As part of human nature, we do not have the ability to remove it, but at least be wary of social self-deception, which will create various scenes to meet our innermost irrational needs, and make people go crazy in deep anesthesia, this tragedy has been repeated many times and should not continue.
On January 28, 1986, the US space shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after liftoff, killing seven astronauts.
On January 28, 1986, the US space shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after liftoff, killing seven astronauts, one of the most costly disasters in the history of human spaceflight, because of just an O-ring seal on the rocket thruster. During the 73 flights of the Challenger, the O-ring was damaged seven times (the most serious one was burned off by 1/3), four of which occurred below 18.3°C (proving that it was not resistant to low temperatures), and the temperature on the day of the accident was 7.2°C.
12 engineers associated with O-rings voted against it collectively — refusing to launch the same day.
One of the astronauts on the Challenger, Christa McAuliffe, is a teacher
In fact, the "Challenger" does not need to take off, because there is no scientific research mission, but one of the seven astronauts is a high school teacher and is ready to give a space lesson to fifth-graders across the United States. This idea is so flashy that it is equivalent to a big advertisement for NASA (NASA) and a dead line for the launch time - if it is delayed, it will have to wait for the summer vacation in a few months.
Therefore, NASA adopted a "new" way of assessing risk: the last O-ring was only burned 1/3, indicating that it could be burned through at least 3 times, and the safety factor was calculated as 3 times! At first, the risk assessment was 1/70 (the actual risk of the US Space Shuttle was 1/63), then it became 1/90, and then the top management didn't even think about it, and changed it to 1/200... When it was handed over to the President of the United States, it was 1/10,000.
For an "educational show", it caused a tragedy.
In this accident, the most difficult thing to understand is: NASA executives are also scientists, why did they make such low-level mistakes? Why didn't anyone point out the mistake? The whole plan is like a child's play, why can it be carried out? ...... American scholar Robert Trivers found that the vast majority of participants fell into "self-deception", they firmly believed that they had made up a scam and denied the truth again and again.
"Self-deception" is a universal psychological reality of human beings, but we often do not realize it, but we all have this experience:
Catch the flying ball with your hand and your brain has not yet "seen" the ball;
find that you have someone else's lighter, signature pen, etc. in your pocket, but you don't need them;
When reminiscing, I often think of things that never happened;
consider themselves kinder than the vast majority;
inadvertently touching the body of the opposite sex while chatting, and using the left hand;
I feel that the opposite sex I meet for the first time is "interesting to me";
As I get older, I will tell the same story over and over again.
The purpose of self-deception is to deceive people.
Everyone is a self-deceptioner.
Self-deception is also taught by parents.
Self-deception can benefit at the cost of becoming stupid.
The purpose of self-deception is to deceive people
In the race for survival, deception is common, and animals also deceive people. 1% of birds (such as cuckoos, North American swallows, etc.) rely on other birds to raise their young. They lay their eggs in someone else's nest, and when the young birds come out of their shells, the color of their beaks is particularly bright, which is a sign of good health and is susceptible to preferential treatment. The cuckoo chick may have evolved to mimic the volume of a whole litter of chicks, because it kicked other chicks out of the nest and fell to death, so it relies on sound to trick - it seems that all of them are there.
Invaded birds are also alert, but cuckoos put only one egg in a nest, birds can't count, and don't know which is the intruder's egg, which becomes a game theory problem: the probability of being invaded is 30%, but who will give up all for 30%? Therefore, putting only one egg is also a deceptive strategy.
Similar deception is widespread in nature:
The butterfly's caterpillar will roll itself into a ball and release the smell of ant pupae, in this way mixing into the ant's nest. When they are transported to the ants' homes, they mimic the queen's call, which gives the queen priority food and protection. When food is in short supply, worker ants will feed the imposter queen with ant pupae, and when the nest is attacked, it will also prioritize saving "her" before the chrysalis.
A person can tell that he is lying from several points:
Reduce the use of "I" and add other pronouns to clear my relationship with lies.
Reduce the use of connectives, which simplifies lies and reduces cognitive load. For example, a truth-telling person would say, "Despite the rain, I walked to the office." The liar said, "I walked to the office." ”
Words that express negation increase.
There are many pauses, because you have to think carefully about the words, so you speak less and slowly, and sometimes the facial muscles will unconsciously twitch to release tension.
