depressive realism

Against Self-Delusion

PNRJ cognitive science, core principles, personal , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Mar 10 JDN 2460381

Is there a healthy amount of self-delusion? Would we be better off convincing ourselves that the world is better than it really is, in order to be happy?


A lot of people seem to think so.

I most recently encountered this attitude in Kathryn Schulz’s book Being Wrong (I liked the TED talk much better, in part because it didn’t have this), but there are plenty of other examples.

You’ll even find advocates for this attitude in the scientific literature, particularly when talking about the Lake Wobegon Effect, optimism bias, and depressive realism.

Fortunately, the psychology community seems to be turning away from this, perhaps because of mounting empirical evidence that “depressive realism” isn’t a robust effect. When I searched today, it was easier to find pop psych articles against self-delusion than in favor of it. (I strongly suspect that would not have been true about 10 years ago.)

I have come up with a very simple, powerful argument against self-delusion:

If you’re allowed to delude yourself, why not just believe everything is perfect?

If you can paint your targets after shooting, why not always paint a bullseye?

The notion seems to be that deluding yourself will help you achieve your goals. But if you’re going to delude yourself, why bother achieving goals? You could just pretend to achieve goals. You could just convince yourself that you have achieved goals. Wouldn’t that be so much easier?

The idea seems to be, for instance, to get an aspiring writer to actually finish the novel and submit it to the publisher. But why shouldn’t she simply imagine she has already done so? Why not simply believe she’s already a bestselling author?

If there’s something wrong with deluding yourself into thinking you’re a bestselling author, why isn’t that exact same thing wrong with deluding yourself into thinking you’re a better writer than you are?

Once you have opened this Pandora’s Box of lies, it’s not clear how you can ever close it again. Why shouldn’t you just stop working, stop eating, stop doing anything at all, but convince yourself that your life is wonderful and die in a state of bliss?

Granted, this is not generally what people who favor (so-called) “healthy self-delusion” advocate. But it’s difficult to see any principled reason why they should reject it. Once you give up on tying your beliefs to reality, it’s difficult to see why you shouldn’t just say that anything goes.

Why are some deviations from reality okay, but not others? Is it because they are small? Small changes in belief can still have big consequences: Believe a car is ten meters behind where it really is, and it may just run you over.

The general approach of “healthy self-delusion” seems to be that it’s all right to believe that you are smarter, prettier, healthier, wiser, and more competent than you actually are, because that will make you more confident and therefore more successful.

Well, first of all, it’s worth pointing out that some people obviously go way too far in that direction and become narcissists. But okay, let’s say we find a way to avoid that. (It’s unclear exactly how, since, again, by construction, we aren’t tying ourselves to reality.)

In practice, the people who most often get this sort of advice are people who currently lack self-confidence, who doubt their own abilities—people who suffer from Impostor Syndrome. And for people like that (and I count myself among them), a certain amount of greater self-confidence would surely be a good thing.

The idea seems to be that deluding yourself to increase your confidence will get you to face challenges and take risks you otherwise wouldn’t have, and that this will yield good outcomes.

But there’s a glaring hole in this argument:

If you have to delude yourself in order to take a risk, you shouldn’t take that risk.

Risk-taking is not an unalloyed good. Russian Roulette is certainly risky, but it’s not a good career path.

There are in fact a lot of risks you simply shouldn’t take, because they aren’t worth it.

The right risks to take are the ones for which the expected benefit outweighs the expected cost: The one with the highest expected utility. (That sounds simple, and in principle it is; but in practice, it can be extraordinarily difficult to determine.)

In other words, the right risks to take are the ones that are rational. The ones that a correct view of the world will instruct you to take.

That aspiring novelist, then, should write the book and submit it to publishers—if she’s actually any good at writing. If she’s actually terrible, then never submitting the book is the correct decision; she should spend more time honing her craft before she tries to finish it—or maybe even give up on it and do something else with her life.

What she needs, therefore, is not a confident assessment of her abilities, but an accurate one. She needs to believe that she is competent if and only if she actually is competent.

