Lying is one of our superior capabilities developed by evolution. In a certain way, helps us to survive in certain situations .

Thus, self-deception has two functions: first, it allows one to deceive others in a better way (since no one lies better than one who lies to himself), which is especially useful in an era where the ability to relate to others (social intelligence) has become a priority, using manipulation as a fundamental tool in many cases (see any business). This 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 only want your money”.

On the other hand, self-deception is a way of preserving our self-esteem and is related in some way 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 serve the function of avoiding exposure to “slump,” the change from experiencing a positive emotion to experiencing a negative emotion (something like “since problems are an inevitable part of life, if I’m worried when things are going well, I’m prepared for when things go badly.) It is, in short, a form of emotional repression.

Concern also reduces the discomfort of the presence of a problem , as it is an attempt at cognitive resolution of the problem. While I worry about a problem, I feel that I am doing “something” to solve it, even if I don’t actually solve it, thus decreasing my discomfort from not actually facing the problem. Hypochondria, on the other hand, is a way of masking an egocentric trait (the patient is so self-centered that he believes 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 become more intelligent or capable of facing 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, Festinger’s term cognitive dissonance refers to the discomfort we feel when we are 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 an apparently reasonable explanation to a past action that is not or did not have good reasons to be performed.

Its application to self-esteem

Let’s explain this: the self-esteem or appreciation 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 lives in order to change it. However, our brain, which is very smart and resistant to change, says “why are we going to modify little things in our lives, face reality that hurts or scares us, take risks like quitting work, talk to a certain person about a very uncomfortable subject, etc, when instead we can rethink this and tell ourselves that we are fine and thus avoid suffering, avoid situations that are going to make us more uncomfortable, avoid fear

Self-deception and avoidance are mechanisms for reducing energy expenditure that the brain should employ to modify connections, translated into behaviors, attitudes and traits (whose neurobiological substrate belongs to many equivalent and very stable connections in our brain). In psychological terms it means that our behaviour and our cognitive processing have a personal style that is difficult to modify to cope with environmental aspects for which we are not prepared.

Most of the heuristics we use to think on a regular basis 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, this is why depression is contagious: the depressive person’s speech is so consistent that the people around him or her can internalize it as well. But patients with depression also don’t escape other forms of self-deception , let alone avoidance.

As Kahneman said, we humans 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 we may believe, if not the result of self-deception and avoidance, are only a small part of the various factors, functions and causes we may perceive.

For example, personality disorders are egosyntonic , that is, the traits do not produce discomfort in the patient, so he considers that the problems he has are due to certain circumstances in his life and not to his personality. Although the factors for assessing 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 boosting his ego, just as a paranoid person does not consider his degree of vigilance pathological.

What to do?

Many concepts of psychology can be pigeonholed into self-deception or avoidance. The most common in any psychological consultation is that patients engage in avoidance behaviors over which they self-deceive themselves so that they do not assume they are avoiding. Thus the problem is perpetuated through powerful negative reinforcement .

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