![]() Without that belief, your spirit dwindles quickly… The illusion of control persists like the other positive illusions because you need to feel as though you can push against the world and notice it move. Another is the illusion of control - our hindsight’s inclination to attribute our successes to ability and our failures to luck. One is the illusory superiority bias - our tendency to judge ourselves less harshly than we do others and to see ourselves as unique, special individuals amid a homogenous, dull crowd. Your more accurate representations of social reality make you feel bad and weird mainly because most people have a reality-distortion module implanted in their heads sadly, yours is either missing or malfunctioning.Ī subset of three positive illusions powers our self-enhancement bias. You have a strange superpower - the ability to see the world closer to what it really is. If your explanatory style rests in that area of the spectrum, you tend to experience a moderate level of depression more often than not because you are cursed to see the world as a place worthy neither of great dread nor of bounding delight, but just a place. About 20 percent of all people live in that spot, and psychologists call the state of mind generated by those people depressive realism*. Positive illusions evaporate there, and the family of perceptions mutating off the self-serving bias cannot take root. ![]() Right below the midpoint of this spectrum is a place where people see themselves in a harsh yellow light of objectivity. At the other end is an overexposed candy-cane forest of unrealistic positive opinions about how other people see you and your own competence. McRaney explains:Īt one end is a black swamp of unrealistic negative opinions about life and your place in it. Still, our self-perception - or explanatory style - exists on a spectrum, and different people fall at different spots along it. Thompson right about journalism when he wrote that “there is no such thing as Objective Journalism” and that “the phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms,” but he was also right about the human condition at large - we are wildly unrealistic about ourselves, and that’s a good thing. that people who are brutally honest with themselves are not as happy day to day as people with unrealistic assumptions about their abilities. Your wildly inaccurate self-evaluations get you through rough times and help motivate you when times are good. Illustration from The Mighty Lalouche by Sophie Blackall Much like the respiration inhibition function of the brain prevents us from damaging our lungs by consciously deciding to stop breathing, the psyche employs a sort of “despair-inhibition module” of positive illusions constantly running in the background to power our self-enhancement bias - those rose-colored glasses we reserve exclusively for viewing ourselves, without which we might be blinded by life. The mind’s delusory tendencies, McRaney explains, are just as vital as the automatic self-preservation processes of the body. The self-enhancement bias, which has significant overlap with the optimism bias neuroscientist Tali Sharot has studied, is one of the seventeen psychological phenomena David McRaney explores in You Are Now Less Dumb: How to Conquer Mob Mentality, How to Buy Happiness, and All the Other Ways to Outsmart Yourself ( public library), which also illuminated why we have a hard time changing our minds and how Benjamin Franklin handled haters. ![]() At the root of that mental machinery lies what psychologists have termed the self-enhancement bias - our systematic tendency to forgo rational evaluation of our own merits and abilities in favor of unrealistic attitudes that keep our ego properly inflated as to avoid sinking into the depths of despair. ![]() But a positive outlook, it turns out, isn’t merely an intellectual disposition we don - it’s a deep-seated component of our evolutionary wiring and the product of powerful, necessary delusions our mind is working around-the-clock to maintain. “Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement nothing can be done without hope,” Helen Keller wrote in her 1903 treatise on optimism. ![]()
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