Never underestimate the power of self-deception.

Before I go on to illustrate this concept through literature, it's important to clarify a few psychology terms here:

• Self-Justification: "Self-justification is fueled by memories that are pruned and shaped to re-enforce the bias, revisionist history to lower culpability and a distancing from disconfirming data to the point where we actually believe that what we have convinced ourselves is true."
• Personal Narrative: Your perception of reality. An understanding of events based on your personal experiences and observations.
• Motivated Reasoning: The subconscious act of dismissing information that contradicts an assumed conclusion to avoid cognitive dissonance.
• Confirmation Bias: "Confirmation bias is the tendency for people to believe evidence that confirms their preexisting beliefs and discount information that counters those beliefs."

Keep these definitions in the back of your mind moving forward.

Motivated Reasoning: Self-Justification in Jane Austen’s Emma

Never underestimate the power of self-deception.

In Jane Austen’s novel, Emma, the main character Emma Woodhouse acts as a self-proclaimed matchmaker with vastly misplaced confidence. In essence the book is a comedic romance, and Austen captures the feminine urge to retell events with a dramatic twist and a flair for justifying one's own behavior.

She opens the novel describing Emma: "Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and a happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her..." Austen is known for the captivating and telling beginnings of her stories, and this line is no exception. By saying, satirically, that Emma "seemed" to unite all the best blessings of existence, Austen embodies the tone of the story. We as readers shall begin to notice almost immediately that Emma has altogether a strong tendency to justify her own actions and shape reality to her desires.

The story begins; after the marriage of Emma's former governess, Miss Taylor, and the widower, Mr. Weston, Emma convinces herself that it was she who contrived the match, and her confirmation bias becomes even clearer when later, in one infamous scene, she completely circumvents the truth based on her personal narrative. When Emma's latest "project," Harriet, tells her about how the man she loves rescued her from a "terrifying situation," Emma builds up a whole future between Harriet and who Emma assumes is her "hero," only to find out she was thinking of the wrong gentleman the entire time.

Emma, who is hoping to arrange a couple in Harriet and a Mr. Elton, believes Harriet's entire heroic story to be about Mr. Elton; however, unbeknownst to Emma, her desire for Harriet and Mr. Elton to be together has blinded her from the truth that Harriet is in love with another man entirely.

Further, given that Harriet's background and parentage is a mystery for most of the book, Emma manages to convince herself and others that Harriet is of noble birth, based on minimal evidence, and she even convinces Harriet to reject her favored suitor because of his "inferior rank," only to find out later that Harriet herself comes from identical means.

All of this chaos because Emma had it in her mind that it was best for Harriet to marry Mr. Elton. There could not be a more perfect match.

Eventually, Emma realizes that she has been twisting narratives to match her personal desires and justifying her manipulative acts based on her presumption that she knows what is best. She even realizes that in meddling so much in the affairs of others, she has utterly avoided comprehension of her own emotions and failed to recognize that she is in love herself.

Emma wonders at the difficulty of ensuring that her narrative is accurate, "Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised or a little mistaken."

This is a deep danger in the feminine heart in particular. In pursuit of caring for others and seeking "what is best," women often can fabricate a reality in which their actions or the actions of others makes sense.

In Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis, Lewis retells the Greek myth of Cupid and Psyche, and he follows the story of Psyche’s sister, Orual. Orual tells her narrative through a fog of guilt, but she mentally transforms that guilt into indignant self-righteousness, until it ultimately comes out at the end that she was lying to herself the whole time. The reader is deceived along with Orual, partaking in a first-hand experience of a mind sabotaging itself. But we do the same thing every day.

Every day, the mind combats regular instances of "cognitive dissonance" or moments and interactions that seem to contradict the viewer's perception of reality. When someone you presumed to be kind acts cruelly. When an assumption about the world is challenged.

In response, our mind has an incredible and subconscious ability to adjust our narrative to match our desires.

When you are late to work and you tell your coworker it was due to traffic, when it was really because you slept in or took too long to get ready, that is a small deception that will gradually become reality in your mind as you say it over and over. "It's rational, so why couldn't it be true?"

Say you make a workout schedule to meet a goal and you miss a day, so you tell yourself "I basically walked enough to count as a work out" and check that day off. Then you tell your friends you work out three days a week instead of the actual and more regular two. Eventually, your mind subconsciously records that you did work out all three days and you begin to believe it.

After an argument, you angrily think to yourself that you were in the right and you don't need to apologize, you will eventually believe it fully. You may never resolve that fight. And just because you convinced yourself you did everything right, does not mean you actually did or that the other person thinks the same way. Self-honesty is essential to good communication in relationships.

Self-justification, motivated reasoning, and confirmation bias are all forms of self-deception that warp our personal narratives. It happens in little ways daily and takes conscious effort to correct. But if ignored, whole stories can be altered by our mind's desire to match reality with expectation.

In our daily lives, we often fail to recognize the power of internal narrative, but the worst thing we can do is lie to ourselves because in doing so, we become handicapped from learning, growing, or maturing.

You have to acknowledge a problem in order to improve; you have to be honest with yourself in order to grow.

“Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.” - Fyodor Dostoevsky