Fooling Ourselves: Self-Deception in Politics, Religion, and Terrorism

Triandis argues that self-deception is a widespread, cross-culturally documented human tendency rooted in information processing: because people desire the world to conform to their wishes, they attend to, interpret, and recall information selectively, sustaining beliefs that feel true but are not. The book rejects the assumption that self-deception is confined to individual pathology or occasional lapses; Triandis treats it as a normal feature of cognition with profound social and political consequences. He applies this framework to politics, religion, and terrorism, arguing that ideologies and sacred beliefs provide ready-made frames that make self-deception feel like conviction. The proposed remedy is not objectivity—which Triandis treats as unattainable—but greater equity in dealing with others and tolerance for ambiguity.

Fooling Ourselves was published in 2008, when Triandis was Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois and a former president of the International Association of Cross-Cultural Psychology . The book applies his decades of work on cultural variation in cognition and social behavior to domains he considered urgent for public understanding rather than narrowly academic. A Choice review by R. E. Osborne called it 'perhaps his most important piece of work' and 'required reading for all concerned citizens' . The turn reflects Triandis's long-standing interest in how cultural frames shape perception, now directed at the ideological conflicts that dominated the post-9/11 period. It is a work of synthesis and public argument rather than original empirical research.

Triandis devotes a chapter to 'Fooling Ourselves Across Cultures,' examining both cultural similarities and differences in self-deception, including the distinction between individualist and collective forms . The cultural dimension matters because self-deception is not purely intrapsychic: shared ideologies, religious traditions, and political cultures provide the content that individuals use to construct comforting narratives. A collective form of self-deception can sustain itself through social reinforcement, making it resistant to correction by outsiders who do not share the frame. This argument extends Triandis's earlier work on subjective culture—the shared categories through which groups perceive their world—by asking what happens when those shared categories systematically distort rather than clarify.

The final chapter, 'What Can We Do?,' argues that recognizing the pervasiveness of self-deception is a first step, and that a significant practical measure would be emphasizing equity—fairness in dealing with others—rather than merely equality, which treats everyone the same regardless of circumstance . Triandis also stresses the need to move beyond black-and-white, 'either-or' thinking toward tolerance of ambiguity. The remedy is moral and cognitive rather than technical: he does not offer a checklist or intervention protocol. Whether this is convincing depends on the reader's expectations. As diagnosis, the book is rich; as prescription, it is suggestive rather than systematic, which is consistent with its origins as a work of scholarly synthesis for a general audience.

Reviews were largely positive. Choice praised it as highly recommended for all readers and singled out its diagnosis of black-and-white thinking . The American Journal of Psychology published a review by Hank Davis in 2011, indicating sustained attention beyond the initial publication window . The book also received the William James Book Award in 2010, a recognition from Division 1 of the American Psychological Association that signals esteem within psychology for accessible scholarship . Its standing today is as a late-career synthesis by a major cross-cultural psychologist rather than as a foundational text in the self-deception literature, which is dominated by philosophical and experimental work by authors such as Robert Trivers and Dan Ariely.

Triandis approaches the topic as a psychologist rather than a philosopher, and the book does not dwell on the logical paradox that has occupied philosophers of mind. His working definition is functional: self-deception occurs when people see the world as they would like it to be rather than as it is, often without awareness that they are doing so . This sidesteps the question of whether self-deception requires two simultaneously held contradictory beliefs. Instead, Triandis treats it as a product of motivated information processing—selective attention, biased interpretation, and memory reconstruction—which is empirically tractable even if the philosophical formulation remains unresolved. Readers seeking a rigorous treatment of the paradox should look elsewhere; readers seeking a clear, culturally informed account of how self-deception operates in social life will find it here.