💠 REVEALED: Who's Really Running the White House (Hint: NOT Biden) 💠

Biden’s Puppet Master…EXPOSED [LOGO OST]( Sometimes, colleagues of Open Source Trades share special offers with us that we think our readers should be made aware of. Below is one such special opportunity that we believe deserves your attention.   Picking sides Schwardmann has now observed a similar process in debating tournaments. At these events, the participants are given a topic and then randomly assigned a point of view to argue – before being given 15 minutes to prepare their arguments. During the debate, they are then judged on how well they present their case. Schwardmann tested the participants’ personal beliefs about the topics before they had been assigned their position, after they had started formulating their arguments, and after the debate itself. In line with the idea that self-deception evolved to help us persuade others, he found that people’s personal opinions substantially changed after they had been told which side of the debate they would need to argue. “Their private beliefs moved towards the side that they’d been given just 15 minutes beforehand – to align with their persuasion goals,” says Schwardmann. After the debate, the participants were also given the chance to allocate small sums of money to charity – selected from a long list of potential organisations. Schwardmann found they were much more willing to choose organisations that aligned with the position of their argument – even though it had initially been chosen at random. Many of our opinions may have been formed in this way. In politics, it could be that a campaigner who is asked to canvas on a particular point really comes to persuade him- or herself that it is the only way of viewing the point – not because they have carefully appraised the facts, but simply because they were asked to make the argument. Indeed, Schwardmann suspects this process may lie behind much of the political polarisation we see today. Delusions of grandeur In all these ways, our brains can fool us into believing things that are not true. Self-deception allows us to inflate our opinion of our own abilities, so that we believe we are smarter than everyone around us. It means that we overlook the repercussions of our actions for other people, so that we believe that we are generally acting in a moral way. And by deceiving ourselves about the veracity of our beliefs, we show greater conviction in our opinions – which can, in turn, help us to persuade others. We can’t ever know what was truly going through the minds of Holmes, Sorokin or Hayut and other fraudsters – but it is easy to speculate how some of these mechanisms may have been at play. At the very least, these con artists seem to have had abnormally high opinions of their own abilities and their right to get what they want – and they happily shrugged off the potential ethical implications of what they were doing. Holmes, in particular, seems to have believed in her product, and attempted to justify her use of misleading data. Despite all evidence to the contrary, she still declared at her trial that "the big medical device companies like Siemens could easily reproduce what we had done”. Hayut, meanwhile, still claims he is “the biggest gentleman”, who had done nothing wrong. Schwardmann agrees it may be possible for some fraudsters to inhabit incredibly elaborate lies. He points out that some even show a kind of righteous anger when they are being questioned, which might be hard to fake. “Maybe that’s a sign that they really buy into their own lie,” he says. Tellingly, a desire for social status seems to increase people’s tendency for self-deception. When people feel threatened by others, for example, they are more likely to inflate their perceptions of their own abilities. It may be that the bigger the stakes, the greater the lies we are able to tell ourselves. Most of the time, our self-deception may be benign – allowing us to feel just a bit more confident in ourselves than is justified. But it’s always worth being aware of these tendencies – especially if we’re making potentially life-changing decisions. You don’t want to deceive yourself about the risks of cutting corners in your current job, or the likelihood of success from an adventurous career move, for example. One good way of puncturing all kinds of bias is to “consider the opposite” of your conclusions. The technique is as straightforward as it sounds: you try to find all the reasons that your belief may be wrong, as if you were interrogating yourself. Multiple studies have shown that this leads us to think more analytically about a situation. In laboratory tests, this systematic reasoning proves to be much more effective than simply telling people to “think rationally”. This is only possible if you can accept your flaws, of course. The first step is acknowledging the problem. Perhaps you think that you don’t need this advice; self-deception only afflicts others, while you are perfectly honest with yourself. If so, that may be your greatest delusion of all. Self-deception can fool us into believing our own lies – and even make us more convincing. T The media today is full of people who have lived a lie. There’s Elizabeth Holmes, the biotech entrepreneur, who in 2015 was declared the youngest and richest self-made female billionaire. She now faces 20 years in prison for fraud. Then there’s Anna Sorokin – aka Anna Delvey, who pretended to be a German heiress, and subsequently fleeced New York’s high society of hundreds of thousands of dollars. And Shimon Hayut, aka Simon Leviev – the so-called Tinder Swindler. What marks all of these people is not just the lies they told others – but the lies they must have