Why You Can’t Trust Yourself

Even when you think you know for sure, think again.
Mark Manson

Bertrand Russell famously said, “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are so certain of themselves and wiser people so full of doubts.”

Over the years, I’ve hammered on the importance of becoming comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity, in questioning all of your most cherished beliefs and dreams, on practicing skepticism, and doubting everything, most importantly yourself. Throughout these posts, I’ve hinted at the fact that our brains are fundamentally unreliable, that we really have no clue what we’re talking about, even when we think we do, and so on.

But I’ve never given concrete examples or explanations. Well, here they are. Eight reasons you can’t trust yourself, as demonstrated by psychology.

1. You Are Biased and Selfish Without Realizing It

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Steven Pinker refers to this as the “Moralization Gap.”2 It means that whenever a conflict is present, we overestimate our own good intentions and underestimate the intentions of others. This then creates a downward spiral where we believe others deserve more severe punishment and we deserve less severe punishment.

This is all unconscious, of course. People, while doing this, think they’re being completely reasonable and objective. But they’re not.

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2. You Don’t Have A Clue about What Makes You Happy (or Miserable)

In his book Stumbling on Happiness, Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert shows us that we suck at remembering how something made us feel in the past and guessing how something will make us feel in the future.

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3. You Are Easily Manipulated Into Making Bad Decisions

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4. You Generally Only Use Logic and Reason To Support Your Preexisting Beliefs

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Motivated reasoning and confirmation bias run rampant when we don’t acknowledge the difference between what we actually know and what we just feel like we know.

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5. Your Emotions Change Your Perceptions Way More Than You Realize

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It turns out that just avoiding making important decisions while emotional isn’t good enough. It turns out that emotions influence your decision making days, weeks or even months later, even after you’ve chilled out and “analyzed” the situation further. What’s more surprising and more counterintuitive is that even relatively mild and short-lived emotions at one point in time can have long-term impacts on your decision making down the road.

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6. Your Memory Sucks

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Not only do our memories of events fade with time, they also become more susceptible to false information as time passes.
Warning people that their memories might contain false information doesn’t always help eliminate the false information.
The more empathetic you are, the more likely you are to incorporate false information into your memories.
Not only is it possible for memories to be altered with false information, it’s possible for entire memories to be planted. We’re especially susceptible to this when family members or other people we trust are the ones planting the memories.

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7. ‘You’ Aren’t Who You think You Are

Consider the following for a moment: The way you express and portray yourself on, say, Facebook probably isn’t exactly the same as the way you express and portray yourself when you’re “offline.” The way you act around your grandma is probably pretty different from the way you act around your friends. You have a “work self” and a “home self” and a “family self” and an “I’m all alone self” and many other “selves” that you use to navigate and survive a complex social world.

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8. Your Physical Experience of the World Isn’t Even That Real

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The light we’re able to see is a laughably small band of the electromagnetic spectrum. Birds and insects can see parts of it that we can’t. Dogs can hear and smell things that we don’t even know exist. Our nervous systems aren’t really data collection machines so much as data filtering machines.

On top of all of that, your conscious mind only seems to be able to handle about 60 bits of information per second when you’re engaged in “intelligent” activities (reading, playing an instrument, etc.).15

So, at best, you’re only consciously aware of about 0.000005454% of the already heavily modified information that your brain is receiving every single second you’re awake.

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