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In each of these cases, there was a mismatch with reality. The person harbored a false belief, but believed it was true. In some cases, the mismatch was due to psychosis, some kind of delusion or malfunctioning of the brain. These people didn’t know that their beliefs were false. In other cases, the mismatch resulted from an intentional lie or distortion, a process that is adaptive, designed to promote self-confidence and manipulate others. When I conjured up images of McEnroe, I momentarily deceived myself. I believed it helped my game. I never thought I was McEnroe. I carried my self-deception honestly. When Hilary Clinton misreported her trip to Bosnia, perhaps she misremembered or perhaps she distorted her memory to convince voters that she had what was necessary to run the country — toughness and international experience. Unfortunately for Clinton, her comment about Bosnia was accompanied by other distortions, which led the American essayist William Safire to write “Americans of all political persuasions are coming to the sad realization that our First Lady... is a congenital liar.” Some cases of self-deception are harmless and even beneficial, as in my illusion of tennis grandeur. Others are only mildly harmful, as in Clinton’s distortion of her political experiences. And yet others are deeply harmful, as when leaders such as Ahmadinejad deny the suffering of millions. The problem is that anyone can harness the power of self-deception for ill gotten gains. Why does our mind play tricks on us, allowing us to believe things that are false? Why didn’t evolution endow us with a reality checking device that is vigilant 24/7? The answer here parallels the refrain carried throughout this book: like its evil sister dehumanization, self-deception is Janus-faced, showing both an adaptive and maladaptive side. Self-deception allows us to protect ourselves from the reality of a current predicament or loss. Self-deception allows us to provide a better personal marketing brand to defeat our competitors in attracting mates and garnering other resources. Self-deception may even be critical to the functioning of a healthy and safe society: in a study of male criminal offenders, those with the lowest levels of self-deception with respect to their own self-worth showed the highest levels of recidivism. There is, however, a fine balancing act, revealing the slippery slope from adaptive to maladaptive: as studies by Roy Baumeister reveal, individuals with the highest self-esteem and the most overblown sense of themselves are also the ones most likely to lash out with extreme violence when someone threatens the reality of their stature. The evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers was the first to identify the adaptive significance of self-deception and its connection to deception. As he insightfully notes in his book The Folly of Fools, what appears completely irrational about self-deception evolved as a consequence of selection to deceive competitors: “To fool others we might be tempted to reorganize information internally in all sorts of improbable ways and to do so largely unconsciously.” The most effective self-deceiver acts without any sense of his true motives. He is on autopilot, driven by a purely self-interested mind. No checks and balances. Here, I build on this idea. I will show you how studies of pathology and healthy brain function Hauser Chapter 3. Ravages of denial 107 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_012853