Culture as dramatization and fooling ourselves

Almost everything human shows individual differences. For instance, our internal organs are not all of the same size. Size follows the bell-shaped curve, where the most frequent size is of a given value and smaller and larger sizes are less frequent. Extremely small and extremely large sizes are rare. Cognitively simple self-deceptions will also be distributed according to the bellshaped curve. It is unclear at this time whether this is due to culture or personality. In any case, it suggests that some people are unusually high in self-deception. Both culture and personality differences are traceable to biased tendencies to sample information from the environment. There are differences in the availability of certain constructs to cultures and individuals, there are differences in the accessibility of the constructs, differences in the applicability of the constructs in particular settings, and also differences in the way the constructs are organized. It seems likely that individuals and members of various cultures will have different tendencies to sample positive and avoid negative information, and that will result in individual differences in selfdeception rates. There is a need for research that will explore this matter in detail. In different domains, such as on personal or public matters, self-deception is likely to be greater in some cultures than in others. This article will explore such individual differences. Cultures differ also on the extent people make most judgments based on information that comes from experience as opposed to make most judgments based on information obtained from opinion or ideological sources, such as leaders, tribal chiefs, and gods. Self deception is likely to be more common in the latter than in the former cultures. This article suggested that there are individual differences in the tendencies toward self-deception.