Your Daily Tao

The political motive for creating fake news is abundantly clear from Russia’s foreign interference in Ukrainian and American politics. But the economic motive should not be underestimated. And nowhere has the economic motive to create fake news been more obvious than in Veles, Macedonia. Veles is a sleepy mountain town with 55,000 residents, two TV channels, and a few lovely churches. It boasts a handful of notable historical figures and events, from Ottoman grand viziers to battles between the Serbian and Ottoman empires in the late fourteenth century. But perhaps the most important contribution to Veles’s global historical significance will be that during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, its unemployed teen population discovered how the Hype Machine could make them rich by spreading fake news online. The teenagers of Veles developed and promoted hundreds of websites that spread fake news to voters in the United States through social media advertising networks. Companies like Google show ads to Internet browsers and pay website creators based on how many high-quality eyeballs they attract. The teenagers of Veles discovered that they could make a lot of money by creating websites and promoting their content though social media networks. The more people read and shared their articles, the more money they made. They found that fake news attracted more readers and, as we found in our own research, that it was 70 percent more likely to be shared online. They created fake accounts to amplify the signal, and once the trending algorithms got hold of them, the fake news stories received a broadcasting boost, exposing them to even more people, in new areas of the network. What ensued was a deluge of fake news that washed over the American public just as they were heading to the polls. Money flowed in one direction and falsehood flowed in the other, leaving Veles flush with new BMWs, and the United States inundated with false news months before the 2016 presidential election. The town of Veles is only one such example. In 2019 fake news websites generated over $200 million a year in ad revenue. Fake news is big business, and our approaches to solving the problem (which I will address in Chapter 12) must recognize that economic reality.

If political incentives was the only motivation for fake news, then it might be easier to alleviate this issue. However, the real world is often far more complex, with multi-faceted parties and incentives. When fake news sites become profit generating on their own, then there are a whole new set of reasons for people to get into it. People whom otherwise have no political reasons might get into it for the profit.

This study, which was published on the cover of Science in March 2018, revealed some of the first large-scale evidence on how fake news spreads online. During our research, we discovered what I still, to this day, consider some of the scariest scientific results I have ever encountered. We found that false news diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information—in some cases, by an order of magnitude. Whoever said “a lie travels halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes” was right. We had uncovered a reality-distortion machine in the pipes of social media platforms, through which falsehood traveled like lightning, while the truth dripped along like molasses.

Figure 1.1 The fact-checked true (light gray), false (dark gray), and mixed (partially true, partially false) (black) news cascades on Twitter from 2009 to 2017. A fact-checked news cascade is a story that was fact-checked by one of six independent fact-checking organizations in our study, diffusing through the Twitter network as it is tweeted and retweeted by Twitter users.
But buried in these more sensational results was a less obvious result, one that is directly relevant to Crimea. As part of our analysis, before building more sophisticated models of the spread of true and false news on Twitter, we produced a simpler graph. We plotted the numbers of true and false news cascades (unbroken chains of person-to-person retweets of a story) in different categories (like politics, business, terrorism, and war) over time (Figure 1.1). The total spread of false rumors had risen over time and peaked at the end of 2013, in 2015, and again at the end of 2016, corresponding to the last U.S. presidential election. The data showed clear increases in the total number of false political rumors during the 2012 and 2016 U.S. presidential elections, confirming the political relevance of the spread of false news.

Figure 1.2 The fact-checked true (light gray), false (dark gray), and mixed (partially true, partially false) (black) political news cascades on Twitter from 2009 to 2017.
But another, more subtle result also drew our attention. Over the ten-year period from 2006 to 2017, there was only one visible spike in the number of rumors that contained both partially true and partially false information, which we called “mixed” rumors. In the original graph, opposite, it was difficult to see. So we filtered the data and replotted the graph, this time considering only political news. That’s when we saw it—a single, clear spike in the spread of stories that contained partially true and partially false information in the two months between February and March 2014 (See the spike labeled “Annexation of Crimea” in Figure 1.2.) It corresponded directly to the Russian annexation of Crimea. This result was striking, not just because it was the largest spike of mixed news in the history of verified stories spreading on Twitter (and more than four times larger than any other spike in mixed political news), but also because it ended almost as quickly as it began, right after the annexation was complete. When we investigated further, we discovered a systematic appropriation of social media by pro-Russian entities that proactively used the Hype Machine to control the Ukrainian national perception of the events in Crimea, and the international perception of what was happening there, to ultimately frame the will of the Crimean people.

