This book takes an empathetic approach and gives bite size approaches and allows you to have kindness and patience with yourself when dealing with life. This is so necessary for everyone to read in life. Highly recommend. Especially loved the reflection to true life to humanize my feelings and relate. I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain is the fascinating new book from Shankar Vedantam, longtime science correspondent and host of the radio podcast Hidden Brain, and co-written by science writer Bill Mesler, which posits that a certain amount of delusion is essential for our well being and our will to live. It builds on ideas from The Hidden Brain and explores the frequent utility, and occasional necessity, of intuitive and nonrational thinking. Not only are we delusional, we actually evolved that way via natural selection because cheerful blindness about some aspects of life helps us survive better. The classic example is something like climate change, right? The evidence for climate change is quite dramatic, quite persuasive. It comes to us from different fields of study: environmental science, pollution studies, oceanography, the study of the Arctic and sea life and species decline. There are just so many different ways in which you can see how climate change is affecting us. And yet, vast numbers of people either don't believe in climate change, or if they believe in it, they don't act as if they believe in it. It doesn't actually change their behavior. And we keep acting like that the 367th study is going to convince people when the first 366 studies have not.

Much of the time, our behavior is not shaped by what is rational; it’s shaped by habits, by norms, by our cultures, by our beliefs. These are the things that are powerful in shaping our views. So if you want to fight climate change, you have to be able to enlist those beliefs, which are not necessarily the domain of the logical, rational brain. We may need to use older, emotion-based systems to accomplish those goals. Many interesting and unsettling examples are given to prove their point, including how our response to the question “how are you?” is quite often dishonest but that the asker really wasn't looking for an honest answer. In the late 1980s, a group known as ”The Church of Love” sent affectionate letters allegedly from anguished young women to lonely men, many of whom not only invested substantial time and effort writing back but who also sent substantial amounts of money. At the trial of the mastermind, many of the victims, despite being informed of the facts, passionately defended him. They also address the placebo effect which makes for intriguing reading and the delusional facade people portray on social media. Its well known that those more in touch with what is realistically happening across the world are more depressed than those who delude themselves into thinking that everything is okay. I can certainly attest to the fact that being a realist can impact not only your mental health but physical too.

Whether we are talking about religion, relationships, medicine, or commerce, the ways in which our brains trick us (or lead us to be easily tricked by others) can certainly be harmful or even deadly. We also harshly judge others for being so easily tricked. But crippling existential dread is not conducive to human flourishing, even if it constitutes the last word in "getting real" or "being truthful." Many of our useful delusions can promote our health and our well-being in numerous ways, and the writers argue that this is profoundly important. They maintain that some deceptions are functional and enable us ”to accomplish useful social, psychological, or biological goals. Holding false beliefs is not always the mark of idiocy, pathology, or villainy.” What follows is an urging for everyone to be compassionate and consider others' perspectives even if they seem irrational, illogical or untrue. Referencing both historical resources and popular culture, the authors show how the lies we tell are often societal niceties. This is a fascinating read that is accessible and extensively researched and it's interesting to see a meditation on the positive side of delusional thinking and a well-constructed counter argument to those books that explore the downside of self-deception; I tend to agree with most of what was presented. It's an engaging, ingenious and deeply convincing account of why people believe stupid things. Highly recommended.

One facet of a book that separates it from other avenues of media, at least for myself, is a book’s surprising ability to make you thankful for the author’s work even if you disagree with it. It seems to happen to me particularly often. Malcolm Gladwell’s ideas are about a 50/50 proposition whether I’ll agree with him or not, but I will always read his books and I’ll eventually catch up on all his podcasts too. I don’t agree with Ben Sasse on several points, but his books (The Vanishing American Adult and Them) are ones I recommend widely.

You can probably guess by now that I thought similarly about Shankar Vedantam’s* Useful Delusions: The Power & Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain. However, I had much deeper disagreements with this book and have struggled with its ideas for a period of weeks now. Vedantam brings meaningful questions to a discussion of how we delude ourselves and how those delusions can be used for meaningful ends. However, his top-line argument is highly controversial (and incorrect, I believe) and some examples he uses are weak, if not hilarious.
*(Although science writer Bill Mesler earns a co-author credit, I will refer to Vedantam as the author because it is written in his voice.)