told themselves. They each believed their actions were somehow justifiable, and – against all odds – believed they would never be found out. Time and again, they personally seemed to deny reality – and dragged others into their scams. You might hope that this kind of behaviour is a relatively rare phenomenon, restricted to a few extreme situations. But self-deception is incredibly common, and may have evolved to bring some personal benefits. We lie to ourselves to protect our self-images, which allows us to act immorally while maintaining a clear conscience. According to the very latest research, self-deception may have even evolved to help us to persuade others; if we start believing our own lies, it’s much easier to get other people to believe them, too. This research might explain questionable behaviour in many areas of life – far beyond the headline-grabbing scams in recent years. By understanding the different factors contributing to self-deception, we can try to spot when it might be swaying our own decisions, and prevent these delusions from leading us astray. Safeguarding the ego Any psychologist will tell you that studying self-deception scientifically is a headache. You can’t simply ask someone if they are fooling themselves, since it happens below conscious awareness. As a result, the experiments are often highly intricate. Let’s begin with the research of Zoë Chance, an associate professor of marketing at Yale University. In an ingenious experiment from 2011, she showed that many people unconsciously employ self-deception to boost their egos. One group of participants were asked to take an IQ test, with a list of the answers printed at the bottom of the page. As you might expect, these people performed considerably better than a control group who did not have the answer key. They did not seem to recognise how much they had relied on the ‘cheat sheet’, however – since they predicted that they would do equally well on a second test featuring another hundred questions, without the answer key. Somehow, they had fooled themselves into thinking that they had known the solutions to the problems without needing the helping hand. To be sure of this conclusion, Chance repeated the whole experiment with a new set of participants. This time, however, the participants were given a financial reward for accurately predicting their results in the second test; overconfidence would come with a penalty. If the participants were conscious of their behaviour, you might expect this incentive to reduce their overconfidence. In reality, it did little to puncture the participants’ inflated self-belief; they still fooled themselves into thinking they were smarter than they were, even when they knew that they would lose money. This suggests that the beliefs were genuine and deeply held – and surprisingly robust. It’s not hard to see how this might apply in real life. A scientist may feel that their results were real, despite the use of fraudulent data; a student may believe they earned their place at a prestigious university, despite cheating on a test. Despite knowing they'd had help, experiment participants convinced themselves they were smarter than they were (Credit: Getty) Despite knowing they'd had help, experiment participants convinced themselves they were smarter than they were (Credit: Getty) Moral sincerity The use of self-deception to enhance self-image has now been observed in many other contexts. For instance, Uri Gneezy, a professor of economics at the University of California, San Diego, has recently shown it can help us to justify potential conflicts of interest in our work. In a 2020 study, Gneezy asked participants to take on the roles of investment advisors or clients. The advisors were given two different opportunities to consider – each of which came with different risks and different payoffs. They were also told that they would receive a commission if the client opted for one of the two investments. In one set of trials, the advisors were told about this potential reward at the very start of the experiment, before they started considering the different options. While they were ostensibly picking the best choice for the client, they were much more likely to go with the choice that was favourable to themselves. In the rest of the trials, however, the advisors were only told of this potential reward after they had been given some time to weigh up the pros and cons of each. This time few chose to let the reward influence their decision; they remained honest to their goal of giving the best advice to the client. To Gneezy, the fact that the knowledge of the personal benefits only influenced the participants’ decision in the first scenario suggests that their self-deception was unconscious; it changed the way they were calculating the benefits and risks without them being aware of the bias, so that they could feel that they were still acting in the clients’ interest. In the second scenario, it would have required a complete change of mind, which would have been harder to justify to themselves. “They just couldn’t convince themselves that they would be acting ethically,” he says. [Self-deception] means that we can continue to see ourselves as good people - Uri Gneezy In this way, self-deception is a way of protecting our sense of morality, says Gneezy. “It means that we can continue to see ourselves as good people,” he says – even when our actions would suggest otherwise. This form of self-deception might be most obviously relevant to financial advisors, but Gneezy thinks it could also be important for private healthcare. Despite having good intentions, a doctor could unconsciously deceive themselves into thinking the more expensive treatment