and serves self-deception, because I hype the positive and neglect the negative, the better to defend the behavior from my own inspection and that of others.
A lab experiment measured this kind of bias precisely by confronting people with the chance that they might have a tendency toward a serious medical condition and telling them a simple test would suggest whether they were vulnerable. If they applied their saliva to a strip of material and it changed color, this indicated either vulnerability or not (depending on experimental group). People led to believe that a color change was good looked at the strip 60 percent longer than did those who thought it would be bad (actually the strip never changed color). In another experiment, people listened to a tape describing the dangers of smoking, while being asked to pay attention to content. Meanwhile, there was some background static and the subjects had the option of decreasing its volume. Smokers chose not to decrease the static, while nonsmokers lowered the level, the better to hear what was being said.
Some people avoid taking HIV and other diagnostic tests, the better not to hear bad news. “What I don’t know can’t hurt me.” As expected, this is especially likely when little or nothing can be done either way. It is also not surprising that those who feel more secure about themselves are more willing to consider negative information. In short, we actively avoid learning negative information about ourselves, especially when it can’t lead to any useful counteraction and when we feel otherwise insecure about ourselves. Self-deception is here acting in service of maintaining and projecting a positive self-view.
In many situations, we can choose what to concentrate on. At a cocktail party, we could overhear two conversations. Depending on which views we wish to hear, we may attend to one conversation instead of the other. We are likely to be aware of the general tenor of the information we are avoiding but none of its details, so here again biased processes of information-gathering may work early enough to leave no information at all that may later need to be hidden. In one experiment, people were convinced that they were likely—or highly unlikely—to be chosen for a prospective date. If yes, they spent slightly more time studying the positive rather than negative attributes of the prospective date, but if no, they spent more time looking at the negative, as