In their classic 1988 paper ‘Illusion and Well-Being’, Taylor and Brown surveyed a wide range of experiments in social psychology that suggest that self-deceptive illusions are not only the norm, but also seem to promote well-being—only depressive people were largely free of such self-deception (let’s set aside the question of causation vs. correlation).
A recent post, and several comments, have considered ways in which bias may sometimes actually promote true belief in the long run. But cognitive biases may be good for us in a more straightforward way, by making us happier. Unless possession of true beliefs is intrinsically valuable, why should we want to have truer beliefs if this will only make us less happy?
Continue reading "Bias, Well-Being, and the Placebo Effect" »
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