So what point is Vedantam arguing in Useful Delusions? I think it is well summed up in a passage of the introduction:
"…we ought to care less about whether something is simply true or untrue and ask more complicated questions: What are the consequences of self-deception? Whom does it serve? Do the benefits justify the costs?
At a minimum, I hope this book prompts you to acknowledge the great debt you owe to the many self-deceptions that sustain your life. Indeed, even if your goal is to fight self-deception, you cannot do it without first understanding its profound power."

On the second point, Vedantam accomplishes his goal of demonstrating the profound power of delusions on our minds. I will give some examples later of how well this is done, and this provides a lot of nuance in my thought process. However, I find it impossible to get on board with the idea that we should be doing a cost-benefit analysis to determine if believing a lie is OK or not.

I realize that this version of the book (I have an advance copy so it is possible that something was changed or explained differently in the published version) was written well before the events from election day 2020 through the Capitol insurrection on January 6th. But this idea, in light of the lies and self-delusions necessary to believe in QAnon conspiracies or believe the 2020 election was stolen, is laughable to support without a much more detailed moral analysis that Vedantam does not provide. By what standard are we to determine if the delusion’s benefits outweigh the costs? It has to be a personalized standard, which is untenable. It’s the same as saying that the truth doesn’t matter, only your truth. And I thought we had spent the last 4+ years discovering that no matter what you personally believe, the truth does matter immensely.

One early example that I considered laughable is one that Vedantam describes as one of the “everyday delusions” with which we trick ourselves: niceties in customer service jobs. Vedantam attempts to argue that being nice to customers in a service job is an example of a delusion and a “minor lie”. But there is a problem with this interpretation: The woman at McDonald’s isn’t deluding herself about how she truly feels about me, and I don’t actually think she likes me as a person. I think she’s being nice! No one is being lied to here.

And then there’s this passage about Donald Trump, the former deluder-in-chief:
"One criticism that both Democrats and Republicans made of President Donald Trump is that he lacked a filter. If he thought Mexicans coming over the border were rapists, he said so. Of course, another term to describe such behavior is “candor.” You knew where you stood when you spoke with The Donald, since he made his mind abundantly clear in a stream of tweets, insults and inflated claims. For a long time, Americans dreamed of getting a president who was “authentic.” But throughout the Trump presidency, most Democrats, and large numbers of Republicans, wished they could install a filter between Trump’s brain and his mouth. They wanted him to shut up about things he clearly believed were true."

I realize the point here is about everyday delusions and how we all “lie” to each other all the time. But to act as if Trump wasn’t either operating under self-delusion or trying to lie to others, at a higher rate than any other President? That is just laughable. It doesn’t land well. Donald Trump either believed lies or peddled them to rally his base, and it is simply wrong to use this example to argue that he was more honest in any way.

The final issues that I saw throughout the book were consistent references to religion as self-delusion. It is perfectly fine to hear from Vedantam’s perspective as an apparently irreligious person, but he seems to take glee in assuming that he is correct in the nonexistence of a deity and thus the vast majority of the earth’s population is self-deluded. Here is the most frustrating excerpt:
"Just as beliefs about an omniscient, angry God fall away when a functioning state provides us with infrastructure, laws, and public safety, and when market economies provide us with consumer goods, entrepreneurial opportunities and good jobs, so also the way to root out self-deception is by compassionately asking what people lack, and exploring how we might help replace what is missing."

So, while Vedantam considers belief in God a delusion, he also thinks that it’s a good thing to replace the delusion with the truth if it can accomplish the same goal. I’m agreed with that point, but it is the opposite of connecting with your readers to assume that their beliefs are incorrect and yours are correct. Not a good look, man.

