People Dislike Hearing Bad News
or anything that contradicts their existing views and conclusions. Therefore, if certain things might be painful, the human brain will start to act, trying to deny reality. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel laureate, believes: “(People often don’t even want to invest) the minimum effort to genuinely figure out what they did wrong. This isn’t accidental; it’s because they simply don’t want to know.”
Everyone Avoids
We all invent stories for ourselves and avoid the facts. Even if you spend a lot of time studying behavioral economics, your skills might only improve slightly. You will always make mistakes. People often ignore or refuse to acknowledge the faults of those they love, and tend to distort the facts to accommodate them.
Some people are clearly criminals—it requires no analysis or deduction—yet their mother insists her son is innocent. This is simple psychological denial. Reality is too painful to bear, so we must distort it in order to cope. To some extent, we all do this; it is a common psychological misjudgment, but it leads to serious problems.