“The greatest danger of deceiving others is that you inevitably end up deceiving yourself,” said Eleonora Dose. As if it were a play on words, we draw the conclusions of a recent study published in the journal Plos One : people who deceive themselves are the ones who best deceive others.
Self-deception is a fairly common trait in humans and has been the object of study by a group of British universities (Newcastle University, Queen Mary of London, Exeter and University College London). The researchers had the participation of a group of students who were joining the university for the first time. All of them attended a tutoring course prior to the beginning of classes. In this context, most did not know each other and freely interacted with each other. After this meeting, they were asked to evaluate the others, giving them a note and a position in a ranking and they asked them to do the same with themselves.
The researchers observed that individuals who rated themselves higher also scored higher than others, regardless of their actual performance , finding an important association between levels of self-deception and the ability to deceive others .
The experiment was repeated six weeks later with the same participants. The results were exactly the same, revealing that this correlation between deceiving others and self-deception was still present. If the hypothesis was confirmed that people who are overvalued are also overvalued by others, in the opposite case, people who believe themselves inferior are also perceived as worse by the rest .
“If individuals with greater excess of confidence are more likely to be prone to risk, promoting those individuals, we may be creating institutions, including banks, emergency services or armies more vulnerable to risk . From the smallest interactions to the institutions we build, self-deception can play a profound role in shaping the world we live in, ”the authors state.