Beyond what I see as obvious pitfalls in Vedantam’s argument, there is a surprising amount of substance there. First, he wonderfully describes the general psychological mechanism for delusional thinking in one brief but important passage:
"Our senses are flooded with information. We literally do not have the cognitive power to process all of this data, and so our brains take a shortcut. They discard most of the information, and focus attention on a small subset of the data. This is one reason we fall for illusions in psychological experiments. When you ask people to keep very close track of basketballs being passed back and forth by a group of players on a court, about half fail to notice an actor in a gorilla suit who walks into the frame, beats his chest, and walks out. (there are popular videos on YouTube that demonstrate this experiment.)"

This is so important in understanding why our brain falls for illusions, delusions, and lies. It’s a cognitive processing problem. So it’s natural. But the goal is to not give in to the illusions and instead let truth reign in its place.

The strongest example of a “useful delusion” Vedantam provides, however, is the strength of the placebo effect. For those unaware, the placebo effect refers to the use of a sugar pill in experiments involving medications so that the control group will not know if they are receiving the treatment or not. This is necessary because just thinking that you are receiving a treatment can actually lessen your symptoms, especially if those are psychological symptoms such as pain or mood state. (Yes, the pain in sprain is mainly in the brain.) Vedantam argues that we should not consider a medication that only provides relief up to the placebo effect to be a medication that “doesn’t work”, because the placebo effect does provide healing to some extent, and that’s something.

I get his point here, and I think it’s an interesting one. Doctors are essentially prescribing a placebo when they prescribe antibiotics for viral infections, which antibiotics will do nothing to heal. And this actually does harm to your body as it builds immunity to the antibiotics. So should doctors prescribe a placebo when they can’t do anything else? Vedantam also writes about “placebo” surgeries, where a surgeon performs a fake surgery, simply going through the motions instead of actually performing it. This also provides some degree of healing to the patient, although obviously not much as the actual surgery. So should “placebo surgeries” become commonplace?
Obviously, people would be very upset if they think they are being treated and it turns out they received a placebo. But if that was the only option, should they be upset? Isn’t some relief better than none? In this case, the delusion (sometimes even self-delusion) does do a significant amount of good. Does it matter that it isn’t the truth? I’m still thinking about this. But the truth is important and delusions are not something to be sought after on a grand scale. How do we decide if they are ever OK? That’s something that needs to be discussed by more than just psychologists. It is important to work through these big questions as post-modernism crumbles and we recover from some of the lies for which many people sadly continue to fall.

I received a review copy of Useful Delusions courtesy of W.W. Norton and NetGalley, but my opinions are my own.

I'm finding that I'm wanting to read more and more non-fiction. I just want to learn all the things. And in that area, Useful Delusions did not disappoint.

Useful Delusions begins by relating the story of the Church of Love, a postal scam that happened in America a good few years ago. Hundreds of men were deceived into thinking women were writing them love letters, when in reality it was one man and his company who were deceiving them into sending money to help these non-existent women. When the scam was exposed, some of the men defended the scammer, as they had gained something valuable from the communications they had been receiving from these women. Vedantam found himself intrigued as to why these men would defend their scammer, and set out to investigate the lies we tell ourselves and others.

Throughout the book, Vedantam explores the ways we lie to each other in order to keep society together, the way brands lie to us (and the way we play along with their lies) in order to sell us products, and the way our brains prefer to delusion to the truth when the truth could cause us mental harm. For instance, he discusses ideas around death, and how we take actions in our every day lives to maintain the delusion that we aren't going to do - even though we know logically we are. If we were to carry that truth around every day of our lives we would be in a constant state of fear and anxiety. Which wouldn't be helpful. So our brains construct delusions to keep us safe and sane.

It's really interesting, fascinating stuff. The book is very well researched. For every claim Vedantam makes, he back sit up with multiple research papers on the topic. He makes a very convincing case for the art of self-delusion.

The book isn't super-scientific though. I understood it easily, and as I've said before, I don't have any education in the sciences beyond the bits I learned at GCSE. All of the terms Vendatam uses are explained at least basically. I never felt lost or confused, or like I had to go away and look stuff up.