A follow up on the previous post. In here, Aral asserts that there was indeed Russian tampering of social media in order to frame the perception of Crimea in its favour.

We are seeing more and more misinformation and alternative news coming in these days, shared not just through social media but even through direct messaging channels like whatsapp. The origins of all these messages remain unclear. But trust in traditional news outlets has been gradually eroding over time, with reason or not. And this will be the new way foreign entities can interfere with local politics for various interests.

On a cold day in February 2014, heavily armed gunmen surrounded the Crimean parliament building in Simferopol, Ukraine. They wore no sovereign markings but were later confirmed to be Russian special forces reacting to the deposition of Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych just days before. By all accounts, the gunmen were organized and professional. After breaking through the front door, they cut the building’s communications, confiscated all mobile electronic devices, and systematically controlled who entered and exited the building, maintaining a tight perimeter and allowing no foreign journalists inside. A few hours later, amid reports of heavy intimidation and fraud by the gunmen inside, the Crimean parliament voted to dissolve the government and replace Prime Minister Anatolii Mohyliov with Sergey Aksyonov, whose pro-Russian Unity Party had won only 4 percent of the vote in the previous election. Less than twenty-four hours later, similarly unmarked troops occupied the Simferopol and Sevastopol international airports and set up checkpoints on Crimean roads throughout the region. Two days later Aksyonov, who had earned the nickname “the Goblin” during his days as a businessman with ties both to the Russian mafia and to pro-Russian political and military groups, wrote a personal letter to Vladimir Putin, in his new capacity as the de facto prime minister of Crimea, formally requesting Russian assistance in maintaining peace and security there. Before the Ukrainian government could declare Aksyonov’s appointment unconstitutional, pro-Russian protests were whipped up throughout Crimea, developing a groundswell of visible support for reunification with Russia. The sentiment seemed one-sided, with many in Crimea expressing a strong desire to return to Russia. Within hours of Aksyonov requesting assistance, Putin received formal approval from the Russian Federation Council to send in troops. The Russian consulate began issuing passports in Crimea, and Ukrainian journalists were prohibited from entering the region. The next day Ukrainian defenses were under siege by the Black Sea Fleet and the Russian Army. Five days later, just ten days after the ordeal began, the Supreme Council of Crimea voted to re-accede to Russia after sixty years as part of Ukraine. It was one of the quickest and quietest annexations of the postwar era. As former secretary of state Madeleine Albright testified, it “marked the first time since World War II that European borders have been altered by force.” In just ten days, the region was flipped, like a light switch, from one sovereignty to another with barely a whisper. The debate about what happened in Crimea continues today. Russia denies it was an annexation. Putin views it, instead, as an accession by Crimea to Russia. His adversaries claim it was a hostile encroachment by a foreign power. In essence, there was a dispute over the will of the Crimean people—a clash of competing realities, if you will. On the one hand, Russia claimed Crimean citizens overwhelmingly supported a return to the Russian Federation. On the other hand, pro-Ukrainian voices claimed the pro-Russian sentiment had been orchestrated by Moscow rather than by the people themselves. Framing the Crimean reality was essential to restraining foreign intervention in the conflict. If this was an annexation, NATO would surely have to respond. But if this was an accession, overwhelmingly supported by the Crimean people, intervention would be harder to justify. So while the clandestine military and political operations were ruthlessly organized and flawlessly executed, Russia’s information operation, designed to frame the reality of what happened on the ground in Crimea, was even more sophisticated, perhaps the most sophisticated the world had ever seen. And when it came to framing that reality, social media—what I call the Hype Machine—was indispensable.

The perfect passage to set the context for this book. It is a long read but do read through it. Reality, more than ever, can be distorted and twisted to drive whichever narratives that people want to push. This book, is about social media and the unseeen forces behind it, shaping how we think, behave and vote.

In today’s context where we get conflicting headlines all the time from various new sources, or even conflicting headlines from a single publication over time, this book is an insightful read onto how information can be manipulated and i’ll be sharing more about it over the next few days.

