Self-Deception in Development

The social life of children in their development is made up of novel attachments, intimacy, and self-defining social affiliation, beyond the first family bonding or attachment to primary caretaker(s). But it is also a life made of conflicts, prejudices, and fears, particularly the fear of being rejected and not recognized by others. In this context, self-assertion, or the need to affirm and make room for self in relation to others, plays a central role in shaping and driving self-concept development. It is also the source, from an early age, of budding self-deception. Self-conceptualizing is primarily the process by which we situate ourselves in relation to others: how close or how estranged we are in relation to them and what impact and power we have on others. In this respect, children show us that conceiving ourselves might serve a primary social function: the function of asserting who we are in relation to others, an important process by which we capture identifiable characteristics that shape our behaviors, intentions, and social decisions.

Essentialism and Prejudice

Humans can’t help but generalize in ways that are rarely, if ever, dictated by reason and prudence. We jump quickly to confirmatory and reassuring conclusions with a propensity to invent things in reference to worlds that only exist in our minds. Rather than being just games of the imagination, these inventions actually influence, often unbeknownst to us (subliminally), our attitudes and actions in the real world, in particular our discriminatory attitudes and actions toward people. Our innate propensity to chunk, cluster, and categorize things corresponds with our propensity to reproduce patterns of reality that are constructed based on ready-made or default implicit beliefs (i.e., stereotyping). Furthermore, the built-in default assumption that things and people have essential, nonobvious characteristics (definition of essentialism) allows for the immediate experience of favorable or unfavorable feelings toward people or things prior to, or not based on, actual experience (i.e. the definition of prejudice).

Love as Exclusion

Inscribed into our psychic system are affective imprinting processes. These processes are the original source of differential investment and quick binding toward certain things over others. It always takes place in favor of a selected few. Inversely, and by extension, it is also the source of our dislikes and potential for dehumanizing of unfamiliar people. We draw strict, categorical lines in our valuation of people, from sacred to trash. If we love our children and immediate family, it is by exclusion. The fact is that love, by definition, is selective. It is always to the detriment of others outside of the particular sphere of infatuation. The simple rule is that things in our mind can only exist via a process of exclusion and the enhancement of contrast in relation to all others. Exclusion is the seed of why we think the world in black and white. Alliance exists because of rejection in the same way that love exists inversely because of hate—no contrast, no existence.

Double Standards

Parochialism is universally irresistible, and we kid ourselves as well as others regarding the unity and consistency of our own morals. In reality, we cannot escape holding multiple standards depending on both situation and degree of affiliation. There is indeed much delusion and blind oversights regarding what we experience as our own moral consistency, and how we perceive and judge the moral consistency of others, the categorical way we experience our own moral self and the moral self of others. To avoid implosion under the weight of moral inconsistencies and blatant ambiguities, we are forced to operate along multiple, typically well-compartmentalized moral standards. We switch moral codes depending on people and situations, rarely losing the sense of our own moral unity. We grow to become very apt at juggling multiple standards. We are moral acrobats always about to lose balance, while dancing over shaky moral montages and other bricolages: “something constructed or created from a diverse range of available things” (Oxford English Dictionary). Historical evidence abounds, from Ben Franklin to Adolph Hitler.

What About Culture and Development?

Across cultures, self-serving interests tends to be considered as wrong or bad, negatively evaluated, and reprehensible. All children are exposed to this norm even if, in some human societies, this norm is expressed in paradoxical individualistic ways. Attached to this fundamental and universal ethics law is the subjective sense of fairness, what individuals consider their right share of the resources and what they are entitled to. Fairness pertains to the strong, often elusive sense we have of who deserves what and why in relation to others. As elusive as it might be, this sense is manifest remarkably early in development. And this is true regardless of vastly different social and cultural environments. In human ontogeny and across cultures, from five years of age, individuals from all cultures have developed all the basic ingredients to face and deal with others’ as well as their own moral conundrums. They step right into the main plot of the human drama that, from time immemorial, plays out in myths, oral tales, and tragic representations across all human cultures.