But I can also see how self-delusion can seem like good advice—and even work for some people.

If you start from an excessively negative view of yourself or the world, then giving yourself a more positive view will likely cause you to accomplish more things. If you’re constantly telling yourself that you are worthless and hopeless, then convincing yourself that you’re better than you thought is absolutely what you need to do. (Because it’s true.)

I can even see how convincing yourself that you are the best is useful—even though, by construction, most people aren’t. When you live in a hyper-competitive society like ours, where we are constantly told that winning is everything, losers are worthless, and second place is as bad as losing, it may help you get by to tell yourself that you really are the best, that you really can win. (Even weirder: “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.” Uh, that’s just… obviously false? Like, what is this even intended to mean that “Winning is everything” didn’t already say better?)

But that’s clearly not the right answer. You’re solving one problem by adding another. You shouldn’t believe you are the best; you should recognize that you don’t have to be. Second place is not as bad as losing—and neither is fifth, or tenth, or fiftieth place. The 100th-most successful author in the world still makes millions writing. The 1,000th-best musician does regular concert tours. The 10,000th-best accountant has a steady job. Even the 100,000th-best trucker can make a decent living. (Well, at least until the robots replace him.)

Honestly, it’d be great if our whole society would please get this memo. It’s no problem that “only a minority of schools play sport to a high level”—indeed, that’s literally inevitable. It’s also not clear that “60% of students read below grade level” is a problem, when “grade level” seems to be largely defined by averages. (Literacy is great and all, but what’s your objective standard for “what a sixth grader should be able to read”?)

We can’t all be the best. We can’t all even be above-average.

That’s okay. Below-average does not mean inadequate.

That’s the message we need to be sending:

You don’t have to be the best in order to succeed.

You don’t have to be perfect in order to be good enough.

You don’t even have to be above-average.

This doesn’t require believing anything that isn’t true. It doesn’t require overestimating your abilities or your chances. In fact, it asks you to believe something that is more true than “You have to be the best” or “Winning is everything”.

If what you want to do is actually worth doing, an accurate assessment will tell you that. And if an accurate assessment tells you not to do it, then you shouldn’t do it. So you have no reason at all to strive for anything other than accurate beliefs.

With this in mind, the fact that the empirical evidence for “depressive realism” is shockingly weak is not only unsurprising; it’s almost irrelevant. You can’t have evidence against being rational. If deluded people succeed more, that means something is very, very wrong; and the solution is clearly not to make more people deluded.

Of course, it’s worth pointing out that the evidence is shockingly weak: Depressed people show different biases, not less bias. And in fact they seem to be more overconfident in the following sense: They are more certain that what they predict will happen is what will actually happen.

So while most people think they will succeed when they will probably fail, depressed people are certain they will fail when in fact they could succeed. Both beliefs are inaccurate, but the depressed one is in an important sense more inaccurate: It tells you to give up, which is the wrong thing to do.

“Healthy self-delusion” ultimately amounts to trying to get you to do the right thing for the wrong reasons. But why? Do the right thing for the right reasons! If it’s really the right thing, it should have the right reasons!

What’s wrong with “should”?

PNRJ cognitive science, ethics, personal , , , , , , , , , ,

Nov 8 JDN 2459162

I have been a patient in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) for many years now. The central premise that thoughts can influence emotions is well-founded, and the results of CBT are empirically well supported.

One of the central concepts in CBT is cognitive distortions: There are certain systematic patterns in how we tend to think, which often results in beliefs and emotions that are disproportionate with reality.

Most of the cognitive distortions CBT deals with make sense to me—and I am well aware that my mind applies them frequently: All-or-nothing, jumping to conclusions, overgeneralization, magnification and minimization, mental filtering, discounting the positive, personalization, emotional reasoning, and labeling are all clearly distorted modes of thinking that nevertheless are extremely common.

But there’s one “distortion” on CBT lists that always bothers me: “should statements”.

Listen to this definition of what is allegedly a cognitive distortion:

Another particularly damaging distortion is the tendency to make “should” statements. Should statements are statements that you make to yourself about what you “should” do, what you “ought” to do, or what you “must” do. They can also be applied to others, imposing a set of expectations that will likely not be met.

