In their analysis of the sources of misbeliefs, McKay & Dennett (M&D) focus on how belief-producing mental mechanisms are designed. Although people may develop beliefs on their own and cherish them in private, they acquire many of their beliefs from others, and they use other people to evaluate them. Often, these beliefs pertain to ephemeral phenomena for which there are no objective criteria, such as whether one is likable or attractive. In contexts in which individuals stand to benefit from accurate representations of reality, they may solicit reality checks from others and correct their beliefs accordingly. However, when individuals stand to benefit from misrepresentations of reality, they may manipulate others into validating them, which in turn may help the manipulators believe that the misrepresentations are true.
Evolutionary theory leads us to expect people to be disposed to seek the truth when truth-seeking is the most adaptive strategy. However, truth-seeking is not always the most adaptive strategy, and the evidence clearly establishes that people are not naturally inclined to process all social information in objective or impartial ways. As expressed by Haidt:
Research on social cognition … indicates that people often behave like “intuitive lawyers” rather than like “intuitive scientists”… . Directional goals (motivations to reach a preordained conclusion) work primarily by causing a biased search in memory for supporting evidence only… . Self-serving motives bias each stage of the hypothesis-testing sequence, including the selection of initial hypotheses, the generation of inferences, the search for evidence, the evaluation of evidence, and the amount of evidence needed before one is willing to make an inference. (Haidt Reference Haidt2001, p. 821)
Strategies of social belief validation
People invoke several strategies to maximize the probability that others will validate their misbeliefs about themselves and others. First, they express their misbeliefs selectively to those they consider most likely to validate them – usually people who have a vested interest in the misbeliefs or in pleasing the misbelief-holder. For example, in conversations with in-group members, people express beliefs that favor their in-groups and demean their out-groups, and they express beliefs about their worth to their friends and relatives. M&D give examples of positive illusions that increase people's chances of surviving by improving their health. Because such beliefs also may benefit those whose fitness is linked to sick people's welfare, these people may have a vested interest in adopting and supporting them. For example, believing that a friend, mate, or relative will recover from an illness may induce one to behave in ways that increase the probability of him or her recovering, which in turn may enhance one's welfare.
Second, people buttress the misbeliefs they voice to others with a biased sample of evidence. For example, people may brag about their successes and hide their failures. And finally, people turn to others to support their misbeliefs. For example, Denton and Zarbatany (Reference Denton and Zarbatany1996) found that when people made mistakes, they made excuses to their friends, who in turn supported them. An interesting dynamic often occurs when people express a biased sample of evidence to their friends in support of their misbeliefs: Their friends end up forming more extreme misbeliefs than the people seeking validation are comfortable accepting. For example, Krebs and Laird (Reference Krebs and Laird1998) found that participants' friends made more exculpating judgments for the transgressions that the participants committed than the participants made themselves.
Social conspiracies
Friends and relatives tend to engage in a subtle form of reciprocity with respect to positive illusions about one another – “You support my illusions, and I will support yours” – which gives rise to benign folie à deux: “You are wonderful.” “So are you.” In some cases, this initiates a self-fulfilling prophesy. If each of us thinks that the other is socially attractive, funny, beautiful, of high worth, then our beliefs are at least partially validated.
Adaptive functions of illusions about one's worth
In an earlier paper, we asserted that illusions about one's own worth are adaptive because they help people deceive others about their worth (see Krebs & Denton Reference Krebs, Denton, Simpson and Kenrick1997). M&D questioned this assertion, because they questioned whether “others are deceived about the worth of self-deceptive individuals” (target article, sect. 12, para. 4, emphasis theirs), and because the results of a study revealed that people tend not to trust highly self-deceptive people (emphasis added). However, our assertion pertained to an adaptive function of species-specific illusion-producing mechanisms, not to the adaptive function of high levels of self-deception. Extreme degrees of self-deception (high and low) are probably maladaptive. Our claims can be understood in the context of the social model of misbeliefs we have outlined in this commentary. Everyone is self-deceptive in the sense that everyone harbors positive illusions about their worth. Everyone is disposed to propagate and reinforce these positive illusions by deceiving others about their worth, and this process pays off in a variety of ways.
Although people's (mis)beliefs about their worth are bound to affect others' judgments, there are two important constraints on the extent to which observers are fooled by invalidly high estimates of people's worth. First, observers inevitably evaluate these beliefs on other criteria, such as their predictive ability and the extent to which they are shared by others. We would not expect high levels of self-deception that give rise to huge discrepancies between evaluations of one's self-worth and more objective evidence to be persuasive to others.
Second, observers are sensitive to the costs and benefits of misreading signals of others' worth. In general, observers are evolved to be wary of deception in contexts in which it is more adaptive to form accurate estimates of others' worth than it is to form inaccurate estimates. In the absence of other information, such as when people are making a first impression, people's conceptions of their worth may be relatively persuasive within an optimal range. However, we would not expect others to support highly exaggerated illusions except in rare cases in which they collaborate in the illusions, such as pathological cases of folie à deux. If you are the King, I am the Queen.
