The totalitarian ego: Fabrication and revision of personal history.

Abstract

This article argues that (a) ego, or self, is an organization of knowledge, (b) ego is characterized by cognitive biases strikingly analogous to totalitarian information-control strategies, and (c) these totalitarian-ego biases junction to preserve organization in cognitive structures. Ego's cognitive biases are egocentricity (self as the focus of knowledge), "beneffectance" (perception of responsibility for desired, but not undesired, outcomes), and cognitive conservatism (resistance to cognitive change). In addition to being pervasively evident in recent studies of normal human cognition, these three biases are found in actively functioning, higher level organizations of knowledge, perhaps best exemplified by theoretical paradigms in science. The thesis that egocentricity, beneffectance, and

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