Last week, I pulled out an old (is 2008 old?) behavioral
science-based personal growth book from talk radio personality Melanie Robbins
to see if there was anything in there to add to my arsenal of design
techniques.
Normally, I don’t put much faith in this domain for having
any scientific foundation, but Melanie Robbins could be an exception. I
discovered her purely by chance, when a radio show that I liked went off the
air and I was nudged over to hers. This
is a good example of serendipitous discovery (the kind that the filter bubble
created by Facebook and Google destroys).
I found a few nuggets of insight and some good terms to
adopt from the book. But perhaps the
best Easter Egg was a set of references she put in about self-delusion. Imagine my surprise that a personal growth
book had real scientific references. And because self-delusion is one of my favorite topics, I had to
look up the papers.
From what I could see, self-delusion research emerged in the
1940s and 1950s, just after WW II and at the beginning of the cold war. I wonder if there was a link here. There was clearly some self-delusion going
on during the war about what Hitler was doing that shocked the world when we
finally opened our eyes. We also had
some huge self-delusions about the Soviet Union that were burst when WW II
transitioned into the cold war. Perhaps
it was this realization that led to a concerted effort to study self-delusion
more rigorously.
One of the great realizations was that the ability of people
to self report their thoughts, feelings and even activities was sorely biased
by self-delusion. Up to that time, much of the psychology research relied on
self-reports for its data. If most of it
is of questionable validity, the findings are too. Oops.
In another great example of self-delusion, psychologists
continued (to this very day even) to use self-reports. Psychology researchers are deluding
themselves that they can use self-reports and that their subjects are not
biased by self-delusions of their own.
I think this is why I talk about self-delusion so much. It is a frustration of mine that despite the
fact that researchers and designers know that self-delusion is a problem, they
continue to ignore it. Every time we
tell ourselves that we will stop after just one potato chip and then eat the
whole bag, we should recognize anew that self-delusion is real and common. But it makes life harder, so we pretend it
doesn’t exist. We do research that is faulty and we create designs that don’t
work.
And now I know that this has been going on for 70 years.
