How we successfully lie to others and ourselves…

Lying to others – described by Kant in the 18th century as “the real rotten spot of human nature” – is certainly as old as modern man himself. And let’s not kid ourselves, lying is part of our everyday life and we learn it from childhood. This article will show functions of lying, why we lie to ourselves, and how we manage to be more honest.
According to various studies, we lie up to 200 times a day. Psychology holds the view that lying protects our privacy and self-esteem while not harming other people.Nevertheless, there are people who have a pathological tendency to tell untruths, but these are very rare. Most of the time – we lie out of politeness, sympathy, and decency and not to harm others. Psychology holds the view that lying protects our privacy and self-esteem while not harming other people.

How are lying and self-deception related?

What transpires when we lie to ourselves rather than to others? When we lie to ourselves, we always do so with the goal of twisting reality. It’s done to make ourselves feel better. The external image (ideas of others about us) shapes our self-image, especially in the early stages of life. It often happens that these two images differ from each other. It can happen that we overestimate our competencies or think that we are more honorable than we actually are. On the other hand, we sometimes make ourselves smaller than we are and overestimate our weaknesses. Often we try to adapt our self-image to a distorted image of others. But this self-deception can have serious consequences.

Not least of all, our self-image determines our self-esteem, which needs to be good and steady to prevent psychiatric issues and to lead a high-quality life. Therefore, we also do a lot to achieve exactly this, for example by lying to ourselves.

However, we are not only dishonest to ourselves in terms of self-image. Self-deception occurs in every day-to-day situation, no matter how small, and in many decisions and judgments, for example when we blame failures on others or external circumstances, or discard our New Year’s resolutions after a short time.

What role does cognitive dissonance play in self-deception?

The more research in psychology progresses, the more obvious it becomes that we humans neither act completely rationally nor manage to detach ourselves completely from our emotions and instincts. This has become particularly evident since the discovery of cognitive biases, or thinking errors. These describe errors in perceiving, remembering, thinking, and judging, and usually remain unconscious. One of the most important thinking errors is cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive dissonance occurs when we perceive several incompatible thoughts, opinions, attitudes, desires, or intentions within us about an issue. This leads to a state of inner tension. We then immediately try to resolve this by either searching for information that reduces the tension, deleting existing information. It is done by ignoring, suppressing, or forgetting. Even replacing it with a viewpoint that is more suitable for us. For example, we estimate the chances of winning higher after we react to rejection by devaluing our counterpart.

How do we deal with defeats and failures?

An old Greek fable called “The Fox and the Grapes” describes this phenomenon particularly vividly: a fox was standing under a tree and showed contempt when he noticed that he could not reach the grapes. “The fox gritted his teeth, wrinkled his nose and said haughtily, ‘They are not ripe enough for me, I don’t like sour grapes.’ With his head held high, he strutted back into the forest.”

The fable gets to the heart of how we adjust our thinking when we experience defeat. In this way, we can protect our self-esteem above all else.

But thinking errors do not always protect us. Especially in the case of bad habits, they tempt us not to change our behavior despite much evidence of harmfulness, such as smoking. It is now common knowledge that smoking causes the most serious damage.

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