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full title:: The Noble Art of Self-Deception
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Highlights
- Self-deception operates because the self is not an indivisible entity: The unconscious side of the self can deceive the conscious one. (View Highlight)
- French philosopher Blaise Pascal’s aphorism: “The heart has its reasons which reason does not know at all.” (View Highlight)
- Social psychologists Justin Kruger and David Dunning conducted a series of tests revealing that people who are among the worst in terms of reasoning logically, writing grammatically, or understanding humor, for example, seriously overestimate their abilities. On average, the lowest-performing quarter of the participants rated themselves as being in the top 40 percent. (View Highlight)
- Metacognition is the ability to reflect on and assess one’s own thought processes. (View Highlight)
- For example, the ability to write a grammatically correct sentence is akin to the ability to recognize that there is a grammatical error in a sentence. Hence, if they fail to recognize their mistakes, they will grossly overestimate their ability to write grammatically correct. (View Highlight)
- positive illusions lead to better health and longer life. Studies conducted on HIV-positive people revealed that those with excessively positive perceptions of themselves exhibited a significantly slower progression of the disease. (View Highlight)
- Often, I find myself attempting to embellish the pictures, for example, only capturing people when they appear happy or deliberately excluding an ugly house in a beach photograph (View Highlight)
- In fact, what happens when I embellish a photo is that I design a memory. My memory of the trip will be largely colored by the images I choose to preserve. I deceive myself into thinking that the trip was more golden than it really was (View Highlight)
- paradox of self-deception lies in the question of how we can avoid discovering that the interpretations we make of our actions are, in the long run, so poorly aligned with our actual behavior. Our consciousness never encourages us to be honest with ourselves. A life free from self-deception can only be attained through an unadulterated understanding of our actions. (View Highlight)