When we hang on too tightly to our “should” statements about ourselves, the result is often guilt that we cannot live up to them. When we cling to our “should” statements about others, we are generally disappointed by their failure to meet our expectations, leading to anger and resentment.

So any time we use “should”, “ought”, or “must”, we are guilty of distorted thinking? In other words, all of ethics is a cognitive distortion? The entire concept of obligation is a symptom of a mental disorder?

Different sources on CBT will define “should statements” differently, and sometimes they offer a more nuanced definition that doesn’t have such extreme implications:

Individuals thinking in ‘shoulds’, ‘oughts; or ‘musts’ have an ironclad view of how they and others ‘should’ and ‘ought’ to be. These rigid views or rules can generate feels of anger, frustration, resentment, disappointment and guilt if not followed.

Example: You don’t like playing tennis but take lessons as you feel you ‘should’, and that you ‘shouldn’t’ make so many mistakes on the court, and that your coach ‘ought to’ be stricter on you. You also feel that you ‘must’ please him by trying harder.

This is particularly problematic, I think, because of the All-or-Nothing distortion which does genuinely seem to be common among people with depression: Unless you are very clear from the start about where to draw the line, our minds will leap to saying that all statements involving the word “should” are wrong.

I think what therapists are trying to capture with this concept is something like having unrealistic expectations, or focusing too much on what could or should have happened instead of dealing with the actual situation you are in. But many seem to be unable to articulate that clearly, and instead end up asserting that entire concept of moral obligation is a cognitive distortion.

There may be a deeper error here as well: The way we study mental illness doesn’t involve enough comparison with the control group. Psychologists are accustomed to asking the question, “How do people with depression think?”; but they are not accustomed to asking the question, “How do people with depression think compared to people who don’t?” If you want to establish that A causes B, it’s not enough to show that those with B have A; you must also show that those who don’t have B also don’t have A.

This is an extreme example for illustration, but suppose someone became convinced that depression is caused by having a liver. They studied a bunch of people with depression, and found that they all had livers; hypothesis confirmed! Clearly, we need to remove the livers, and that will cure the depression.

The best example I can find of a study that actually asked that question compared nursing students and found that cognitive distortions explain about 20% of the variance in depression. This is a significant amount—but still leaves a lot unexplained. And most of the research on depression doesn’t even seem to think to compare against people without depression.

My impression is that some cognitive distortions are genuinely more common among people with depression—but not all of them. There is an ongoing controversy over what’s called the depressive realism effect, which is the finding that in at least some circumstances the beliefs of people with mild depression seem to be more accurate than the beliefs of people with no depression at all. The result is controversial both because it seems to threaten the paradigm that depression is caused by distortions, and because it seems to be very dependent on context; sometimes depression makes people more accurate in their beliefs, other times it makes them less accurate.

Overall, I am inclined to think that most people have a variety of cognitive distortions, but we only tend to notice when those distortions begin causing distress—such when are they involved in depression. Human thinking in general seems to be a muddled mess of heuristics, and the wonder is that we function as well as we do.

Does this mean that we should stop trying to remove cognitive distortions? Not at all. Distorted thinking can be harmful even if it doesn’t cause you distress: The obvious example is a fanatical religious or political belief that leads you to harm others. And indeed, recognizing and challenging cognitive distortions is a highly effective treatment for depression.

Actually I created a simple cognitive distortion worksheet based on the TEAM-CBT approach developed by David Burns that has helped me a great deal in a remarkably short time. You can download the worksheet yourself and try it out. Start with a blank page and write down as many negative thoughts as you can, and then pick 3-5 that seem particularly extreme or unlikely. Then make a copy of the cognitive distortion worksheet for each of those thoughts and follow through it step by step. Particularly do not ignore the step “This thought shows the following good things about me and my core values:”; that often feels the strangest, but it’s a critical part of what makes the TEAM-CBT approach better than conventional CBT.

