The Stories We Tell Ourselves to Survive 🎭
Most people are not liars. They are just very good at remembering things the way they needed them to go.
That is not entirely our fault. Memory is not a recording. Every time you retrieve it, you reconstruct it — and every reconstruction is quietly shaped by who you need to be right now, what you need to have been true, what is most bearable to carry forward. The neuroscience on this is unambiguous: we do not remember what happened. We remember the last time we remembered it. Each time, the story shifts — imperceptibly, plausibly, in the direction of least resistance.
It might be the story about why the relationship ended, and your part in it is smaller each time you tell it. Maybe it is the explanation for why you have not done the thing you keep saying you will do — the one that sounds completely reasonable, that you could defend if someone pushed back, that you have refined over years into something airtight. Maybe it is something quieter than that. A habit you have reclassified as a personality trait. A pattern you have renamed as someone else's fault. A decision you stopped examining because the examination was starting to cost too much.
Most of us are not pathological liars. We are people whose brains are doing exactly what they were built to do — resolving contradiction, maintaining coherence, protecting the self from information it has decided is too expensive.
There is a reason it feels real. 👩🏽🔬
Evolutionary psychologists William von Hippel and Robert Trivers have spent decades studying why humans deceive themselves and their argument is uncomfortable in the best way: we evolved to do it. A person who genuinely believes their own version of events is a far more convincing communicator than someone who knows they're distorting things — no suppressed anxiety, no tells, no cognitive load from maintaining two separate accounts of what happened. Self-deception, they argue, makes deception of others more effective. It is not weakness. It is a very old strategy (Von Hippel & Trivers, 2011).
Underneath it is a mechanism Leon Festinger named cognitive dissonance in 1957 — the discomfort the mind experiences when two contradictory things must coexist. Harmon-Jones and Mills describe it as an uncomfortable state the mind is highly motivated to resolve: not by looking harder at the contradiction, but by softening one of its edges until the friction disappears. Change the behaviour, or rewrite the belief. Most of us, most of the time, rewrite the belief (Harmon-Jones & Mills, 2019).
Then the brain does something more specific. Neuroscientist Tali Sharot and colleagues, studying self-serving dishonesty using brain imaging, found that the amygdala — the brain's emotional signal generator — responds less and less to each successive dishonest act. The discomfort that might have flagged something as wrong habituates. It gets quieter. What began as a recognisable sensation gradually becomes unremarkable — until the behaviour that once required justification requires no effort at all (Garrett, Lazzaro, Ariely & Sharot, 2016).
Reeck and Ariely extended this finding across six experiments, demonstrating that repeated transgressions don't just escalate — they can transition into a mode where dishonest behaviour becomes continuous and self-sustaining, no longer experienced as deviation at all (Reeck & Ariely, 2025).
The story rewrites itself. The memory shifts to match. Research on cognitive dissonance shows how our recollection of events is shaped by who we currently believe ourselves to be — current self-concept is a better predictor of what we remember than what actually happened. We are not lying, exactly. We are remembering what it was most comfortable to remember (Tavris & Aronson, 2007).
This is the machinery. It does not require bad intentions to run. It runs on the ordinary human need to be someone coherent — someone whose actions and beliefs fit together, someone whose past makes sense given who they are now.
Zooming Out 📰
The same machinery that runs in each individual person also runs in systems, with potentially devastating consequences.
Families develop agreed-upon versions of themselves — who the difficult one is, which decade we don't talk about, what really happened that Christmas. These narratives are not usually constructed deliberately. They emerge through repetition, through what gets laughed off and what gets met with silence, through whose account of events is allowed to stand. Research on Bowen family systems theory, examining three generations of families, found that dysfunctional relational patterns — including the avoidance behaviours that maintain them — transmit reliably from grandparents to parents to children. Not through genetics. Through the emotional climate of the household, and through a process called triangulation: routing tension through third parties and shared fictions rather than addressing it directly (Čepukienė & Neophytou, 2024; Miller, Anderson & Keala, 2004).