While some readers will take the elephant as a challenge to behave better, others may be tempted to throw up their hands. If it’s in our nature to be selfish, why beat ourselves up over it? Why bother striving for higher ideals? There’s some evidence to suggest that our standards and our behavior can indeed degrade in this way, as the economist Robert Frank has argued. In one study, undergrads reported a greater willingness to act dishonestly after taking an economics course that emphasized self-interest as a model for human behavior. (This effect was stronger than for students who took other courses, such as an astronomy course, or even the same economics course when taught by a professor who didn’t emphasize self-interest.) More generally, people who are “cynical,” that is, who attribute lower motives to others, tend to cooperate less. Are we doing the world a disservice, then, by calling attention to the elephant and by describing it as “normal” and “natural”? Perhaps. Certainly we admit that teaching students about the elephant may have the direct effect of inducing selfishness. But this won’t necessarily be the only effect in a community that takes the ideas in this book seriously. Such a community may learn to enforce better norms against selfishness, for example, by being less willing to accept the shallow appearances of prosocial motives. There’s a whole complex game to be worked out here, well beyond the scope of this final chapter. In any case, we need to be careful to avoid the naturalistic fallacy—the mistaken idea that what’s natural (like some amount of human selfishness) is therefore good. So let us be clear: this book is not an excuse to behave badly. We can acknowledge our selfish motives without endorsing or glorifying them; we need not make virtues of our vices. At the same time, however, it would be a mistake to conclude that virtue requires us to somehow “rise above” our biological impulses. Humans are living creatures through and through; we can’t transcend our biology any more than we can transcend the laws of physics. So if we define virtue as something that arises from nonbiological causes, we set a literally impossible standard. If we want to improve ourselves, it must somehow be through our biological heritage. By the same token, we can’t ignore incentives—for example, by telling people that “good behavior” requires them to abandon their self-interest. The more sacrifice and suffering we demand in the name of virtue, the less rewarding it will be—and taken to an extreme, it means that “bad” people will fare better than “good” ones in our society. Where does this leave us, then? By what path can we hope to improve our collective welfare? Enter here the philosophy of “enlightened self-interest.” This is the notion that we can do well for ourselves by doing good for others. It’s the philosophy described by Alexis de Tocqueville, preached by Adam Smith, and practiced by Benjamin Franklin.In the biological literature, it’s known as “indirect reciprocity” or “competitive altruism.”

The final excerpt from this book. While no doubt, we all have selfishness and dishonest traits embedded into our behaviours, simply accepting this can cause us to behave in selfish ways. To round off this book, what we need to do is to understand and be aware of our subconscious behaviour while trying to do better than our biology.

The book ends off with a part about “Enlightened self-interest”. We can do well for ourselves by doing good for others.

Note that the coalitions that command our loyalty aren’t always the kind we typically consider “political.” Each of us is a member of many different groups, which can be nested within each other or else partially overlapping, as in a Venn diagram. We live in neighborhoods, cities, states, and nations; we work on teams within companies; and we worship at churches belonging to denominations of overarching religions. We’re also tied to a given race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation. All of these groups compete for our loyalties; note, for example, Madeleine Albright’s insistence that “there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other.” And how much loyalty we feel to each group depends on many factors, both personal and cultural. As the political scientist Samuel Huntington points out, Westerners typically have a lot of national loyalty, whereas Arab Muslims are less devoted to their nation than to their extended family and tribe (on the one hand), and to their entire religion and civilization (on the other).At that our political behavior is driven largely by coalition loyalty, then, we’re not trying to single out political parties (Democrat, Republican) or political ideologies (liberal, conservative) as the fundamental focal points. The left–right split happens to be important in modern liberal democracies, especially the United States in recent, more-polarized decades, but changing circumstances can shift the focal points. When a nation goes to war, for example, intra-national political divisions often take a back seat to patriotism and national unity. In other words, context matters—a lot. Nevertheless, our hypothesis is that the political behavior of ordinary, individual citizens is often better explained as an attempt to signal loyalty to “our side” (whatever side that happens to be in a particular situation), rather than as a good-faith attempt to improve outcomes. In addition to the Do-Right’s motives, then, we also harbor the motives of the apparatchik: wanting to appear loyal to the groups around us. This is the key to making sense of our political behavior. It’s not just an attempt to influence outcomes; it’s also, in many ways, a performance.

We are all engaging in this performance online where we can signal our loyalty to our “tribes” as well as our views. When we share or chat with our friends about how “stupid” the other side is, a hidden motivation is to entrench our loyalty and feel supported. Attempting, in good faith, to improve outcomes can get difficult if we remain in our digital or physical echo chambers.