I've never listened to Vedantam's podcast, Hidden Brain, but I think I might start to.

This is a fascinating look at how the brain uses delusions at a conscious and subconscious level to increase happiness and longevity. The book uses a combination of science and anecdote. It's both informative and entertaining, easy to read and understand.

Thanks, NetGalley, for the ARC I received. This is my honest and voluntary review.

I liked the idea of this book. When can self-delusion be helpful in our day-to-day life? Can it EVER be helpful? I have always believed that deluding myself works in wonderful ways and Vendatam and Mesler would agree.
I thought one of the most interesting studies was in wine tasting when people's brain scans actually showed that the pleasure center lit up more when tasting a wine they had been told was $90 even though it was the same as the $10 bottle. Does that mean the people who pay more for wine will always enjoy it more? Maybe. But price isn't the only thing that can "trick" our brain like that. It can also be the story behind a product or brand.
There are several of these studies interwoven with the story of a letter writing scheme where lonely hearts would write to each other. However, it turned out most of the women in these exchanges were semi or wholly fictitious. Yet many of the men defended the fraudster. Why? Well, the book explains. If you consider yourself a rationalist, this may not be a good book for you because it will change how you define "rational."

Three and a half stars
This book comes out March 2nd
ARC kindly provided by W. W. Norton & Company and NetGalley
Opinions are my own

This was a fascinating read and really gives the reader a lot to think about. It puts a whole new spin on deception. I found it very interesting to hear the author’s take and personal views on deception and the everyday life.

This was better than I thought it was going to be and I enjoyed the insights this author had about other people's "truths." However, this was highly opinion based and not backed by much research. Some of the observations were spot on, at times for how we as people perceive other people around us. I was just left with an ok feeling after reading this. Easy to read this in a few days. Overall, just ok by me but other people may like these insights more than me.

Thanks to Netgalley, Shankar Vedantam and WW Norton & Company for an ARC in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

Available: 3/2/21

We’re all constantly deluded. In fact, people’s lives could often be improved if only they were a bit more deluded. This is the surprising message of ‘Useful Delusions.’

The book presents two different perspectives. On the one hand there is a fascinating catalogue of examples of deceptions and foibles. Then there is an argument and conclusion that deception is good for us and, we should do it more.

I enjoyed the descriptive side of the book. We hear how people tricked by fake churches rejected attempts to ‘save’ them. We hear of placebo effects (17%) and fake medicine which has real effects. We hear of Military cults which became successful because they believed they were bullet proof (62%). We hear of customers with very different views about Toyota Corollas and Geo Prizm’s, even though they are exactly the same car (26%). And there are many, many more examples of illusions, delusions and deceptions.

One of the surprising conclusions of these examples is that deception is genuinely good for us. For example, when people tasted a wine which they mistakenly thought was expensive, brain scans showed that they had genuinely increased sensations of pleasure (28%).

The argumentative side of the book was less convincing. The book makes the point that we are all lying for much of the time. And the world would be a better place if we lied more. Indeed, the author suggests that our whole obsession with truth is just a mistake and we should focus on what works, not on what is true (89%).

This ‘pragmatism’ can seem to be seductively attractive. But as a policy idea it quickly collapses. The reason why deception and lying works (when it does work) is because people think it is not lying. Deception is only possible against a backdrop of normality which rejects lying. If we had a world where everyone thought that it was good to lie all the time, then no one would be able to trust anyone else, and so relationships and society would quickly fall apart. Normalising lying and deception is therefore an impossible idea.

A key problem with the book is that it never clarifies what it means by lying and deception. Language is complicated and some statements can be both true and false. For example, ‘the boy is a pig’ may be literally false, whilst also being metaphorically true. This means falsity does not entail lying (or deception). The book doesn’t recognise this kind of sophistication, so its assumptions about truth and lies are sometimes too simplistic.

This over-simplification also occurs when the author claims that social etiquette and ritual language are examples of daily lying. For example, the question ‘how are you?’ generally elicits a ritualistic reply of ‘I’m very well thank you, how are you?’ Is it a lie to say this when you have a headache? These are complicated questions within the philosophy of language, but they are not explored in the book. This means that the author is making assumptions about what counts as lying, without actually explaining or defending those assumptions.

