Self-Deception an Aid to Happiness, Studies Say, but Caution Is Needed

The art of self-deception can be an effective psychological tool for staying happy in the face of everyday life, but this all too common human trait can cause stress and serious health problems if carried too far, researchers said Wednesday.

Studies show that when people block out events or subjects they find traumatic, they are prone to illnesses often associated with stress, such as hypertension and ulcers, the researchers said.

The process of self-deception--a blocking from the awareness of actions or thoughts--was discussed here by psychiatrists and psychologists at the annual meeting of the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science.

Interestingly, scientists are not immune from the phenomenon, one researcher revealed.

Self-deception plays a major role in everyday life and is well-rooted in evolution. And it has frequently been demonstrated, in both animals and humans, that the ability to deceive others can provide an evolutionary advantage.

But because lying can often be detected in facial features and body language, the most successful deceiver of all is the individual who deceives himself, according to sociobiologist Robert Trivers of the University of California, Santa Cruz, whose research results were presented by others in his absence.

For example, according to Trivers, those who function well often imagine that “they are a little better than they are,” thereby inflating their own self-esteem. Such deceptions, he said, can often serve as the foundation of courage or hope in the face of overwhelming odds. Conversely, he said, people who are forced into a more realistic view of themselves often become depressed.

But long-term denial of traumatic events also can have repercussions on health, according to psychologist James Pennebaker of Southern Methodist University.

In one study, he administered to 800 students a questionnaire that contained what he first thought to be an inconsequential question: “Did a significant traumatic event occur in your life before the age of 17?”

To Pennebaker’s surprise, 17% of the students answered yes, even though most of them had never before talked about such an event. These students, further investigation showed, used the SMU medical center twice as often as other students.

Pennebaker also found that these victims of early childhood traumas, such as sexual or physical abuse and divorce of parents, were more likely than others later in life to suffer from diseases, including cancer, hypertension, ulcers, and migraine headaches.

In another study, Pennebaker found that individuals whose spouses died suddenly had fewer illnesses in the year following that death if they had discussed their grief with others. Also, men in this group suffered a greater incidence of disease because they were less likely than women to talk about their deceased spouses. Finally, widowers who remarried had the worst incidence of disease “because they thought they couldn’t talk about their first wife to their current spouse,” Pennebaker said.

He also found that individuals who were induced to talk or write about their traumas experienced an immediate drop in blood pressure, as well as in other indexes of anxiety. Among the SMU students, for example, those who discussed past traumas later made significantly fewer visits to the university medical center than students who wrote or talked only about non-traumatic events.

In another study, immunologist Janice Kiecolt-Glaser of Ohio State University found that the immune system of adults who talked about the traumas showed increased activity for at least six weeks afterward.

Self-deception also can affect scientists in their supposed “search for truth,” as University of California, Santa Barbara, psychologist Michael Mahoney discovered.

In a study involving 15 psychologists, 15 physicists, and 15 ministers, he told each of them that the numbers 2, 4, and 6 were part of a mathematical group and asked them to discover how the group was formed, using as a rule that there had to be three positive numbers in ascending order.

The ministers, it turned out, generated two to three times as many experiments for each hypothesis. Mahoney also found that the ministers were twice as likely to devise experiments to disprove a hypothesis, that they took longer to reach hypotheses, and that they were only half as likely to return to a disproved hypothesis.

The study suggests that scientists “are very reluctant to change their minds,” Mahoney concluded.