In light of this, consider how an industrial-era school system prepares us for the modern workplace. Children are expected to sit still for hours upon hours; to control their impulses; to focus on boring, repetitive tasks; to move from place to place when a bell rings; and even to ask permission before going to the bathroom (think about that for a second). Teachers systematically reward children for being docile and punish them for “acting out,” that is, for acting as their own masters. In fact, teachers reward discipline independent of its influence on learning, and in ways that tamp down on student creativity. Children are also trained to accept being measured, graded, and ranked, often in front of others. This enterprise, which typically lasts well over a decade, serves as a systematic exercise in human domestication. Schools that are full of regimentation and ranking can acclimate students to the regimentation and ranking common in modern workplaces. This theory is supported by the fact that managers of modern workplaces, like factories, have long reported that workers worldwide typically resist regimentation, unless the local worker culture and upbringing are unusually modern. This complaint was voiced in England at the start of the industrial revolution, and also in developing nations more recently. The main symptom is that unschooled workers don’t do as they’re told. For example, consider the data on cotton mill “doffers,” workers who remove full spools of yarn from cotton spinning machines. In 1910, doffers in different regions around the world had a productivity that varied by a factor of six, even though they did basically the same job with the same material and machines. In some places, each doffer managed six machines, while in other places only one machine. The problem was that workers in less-developed nations just refused to work more machines: Moser, an American visitor to India in the 1920s, is even more adamant about the refusal of Indian workers to tend as many machines as they could “ . . . it was apparent that they could easily have taken care of more, but they won’t . . . They cannot be persuaded by any exhortation, ambition, or the opportunity to increase their earnings.” In 1928 attempts by management to increase the number of machines per worker led to the great Bombay mill strike. Similar stories crop up in Europe and Latin America. The reluctance of unschooled workers to follow orders has taken many forms. For example, workers won’t show up for work reliably on time, or they have problematic superstitions, or they prefer to get job instructions via indirect hints instead of direct orders, or they won’t accept tasks and roles that conflict with their culturally assigned relative status with coworkers, or they won’t accept being told to do tasks differently than they had done them before. Modern schools also seem to change student attitudes about fairness and equality. While most fifth graders are strict egalitarians, and prefer to divide things up equally, by late adolescence, most children have switched to a more meritocratic ethos, preferring to divide things up in proportion to individual achievements.

School does help prepare us for the workforce in some ways. We learn how to get used to comparing ourselves against others using standard metrics, we learn how to listen and absorb instructions and execute accordingly, and to learn how to get along with our peers. In this passage, Hanson terms it as “human domestication”.

For me, I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing. For me, being able to listen, accept standards and getting along with others are traits that are be objectively good. Schools are ultimately a way to inculcate certain values and behaviours that society needs at that point in time. Hence, the shifting focus towards creativity, critical thinking and learning about technology in recent times. While we can be critical of what we are learning in schools, we should not also be too quick to discount the whole education system.

