Chapter 11 Self-Actualization and Self-Determination

Question 1

Humanistic psychology

Answer 1

• Everyone has the potential for growth and development. -No one- no one- is inherently bad or unworthy.
• Help people realize this about themselves, so they’ll have the chance to grow.
• People are inherently good
• Pursue goals that self-concordant
• Free will?

Question 2

Phenomenological

Answer 2

*An emphasis on the importance of one’s own personal experiences.

Question 3

Actualization

Answer 3

• Carl Rogers: Everyone tends toward a state of actualization, a tendency to develop capabilities in ways to maintain or enhance organism
• Potential for positive, healthy growth expresses itself in everyone if there are no strong opposing influences
• Reflected physically
• Part of human nature

Question 4

Self-actualization

Answer 4

• Promotes congruence, wholeness or integration within the person
• maintenance or enhancement of the self
• Enriches your life experiences and enhances creativity
• Minimizes disorganization or incongruence

Question 5

Organismic valuing process

Answer 5

• the organism automatically evaluates its experiences to tell whether they are enhancing actualization
• If they aren’t, the organismic valuing process creates a nagging sense that something isn’t right.

Question 6

Fully functioning person

Answer 6

• someone who is self-actualizing
• Open to experiencing their feelings and not threatened by them, no matter what the feelings are
• Trust their feelings
• Open to experiencing the world
• Immerse themselves in it
• Result: lives filled with meaning, challenge, and excitement but also a willingness to risk pain
• Isn’t particular kind of person, but a way of functioning that can be adopted by anyone who chooses to live that way

Question 7

Positive regard

Answer 7

*People need to have the acceptance, love, friendship, and the affection of others- particularly, others who matter to them (significant others)

Question 8

Unconditional positive regard

Answer 8

*affection given without special conditions- with “no strings attached”

Question 9

Conditional positive regard

Answer 9

• affection is given only if certain conditions are satisfied, vary from case to case
• I will only be loved by others, be accepted by others if I am…

Question 10

Conditions of worth

Answer 10

• conditions under which people are judged worthy of positive regard
• Get positive regard from other people
• Applied to us by people around us causes us to start applying the conditions to ourselves

Question 11

Conditional self-regard

Answer 11

• give ourselves affection and acceptance only when we satisfy those conditions
• Makes you behave so as to fit the conditions of worth you’re applying to yourself
• Interferes with self actualization. Can have both internal and external sources.
• Hyper-focus on how other people think of you, judge you
• Trying to live up for conditions -> Keep you achieving from self-actualization

Question 12

Precondition for acceptance

Answer 12

• defines a condition of worth

- Either by others or by one self

Question 13

Contingent self-worth

Answer 13

*conditional self regard; people who use their performance in some area of life as a condition for self-acceptance
*The pursuit of self esteem as a costly endeavor, especially when contingencies are external instead of internal
-Jennifer Crocker: people place such conditions of worth on themselves
-Come in many forms
=Academic performance
=Appearance
-Contingencies can be motivating
-Failure can result in loss of motivation
-Stressful and disrupts relationships
=Causes people to be more upset by negative interpersonal feedback
=Make people more likely to become victims of relationship violence
=Keep people focused on a particular condition of worth, rather than having grow freely

Question 14

Self Determination Theory

Answer 14

• Ed Deci and Richard Ryan
• Having a life of growth, integrity, and well-being means satisfying three needs
• For autonomy (self-determination), competence, and relatedness
• Self-determined: done either because they have intrinsic interest or are of value to you; stay interested longer
• Controlled: done to gain payment or to satisfy some pressure; lose interest

Question 15

Rewards as having both controlling and informational features

Answer 15

*Controlling: your actions are not autonomous
*Informational: informing you about yourself
-If a reward tells you that you’re competent -> increases motivation
=Possible to promote a sense of self-determination under right conditions
-If the reward implies a condition of worth/it implies that you’re acting just for the reward -> controlling will stand out -> motivation fall off

Question 16

Introjected regulation

Answer 16

*When a person treats a behavior as a “should” or an “ought”- when the person does it to avoid guilt or gain self-approval; internally controlled
-Controlled- control is exerted from inside
=Ex: Do well in class so won’t feel guilty for wasting parent’s money
-Fits with Roger’s belief that the desire for positive regard can disrupt self-actualization.

Question 17

Identified regulation

Answer 17

*The person has come to hold the behavior as personally meaningful and valuable
-Self-determined
-By identified and integrated (autonomous) values
-Having a sense of autonomy -> foster further autonomy
=Felt more competent, acted toward others in ways that supported the others’ autonomy

Question 18

Need for Relatedness

Answer 18

*Deci and Ryan: people have an intrinsic need for relatedness
-Autonomy: having a sense of free self-determination
-True relatedness doesn’t conflict with autonomy
-Autonomy and relatedness were complementary: each related independently to well-being
-Behaving autonomously was tied to more relatedness- having open and positive communication with significant others.
=the use of relationship-maintaining coping strategies and positive responses in discussing relationships
-When relationship partners are supportive of autonomy, the relationship is experiences as being better and richer.

