![]() ![]() ![]() For others, the videos went from dark to light. For some viewers, most of the early videos presented Mark in a good light (recycling, returning a wallet), and they grew gradually darker (catcalling, punching a friend). To gather information about Mark, the participants watched a series of short videos, which they could stop observing at any intermission. ![]() Some were told to present Mark as likable, others were instructed to depict him as unlikable, the remaining subjects were directed to convey whatever impression they formed. They were told they would receive a bonus depending on how effective it was. In one experiment Trivers and his team asked 306 online participants to write a persuasive speech about a fictional man named Mark. The new work, forthcoming in the Journal of Economic Psychology, focuses on the first-the way we seek information that supports what we want to believe and avoid that which does not. Psychologists have identified several ways of fooling ourselves: biased information-gathering, biased reasoning and biased recollections. Now after four decades Trivers and his colleagues have published the first research supporting his idea. In 1976, in the foreword to Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene, the biologist Robert Trivers floated a novel explanation for such self-serving biases: We dupe ourselves in order to deceive others, creating social advantage. We tell ourselves we’re smarter and better looking than our friends, that our political party can do no wrong, that we’re too busy to help a colleague. ![]()
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