was best for the patient – without even recognising their self-deception, he says. Persuading ourselves, persuading others Perhaps the most surprising consequence of self-deception concerns our conversations with others. According to this theory, self-deception allows us to be more confident in what we are saying, which makes us more persuasive. If you are trying to sell a dodgy product, for instance, you will make a better case if you genuinely believe it is a high-quality bargain – even if there is evidence to suggest otherwise. This hypothesis was first proposed decades ago, and a recent paper by Peter Schwardmann, an assistant professor of behavioural economics at Carnegie Mellon University, US, provides some strong evidence for this idea. Like Chance’s study, Schwardmann’s first experiments began with an IQ test. The participants weren’t given the results, but after the test was finished, they had to privately rate how well they thought they’d done. They then took a test of persuasion: they had to stand before a jury of mock employers and convince the panel of their intellectual prowess – with a potential 15 euro ($16, £12.80) reward if the judges believed that they were among the smartest in the group. Some people were told about the persuasion task before they rated their confidence in their performance, while others were told afterwards. In line with the hypothesis, Schwardmann found that this changed their ratings of their abilities: the prior knowledge that they would have to convince others resulted in greater overconfidence in their abilities, compared to those who had not yet been told. The need to persuade others had primed them to think that they were smarter than they really were. He describes this as a kind of “reflex”. Importantly, Schwardmann’s experiments showed that the self-deception paid off; unfounded overconfidence did indeed increase people’s ability to persuade the mock employers. Dear reader, If you suspected Joe Biden isn't really the one running the U.S. government, you may be right. But his "Puppet Master" isn't Obama, Hillary, George Soros, or anyone you might have thought about... [It's this man right here...]( And his plan for America is terrifying. [Click here now and learn how to prepare for what could be very dark days for America...]( Little is known about the ancient Etruscans, but one of the clues they left behind is a network of sunken paths said to connect the land of the living with the land of the dead. W Wildflowers grazed my legs as I hiked down from the volcanic-rock hilltop fortress of Pitigliano into the Tuscan valley below. At the base of the hill, I crossed a burbling stream and followed a winding trail as it inclined. All of a sudden, I was walled in. Huge blocks of tuff, a porous rock made from volcanic ash, rose as high as 25m on either side of the trench I found myself in. I felt spooked – and I'm not the only one who's felt that way in vie cave like this. These subterranean trails have been linked with lore of devils and deities for centuries. "When we were kids, nobody really went there," said Elena Ronca, a hiking guide who has been leading tours around this area of Tuscany, where she grew up, for 12 years. That's because there wasn't much information about the trails, nor about the Etruscan civilisation that built them. The ancients didn't leave road maps or written records, and many pathways were abandoned and overgrown with shrubs. But in the last few decades, archaeological discoveries in tombs across central Italy, and as far as Corsica, have revealed more about the Etruscans and their mysterious vie cave, which are said to connect the land of the living with the land of the dead. At their simplest definition, vie cave (via cava is the singular) were walled pathways used to travel from the highlands to the riverbanks and vice versa. While they're found in various places across central Italy (where the Etruscans thrived from 900 BCE until they were absorbed into the Roman Empire), the vie cave here in southern Tuscany between the towns of Pitigliano, Sorano and Sovana are among the oldest and most intact. "It's incredible that the vie cave have lasted so long," Ronca said. "During the Etruscan times, they knew what they were doing." The vie cave in Pitigliano are among the oldest and most intact (Credit: Shaiith/Getty Images) The vie cave in Pitigliano are among the oldest and most intact (Credit: Shaiith/Getty Images) On my hike through the area, each vie cave I walked was different than the next. Some were narrow, with walls not much taller than me, and finely cut stairs. Others were lush jungles of moss and ferns contained by giant walls, or residential roads wide enough to fit a car or two. Originally, Ronca explained, the vie cave were carved only a few feet deep, using a rock-cutting technique first seen in ancient Egypt that involved drilling a hole into the tuff, inserting a piece of wood and then filling the hole with water. The wood would expand, forcing the tuff to fracture. They would do this again and again, lengthening and deepening the road to its desired size. "It's not a simple and easy technique," she said. Over centuries, the vie cave were further altered by various empires, including the Ostrogoths, Lombards and Franks, that used them to suit their needs. At some unknown point along the way, stairs were added and ravines were deepened, but even the original vie cave had a way to channel out the rainwater: in each path I walked, I could see some form of water trough system cut into the tuff rock to prevent erosion and drain rainwater. "Etruscans were extremely skilled hydraulic engineers," Ronca said. "We know that they levelled some lakes and then drained huge