The family is the smallest version of this. Scale it up and the architecture is identical — the same triangulation, the same agreed silences, the same implicit recruitment of anyone who gets close enough to know. The difference between a family that cannot name what is happening in its own house and an institution that cannot name what is happening in its own systems is not the pattern - what changes is how many people are standing inside it when it collapses.
Australia's Robodebt scheme ran for four years while public servants and ministers were told, internally and in writing, that the debt-raising mechanism was almost certainly unlawful. Compliance officers described the process as fraud being perpetrated on their own customers. One officer, who raised concerns directly with the departmental secretary, was told her feedback would be considered — then quietly dismissed. She retired rather than continue. The Royal Commission found dishonesty and collusion at multiple levels, and documented at least two people who died by suicide in circumstances where the scheme was identified as a probable contributing factor (Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme, 2023).
The UK Post Office prosecuted postmasters for theft and fraud using accounting data its own employees knew could produce false results. This continued for over a decade. By the time the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry concluded, thirteen people were identified as having possibly died by suicide as a consequence of Horizon showing illusory shortfalls in their accounts, and at least fifty-nine people told the Inquiry they had contemplated suicide at various points (Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry, 2025).
It is not a recent phenomenon and it is not uniquely Australian or British. The Soviet state had been concealing safety failures at the Chernobyl nuclear plant for years before the 1986 disaster — newly declassified documents revealed a serious accident had occurred as early as 1982, suppressed entirely from public record (Marples, 2004). The tobacco industry's internal scientists had confirmed nicotine's addictive properties decades before any public admission, a finding buried inside the institution's own architecture of motivated reasoning (Glantz et al., 1996).
Australia's Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse found that many institutions had prioritised their own reputation and the protection of accused persons over the safety of children — and documented the internal logic that made this feel, at the time, like the responsible call (Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, 2017). Different industries, different countries, different decades. The same shape every time. Not one person deciding to look away — an entire system learning not to.
Dishonesty spreads through proximity. Gino, Ayal and Ariely demonstrated in a controlled study that observing someone from your own in-group behave dishonestly increases your own threshold for dishonest behaviour — not because you consciously decide to lower your standards, but because the social norm has quietly shifted (Gino, Ayal & Ariely, 2009). The people around you are not just company. They are, in part, the medium your thoughts are thunk in.
What This Actually Means 🤔
The person lying to themselves and the institution covering up a fatal flaw are running the same programme. The scale is different. The consequences are different. The mechanism is familiar.
Self-deception is not a private problem. It cannot stay private. The longer it runs, the more energy it requires — more story, more justification, more people who are willing to not ask the question. At a certain point, the self-deception stops being something you are doing and starts being something you need others to do with you. You will need someone to agree that you did nothing wrong. You will need someone to stop bringing up what happened. You will need the people around you to inhabit the same version of events you’re telling — not because you have consciously asked them to, but because the alternative is too expensive to maintain in cognitive dissonance.
This is the moment it becomes an ask. Usually unspoken. Always felt.
Imagine a close friend confides in you that they are having an affair. You want to be supportive. They tell you it's over with their current partner anyway, that the marriage has been dead for years. You assume the end is coming. You listen, you hold it, you are there for them through all of it.
Then one day the conversation stops. Your friend tells you they've decided to give the marriage another chance. They do not mention the affair again and appear uncomfortable if you ever raise it. Their spouse does not know. Nothing has been resolved — everything has simply been reclassified and filed away. What is now required of you, implicitly, is to reclassify it too. To keep showing up to dinner. To make conversation with the spouse. To act as though none of it happened. To become, without ever being asked directly, a participant in the new story and in effect — the lie.
You have a few choices. You confront your friend and likely lose them. You keep showing up and carry the lie every time you're in their house. Or — most commonly — you just quietly stop seeing each other, so your friend can live in their new reality and you are no longer being asked to perform in theirs.
Notice what happened? Your friend's self-deception did not stay contained. It reached out and reorganised your life too. It asked something of you. It cost you something. Your friend, in all likelihood, does not fully see that cost — because seeing it would require them to sit with what they did, and that is exactly the thing the story was built to avoid.
