Are Illusions Good for You?

On functional and dysfunctional illusions

In “Positive Illusions: The Psychology of Self-Enhancement,” I reviewed the large bodies of evidence in support of the thesis that normal human psychology is characterized by unrealistically positive views of the self, unrealistic optimism, and the illusion of control. Multiple measures of the way that humans conceive of themselves, including the better than average effect and comparisons of estimated with actual ability, converge on the conclusion that people overestimate their positive traits, their ability to control the world around them, and their likelihood of achieving hoped-for outcomes and avoiding negative ones.

That such positive illusions are constitutive of psychological normality was the first half of the radically novel theory of mental health proposed by Shelley E. Taylor and Jonathon D. Brown in their 1988 article, “Illusion and Well-Being.” This part of their thesis has found broad support among psychologists.

Taylor and Brown went on to argue that these positive illusions, which are sometimes also called “self-enhancement” or “self-deceptive enhancement,” lead to happiness, motivation to tackle and succeed at challenging tasks, and popularity. This second half of their thesis is still highly controversial. Much experimental research has confirmed the thesis, but other research has concluded that self-enhancement leads to dysfunctional, narcissistic behaviors.

The reason for these divergent findings is that psychological instruments for measuring self-enhancement cannot capture the difference between two overlapping groups of people: functional and dysfunctional self-enhancers. Functional self-enhancers can regulate and adjust their positive illusions so that they do not result in negative outcomes. This group typically reconciles their enhanced self-image with reality to avoid humiliation, failure, and social rejection. Dysfunctional self-enhancers, including clinical narcissists, live in denial of reality and, therefore, experience negative outcomes because of their illusions.

Two classic studies of self-enhancers

What is the personality and lifestyle of a self-enhancer like? Two classic studies provide radically different answers.

The first is the 2003 study, “Portrait of the Self-Enhancer,” by Shelley E. Taylor and her colleagues. They conducted tests of the relationship between self-enhancement and both personal well-being and interpersonal adjustment. They found that subjects’ self-enhancement was significantly correlated with multiple measures of mental health, including autonomy, purpose in life, and self-acceptance. A clinical psychologist and peers also rated subjects who self-enhanced as mentally healthy. Moreover, ratings by the subjects’ friends indicated that self-enhancers were well-liked.

However, Randall Colvin and his colleagues reached radically different conclusions in a 1995 study, “Overly positive self-evaluations and personality: negative implications for mental health.” They found that self-enhancers were socially maladjusted and appeared to be unhappy. Self-enhancers were rated as deceitful, self-pitying, insecure, self-defeating, brittle, and hostile. Positive traits like charm, intelligence, and social poise were negatively correlated with self-enhancement.

Colvin et al. concluded with a grim diagnosis of self-enhancers:

The present analyses suggest that self-enhancement, while aiding one's self-esteem, is over the long term an ineffective interpersonal strategy with both friends and acquaintances and, therefore, the growth or development of self. A vicious cycle is generated whereby self-enhancement is rigidly and frequently used to maintain positive self-regard but at a continual and cumulative cost of alienating one's friends and discouraging new acquaintances. A deep albeit perhaps unrecognized and unacknowledged sense of uneasiness consequently may pervade the self-enhancer, hardly a condition conducive to mental health.

These two studies capture recognizable and radically different personality types. Taylor et al.’s self-enhancers are happy, confident, upbeat, highly motivated people who are resilient against shocks to their self-esteem.

However, in the Colvin et al. study, self-enhancers look very much like clinical vulnerable narcissists. As Anna Z. Czarna and colleagues write,

Vulnerable narcissism… is inversely associated with subjective well-being. It predicts a number of variables related to negative emotionality, such as anxiety, depression, and hostility, earning vulnerably narcissistic individuals the name “struggling narcissists” or even “failed narcissists.”

The internal lives of vulnerable narcissists are roiled by “a constant interplay of excessive pride and shame,” as well as envy and anger.

Dall-E’s interpretation of a vulnerable narcissist

This disagreement about the consequences of self-enhancement exists to this day. Saya Weissman and Eugenia I. Gorlin’s recent review of work on the consequences of positive illusions illustrates the contradictory findings. Many studies have confirmed that self-enhancement has positive outcomes, like high self-esteem, ability to cope with trauma, and successful romantic relationships. On the other hand, it has also been found that self-enhancement leads to social rejection, low learning ability, irrational perseverance in hopeless tasks, low moral reasoning, criminal behavior, and drug abuse.

