A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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Living a Lie: We Deceive Ourselves to Better Deceive Others
People mislead themselves all day long. We tell ourselves we’re smarter and better looking than our friends, that our political party can do no wrong, that we’re too busy to help a colleague. In 1976, in the foreword to Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene, the biologist Robert Trivers floated a novel explanation for such self-serving biases: We dupe ourselves in order to deceive others, creating social advantage. Now after four decades Trivers and his colleagues have published the first research supporting his idea.
Psychologists have identified several ways of fooling ourselves: biased information-gathering, biased reasoning and biased recollections. The new work, forthcoming in the Journal of Economic Psychology, focuses on the first — the way we seek information that supports what we want to believe and avoid that which does not.
Much more at www.scientificamerican.com/article/living-a-lie-we-deceive-ourselves-t
o-better-deceive-others/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Ahem!
Haven't people known about the first part for a long time and didn't they call it confirmation bias a long time ago?
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Quote:You didn't read the article, did you? I'll quote three paragraphs:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
Ahem!
Haven't people known about the first part for a long time and didn't they call it confirmation bias a long time ago?
In one experiment Trivers and his team asked 306 online participants to write a persuasive speech about a fictional man named Mark. They were told they would receive a bonus depending on how effective it was. Some were told to present Mark as likable, others were instructed to depict him as unlikable, the remaining subjects were directed to convey whatever impression they formed. To gather information about Mark, the participants watched a series of short videos, which they could stop observing at any intermission. For some viewers, most of the early videos presented Mark in a good light (recycling, returning a wallet), and they grew gradually darker (catcalling, punching a friend). For others, the videos went from dark to light.
When incentivized to present Mark as likable, people who watched the likable videos first stopped watching sooner than those who saw unlikable videos first. The former did not wait for a complete picture as long as they got the information they needed to convince themselves, and others, of Mark’s goodness. In turn, their own opinions about Mark were more positive, which led their essays about his good nature to be more convincing, as rated by other participants. (A complementary process occurred for those paid to present Mark as bad.) “What’s so interesting is that we seem to intuitively understand that if we can get ourselves to believe something first, we’ll be more effective at getting others to believe it,” says William von Hippel, a psychologist at The University of Queensland, who co-authored the study. “So we process information in a biased fashion, we convince ourselves, and we convince others. The beauty is, those are the steps Trivers outlined—and they all lined up in one study.”
In real life you are not being paid to talk about Mark but you may be selling a used car or debating a tax policy or arguing for a promotion—cases in which you benefit not from gaining and presenting an accurate picture of reality but from convincing someone of a particular point of view.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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No - I read it.
People have all sorts of reasons to want to be right. Wanting to be right to sell something to somebody is only one reason out of many. Once you want to be right for whatever reason, you'll do a lot to convince yourself that you are.
It all seems like part of the same package to me.
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Quote:You could change the words "want to be right" to "deceive and mislead". Then you'd be more than halfway to a theory about why American politics has gone so horribly wrong. See, for examples, Hoover's Great Depression or LBJ's Vietnam War or Bush's Iraq War or Trump's Covid-19 War.
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
No - I read it.
People have all sorts of reasons to want to be right. Wanting to be right to sell something to somebody is only one reason out of many. Once you want to be right for whatever reason, you'll do a lot to convince yourself that you are.
It all seems like part of the same package to me.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Living a Lie: We Deceive Ourselves to Better Deceive Others
People mislead themselves all day long. We tell ourselves we’re smarter and better looking than our friends, that our political party can do no wrong, that we’re too busy to help a colleague. In 1976, in the foreword to Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene, the biologist Robert Trivers floated a novel explanation for such self-serving biases: We dupe ourselves in order to deceive others, creating social advantage. Now after four decades Trivers and his colleagues have published the first research supporting his idea.
Psychologists have identified several ways of fooling ourselves: biased information-gathering, biased reasoning and biased recollections. The new work, forthcoming in the Journal of Economic Psychology, focuses on the first — the way we seek information that supports what we want to believe and avoid that which does not.
Much more at www.scientificamerican.com/article/living-a-lie-we-deceive-ourselves-t
o-better-deceive-others/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
Glad you're doing research to figure out what's wrong with you.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Yeah, pretty much.
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LOL
Cool.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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If you could reason with Trump supporters, there would no longer be any.
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We wouldn't have Trump in there if it weren't for you people.
Take some accountability for your actions, and remember those words when you've got four more years of Trump come November.
Every single thing you claim other people are doing is exactly what you yourself have done.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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