This is what self-deception does when it has been running long enough. It stops being an internal condition and becomes a social contract. The people closest to you are not just witnesses to it. They can be quietly recruited into it. The ones who love you most — the ones who care enough to stay — are the most vulnerable to being conscripted. Because leaving feels like abandonment. Because naming what you can see feels like cruelty. Because it is easier, in the short term, to just go along with things and not rock the boat.
The most dangerous person is someone who can lie to themselves and believe it. This example is one reason it is not wise to surround yourself with people who live in deception, they will encourage you to do the same.
Practical Grounding 🧘
So how do we catch these patterns in our own life?
The signal is rarely a direct lie you can point to. It is more often a line of inquiry you didn't finish. A pathway of thinking you followed until the next corner, then didn't take the next turn. A question you know the answer to and have decided, without quite deciding consciously, not to ask.
Von Hippel and Trivers note that self-deception operates not by holding two contradictory truths simultaneously — but by stopping the information search before the unwelcome truth arrives. The tell is not what you believe. It is what you chose not to look into.
The second signal requires a different kind of attention. The brain adapts to what it is repeatedly asked to overlook — each time the emotional discomfort of a self-serving story goes unexamined, the signal gets quieter. Garrett and colleagues found that this habituation is measurable in the brain, and that it predicts escalation: the quieter the signal gets, the further the next deviation tends to go (Garrett et al., 2016). The practical interruption is simple but uncomfortable: reintroduce the friction deliberately.
When you notice yourself explaining a decision — to yourself or someone else — ask what you are leaving out of the explanation. Write it down rather than just thinking it. Saying something aloud, or putting it on a page, makes it harder for the confirmation bias to quietly filter the uncomfortable parts before they register. You do not need to share it. You just need to make the whole story visible to yourself, at least once, before you settle on the perspective you are going to internalise.
Then there is your circle. Look at the people you spend the most time with. Not whether you like spending time with them — whether they are honest with themselves. Do they repeat the same patterns in their relationships or life choices?
You absorb the standards of the people closest to you, often without noticing. If everyone around you is papering over uncomfortable truths, you will get your paper and glue out eventually too.
Now What: Catching the Story ⚾
Start with one area of your life. Not one that would require you to blow up your life if you looked at it honestly. Pick something smaller. A habit you keep almost addressing. A relationship dynamic you have explained away more than once. A version of something that you tell differently depending on who is asking.
Write the story you tell to others. The version that holds together nicely. Then write the version you haven't let yourself say — the one where your actions or inaction had more influence than you first let yourself believe.
The second thing is slower. Pay attention to what you stop yourself from asking. Not the questions you cannot answer — the ones you can answer, but don't pursue. The inquiry that stalls mid-thought. The conversation you steer away from. Self-deception lives in the pause before the next question, not in any particular answer.
If you are going to look at any of this honestly, the research is clear that harsh self-criticism will not help. It activates the exact defences that make honest examination impossible. The goal is not to prosecute yourself. It is to get curious about where the story went and whether it's still serving you.
That is a different kind of courage — and a much more useful one.
Now What About Those Systems? 🏛️
This is not only a personal problem — and the antidote is not only personal either.
Every scandal named in this post exists in the public record because someone, at some point, decided that the cost of staying silent was higher than the cost of speaking. The compliance officer who put her concerns in writing and was dismissed. The postmasters who kept insisting, for over a decade, that the numbers were wrong. The survivors who gave evidence to royal commissions that institutions had spent years hoping would never be convened. None of them fixed the problem overnight. Most of them were ignored, sidelined, or disbelieved for years before anything changed. But they kept the record. They made themselves inconvenient to the story. Eventually the story did break.
We are at a moment of significant disruption to almost every social contract we have inherited. Institutions are under pressure. AI is being embedded into systems that govern how people receive payments, access services, make medical decisions, and interact with the law — often with reduced human oversight, and often faster than regulation can follow. The conditions that produced Robodebt are not exceptional. They are a template. There will be more this decade.
