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Article Excerpt
1. Introduction
An influential literature in psychology claims that self-deception is characteristic of mental health. Most notably, Shelley Taylor, in a series of works that touches three decades, argues that "positive illusions" contribute to the production of better mood, better popularity, better ability to care for others, creativity, productivity, resilience from stress, and ultimately happiness. (1) So Taylor is enamored of the "adaptiveness" of human positive illusions. (2) Not having them is the hallmark of depression. Having them is a great boon (with a few qualifiers for when they get too extreme). Her work is not explicitly normative, but it seems to me to have the implication that many illusions she discusses are to be encouraged. Fully realistic assessments of oneself are not prized.
The question I shall be concerned with is normative. I shall ask: If we desire happiness, is it practically rational to pursue policies of self-deception? Although Taylor does not address this question specifically, her work might inspire one to answer in the affirmative.
To be precise, the reasoning I wish to refute is as follows. Having beliefs about oneself that are positive (flattering, make oneself out to be admirable, and so on) leads to happiness; work such as Taylor's in social psychology shows that this is true even when such beliefs depart from the truth in being overly self-flattering. In order to achieve happiness, therefore, it is a good idea to pursue a policy of self-deception concerning the self and one's situation, making self and situation out to be better than frank appraisal would support. (Again, I don't attribute this reasoning to Taylor herself, but hold that her work suggests it.)
I argue, on the contrary, that self-honesty is a superior policy to self-deception, if one wishes to achieve happiness. There are three sides to my overall argument.
First, I argue that Shelley Taylor's work, empirical and otherwise, cannot properly be used to support the target reasoning. This is because: (i) Taylor misapplies the notion of illusion to cases of self-fulfilling belief that, although possibly conducive to happiness, needn't be illusory; (ii) Taylor misconstrues imagining positive outcomes as part of planning as illusion; and (iii) Taylor fails to show that the beliefs resulting from what we might call self-inflation bias are the kind of beliefs needed for happiness.
Second, I give three arguments that a policy of self-deception does not produce choiceworthy happiness. The first two of these arguments even support the contrary claim: self-deception leads to unhappiness. I hold: (a) self-deception, as a producer of false belief, undermines one's ability to satisfy one's desires; (b) self-deception creates an anxiety-provoking internal tension in the mind of the self-deceiver; and (c) self-deception could only produce happiness in a thin sense, which I call Matrix happiness.
Third, I argue that an effective route to happiness lies in honest imagining, which involves honesty with oneself about one's own abilities and the offerings of one's environment, and positive imagination about what to do with abilities and environment.
2. The Ideas in Question
Before turning to these arguments, let's stabilize the notions under investigation with some conceptual work on happiness and self-deception.
2.1. Happiness
What do I mean by "happiness"? Some hold that an array of pleasurable or positive feelings constitutes happiness. Others hold that having certain genuine "external" goods--health, friends, activities, enjoyable possessions--is required as well.
I hold that both positive feelings and the possession of genuine external goods are constituents of happiness. Nor are they neatly separable. Human relationships (having friends) would, by most lights, fall in the category of external goods. But a relationship is not one we desire without mutually held positive feelings; so the relationship, usually thought of as an external good, does not exist without the pleasurable sentiment, usually thought of as an internal good. Relationships thus don't fall neatly into either category. Furthermore, activities need a favorable environment to be possible and have mental components; they defy the dichotomy as well. Nevertheless, let's treat external goods and internal positive sentiments as separable for now, since doing so will help us see some useful distinctions. (3)
One may have positive sentiments or not; and one may have genuine external goods or not. There are thus four categories of interest.
First, having neither external goods nor positive sentiments is misery.
Second, suppose one is arrayed with a fine panoply of genuine external goods but largely lacks positive sentiments in life. I call this state of affairs the Woody Allen condition, after Woody Allen's character in the film "Manhattan," who is largely successful in life and is dating a beautiful young woman, but who lacks positive sentiments about his state of affairs. The Woody Allen condition is not just a form of depression; depression involves loss of motivation and hence leads to inactivity, but neither of these problems (necessarily) obtains in the Woody Allen condition.
Third, one may have positive, pleasurable sentiments without having much or anything by way of genuine goods. I call this Matrix happiness, after the film "The Matrix," in which humans are kept in cells by artificially intelligent robots and kept in a (relatively) positive-feeling state of mind by a massive computer program that influences their conscious experience. The happiness of most humans in that film did not include genuine external goods.