Lies are often debunked, and surveys of Americans show that there is a 1 in 5 chance that the lies they tell will be debunked and another 1 in 5 will be discovered. As for the remaining 3/5, it may be that those in the know do not want to break it.
The cognitive load of lies is too heavy for ordinary people to bear, so self-deception has evolved, which has at least three major functions:
First, it is easier to be fooled;
Second, reduce the cognitive load in the process of lying;
Third, when others accuse you of lying, you can quickly defend yourself (self-deception makes people not realize that they are lying).
Everyone is a self-deceptioner
There are nine types of self-deception:
Self-aggrandizement: 80 percent of U.S. high school students consider their leadership skills to be above average, and 94 percent of researchers consider themselves to be in the top 50 percent of their industry. In matters of morality, we often think of ourselves as superior to others. Similarly, we all feel that the quality of our friends is above average... Obviously, none of this is statistically valid. The extreme form of this self-flattery is narcissism.
Demeaning others: This should be a mirror image of self-aggrandizement, and devaluing others can improve self-image.
Gangsters: By finding "likeness", it is much easier to exclude "others" than you think. There is no need to differ in beliefs, just let some people wear blue shirts and others wear red shirts, and within half an hour you can induce the emotions of the ingroup and the outgroup in this group. Such prejudices appear as early as infancy, and 3-year-olds prefer to play with in-group members and show obvious hostility towards out-group members.
Power bias: Power immediately corrupts human psychological processes. After inducing a sense of power in people, they no longer consider the views of others and always think only about themselves. For example, when Winston Churchill was prime minister, people often used to judge him as dictatorial, arrogant, and narrow-minded, but after leaving the field, he was quickly recognized as a person of self-examination and humility.
Moral superiority: Moral hypocrisy is a hidden part of our nature, and it may be just a small moral defect in ourselves, and it is an unforgivable moral problem to put on others.
Control illusion: Scientists create a lateral movement line on a computer screen that starts down and then goes up. Then have the stockbroker sit in front of the computer and hold the mouse, telling him that pressing the mouse "may" affect the movement of the line, but in fact the mouse is not connected to the computer at all. As a result, these stockbrokers performed poorly because they were used to interpreting stock market fluctuations and establishing fake pattern recognition — creating a sense of security by unearthing connections that didn't exist.
Social bias: Everyone has a set of views of society that are closely related to reality. Allowing two sides with different positions to discuss will not only fail to reach reconciliation, but will make the differences even greater. In order to build a set of self-justifying and self-serving social prejudices, everyone ignores the contradictions in them. The Republican Party once said that when the Founding Fathers knew that a future president of the United States (referring to Clinton) would sleep with a White House intern, what would they think? Black American comedian Chris Rock responded: "The Founding Fathers don't sleep with interns, they are busy sleeping with slaves."
False subject narrative: The perpetrator often makes the offense reasonable, and the victim emphasizes that the other party is intentional.
Unconscious behavior: People will unconsciously take away the unit's signature pen, lighter, and even "stolen" things are actually their own, or unconsciously touch women with their left hand when chatting, because the left brain is responsible for language, and when it is busy, it is unable to monitor the right brain, and the left hand controlled by the right brain is no longer concealed.
Self-deception is also taught by parents
There is strong evidence that babies can cheat at 6 months of age, such as fake crying and faking laughter. Babies will stop when they fake crying, see if the adult responds, and continue to cry if they do.
An interesting case:
There is a mother with a 5-month-old daughter, and the mother and daughter are very close. When her mother picked up her daughter at the nursery, her daughter was playing with her aunt, and when she saw her mother, she burst into tears after a flash of elation. The mother thought that her daughter was too happy to see her, but the daughter actually vented her grievances that she had not been taken care of by her mother, in order to make her mother feel guilty.
In the depths of human nature, everyone has the instinct of self-deception, but mastering it requires the teaching of parents, peers, teachers, society, etc. At home, parents are self-deceptionists, pretending to think about their children, but in fact they are trying to manipulate him to achieve parental exploitation. The main methods used are:
First, deliberately not responding to the needs of the child.
Second, through preaching, let children form induced self-deception, which is beneficial to parents.
Third, encourage children's altruism and punish children's selfish behavior, because parents are direct beneficiaries of altruism.
The significance of cultivating self-deception lies in:
First of all, every child has two selves, one is the maternal self and the other is the paternal self, they come from heredity, and the conflict between the two selves is constant, and they can only be bridged by self-deception.