What is needed is not for everyone to take on the world's problems. It is for people to exercise the influence they actually have, in the place they actually occupy. That might mean refusing to participate in triangulation inside your own family. It might mean raising a concern at work that everyone else has decided not to name. It might mean using whatever public platform you have — however small — to ask questions about a system that isn't adding up. Or it might, one day, mean being the person who blows the whistle on something that matters enormously and that no one else was willing to see.
The only reason we know what we know now is because people are brave and have a strong sense for collective justice. I am asking yourself to consider if you can be this brave, one day, if needed.
Institutions do not protect us, we protect each other.
💜 Soul Mapping
Reading about self-deception is one thing. Catching it in yourself — consistently, over time, without sliding back into the comfortable version — is another. That gap between recognition and sustained honesty is exactly what structured support is for.
The Build Your OS sequence inside Soul Mapping's Mind Branch is where this work gets a container. Not to prosecute the stories you've been telling — but to trace their roots.
Where did this one come from? What was it protecting when it first formed? Is it still doing that job, or has it just become the path of least resistance? Those are different questions, and they tend to need more than a single journalling session to answer properly.
Most people have never had a structured space to ask what they actually believe versus what they inherited. Most don't know how different those two things are until they look directly.
If you're ready to look, Soul Mapping is where we shine that light. 🏮
References 📚
Čepukienė, V. and Neophytou, K., 2024. Intergenerational transmission of familial relational dysfunction: A test of a complex mediation model based on Bowen family systems theory. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 41(11), pp.3385–3408.
Garrett, N., Lazzaro, S.C., Ariely, D. and Sharot, T., 2016. The brain adapts to dishonesty. Nature Neuroscience, 19(12), pp.1727–1732.
Gino, F., Ayal, S. and Ariely, D., 2009. Contagion and differentiation in unethical behavior: The effect of one bad apple on the barrel. Psychological Science, 20(3), pp.393–398.
Glantz, S.A. ed., 1996. The cigarette papers. Univ of California Press.
Harmon-Jones, E. and Mills, J., 2019. An introduction to cognitive dissonance theory and an overview of current perspectives on the theory. In E. Harmon-Jones (Ed.), Cognitive Dissonance: Reexamining a Pivotal Theory in Psychology (2nd ed.). American Psychological Association.
Lewicki, R.J., Polin, B. and Lount Jr, R.B., 2016. An exploration of the structure of effective apologies. Negotiation and Conflict Management Research, 9(2), pp.177–196.
McCullough, M.E., 2001. Forgiveness: Who does it and how do they do it? Current Directions in Psychological Science, 10(6), pp.194–197.
Miller, R.B., Anderson, S. and Keala, D.K., 2004. Is Bowen theory valid? A review of basic research. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 30(4), pp.453–466.
Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry, 2025. Report: Volume 1. HC 1119. Presented to Parliament 8 July 2025.
Reeck, C. and Ariely, D., 2025. Dishonest behavior can transition to continuous ethical transgressions. Scientific Reports, 15(1), p.24484.
Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, 2017. Final Report: Preface and Executive Summary. Commonwealth of Australia.
Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme, 2023. Report: Volume 1. Commonwealth of Australia. ISBN 978-1-921241-58-1.
Tavris, C. and Aronson, E., 2007. Self-justification in public and private spheres. The General Psychologist, 42, pp.4–7.
Tavris, C. and Aronson, E., 2017. Why we believe–long after we shouldn't. Skeptical Inquirer, 41(2), pp.51–53.
Von Hippel, W. and Trivers, R., 2011. The evolution and psychology of self-deception. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 34(1), pp.1–16.
Further Reading
Marples, D.R., 2004. Chernobyl: a reassessment. Eurasian Geography and Economics, 45(8), pp.588–607.
McCullough, M.E., Bono, G. and Root, L.M., 2005. Religion and forgiveness. In R.F. Paloutzian and C.L. Park (Eds.), Handbook of the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality. Guilford Press, pp.394–411.
Paul, C. and Matthews, M., 2016. The Russian "firehose of falsehood" propaganda model. Rand Corporation, 2(7), pp.1–10.