The fitness-display theory helps us understand why art needs to be impractical in order to succeed as “art.” Consider a well-made kitchen knife: sturdy, solid, and sharp. As many commentators have pointed out, there’s something delightful, even beautiful, about an object perfectly suited to its purpose. And yet, however exquisite the knife’s craftsmanship, however pleasing it is to the senses, it doesn’t qualify as “art” unless it has decorative, non-functional elements. The fitness-display theory explains why. Art originally evolved to help us advertise our survival surplus and, from the consumer’s perspective, to gauge the survival surplus of others. By distilling time and effort into something non-functional, an artist effectively says, “I’m so confident in my survival that I can afford to waste time and energy.” The waste is important. It’s only by doing something that serves no concrete survival function that artists are able to advertise their survival surplus. An underground bunker stocked with food, guns, and ammo may have been expensive and difficult to build (especially if it was built by hand), and it may well reflect the skills and resources of its maker. But it’s not attractive in the same way art is. The bunker reflects a kind of desperation of an animal worried about its survival, rather than the easy assurance of an animal with more resources than it knows what to do with. Thus impracticality is a feature of all art forms. But we can see it with special clarity in those art forms that need to distinguish themselves from closely related practical endeavors. Consider the difference between clothing, which is a necessity, and fashion, which is a luxury. Fashion often distinguishes itself from mere clothing by being conspicuously impractical, non-functional, and sometimes even uncomfortable. “The history of European costume,” writes Alison Lurie, “is rich in styles in which it was literally impossible to perform any useful function: sleeves that trailed on the floor, . . . powdered wigs the size, color and texture of a large white poodle, . . . and corsets so tight that it was impossible to bend at the waist or take a normal breath.” Even today we encumber ourselves in the name of style. High heels, for example, are awkward for walking and brutal on the feet—which is precisely how they’re able to convey the message, “I care about fashion.” Neckties are utterly superfluous, of course, as are dangly earrings and elaborate updos. Meanwhile, durable, low-maintenance fabrics, like cotton or denim, don’t have nearly the same cachet as fabrics that are delicate and hard to clean, like silk, lace, or wool. And polyester? Please. Food—as an art form—also needs to distinguish itself as something more than mere nourishment and a source of gustatory pleasure. Cakes, for example, are easy to make and almost always taste great. But however delicious, no one will pay $1,000 for a wedding cake unless it’s exquisitely decorated. Haute cuisine also differentiates itself from takeout by virtue of its artful arrangement (a sprig of fresh rosemary), elaborate preparations (tableside flambé), and specially sourced ingredients (not just any lemons, but Meyer lemons). None of these especially improves the taste, but we appreciate them nonetheless.

Why are we so impressed by things like fine dining? Beyond the fact that it just tastes nice, style over substance indicates “waste” or “excess”. The fitness-display theory, states that we tend to be attracted to people who can display a surplus beyond just survival as that means that they are “fit” and more than capable of surviving. Someone who is able to bring you out on a nice fine-dining meal is so secure in their survival that they have the excess resources to take you out on a frivolous meal.

In another experiment, Griskevicius and his team asked subjects to consider buying green or non-green products in two different shopping scenarios. One group was asked to imagine making the purchase online, in the privacy of their homes, while another group was asked to imagine making the purchase in public, out at a store. What they found is that, when subjects are primed with a status motive, they show a stronger preference for green products when shopping in public, and a weaker preference for green products when shopping online. Clearly their motive isn’t just to help the environment, but also to be seen as being helpful. Savvy marketers at Toyota, maker of the popular Prius brand of hybrid cars, no doubt had this in mind when they designed the Prius’s distinctive body. For the U.S. market, they chose to produce a hatchback instead of a sedan, even though sedans are vastly more popular. Why change two things at once, both the engine and the body? A likely reason is that a distinctive body makes the car more conspicuous. Whether out on the road or parked in a driveway, a Prius is unmistakable. If the Prius looked just like a Camry, fewer people would notice it. Discussions of conspicuous consumption often focus on how we use products to signal wealth and social status. But the expressive range is actually much wider. Hybrid owners, for example, probably aren’t trying to advertise their wealth per se. A Prius doesn’t cost much more than a standard combustion car, and doesn’t have the high-end cachet of a BMW or Lexus. Instead, what Prius owners are signaling is their prosocial attitude, that is, their good-neighborliness and responsible citizenship. They’re saying, “I’m willing to forego luxury in order to help the planet.” It’s an act of conspicuous altruism, which we’ll see much more of in Chapter 11, on charitable behavior.

One of the hidden motives of buying environmental friendly products is signalling your environmental friendliness to others. Nothing wrong with that. Many of the things we do is to basically promote and cultivate our identity, especially on social media. Likewise, I recognise that what I’m trying to do here is to take part in this outward display of my identity to show that I am someone who reads a lot so any criticism of such motives will be hypocritical to say the least.

The key is whether we are able to acknowledge this fundamental characteristic in humans. We can use this to our advantage, especially when planning for policies and nudging people towards actions that benefit the common good.