So yes, we should try to challenge our cognitive distortions. But the mere fact that a thought is distressing doesn’t imply that it is wrong, and giving up on the entire concept of “should” and “ought” is throwing out a lot of babies with that bathwater.

We should be careful about labeling any thoughts that depressed people have as cognitive distortions—and “should statements” is a clear example where many psychologists have overreached in what they characterize as a distortion.

Revealed preference: Does the fact that I did it mean I preferred it?

PNRJ critique of neoclassical economics, heuristics and biases , , , , , , ,

Post 312 Oct 27 JDN 2458784

One of the most basic axioms of neoclassical economics is revealed preference: Because we cannot observe preferences directly, we infer them from actions. Whatever you chose must be what you preferred.

Stated so badly, this is obviously not true: We often make decisions that we later come to regret. We may choose under duress, or confusion; we may lack necessary information. We change our minds.

And there really do seem to be economists who use it in this bald way: From the fact that a particular outcome occurred in a free market, they will infer that it must be optimally efficient. (“Freshwater” economists who are dubious of any intervention into markets seem to be most guilty of this.) In the most extreme form, this account would have us believe that people who trip and fall do so on purpose.

I doubt anyone believes that particular version—but there do seem to be people who believe that unemployment is the result of people voluntarily choosing not to work, and revealed preference has also led economists down some strange paths when trying to explain what sure looks like irrational behavior—such as “rational addiction” theory, positing that someone can absolutely become addicted to alcohol or heroin and end up ruining their life all based on completely rational, forward-thinking decision planning.

The theory can be adapted to deal with these issues, by specifying that it’s only choices made with full information and all of our faculties intact that count as revealing our preferences.

But when are we ever in such circumstances? When do we ever really have all the information we need in order to make a rational decision? Just what constitutes intact faculties? No one is perfectly rational—so how rational must we be in order for our decisions to count as revealing our preferences?

Revealed preference theory also quickly becomes tautologous: Why do we choose to do things? Because we prefer them. What do we prefer? What we choose to do. Without some independent account of what our preferences are, we can’t really predict behavior this way.

A standard counter-argument to this is that revealed preference theory imposes certain constraints of consistency and transitivity, so it is not utterly vacuous. The problem with this answer is that human beings don’t obey those constraints. The Allais Paradox, the Ellsberg Paradox, the sunk cost fallacy. It’s even possible to use these inconsistencies to create “money pumps” that will cause people to systematically give you money; this has been done in experiments. While real-world violations seem to be small, they’re definitely present. So insofar as your theory is testable, it’s false.

The good news is that we really don’t need revealed preference theory. We already have ways of telling what human beings prefer that are considerably richer than simply observing what they choose in various scenarios. One very simple but surprisingly powerful method is to ask. In general, if you ask people what they want and they have no reason to distrust you, they will in fact tell you what they want.

We also have our own introspection, as well as our knowledge about millions of years of evolutionary history that shaped our brains. We don’t expect a lot of people to prefer suffering, for instance (even masochists, who might be said to ‘prefer pain’, seem to be experiencing that pain rather differently than the rest of us would). We generally expect that people will prefer to stay alive rather than die. Some may prefer chocolate, others vanilla; but few prefer motor oil. Our preferences may vary, but they do follow consistent patterns; they are not utterly arbitrary and inscrutable.

There is a deeper problem that any account of human desires must face, however: Sometimes we are actually wrong about our own desires. Affective forecasting, the prediction of our own future mental states, is astonishingly unreliable. People often wildly overestimate the emotional effects of both positive and negative outcomes. (Interestingly, people with depression tend not to do this—those with severe depression often underestimate the emotional effects of positive outcomes, while those with mild depression seem to be some of the most accurate forecasters, an example of the depressive realism effect.)

There may be no simple solution to this problem. Human existence is complicated; we spend large portions of our lives trying to figure out what it is we really want.
This means that we should not simply trust that whatever it is happens is what everyone—or even necessarily anyone—wants to happen. People make mistakes, even large, systematic, repeated mistakes. Sometimes what happens is just bad, and we should be trying to change it. Indeed, sometimes people need to be protected from their own bad decisions.