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illusory pattern recognition. That is, when individuals are induced to feel a lack of control, they tend to see meaningful patterns in random data, as if responding to their unfortunate lack of control by generating (false) coherence in data that would then give them greater control.

The Construction of Biased Social Theory
     
    We all have social theories, that is, theories regarding our immediate social reality. We have a theory of our marriages. Husband and wife may agree, for example, that one party is a long-suffering altruist while the other is hopelessly selfish, but disagree over which is which. We each have a theory regarding our employment. Are we an exploited worker, underpaid and underappreciated for value given—and therefore fully justified in minimizing output while stealing everything that is not nailed down? We usually have a theory regarding our larger society as well. Are the wealthy unfairly increasing their share of resources at the expense of the rest of us (as has surely been happening) or are the wealthy living under an onerous system of taxation and regulation? Does democracy permit us to reassert our power at regular intervals or is it largely a sham exercise controlled by wealthy interests? Is the judicial system regularly biased against our kinds of people (African Americans, the poor, individuals versus corporations)? And so on. The capacity for these kinds of theories presumably evolved not only to help understand the world and to detect cheating and unfairness but also to persuade self and others of false reality, the better to benefit ourselves.
    The unconscious importance of biased social theory is revealed most vividly perhaps when an argument breaks out. Human arguments feel so effortless because by the time the arguing starts, the work has already been done. The argument may appear to burst forth spontaneously, with little or no preview, yet as it rolls along, two whole landscapes of information lie already organized, waiting only for the lightning of anger to reveal them. These landscapes have been organized with the help of unconscious forces designed to create biased social theory and, when needed, biased evidence to support them.
    Social theory inevitably embraces a complex set of facts, which may be only partially remembered and poorly organized, the better to construct a consistent, self-serving body of social theory. Contradictions may be far afield and difficult to detect. When Republicans in the US House of Representatives bemoaned what the Founding Fathers would have thought had they known a future president (Clinton) would have sex with an intern, the black American comedian Chris Rock replied that they were having sex not with their interns but with their slaves . This of course is an important function of humor—to expose and deflate hidden deceit and self-deception (see Chapter 8).

False Personal Narratives
     
    We continually create false personal narratives. By enhancing ourselves and derogating others, we automatically create biased histories. We were more moral, more attractive, more “beneffective” to others than in fact we were. Recent evidence suggests that forty- to sixty-year-olds naturally push memories of negative moral actions roughly ten years deeper into their past than memories of positive ones. Likewise, there is a similar but not so pronounced bias regarding nonmoral actions that are positive or negative. An older self acted badly; a recent self acted better. I am conscious of this in my own life. When saying something personal, whether negative or positive, I displace it farther in the past, as if I am not revealing anything personal about my current self, but this is especially prominent for negative information—it was a former self acting that way.
    When people are asked to supply autobiographical accounts of being angered (victim) or angering someone else (perpetrator), a series of sharp differences emerges. The perpetrator usually describes