Delusions of Grandeur

How logical are you as an individual? Chances are that you consider yourself far more logical than you really are. The reason for this is that you (just like everybody else) post rationalise. You apply logic after the fact and then believe that it was always there. Very often we react out of an emotional basis, but then fool ourselves later into believing that it was all done from a completely logical point of view. Though we might not be able to change what we did terribly much (though even that is possible) we can change why we did it.

Our motivations for our actions are largely internal and frequently not immediately shared with those around us. For that reason the only person who could possibly notice them changing is you and, since you never vocalised them, the chance of you noticing that happening is rather slim.

That is especially true considering the weakness of memory. Every single time you remember something, what you’re really doing is remembering the memory as you last remembered it. Yes, that sounds like quite twisted way of saying the same thing, but it isn’t quite. If you remember something you recall it from your memory, bring it into your conscious mind, play around with it and then put it back in your memory. There is no backup copy that remains behind!

Every single time you do that little details change. This is made even easier because, contrary to the common held view, memories are stripped off all but the most essential information so as to make it easier to store them. The rest of the memory isn’t actually memory at all, but simply your imagination filling in the details.

You’d think you’d notice, wouldn’t you? But of course you don’t, because the only thing you have to compare your memory to is, well, it self. You have (as mentioned before) no backup. There is no part of you that’s going ‘but wait a minute, wasn’t her coat red the last time I remembered this?’ because the only thing you have to go by is your memory and if you this time remember her coat as blue, well then it must have been blue all along, mustn’t it?

The only way to compare memories is to look at other people that were there at the same time. These people have their own memories and will frequently have memories quite different from your own. This is, in fact, the proof of changing memories.

So with these memories so easily changed, it becomes easy to make yourself appear much more thoughtful and intelligent, as well as far less emotional and capricious than you really are. Add to that the halo effect (in which we think we’re more special than everybody else for the simple reason that we are the only person we are fully aware of) and you’ve got a situation where you think you performed more reasonably in the past than you did and you predict you’ll behave more reasonably in the future than others.

No wonder complete strangers are almost as good at predicting our future actions as we are.