The Totalitarian Ego Fabrication and Revision of Personal History

This article argues that ( a ) ego, or self, is an organization of knowledge, ( b ) ego is characterized by cognitive biases strikingly analogous to totalitarian information-control strategies, and ( c ) these totalitarian-ego biases junction to preserve organization in cognitive structures. Ego's cognitive biases are egocentricity (self as the focus of knowledge), "beneffectance" (perception of responsibility for desired, but not undesired, outcomes), and cognitive conservatism (resistance to cognitive change). In addition to being pervasively evident in recent studies of normal human cognition, these three biases are found in actively functioning, higher level organizations of knowledge, perhaps best exemplified by theoretical paradigms in science. The thesis that egocentricity, beneffectance, and conservatism act to preserve knowledge organizations leads to the proposal of an intrapsychic analog of genetic evolution, which in turn provides an alternative to prevalent motivational and informational interpretations of cognitive biases. The ego rejects the unbearable idea together with its associated affect and behaves as if the idea had never occurred to the person a t all. (Freud, 1894/1959, p. 72) Alike with the individual and the group, the past is being continually re-made, reconstructed in the interests of the present. (Bartlett, 1932, p. 309) As historians of our own lives we seem to be, on the one hand, very inattentive and, on the other, revisionists who will justify the present by changing the past. (Wixon & Laird, 1976, p. 384) "Who controls the past," ran the Party slogan, "controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." (Orwell, 1949, p. 32) totalitarian, was chosen only with substantial reservation because of this label's pejorative connotations. Interestingly, characteristics that seem undesirable in a political system can nonetheless serve adaptively in a personal organization of knowledge. The conception of ego as an organization of knowledge synthesizes influences from three sources --empirical, literary, and theoretical. First, recent empirical demonstrations of self-relevant cognitive biases suggest that the biases play a role in some fundamental aspect of personality. Second, George Orwell's 1984 suggests the analogy between ego's biases and totalitarian information con&ol. Last, the theories of Loevinger (1976) and Epstein ( 1973 ) suggest the additional analogy between ego's organization and theoretical organizations of scientific knowledge. The first part of this article surveys evidence indicating that ego's cognitive biases are pervasive in and characteristic of normal personalities. The second part sets forth arguments for interpreting the biases as manifestations of an effectively functioning organization of knowledge. The last section develops an explanation for the totalitarian-ego biases by analyzing their role in maintaining cognitive organization and in supporting effective behavior. I . Three Cognitive Biases: Fabrication and Revision of Personal History Ego, as an organization of knowledge (a. conclusion to be developed later), serves the functions of What follows is a portrait of self (or ego-the terms observing (perceiving) and recording (rememberare used interchangeably) constructed by intering) personal experience; it can be characterized, weaving strands drawn from several areas of recent therefore, as a perssnal historian. Many findings research. The most striking features of the portrait are three cognitive biases, which correspond disturbingly to thought control and propaganda devices Acknowledgments are given at the end of the article. Requests for reprints should be sent to Anthony G. that are to be defining characteristics of Greenwald, Department of Psychology, Ohio State Univera totalitarian political system. The epithet for ego, sity, 404C West 17th Avenue, Columbus, Ohio 43210. Copyright 1980 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 0003466X/80/3S07-0603$00.75 from recent research in personality, cognitive, and social psychology demonstrate that ego fabricates and revises history, thereby engaging in practices not ordinarily admired in historians. These lapses in personal scholarship, or cognitive biases, are discussed below in three categories: egocentricity (self perceived as more central to events than it is), "beneffectance" l (self perceived as selectively responsible for desired, but not undesired, outcomes), and conservatism (resistance to cognitive