Fourth, if one has genuine external goods and positive sentiments, one has choiceworthy happiness. I say "choiceworthy" because even the advocate of the view that only sentiments are needed for happiness would choose this form of happiness, if given the option. (4) Choiceworthy happiness is, I believe, more stable than either the Woody Allen condition or Matrix happiness. Matrix happiness is likely to be intruded upon often by the natural connection between people's perception of the world around them and their sentiments. The Woody Allen condition is likely to devolve into depression and then misery. (5)
We can summarize these types with the following chart:
Have positive Lack positive sentiments sentiments Have Choiceworthy Woody Allen worthwhile happiness condition external goods Lack worthwhile Matrix happiness Misery external goods
A couple of clarifying points are in order.
First, concepts of happiness or unhappiness can be applied globally or locally. Globally, one discusses a person's overall state of happiness; locally, one speaks of a person's happiness in a certain area of life. It's generally assumed that one's global happiness is largely a function of aggregated local areas of happiness. I make the analogous assumptions using the distinctions I draw here. For example, if one has local Matrix happiness in many areas of life, the person will be Matrix happy globally; and so on.
Second, just as believing one has external goods is not sufficient for having them, believing one has positive feelings or sentiments is not sufficient for having them. Beliefs about feelings may often be right, but we'll easily be misled and run afoul of much empirical psychology if we assume that people's beliefs about their own mental states, including feelings and sentiments, are always right. (6)
The distinctions of this section will play into the conclusions of this article as follows. The only kind of "happiness" that pursuing a policy of self-deception is at all likely to promote is Matrix happiness. Now you can divide Matrix happiness into two types. Some Matrix happiness will lead to choiceworthy happiness, since positive sentiment can breed positive action that yields genuine external goods. But some Matrix happiness simply sets one up for a fall and disillusionment. The Matrix happiness that a policy of self-deception produces is likely to be the latter sort.
Keep in mind that I'm focusing on the question of what's the best policy. On the issue of whether self-deception can contribute to happiness, people often raise individual examples of how self-deception can bring about happiness in particular circumstances. But to justify a policy of doing x for the sake of y, it is not enough for it to be possible for an instance of x to play a causal role in the occurrence of an instance of y; rather, making a policy of doing x for the sake of y is only justifiable, in general, if the occurrence of x can lead to a rational expectation of y in the circumstances one is actually in. So one example of a self-deception that led to happiness, choiceworthy or otherwise, will not refute my argument that it is not instrumentally rational to self-deceive for the sake of happiness. Suppose someone argues that it is bad to give sharp knives to children under the age of four. Would it refute this argument to show one possible case of a three-year-old child who did something good with a knife, for example, cut carrots? Or is that an exceptional behavior that in no way justifies the practice of giving children knives? Thus, to assess the policy, we'll have to attend to the systematic features of the states in question, self-deception and happiness. Cases are relevant, but only insofar as they represent actual patterns.
2.2. The policy of self-deception for the sake of happiness
How might one hope to deceive oneself to become happy? One cannot turn self-deception on and off like flipping a switch, so a policy will be necessary. So one must adhere to habits that cultivate beliefs that one believes will cause happiness. (7)
In particular, one wishes to believe that certain negative propositions are not true (although the weight of one's information suggests they are) and that certain positive propositions are true (although the evidence suggests otherwise). In order for it to be a policy of self-deception that one is pursuing, one must have beliefs already that are in tension with the desired beliefs. (I'll explain why shortly.) This is an important difference from most of the positive illusions that Taylor discusses, for her "healthy" subjects seem to be not at all divided on questions of whether they are, for example, more liked than most people (even though they aren't) or are better drivers than most (even though they aren't).
Along these lines, let's draw a distinction for use in the wider argument. "Self-inflation bias" will refer to a general tendency to form beliefs about oneself that are more flattering than reality justifies, where those beliefs are not necessarily controverted by other information in the agent's mind. For example, believing one is an above-average cook, where one has not much evidence for or against this, is most likely the product of self-inflation bias. "Self-deception," on the other hand, refers either to a process or a state. "Self-deception" (as a state) occurs when a belief exists that is contrary to the evidence and epistemic norms an agent has, where motivations topically related to the content of this belief are causally implicated in...
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