it is difficult for me to stand for a prolonged time because the circulation in my legs is far from good. But I don’t need a wheelchair.)
We were both convinced that it was a good plan, so Ken jumped out of the cab and returned with the wheelchair. We breezed through check-in and, with an extra two hours to kill, we enjoyed coffee and a sandwich. But then I needed to use the restroom. So Ken pushed me in the wheelchair to the nearest bathroom, which unfortunately was not designed to accommodate a wheelchair. I maintained my role, though; we got the wheelchair as close to the toilet as possible and I tried to hit the mark from a distance, with limited success.
Once we made it through the bathroom challenge, it was time to board the plane. Our seats were in row 30, and as we neared the entrance to the plane, I realized that the wheelchair was going to be too wide for the aisle. So we did what my new role dictated: I left the wheelchair at the entrance of the plane, grabbed on to Ken’s shoulders, and he hauled me to our seats.
As I sat waiting for the flight to take off, I was annoyed that the bathroom in the airport wasn’t handicap- accessible and that the airline hadn’t provided me with a narrower wheelchair to get to my seat. My irritation increased when I realized that I shouldn’t drink anything on the six-hour flight because there would be no way for me to keep up the act and use the bathroom. The next difficulty arose when we landed in London. Once again, Ken had to carry me to the entrance of the plane, and when the airline didn’t have a wheelchair waiting for us, we had to wait.
This little adventure made me appreciate the daily irritations of handicapped people in general. In fact, I was so annoyed that I decided to go and complain to the head of Air India in London. Once we got the wheelchair, Ken rolled me to Air India’s office, and with an overblown air of indignation I described each difficulty and humiliation and reprimanded the regional head of Air India for the airline’s lack of concern for disabled people everywhere. Of course he apologized profusely, and after that we rolled away.
The odd thing is that throughout the process I knew I could walk, but I adopted my role so quickly and thoroughly that my self-righteousness felt as real as if I had a legitimate reason to be upset. Then after all that, we got to the baggage claim, where I simply picked up my backpack and walked away un-hampered, like Keyser Soze in the film
TO MORE SERIOUSLY examine self-deception, Zoe Chance (a postdoc at Yale), Mike Norton, Francesca Gino, and I set out to learn more about how and when we deceive ourselves into believing our own lies and whether there are ways to prevent ourselves from doing so.
In the first phase of our exploration, participants took an eight-question IQ-like test (one of the questions, for example, was this: “What is the number that is one half of one quarter of one tenth of 400?”). After they finished taking the quiz, participants in the control group handed their answers over to the experimenter who checked their responses. This allowed us to establish the average performance on the test.*
In the condition where cheating was possible, participants had an answer key at the bottom of the page. They were told that the answer key was there so that they could score how well they did on the test and also to help them estimate in general how good they were at answering these types of questions. However, they were told to answer the questions first and only then use the key for verification. After answering all the questions, participants checked their own answers and reported their own performance.
What did the results from phase one of the study show? As we expected, the group that had the opportunity to “check their answers” scored a few points higher on average, which suggested that they had used the answer key not only to score themselves but also to improve their performance. As was the case with all of our other experiments, we found that people cheat when they have a chance to do so, but not by a whole lot.
Helping Myself to a Higher MENSA Score
The inspiration for this experimental setup came from one of those complimentary magazines that you find in seat-back pockets on airplanes. On one particular flight, I was flipping through a magazine and discovered a MENSA quiz (questions that are supposed to measure intelligence). Since I am rather competitive, I naturally had to try it. The directions said that the answers were in the back of the magazine. After I answered the first question, I flipped to the back to see if I was correct, and lo and behold, I was. But as I continued with the quiz, I also noticed that as I was checking the answer to the question I just finished solving, my eyes strayed just a bit to the next answer. Having glanced at the answer to the next question, I found the next problem to be much easier. At the end of the quiz, I was able to correctly solve most of the questions, which made it easier for me to believe that I was some sort of genius. But then I had to wonder whether my score was that high because I was supersmart or because I had seen the answers out of the corner of my eye (my inclination was, of course, to attribute it to my own intelligence).
The same basic process can take place in any test in which the answers are available on another page or are written upside down, as they often are in magazines and SAT study guides. We often use the answers when we practice taking tests to convince ourselves that we’re smart or, if we get an answer wrong, that we’ve made a silly mistake that we would never make during a real exam. Either way, we come away with an inflated idea of how bright we actually are—and that’s something we’re generally happy to accept.
THE RESULTS FROM phase one of our experiments showed that participants tended to look ahead at the answers as a way to improve their score. But this finding did not tell us whether they engaged in straight-up old-fashioned cheating or if they were actually deceiving themselves. In other words, we didn’t yet know if the participants knew they were cheating or if they convinced themselves that they legitimately knew the correct answers all along. To figure this out, we added another component to our next experiment.
Imagine that you are taking part in an experiment similar to the previous one. You took the eight-question quiz and answered four questions correctly (50 percent), but thanks to the answers at the bottom of the page, you claimed that you had solved six correctly (75 percent). Now, do you think that your actual ability is in the 50 percent range, or do you think it is in the 75 percent range? On the one hand, you may be aware that you used the answer key to inflate your score, and realize that your real ability is closer to the 50 percent mark. On the other hand, knowing that you were paid as if you really had solved six problems, you might be able to convince yourself that your ability to solve such questions is in reality closer to the 75 percent level.
This is where phase two of the experiment comes in. After finishing the math quiz, the experimenter asks you to predict how well you will do on the next test, in which you will be asked to answer a hundred questions of a similar nature. This time, it’s clear that there are not going to be any answers at the bottom of the page (and therefore no chance to consult the key). What do you predict your performance will be on the next quiz? Will it be based on your real ability in the first phase (50 percent), or will it be based on your exaggerated ability (75 percent)? Here is the logic: if you are aware that you used the answer key in the previous test to artificially inflate your score, you would predict that you would correctly solve the same proportion of questions as you solved unassisted in the first test (four out of eight, or around 50 percent). But let’s say you started believing that you really did answer six questions correctly on your own and not because you looked at the answers. Now you might predict that in this next test, too, you would correctly solve a much larger percentage of the questions (closer to 75 percent). In truth, of course, you can solve only about half of the questions correctly, but your self-deception may puff you up, crablike, and increase your confidence in your ability.
The results showed that participants experienced the latter sort of self-puffery. The predictions of how well