wetlands in order to have lands that were possible to farm." Some cave roads are narrow, with finely cut stairs; others are lush jungles of moss and ferns contained by giant walls (Credit: Joel Balsam) Some cave roads are narrow, with finely cut stairs; others are lush jungles of moss and ferns contained by giant walls (Credit: Joel Balsam) As I continued my hike, I came across deep diagonal pits with rock monuments above them that appeared to be carved by human hands. These were Etruscan necropolises, with tombs for individuals or families cut deep into the tuff and filled with gold, food and clothing for safe passage into the afterlife. Unfortunately, many Etruscan tombs in the area were robbed long ago. As English writer D H Lawrence wrote in Etruscan Places after a visit to Tuscany in the 1920s: ''to the tombs we must go: or to the museums containing the things that have been rifled from the tombs". But historians like Luca Nejrotti, an archaeologist working with the Italian government in the region, have managed to find pottery and painted frescoes in the necropolises that may answer some questions about Etruscans and their vie cave. "Most of the Etruscan tombs have been robbed since ancient times, but the robbers used to take just the gold," he said. "So, for archaeologists, it's quite interesting because you can still find pottery and stuff that is really, really important for the historical research," he said. Etruscans' traditional tomb frescoes didn't last in the Pitigliano area, since paint doesn't stick to tuff very well, but by studying famous frescoes in necropolises like the ones beneath the city of Tarquinia, in the province of Lazio, along with artefacts in Tuscany, Nejrotti believes that vie cave might have hosted celebratory funeral parades, complete with food offerings, dancing, musical instruments and even public sex. Some historians posit that this could be because Etruscans believed life continued after death and the vie cave were pathways to the afterlife. "Etruscans believed that the trees were gods, they believed that the rivers were gods, and the main important gods were underground," Ronca said. "So probably the idea of digging vie cave through the rock was a way to connect with these gods, but we are not sure about that." At Etruscan necropolises such as Cerveteri, tombs were filled with gold, food and clothing for safe passage into the afterlife (Credit: Franz-Marc Frei/Getty Images) At Etruscan necropolises such as Cerveteri, tombs were filled with gold, food and clothing for safe passage into the afterlife (Credit: Franz-Marc Frei/Getty Images) Interestingly, the artefacts also suggest that women and men were equal in Etruscan society, which is different than how the Romans behaved: in sculptures and paintings, women are depicted as being not only welcome but active participants at banquets and social gatherings; inscriptions indicate that women could inherit property and kept matronymic names (Roman women took their father's or husband's name); and the Sarcophagus of the Spouses, found in the Etruscan necropolis in Cerveteri, shows a man and woman held in equal status. "Roman women were just the mother of the family – they had lots of power, but inside the house," Ronca said. "On the contrary in the Etruscan world, females were almost [the same] as men; they could rule a family, they could rule a town. We have some magistrates that were women." For both Nejrotti and Ronca, the most interesting theory suggested by artefacts and archaeological research is that Etruscans seem to have had a limited impact on the environment compared with the Romans, who frequently razed land, rerouted rivers and flattened hills. For instance, the vie cave caused comparatively little detrimental impact and were made using materials found in the area – possibly because the Etruscans believed certain natural features (like trees and rivers) were gods and that man was connected to nature. The Sarcophagus of the Spouses, found in the Etruscan necropolis in Cerveteri, shows a man and woman held in equal status (Credit: Leemage/Getty Images) The Sarcophagus of the Spouses, found in the Etruscan necropolis in Cerveteri, shows a man and woman held in equal status (Credit: Leemage/Getty Images) "The Romans used to be more aggressive with the environment and they used to change the landscape more deeply," Nejrotti said. "You can see that the traces that the Etruscan people left in the landscape were quite soft, maybe this is something we can learn from them." As my hike ended in the town of Sovana, a former Etruscan city that has long been built over, I wondered why I knew so little about Etruscans and their fascinating vie cave, while I knew a ton about Romans. According to Ronca, I shouldn't feel bad. "Italian people, not only European or American people, nobody knows about them," she said. "At schools, they still don't teach about the Etruscans… They are really underestimated and undervalued." But that is starting to change. Ronca said that in the past five to eight years, and especially during the pandemic lockdowns when Italians spent more time exploring their own regions, vie cave and their necropolises have grown in popularity. "Ten years ago, I had to force people to come and see the vie cave," Ronca said. Soon perhaps, vie cave will be as busy as more well-known Roman historical sites, but if they do, Ronca hopes we will do our best to preserve them. "Vie cave are something unique. We cannot just remake them," Ronca said. "Once they're gone, they're gone forever." [divider] From time to time, we send special emails or offers to readers who chose to opt in. We hope you find them useful. 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