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From the New York Times best-selling author and host of Hidden Brain comes a thought-provoking look at the role of self-deception in human flourishing.Self-deception does terrible harm to us, to our communities, and to the planet. But if it is so bad for us, why is it ubiquitous? In Useful Delusions, Shankar Vedantam and Bill Mesler argue that, paradoxically, self-deception can also play a vital role in our success and well-being.The lies we tell ourselves sustain our daily interactions with friends, lovers, and coworkers. They can explain why some people live longer than others, why some couples remain in love and others don’t, why some nations hold together while others splinter.Filled with powerful personal stories and drawing on new insights in psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy, Useful Delusions offers a fascinating tour of what it really means to be human.
At this time of writing, The Audiobook Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain has garnered 9 customer reviews with rating of 5 out of 5 stars. Not a bad score at all as if you round it off, it’s actually a perfect TEN already. From the looks of that rating, we can say the Audiobook is Good TO READ!
Best Edition Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain with FREE EASY Reading!
One facet of a book that separates it from other avenues of media, at least for myself, is a book’s surprising ability to make you thankful for the author’s work even if you disagree with it. It seems to happen to me particularly often. Malcolm Gladwell’s ideas are about a 50/50 proposition whether I’ll agree with him or not, but I will always read his books and I’ll eventually catch up on all his podcasts too. I don’t agree with Ben Sasse on several points, but his books (The Vanishing American Adult and Them) are ones I recommend widely.You can probably guess by now that I thought similarly about Shankar Vedantam’s* Useful Delusions: The Power & Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain. However, I had much deeper disagreements with this book and have struggled with its ideas for a period of weeks now. Vedantam brings meaningful questions to a discussion of how we delude ourselves and how those delusions can be used for meaningful ends. However, his top-line argument is highly controversial (and incorrect, I believe) and some examples he uses are weak, if not hilarious.*(Although science writer Bill Mesler earns a co-author credit, I will refer to Vedantam as the author because it is written in his voice.)So what point is Vedantam arguing in Useful Delusions? I think it is well summed up in a passage of the introduction:"…we ought to care less about whether something is simply true or untrue and ask more complicated questions: What are the consequences of self-deception? Whom does it serve? Do the benefits justify the costs?At a minimum, I hope this book prompts you to acknowledge the great debt you owe to the many self-deceptions that sustain your life. Indeed, even if your goal is to fight self-deception, you cannot do it without first understanding its profound power."On the second point, Vedantam accomplishes his goal of demonstrating the profound power of delusions on our minds. I will give some examples later of how well this is done, and this provides a lot of nuance in my thought process. However, I find it impossible to get on board with the idea that we should be doing a cost-benefit analysis to determine if believing a lie is OK or not.I realize that this version of the book (I have an advance copy so it is possible that something was changed or explained differently in the published version) was written well before the events from election day 2020 through the Capitol insurrection on January 6th. But this idea, in light of the lies and self-delusions necessary to believe in QAnon conspiracies or believe the 2020 election was stolen, is laughable to support without a much more detailed moral analysis that Vedantam does not provide. By what standard are we to determine if the delusion’s benefits outweigh the costs? It has to be a personalized standard, which is untenable. It’s the same as saying that the truth doesn’t matter, only your truth. And I thought we had spent the last 4+ years discovering that no matter what you personally believe, the truth does matter immensely.One early example that I considered laughable is one that Vedantam describes as one of the “everyday delusions” with which we trick ourselves: niceties in customer service jobs. Vedantam attempts to argue that being nice to customers in a service job is an example of a delusion and a “minor lie”. But there is a problem with this interpretation: The woman at McDonald’s isn’t deluding herself about how she truly feels about me, and I don’t actually think she likes me as a person. I think she’s being nice! No one is being lied to here.And then there’s this passage about Donald Trump, the former deluder-in-chief:"One criticism that both Democrats and Republicans made of President Donald Trump is that he lacked a filter. If he thought Mexicans coming over the border were rapists, he said so. Of course, another term to describe such behavior is “candor.” You knew where you stood when you spoke with The Donald, since he made his mind abundantly clear