These contradictory findings are due to differences in the methods psychologists use to measure self-enhancement, social adjustment, and other psychological variables, as well as to differences in the populations studied. It is not surprising that positive illusions play different roles in the lives of college students, drug addicts, and domestic violence offenders, three groups included in the Weissman and Gorlin review. I will not try to sort out all of the methodological differences in self-enhancement research here. (If you’re interested in these, here is a good place to start.) Rather, I will review research on the positive and negative consequences of positive illusions and suggest a way of reconciling them afterward.

The pros of positive illusions

Well-being and self-esteem

Self-enhancement has been shown to promote psychological well-being and self-esteem. As an example, Constantine Sedikides and colleagues studied the psychological state of subclinical narcissists, or “normal narcissists.” These are people who exhibit narcissistic tendencies, but not to pathological extremes. Normal narcissism is a construct consisting of “autonomy, entitlement, exhibitionism, exploitation, self-sufficiency, superiority, and vanity.” They found that normal narcissists were high in self-esteem and well-being and low in depression, loneliness, and anxiety.

A 2018 meta-analysis of 299 studies on the outcomes of self-enhancement by Michael Dufner and colleagues found that self-enhancement was positively related to positive affect and life satisfaction and negatively related to negative affect and depression. This finding was extremely robust and dramatically weakens the case that self-enhancement normally leads to unhappiness:

These benefits were detectable regardless of the source of adjustment scores (self-reported vs. informant reported), the way self-enhancement was operationalized (criterion discrepancy vs. self-report only), participants’ life circumstances (adverse vs. normal), participants’ sex (male vs. female), participants’ age (young adults vs. older adults), year of publication (younger cohort vs. older cohort), and participants’ cultural background (Westerners vs. Easterners). Stated otherwise, the findings were robust across a wide range of relevant moderators.

Coping with adversity

Self-enhancement enables people better to cope with adverse life events. Oscar H. Yan and George A. Bonanno studied how self-enhancement affected the coping of people whose spouses had recently died. Subjects were questioned regarding symptoms of depression, posttraumatic stress disorder, grief, and loneliness. Some of the questions gauged whether subjects became distressed when confronted with reminders of their loss, whether they blamed themselves for their spouses’ deaths, and whether they had difficulty developing new relationships. Friends and relatives of the subjects evaluated the subjects’ social functioning. Higher self-enhancement was associated with low negative mental health symptoms and loneliness and high ratings of social functioning.

In “Positive Illusions and Coping with Adversity,” Shelley E. Taylor and David A. Armor review Taylor’s studies in the 1980s and 90s on the psychology of breast cancer patients and HIV-positive men. (The studies of the latter were conducted in the early 90s before effective AIDS treatments were available.) Profound illusions about their prospects were common in both of these groups. For example, many cancer patients believed without medical justification that they could control the course of their cancer by informing themselves about their condition, meditation, or the maintenance of a positive attitude. Many women invented bizarre mythologies about their illness. One woman believed that the cancer had been caused by the stress of her relationship with her “boorish” first husband. Now that she had a “wonderful” second husband, she would remain cancer-free.¹ Taylor found that the women who harbored such illusions of control were better adjusted to their condition than more realistic cancer patients. Similar results were found among HIV-positive men.

Motivation and task success

David A. Armor and Shelley E. Taylor studied the difference between deliberative and implemental mindsets in planning. When subjects are deliberating how to go about a task, they tend to be realistic and weigh the likelihoods of both positive and negative outcomes. However, when they are induced to think about implementing a plan, they are more optimistic about the outcome. This optimistic implemental mindset leads to greater success at the task. These results indicate that unrealistic optimism serves a motivating purpose that leads to greater success. Taylor and Armor’s thesis tallies with studies of success in athletics, which showed that positive illusions lead to enhanced motivation and success in competition.

Self-enhancement and interpersonal adjustment: contradictory findings

Interpersonal adjustment refers to the extent to which people are valued by others and achieve successful and fulfilling relationships. Do positive illusions lead to high interpersonal adjustment? The evidence is mixed.

Many studies unambiguously confirm Taylor et al.’s findings, reviewed above, that self-enhancers are socially well-adjusted and well-liked. Positive illusions have been found to predict low neuroticism and high openness and conscientiousness, all of which tend to facilitate social adjustment. Self-enhancers tend to be dutiful, emotionally stable, socially desirable, and disposed to cooperation with others. The abilities of self-enhancers tend to be overrated by the people that they come into contact with, whereas the opposite is the case for people who underestimate their abilities. This effect is not confined to first impressions, but continues over time.

Positive illusions are also a key component of successful romantic relationships. Self-enhancers also enhance the positive traits of their romantic partners. Mutual idealization between romantic partners buffers relationships against conflicts. Romantic partners’ idealization of each other is more predictive of the success of romantic relationships than is accurate understanding of each other.