Second, moving from deception to self-deception is an important part of growth. Most children's literature contains fiction, and most children's games are related to deception, in fact, deception and self-deception make children wiser.
However, self-deception can indeed improve the body's immunity.
In response to the invasion of parasites, bacteria, etc., the immune system will raise body temperature, every 1 ° C increase, metabolic rate will increase by 15%, and patients will lose 20% of the protein in the body. The immune system is directly related to the psychology of humans, and low immunity will bring shame, guilt, depression, etc., and to improve immunity, keeping a diary is a good choice.
In a diary, people retell past events in a way they like, and this self-deception can eliminate feelings of shame, guilt, depression, etc. Grandchildren often marvel at their ability to be unfazed, but it's not that they're calmer, it's that they're better at self-deception—telling everything in a positive way. The downside is that grandparents become weird and irritable because they refuse to see the other side that may be more real.
The older a person gets, the more likely he is to do things that others may consider very strange, including chatting about privacy regardless of the occasion, becoming more stubborn, and more fond of nagging. "Because self-deception makes them unable to tell the difference between fact and imagination.
Self-deception can benefit at the cost of becoming stupid
Self-deception is a high-level deceptive trick that reinforces deception and absolves conscience of responsibility by "believing the truth." Self-deceivers will repeatedly emphasize: my intentions are good, I wanted to help everyone; Something went wrong, it was a mistake in the operation, or someone else misunderstood me...
Self-deception is like inadvertently taking away someone else's signature pen, lighter, etc., it is an unconscious module, encountered in an adaptive scene, it is automatically triggered, it stems from the selfish nature of human beings, only by being aware of it and monitoring it can it be kept harmless.
However, the most common method used by self-deception is to declare that all human behavior should be rational and to stop the monitoring mechanism by setting a "absolutely right" goal. Looking at the history of mankind, these "infallible" goals have never succeeded, but have caused collective disasters time and time again.
Self-deception makes people stupider and dumber.
First of all, self-deception needs to hide part of the truth, which disturbs the mechanism of correct understanding of reality. Self-deception usually comes at the cost of misunderstanding the truth, especially on a social level.
Second, self-deception can fragment the psychological system and impose a heavy immune burden.
Third, self-deception allows people to automatically reinforce self-deception for short-term benefits, and once they enter the cycle of self-deception, individuals are easily trapped.
Obviously, self-deception is "the least profitable business in the world", but human beings lack enough courage to accept psychological facts such as "everyone has homosexual tendencies", "love changes over time", "self is divided and constantly conflicts with each other", "saying love is to gain profit".
In daily life, we often use the following methods:
Turning a blind eye to certain information: Criticizing our voices, even if they are correct, should be seen as ulterior motives. Just as many people refuse to get tested for AIDS because "what I don't know won't hurt me."
Misreading information: Psychological experiments have shown that when children are asked to draw a coin, hungry children draw a larger coin because money can buy food. People exaggerate information they like to hear, interpret it as "historical" and "unprecedented," and amplify that information by blocking out other information.
Biased memory: As the saying goes, "My memory is so good that I can even remember things that never happened." The author points out that the most common biased memory is historical writing, and by emphasizing a certain period of time and ignoring a certain time period, different historical interpretations can be created, and bad things become good things.
Rationalize misconduct: Obviously immoral behavior, with "I have no choice" can be exempted, similar statements include "the product of a specific stage of history", "the cost of development", "should not be blamed on the fathers" and so on.
Predicting the future: When they meet a beautiful woman, people fantasize about how they will talk to her and what will happen if they succeed, but they don't really try. Through daydreaming, sexual stress is resolved. This prediction is nothing more than brain supplement, lacking a realistic basis.
Denial and Projection: When faced with difficulties, portray a demon, push all the problems onto it, and revel in myself with a pathetic narrative of "I am pure and have been bullied by bad people".
Self-proof with denial: Self-deception does not dare to face their true self, and they cannot explain what they need, so they will deny it everywhere, and locate it through "this can't work" and "that can't work", which falls into the trap of "doubling down on the bet". After the first round of denial, the second round must continue to deny, and the third round must also deny... The responsibility for each round becomes heavier, one is to show that the other party is wrong, and the other is to show that the previous rounds did not lie, and as a result, there are more and more lies, and the resources consumed by the system are also increasing.