Tag Archives: self deception

Who Am I Really?

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Am I morphing into some kind of monster?

Am I morphing into some kind of monster?

It’s a little-known or at least little-appreciated fact that a rather large percentage of my biomass is not human. Let me repeat that just for emphasis -

I am NOT ALL HUMAN!

About 99% of the outer covering of my body is NOT human. Rather, it is a “coating” of bacteria – mostly feeding on my dead skin – while some feed on my living skin cells. That’s just my skin! Within my gut are many more species of bacteria. Some help and some hinder my digestion process.

The point is – my body is not just “mine”. It is home to a large number of single-celled plant and animal life – as much as 90% of my biomass!* Each of those microscopic creatures has its own “mind” – with its own volition, decision making processes, and behaviors – maybe thoughts, too.

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10 Cognitive Thinking Errors

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One of 10 Cognitive Thinking Errors?

One of 10 Cognitive Thinking Errors?

And what to do about them. Based on the work of Aaron Beck and others, in Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy, David Burns outlines 10 common mistakes in thinking, which he calls cognitive distortions.

  1. ALL-OR-NOTHING THINKING – Also called Black and White Thinking – Thinking of things in absolute terms, like “always”, “every” or “never”. For example, if your performance falls short of perfect, you see yourself as a total failure. Few aspects of human behavior are so absolute. Nothing is 100%. No one is all bad, or all good, we all have grades. To beat this cognitive distortion:
    • Ask yourself, “Has there ever been a time when it was NOT that way?” (all or nothing thinking does not allow exceptions so if even one exception can be found, it’s no longer “all” or “nothing”)
    • Ask yourself, “Never?” or “Always?” (depending upon what you are thinking)
    • Investigate the Best-Case vs Worst-Case Scenario NLP Meta program Continue reading →

Bush’s Mistake and Kennedy’s Error

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Self-deception proves itself to be more powerful than deception

By Michael Shermer

Published in Scientific American

 

Michael Shermer, PhD
 

The war in Iraq is now four years old. It has cost more than 3,000 American lives and has run up a tab of $200 million a day, or $73 billion a year, since it began. That’s a substantial investment. No wonder most members of Congress from both parties, along with President George W. Bush, believe that we have to “stay the course” and not just “cut and run.” As Bush explained in a speech delivered on July 4, 2006, at Fort Bragg, N.C.: “I’m not going to allow the sacrifice of 2,527 troops who have died in Iraq to be in vain by pulling out before the job is done.”

We all make similarly irrational arguments about decisions in our lives: we hang on to losing stocks, unprofitable investments, failing businesses and unsuccessful relationships. If we were rational, we would just compute the odds of succeeding from this point forward and then decide if the investment warrants the potential payoff. But we are not rational–not in love or war or business–and this particular irrationality is what economists call the “sunk-cost fallacy.”

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Emotional Prediction Bias

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How we predict we'll feel afterward can motivate us.

How we predict we'll feel afterward can motivate us.

Humans are notoriously poor predictors of future emotional states. A study out of NYU demonstrated again our mental poverty. Subjects were asked before an event how they thought they’d feel after the event. Then they were polled after the event to see how their predictions held up. In every case (not just a few) they misremembered their previous prediction so as to make their prediction more accurately reflect how they felt at the time (after the event).

The study demonstrates that our emotional predictions are set to motivate rather than to be accurate. For example, football fans are more excited by their erroneous predictions of future emotional states (“I’ll hate it if my team loses”) than if they were to reflect beforehand their actual emotional state afterward (“So, they lost. It’s no big deal. I’m ok… I knew I would be…” etc.).

The results reveal a bias toward using current feelings to infer our earlier predictions. People don’t realize they made a mistake, so they don’t learn from that mistake — and keep making the same errors, said the researchers. “So, next time, Eagles fans will again expect to be devastated after their team’s loss,” Meyvis predicted. (Medical News Today)

We can use this thinking error to our advantage. Continue reading →