However, most psychologists reach more ambiguous conclusions about the social adjustment of self-enhancers. The Dufner et al. meta-analysis found that self-enhancers tend to make positive first impressions on people, but that this positive impression fades over time. This result tallies with the conclusions of Constantine Sedikides and colleagues about the likeability of narcissists:

narcissists are viewed as physically attractive and are ascribed relatively high mate value, due not only to their perceived physical attractiveness but also to their perceived social boldness. Narcissists, upon acquaintance, come across as interesting, energetic, competent, well-adjusted, and entertaining. Also, they create excitement and bring satisfaction in the early stages of the relationship. Yet, the weight of the evidence points to a damaging influence of narcissism on long-term relationships. Narcissists are disagreeable and high in need for power, are low on empathy or perspective-taking, and respond with aggression to criticism. Indeed, with increased familiarity, narcissists come to be disliked by their acquaintances due to their arrogant and antagonistic behavior.

The Dufner et al. meta-analysis found that those who self-enhance on communal traits, like agreeableness, empathy, and helpfulness, are perceived as highly communal. People who self-enhance on agentic traits, like assertiveness and leadership, are perceived as highly agentic, but they are also perceived as low on communal traits, meaning that people find them unlikeable.

Negative effects of positive illusions

Irrational perseverance

As noted above, the Dufner et al. meta-analysis provided no support for the thesis that self-enhancement leads to unhappiness. However, there is some evidence that people who score very high on measures of self-enhancement encounter negative outcomes. Jordan B. Peterson² and his colleagues found that people who scored very high on measures of self-enhancement were subject to irrational perseverance in a card-playing game. The game was set up to create very high chances of winning at the beginning, but the chances of winning steadily decreased so that at the end, virtually all cards were losing. Participants were boys and male college students. The performances of the those who had scored in the top and bottom quartile of self-enhancement were compared. Whereas the low self-enhancers stopped playing the game after the odds turned against them, the high self-enhancers went on playing. The result was that high self-enhancers won considerably less money and in many cases lost all of their money.

Radically unrealistic self-image

Positive illusions can distort people’s perception of themselves so that they develop a radically and dysfunctionally unrealistic self-image. Maria L. Vecina and colleagues studied self-enhancement in men convicted of domestic violence. The offenders rated themselves higher on a moral self-evaluation test than did a control group of male psychologists, who were actually working to prevent domestic violence. The offenders also scored higher on a measure of self-enhancement. Self-enhancement explained how the men reconciled their self-image with their destructive behavior.

Denial of reality

A study of patients under treatment for drug addiction found that self-enhancement accounted for problems in their recovery. They were given a questionnaire that measured not only how realistic their self-image was, but a number of other psychological traits like “selective amnesia,” or the tendency to forget mistakes, and propensity to deny reality. High scores on the self-deception test were associated with counter-productive and unrealistic beliefs about their addictions. High self-enhancers were relatively unable to accept that their addiction was a chronic disorder and rationalized and made excuses for their self-destructive drug use. High scores also predicted relatively short periods of abstinence from drugs.

Functional and dysfunctional self-enhancement

We have seen that explorations of the consequences of positive illusions reach radically different conclusions. On the positive side, self-enhancement is associated with psychological well-being, ability to cope with adversity, success in romantic relationships, and high motivation and social adjustment. However, on the negative side, self-enhancers have been shown to be unlikeable, especially at extended acquaintance. They have also been shown to construct delusional images of themselves that result in poor task performance and other negative outcomes.

What accounts for these disparate findings? Shelley E. Taylor addressed this question in several articles, particularly “Situated Optimism: Specific Outcome Expectancies and Self-Regulation,” written with David A. Armor. Taylor and Armor argue that successful self-enhancers are capable of regulating illusions to prevent negative outcomes. “The key to the effective self-regulation of behavior, affect, and well-being involves the interplay of optimistic expectations and the demands of reality.” While people may be generally over-optimistic, their expectations about specific outcomes are “flexible, malleable, and at least partially ephemeral across time and context.”

People's specific predictions are not indiscriminately optimistic—they tend to obey the constraints of reality (or at least the person's knowledge of it) and as a consequence become more or less realistic depending on the demands of the situation, the nature of the prediction, and the psychological state of the individual…. What emerges from this review is a portrait of a situated optimist, a flexible prognosticator who balances visions of the world as one would want it with an understanding of the world that is.

In short, mentally healthy people practice what I will call “functional self-enhancement,” which allows them to maintain an unrealistic view of themselves, but prevents those illusions from getting them into trouble.

