“Deceiving yourself shouldn’t make logical sense. After all, lying involves telling someone something you know to be untrue. When you are both the liar and one lied to, this means you have to both know the truth and not know the truth. In practice, that means willfully disregarding key knowledge to arrive at a conclusion that is more convenient than what the facts appear to suggest.”
“In a recent Ditch the Label study, we spoke to 7,347 people about bullying. We asked respondents to define bullying and then later asked if, based on their own definition, they had ever bullied anybody. 14% of our overall sample, so that’s 1,239 people, said yes. What we then did was something that had never been done on this scale before; we asked them intimate questions about their lives, exploring things like stress and trauma, home lives, relationships and how they feel about themselves.”
“So bullshitting isn’t just nonsense. It’s constructed in order to appear meaningful, though on closer examination, it isn’t. And bullshit isn’t the same as lying. A liar knows the truth but makes statements deliberately intended to sell people on falsehoods. bullshitters, in contrast, aren’t concerned about what’s true or not, so much as they’re trying to appear as if they know what they’re talking about. In that sense, bullshitting can be thought of as a verbal demonstration of the Dunning-Kruger effect—when people speak from a position of disproportionate confidence about their knowledge relative to what little they actually know, bullshit is often the result.”
“There are a number of theories on the reasons why people experience jealousy. Whether it’s over what other people have that we don’t or have accomplished by means of resources, privilege, opportunity, or hard work, it seems like jealousy has always been a part of being human. One theory is that jealousy was how our early ancestors defended themselves from infidelity, according to evolutionary psychology. Today, we’ve taken theory and applied it to more rigorous scientific study.”
“The male ego can in some cases be tied to how and where a man sees his place in the world and whether he’s living up to expectations — his and those of society.
Cultural stereotypes for men can be intricately tied to both the inflation and deflation of the male ego. Some men measure themselves by the answers to the following questions:
Am I strong enough? Am I wealthy enough? Do I meet the traditional definition of masculinity? Do I attract women? Do I control things or people? Do people recognize me for these things and am I respected and revered for them?”