Natural Roots of Moral Hypocrisy

The human ontogenetic (developmental) unique bifurcation compared to other animal ontogenies is the emergence of make beliefs. It is when, from around two years of age, children start seamlessly to switch from discriminating and categorizing, as well as recombining categories in the here and now of perception and action, to start doing the same thing but in the realm of realities that exist only in their heads, the internal products of their own imagination. From this point on and at an exponential rate, the engagement of the basic process of discrimination and categorization operates on “decoupled” realities. This is what primarily set us apart in Nature from a general psychological and cognitive perspective. The natural roots of moral hypocrisy and other blatant moral inconsistencies are to be found not only in the categorical discrimination process embedded in our brains, a process that—from the outset—we share with all other mindful animals. These roots are also and more specifically to be found in the bootstrapping and recursive inference mechanisms that feed onto themselves. These mechanisms bring children by the second year to the incomparable symbolic and decoupled levels of our own self-conscious imagination. It is this imagination that parses the world in essential clusters as a function of particular spherical alliances, each defining particular moral contexts. These contexts call for character roles that are often deeply irreconcilable, only manageable for those endowed with a compartmentalized mind. This compartmentalization is at the origins of our moral acrobatics and the human propensity to think about the world in black and white.

Lying and Deception in Development

Human self-consciousness and symbolic functioning bring deception to new levels, incomparable to all the other forms of deception found in other animals or in nature in general. It brings intention and open-ended delusional redescription of reality to fit our social needs, boost our self-worth, and maintain semblance of self-unity. Children learn and develop quickly the ability to use semblances as the primary tool in their navigation of the social world, gaining affiliation through the debunking and deliberate creation of false or pseudo beliefs. In fact, the catalogue of lies and deception found in toddlers starting at two years, even if they are at basic, putatively nonstrictly representational level (i.e., without explicit false belief understanding) is stunning.

Self-Essentialism

We are impersonators of who we represent ourselves to be, not only for others but also ourselves, always fearful of being debunked as impostors or fakes. We do care about our own reputation, the reputation of being consistent for self and for others in what we think, feel, and do. In caring about our own reputation, we do create values for ourselves in relation to others, but that is the source of much self-delusion. Looking at myself in the mirror, rearranging my hair or putting on makeup is much more than a simple functional act. It is an essentialist and inferential process of self-evaluation from a public vantage point: Do I look good for others? Do I cause good or bad impressions? If bad, what can be done about it? How can I fix it? What essential character do I want to project or protect from an outside evaluation? Underlying such self-rumination and typical branding of particular features of the self that would stand for essential characteristics of who we are (i.e., self-essentialism), there is always much comparison and competition with the essential characteristics we likewise project and infer in others (i.e., group and other essentialism).

Belonging Instinct

People do need people, in particular they need to belong and be recognized as integral member of a group or community. Nothing is worse than being transparent to the gaze of others. We affirm and constantly probe our place via the co-existing and co-defining proclivities of inclusion and exclusion of the self in relation to others (dual centripetal and centrifugal forces). This process is universal. It applies equally for those protecting their inclusion privilege, such as belonging to a select group, or trying to acquire membership privilege. Both forces are complementary, under the same fundamental umbrella drive: the need to belong. This need drives relations of self to others from birth, and it is not just motivated by breast or access to food.

Moral Acrobats

Morality, psychologically speaking, is essentially the balancing of opposite propensities that co-exist and are co-defined within us as individuals, but also as groups of individuals: the propensity to do good or bad, act selfishly or for the common good. The good always tends to hide the bad, and vice versa. We juggle multiple hats on a single head, making the issue of morality particularly complex. We switch from being Dr. Jekyll in one moment to Mr. Hyde the next; from loving father to abusive boss, for example. Our ability to switch moral codes depending on people and situations is the most unsettling issue of moral psychology. The main moral rule is the fact that our moral compass is instantly recalibrated depending on people and situations.