in a stream of tweets, insults and inflated claims. For a long time, Americans dreamed of getting a president who was “authentic.” But throughout the Trump presidency, most Democrats, and large numbers of Republicans, wished they could install a filter between Trump’s brain and his mouth. They wanted him to shut up about things he clearly believed were true."I realize the point here is about everyday delusions and how we all “lie” to each other all the time. But to act as if Trump wasn’t either operating under self-delusion or trying to lie to others, at a higher rate than any other President? That is just laughable. It doesn’t land well. Donald Trump either believed lies or peddled them to rally his base, and it is simply wrong to use this example to argue that he was more honest in any way.The final issues that I saw throughout the book were consistent references to religion as self-delusion. It is perfectly fine to hear from Vedantam’s perspective as an apparently irreligious person, but he seems to take glee in assuming that he is correct in the nonexistence of a deity and thus the vast majority of the earth’s population is self-deluded. Here is the most frustrating excerpt:"Just as beliefs about an omniscient, angry God fall away when a functioning state provides us with infrastructure, laws, and public safety, and when market economies provide us with consumer goods, entrepreneurial opportunities and good jobs, so also the way to root out self-deception is by compassionately asking what people lack, and exploring how we might help replace what is missing."So, while Vedantam considers belief in God a delusion, he also thinks that it’s a good thing to replace the delusion with the truth if it can accomplish the same goal. I’m agreed with that point, but it is the opposite of connecting with your readers to assume that their beliefs are incorrect and yours are correct. Not a good look, man.Beyond what I see as obvious pitfalls in Vedantam’s argument, there is a surprising amount of substance there. First, he wonderfully describes the general psychological mechanism for delusional thinking in one brief but important passage:"Our senses are flooded with information. We literally do not have the cognitive power to process all of this data, and so our brains take a shortcut. They discard most of the information, and focus attention on a small subset of the data. This is one reason we fall for illusions in psychological experiments. When you ask people to keep very close track of basketballs being passed back and forth by a group of players on a court, about half fail to notice an actor in a gorilla suit who walks into the frame, beats his chest, and walks out. (there are popular videos on YouTube that demonstrate this experiment.)"This is so important in understanding why our brain falls for illusions, delusions, and lies. It’s a cognitive processing problem. So it’s natural. But the goal is to not give in to the illusions and instead let truth reign in its place.The strongest example of a “useful delusion” Vedantam provides, however, is the strength of the placebo effect. For those unaware, the placebo effect refers to the use of a sugar pill in experiments involving medications so that the control group will not know if they are receiving the treatment or not. This is necessary because just thinking that you are receiving a treatment can actually lessen your symptoms, especially if those are psychological symptoms such as pain or mood state. (Yes, the pain in sprain is mainly in the brain.) Vedantam argues that we should not consider a medication that only provides relief up to the placebo effect to be a medication that “doesn’t work”, because the placebo effect does provide healing to some extent, and that’s something.I get his point here, and I think it’s an interesting one. Doctors are essentially prescribing a placebo when they prescribe antibiotics for viral infections, which antibiotics will do nothing to heal. And this actually does harm to your body as it builds immunity to the antibiotics. So should doctors prescribe a placebo when they can’t do anything else? Vedantam also writes about “placebo” surgeries, where a surgeon performs a fake surgery, simply going through the motions instead of actually performing it. This also provides some degree of healing to the patient, although obviously not much as the actual surgery. So should “placebo surgeries” become commonplace?Obviously, people would be very upset if they think they are being treated and it turns out they received a placebo. But if that was the only option, should they be upset? Isn’t some relief better than none? In this case, the delusion (sometimes even self-delusion) does do a significant amount of good. Does it matter that it isn’t the truth? I’m still thinking about this. But the truth is important and delusions are not something to be sought after on a grand scale. How do we decide if they are ever OK? That’s something that needs to be discussed by more than just psychologists. It is important to work through these big questions as post-modernism crumbles and we recover from some of the lies for which many people sadly continue to fall.I received a review copy of Useful Delusions courtesy of W.W. Norton and NetGalley, but my opinions are my own.
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