Overall, I enjoyed the examples and anecdotes, and I appreciated the 10% of the book devoted to additional notes. But I was disappointed by the book’s arguments and conclusions, as they seemed too simplistic.

(These comments are based on a copy of the text kindly donated by the publishers for the purposes of review).

Sometimes you’re better off letting people lie to you, and even lying to yourself. That’s the surprising, but well-argued, conclusion of Useful Delusions. Some people, for example, corresponded with romantic pen pals for years, sending money and other gifts. But their pen pals didn’t actually exist. They were fictions created in a scam called the Church of Love. Were the gift-givers, then, victims of fraud? You’d think so. But some of them resented that the letter-writers had been arrested and even testified in their defense. The belief they were in a loving relationship had been a positive one, they said.

Okay, that’s an extreme case. But the authors point out so many other ways in which self-deception is actually helpful to us.

Most of us act as if we’re happy to see customers and co-workers, even when we aren’t—and they do the same for us. We get more enjoyment out of things we pay more for, even when they’re identical to lower-priced options. Patients who believe they’ll live longer than the data would suggest do, in fact, tend to live longer.

Here’s the thing: Our brains are great at passing on our genes to the next generation, and not so great at perceiving objective reality in every detail. The mental shortcuts baked into our operating system give us a somewhat accurate and mostly useful idea of what’s going on. When we find ourselves in a truly dystopian situation like being a civilian during a genocidal civil war, experiencing a ritual for bulletproofing might actually help to keep you alive. On the other hand, patriotic and religious beliefs can preserve an entire society even as they cost individual people their lives.

This book is well-organized, and easy to pick up again after a break. A few fascinating stories of extreme self-deception (like the pen pals) weave throughout the narrative, showing up to illustrate a point or to delve deeper into the case study. Since it isn’t designed for academic use, there’s no index—but the well-planned organization of chapters certainly helps.

I am grateful to the authors, the publisher, and NetGalley for a free advance review copy.

Thank you to the publisher for giving me a free digital galley of this book in exchange for feedback.

"Useful Delusions" reads like an extra-long episode of "Hidden Brain" - Shankar Vendantam's voice is more distinctive than I had realized, I think. It makes a case that a certain amount of self-deception is helpful, even necessary, to living a happy life, with stories of people who've found contentment and health in their faith in demonstrable falsehoods. At the center of the book is the story of the "Church of Love," which tricked thousands of men into thinking they were writing to, and sending gifts to, a real woman who needed their help and support.

This was well worth reading.

An interesting hypothesis that gets lost in repeating the same theme too many times. The book talks about various situations where we tend to use white lies. - whether it is encouraging a child's drawing, or someones dress, etc. Numerous examples of similar theme occupy the earlier chapters of the book leading to unnecessary reptition. But it also provides some interesting views on the extra effort folks working in hospitality industry. and the role of religion. The later chapters include an interesting discussion on placebo effect and the psychology of marketing/branding, price points as a signal etc. Even though each of these topics makes for interesting reading and highlights some way someone's biases are exploited (or pampered), it is still pretty harsh to call all these as delusions; cognitive biases, for sure. Perhaps the single biggest issue with the book is that while the reader is entertained and informed of some key biases, the author doesnt extend the discussion to prescribe any solution or a cheat sheet for what to do to identify these biases and how to determine when to recognize and move away and when to embrace them for what they are.

As a fan of Hidden Brain, I was really looking forward to this book. Vedantam does a great job peeling back the layers of our cognitive biases and how we actually do hold mental hypocrisies (my term). There are times in which lying, not being truthful, and not totally forthcoming are the norm and expectation. (Re "does this dress make my butt look big?") His book calls us to consider why we lie to kids about Santa Claus, and why some of us hold on to religious beliefs that are hard, if not impossible, to prove.

This book, like the podcast, will make you think. You may not necessarily agree with everything he has to say, but will you admit it?