As an example, take a college freshman who is highly optimistic about their future. If such optimism is unrealistic, the freshman may risk humiliation and disappointment. They may loudly brag that they will get an A on a hard exam that they will take later in the day. If they get a B- instead, people might humiliate them for their overconfidence.

There are many ways for the student to hold onto their positive illusions but avoid potential humiliation. One way is for them to simply remain silent about their optimistic predictions. Another is for them to express optimism in a way that is not as easily testable as the prediction about the exam grade. The student may express a general optimism about performing brilliantly in college over the next four years. This expectation cannot be disconfirmed by the results of a single exam. Functional self-enhancers thus hold unrealistically optimistic views that are not easily verifiable. This strategy tallies with the experimental finding that people’s optimism about a future event diminishes as the event grows nearer in time.

Unrealistic optimism can also be accompanied by realistic beliefs. Taylor and Armor contrast active and naïve optimism: active optimists believe that they can possibly achieve goals, but naïve optimists believe that they will inevitably achieve goals. The active optimist recognizes that the achievement of a challenging goal is contingent on their effort: the freshman must study hard. However, the naïve optimist is so confident in their ability that they feel there is no need to make an effort. Active optimists may not live up to their expectations, but they are likely to come closer than naïve optimists.

Relatedly, the freshman’s predictions about their exam performance may change over time. The student may go through a deliberative stage in which they make realistic assessments about their exam performance. Recognizing the difficulty of the exam, they study hard. However, on the day of the exam, they may adopt an implemental mindset that is highly optimistic. As I discussed above, this type of optimism at the implemental stage, when deliberation can no longer help, has been shown to increase motivation and success at tasks.

Expectations may be unrealistic in an absolute sense but realistic in a relative sense. If the exam is so hard that the B- grade is in the top 10% of the class scores, the student is not likely to attract much ridicule for their prediction. Their prediction was wrong in an absolute sense, but the student realistically assessed where they stood relative to others.

Taylor and Armor argue that these psychological practices are what distinguishes functional from dysfunctional self-enhancers. While the first reconcile illusion with realism, a defining trait of narcissists is that they are impervious to realistic feedback about themselves. As Eddie Brummelman and Constantine Sedikides write, “Adult narcissists see themselves as geniuses, even if their IQ scores are average; they think they are superb leaders, even if they disrupt group performance; and they believe they are attractive, even if others disagree.” Such denial of reality inevitably results in humiliation, disappointment, anger, and poor performance.

You may be thinking that, even if this theory is plausible, it is unproven, and you are right. Psychologists have never been able to reliably separate functional from dysfunctional self-enhancement in experimental settings. They have often tried, however. One frequently employed method has been to test whether there is a curvilinear relationship between the degree of self-enhancement and outcomes. The theory is that functional self-enhancers will show lower levels of self-enhancement than dysfunctional ones. Functional self-enhancers, the theory goes, ought to show an “optimal margin” of illusion and experience better outcomes than those who self-enhance to an extreme degree.

Such a curvilinear effect has never been convincingly demonstrated, and it is not hard to see why. The technique cannot pick up on the specifics of self-presentation and context that distinguish between functional and dysfunctional illusions. Functional illusions are usually constrained by reality, but they are not necessarily so. Consider the breast cancer patients mentioned above who believed that their cancer could be stopped through meditation or marriage to a better husband. These beliefs are profoundly unrealistic and even qualify as magical thinking. But they are quite functional in their context. It is not likely that these illusions will lead to harmful results, especially since they were not found to reduce patients’ adherence to their course of treatment. No one is going to taunt and humiliate severely ill patients for holding bizarre beliefs about their illnesses. Measuring the extent of deviation from realism is a crude and usually ineffective way of distinguishing between functional and dysfunctional illusions.

Positive illusions bring people the gifts of happiness, ability to cope with adverse life events, high motivation, and interpersonal success. However, these illusions can also cause many problems, including irrational perseverance, a delusional self-image, and denial of reality. The key to avoiding these negative outcomes is a functional self-enhancement style that regulates and adjusts positive illusions so that they do result in humiliation and poor performance. As Taylor and Armor conclude, functional self-enhancers “seem to maintain expectations that are as favorable as they can get away with, given the demands of the current situation and the state of their own self-knowledge.”

1. Taylor, S. E. (1989). Positive illusions: Creative self-deception and the healthy mind. Basic Books, p. 179. The whole fifth chapter is reading for a deep dive into Taylor’s work with cancer patients.

2. Yes, that Jordan B. Peterson! The 2003 article that I cite was written before he got famous.