Denial makes the world go round

(Article Link) Everyone is in denial about something; just try denying it and watch friends make a list. Yet recent studies from fields as diverse as psychology and anthropology suggest that the ability to look the other way, while potentially destructive, is also critically important to forming and nourishing close relationships.

"The closer you look, the more clearly you see that denial is part of the uneasy bargain we strike to be social creatures," said Michael McCullough, a psychologist at the University of Miami and the author of the coming book Beyond Revenge: The Evolution of the Forgiveness Instinct. "We really do want to be moral people, but the fact is that we cut corners to get individual advantage, and we rely on the room that denial gives us to get by, to wiggle out of speeding tickets, and to forgive others for doing the same."

The capacity for denial appears to have evolved in part to offset early humans' hypersensitivity to violations of trust.

In a series of recent studies, groups of business students rated the trustworthiness of a job applicant after learning that the person had committed an infraction at a previous job. If the infraction was described as a mistake and the applicant apologized, viewers gave him the benefit of the doubt and said they would trust him with job responsibilities. But if the infraction was described as fraud and the person apologized, viewers' trust evaporated--and even having evidence that he had been cleared of misconduct did not entirely restore that trust.

"We concluded there is this skewed incentive system," said researcher Peter H. Kim. "If you are guilty of an integrity-based violation and you apologize, that hurts you more than if you are dishonest and deny it."

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