This question has been floating in my mind for quite a long time... what is going on with denial? Why people lie to others and perhaps to themselves even, simply because they are in denial?
Why do some people even refute hard facts like the Holocaust?
What is this strange and powerful force,
Denial
I finally found the answer as part of my degree of psychology studies this year, so I am happy to share it with my friends
It is all about threat to self-esteem and that one of the hardest things in life to understand is the why me, why her, why him, after the occurrence of tragic events such as random assault, terminal disease, and fatal accidents.
We get upset because these events remind us that if such tragedies can happen to someone else, tomorrow it could happen be us.
So we take steps to deny this fact. We protect ourselves. We protect our self-esteem.
And we shamelessly rationalise: one example is to think that this only happens to bad people, or to people who make bad choices or stupid mistakes.
Defense mechanism
This allows us to be reassured that bad things won't happen to us because we (as opposed to them) are not careless.
I cite my text book:
'Melvin Lerner (1980, 1998) has called this the belief in a just world—the assumption that people get what they deserve and deserve what they get (Aguiar, Vala, Correia, & Pereira, 2008; Hafer, 2000; Hafer & Begue, 2005).
The just-world belief has some sad and even tragic consequences.
For example, suppose a female student on your campus was the victim of a rape by a male student. How do you think you and your friends would react? Would you wonder if she’d done something to trigger the rape? Ask if she had been acting suggestively earlier in the evening or whether she had invited the man into her room?
All of these questions are examples of a defensive attribution process by which people might try to
make themselves feel better
about the attack by placing some of the blame onto the victim (Burger, 1981; Lerner & Miller, 1978; Stormo, Lang, & Stritzke, 1997; Walster, Aronson, Elliot'.
Who should be made to feel better?
(ask yourself)
In order to truly make oneself better, one has to face facts, evolution strikes randomly, it is messy, we do need luck sometime, but we are all in it, it is all part of our humanity, some people do well because they deserve it, some do well because they are at the right place at the right time, some suffer more than others because they deserve it, but some don't deserve it, so never assume a sense of misplaced superiority, you are just lucky you have been spared.
What is superior is that overall, we still manage AS ONE (people) but no, it is far from being perfect, it is very messy indeed.
Source Social Psychology, Global Edition (p. 127). Pearson Education Limited.