In other words, even we don’t have particularly privileged access to the information and decision-making that goes on inside our minds. We think we’re pretty good at introspection, but that’s largely an illusion. In a way we’re almost like outsiders within our own minds. Perhaps no one understands this conclusion better than Timothy Wilson, a social psychologist who’s made a long career studying the perils of introspection. Starting with an influential paper published in 1977 and culminating in his book Strangers to Ourselves, published in 2002, Wilson has meticulously documented how shockingly little we understand about our own minds. Wilson writes about the “adaptive unconscious,” the parts of the mind which lie outside the scope of conscious awareness, but which nevertheless give rise to many of our judgments, emotions, thoughts, and even behaviors. “To the extent that people’s responses are caused by the adaptive unconscious,” writes Wilson, “they do not have privileged access to the causes and must infer them.” He goes on: Despite the vast amount of information people have, their explanations about the causes of their responses are no more accurate than the explanations of a complete stranger who lives in the same culture. This, then, is the key sleight-of-hand at the heart of our psychosocial problems: We pretend we’re in charge, both to others and even to ourselves, but we’re less in charge than we think. We pose as privileged insiders, when in fact we’re often making the same kind of educated guesses that any informed outsider could make. We claim to know our own minds, when, as Wilson says, we’re more like “strangers to ourselves.” The upshot is that every time we give a reason, there’s a risk we’re just making things up. Every “because” clause, every answer to a “Why?” question, every justification or explanation of a motive—every one of these is suspect. Not all will turn out to be rationalizations, but any of them could be, and a great many are.

How its difficult to be fully self aware of why we make the decisions we do. Many times, what we are doing is post-hoc rationalisation of actions we have already undertaken, where our brains have made decisions that we are unaware of. Figuring ourselves out can be like figuring out a stranger sometimes.

Still there’s an important lingering question. If the goal of self-deception is to create a certain impression in others, why do we distort the truth to ourselves? What’s the benefit of self-deception over a simple, deliberate lie? There are many ways to answer this question, but they mostly boil down to the fact that lying is hard to pull off. For one thing, it’s cognitively demanding. Huckleberry Finn, for example, struggled to keep his stories straight and was eventually caught in a number of lies. And it’s even harder when we’re being grilled and expected to produce answers quickly. As Mark Twain may have said elsewhere, “If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.” Beyond the cognitive demands, lying is also difficult because we have to overcome our fear of getting caught. People get angry when they’re lied to—a reaction almost as universal as lying itself. (Even wasps who catch other wasps lying are known to retaliate in response.) Therefore, aside from sociopaths and compulsive liars, most of us are afraid to tell bald-faced lies, and we suffer from a number of fear-based “tells” that can give us away. Our hearts race, our skin heats up, we start sweating and fidgeting. Maybe we have an eye twitch, nervous tic, awkward gulp, or cracking voice. In light of this, often the best way to get others to believe something is to make it a reality. When you’re playing chicken, it won’t do much good to yell at your opponent, “Hey, I’ve torn off my steering wheel!” He won’t believe you until he sees that you’ve actually done it. Similarly, often the best way to convince others that we believe something is to actually believe it. Other people aren’t stupid. They’re aware that we often have an incentive to lie to them, so they’re watching us, eagle-eyed, for any signs of deception. They’re analyzing our words (often comparing them to things we said days, weeks, or months ago), scrutinizing our facial expressions, and observing our behaviors to make sure they conform to our stated motives. The point is, our minds aren’t as private as we like to imagine. Other people have partial visibility into what we’re thinking. Faced with the translucency of our own minds, then, self-deception is often the most robust way to mislead others. It’s not technically a lie (because it’s not conscious or deliberate), but it has a similar effect. “We hide reality from our conscious minds,” says Trivers, “the better to hide it from onlookers.” Modeling the world accurately isn’t the be-all and end-all of the human brain. Brains evolved to help our bodies, and ultimately our genes, get along and get ahead in the world—a world that includes not just rocks and squirrels and hurricanes, but also other human beings. And if we spend a significant fraction of our lives interacting with others (which we do), trying to convince them of certain things (which we do), why shouldn’t our brains adopt socially useful beliefs as first-class citizens, alongside world-modeling beliefs? Wear a mask long enough and it becomes your face. Play a role long enough and it becomes who you are. Spend enough time pretending something is true and you might as well believe it. Incidentally, this is why politicians make a great case study for self-deception. The social pressure on their beliefs is enormous. Psychologically, then, politicians don’t so much “lie” as regurgitate their own self-deceptions. Both are ways of misleading others, but self-deceptions are a lot harder to catch and prosecute.

Lying is difficult for most of us. We tend to trip up on our words or are unable to lie convincingly when we know something is wrong. This is where self-deception comes in. Being able to paint ourselves as the victim or hero in certain situations help us get by. Whats important is to not let our internal reality get too disconnected with the reality of your peers.