Question 19

Self-Concordance

Answer 19

*pursue goals that are consistent with your core values
-Care more about such goals
-Benefit more from attaining them
-Create a longer-term spiral of benefit
=Try harder -> more satisfying experiences -> attain better well-being
=Promotes greater motivation for the next self-concordant goal and the cycle continues

Question 20

Free Will

Answer 20

• Humanistic psychologists: people have freedom to decide for themselves how to act and what to become
• Roger’s view: people are free to choose whether to act in self-actualizing ways or to accept conditions of worth
• Deci and Ryan’s view: people exert their will when they act in self-determination
• Whether people have free will, but certainly seem to think they do
• Wagner (2002): free will is an illusion

Question 21

Reactance

Answer 21

• when you expect to have a particular freedom and you see it as being threatened
• Regain or reassert it
• Leads to reassertion of freedom

Question 22

Self Theorist about Self

Answer 22

• Rogers (self theorist): stressed the importance of the self
• As the person grows, the self becomes more elaborate and complex
• It never reaches an end state but continues to evolve.
• Subjective awareness of being
• Used it interchangeably with self-concept

Question 23

Self-Concept`

Answer 23

*Set of qualities a person views as being part of himself or herself (much like ego identity)

Question 24

Ideal Self

Answer 24

*image of the kind of person you want to be

Question 25

Actual Self

Answer 25

*what you think you’re really like

Question 26

Self-Actualization & Self

Answer 26

*Self-actualizing: promote congruence- “fitting together”
-Actual and ideal selves- one kind of congruence
=As self-actualization occurs -> closer fit between actual and ideal -> become more like the self you want to be
-Actual self and experience -> second kind of congruence
=Self-actualization should tend to promote a closer congruence here, as well

Question 27

Self-Verification

Answer 27

• once people have a picture of what they’re like, they want to have that self-concept confirmed by other people’s reactions to them.
• Self-vertification tendency influences the kind of information they focus on

Question 28

People with negative self-view

Answer 28

*Built-in conflict between self-verification and self-protection
-Self-verification: trying not to have incongruity between self and experience
-Self-protection: trying not to be aware of incongruity between one’s desired self and actual self
-Attempts to diminish these two incongruities can pull a person in opposite directions
-Self-protection and self-enhancement tendencies seem to influence where you look (and where you don’t look) when you consider the relationship between your actual and desired selves.
-Swann: both of these forces operate in everyone
=Which force dominates at a given moment depends on your options
=Most people would prefer to learn about something they view as desirable- fits with self-protection tendency
=People also tend to seek unfavorable information

Question 29

Incongruence

Answer 29

• disorganization, a fraying of the unitary sense of self
• Don’t always know it consciously, but organismic valuing process senses it
• Rogers: either perceiving a gap between real and ideal or experiencing something that doesn’t fit your self-image- leads to anxiety
• Between actual and ideal selves -> underestimate how much their significant others care for them -> react poorly to their partners , feel pessimistic about the relationship and may act in ways that aren’t genuine -> relationship is less likely to flourish
• Rogers: people defend themselves against even the perception of incongruence, to avoid the anxiety it creates.

Question 30

Defenses against perceptions of incongruity form two categories:

Answer 30

*Distortion of experience
-Rationalization: creating a plausible but untrue explanation for why something is the way it is
-Seeing an event as being different from how it really is
*Preventing threatening experiences from reaching awareness
-Denial: refusing to admit to yourself that a situation exists or an experience took place
*You can also prevent an experience from reaching awareness indirectly by not letting yourself be in a situation in which the experience would be possible- prevent its access to consciousness
*Defenses act to maintain and enhance the congruity or integrity of the self.
Protect and enhance self-esteem

Question 31

Two conditions are required for someone to become concerned about maintaining or enhancing self-esteem.

Answer 31

• An event must be attributable to the person
• Events that’s outside your control is not relevant to you
• The event must be good or bad, thereby having a potential connotation for the person’s self-esteem.
• Not relevant- when it’s bad
• Relevant- when it’s good

Question 32

Self-handicapping

Answer 32

• acting to create the very conditions that tend to produce a failure
• Failing to attain a goal threatens self-esteem
• Your can’t really fail, though, if success is prevented by circumstances beyond your control.
• No one could do well in those conditions, so it wasn’t really a failure.
• People self-handcap more when they expect bad outcomes.
• Prevents awareness of failuring
• Unaware that you’re using it
• Cope poorly with stress
• If people think you’re self-handcapping, they react negatively to you.
• Self-handcapping helps create the very failure it was intended to protect against.

Question 33

Stereotype threat

Answer 33

*Claude Steele
*Some groups are stereotyped in ways that lead to expectations of poor performance of some sort
-Members of these groups can be threatened by being viewed through the stereotype, rather than as individuals.
-The sense of being prejudged occupies the person’s mind and promotes negative thinking.
-The person begins to disidentify with the domain in which the threat is occurring- to stop caring about it.
=Protects self-esteem by denying that the experience is relevant to the self.
=Failure doesn’t matter if the test isn’t important.

Question 34

Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Motives

Answer 34

*Human needs = forming a hierarchy,
*Needs vary in their immediacy and power
*Physiological needs: base of the pyramid, primitiva, basic, and demanding, fundamental, necessary for survival
*Safety and physical security needs: necessary for survival but less demanding, less basic because they require satisfaction less frequently
*Love and belongingness: companionship, affection, acceptance from others (need for positive regard), satisfied through interaction with other people.
*Esteem needs: needs bearing on evaluation and self-evaluation, need for a sense of mastery and power and a sense of appreciation from others
Acceptance may not be evaulated but appreciation is.
*Self-actualization: tendency to become whatever you’re capable of becoming, to extend yourself to the limits of your capacities
*Low-level needs are more primitive and more demanding than needs higher on the hierarchy
*The power of the motive force weakens as you move up the pyramid
*As you move up, the needs are also more distinctly human and less animalistic
*We have needs that make us different from other creatures- less powerful when they’re unsatisfied than the needs we share with other creatures
*If a need begins to develop at a lower level while you’re trying to satisfy a higher, the lower-level need can cause you to be pulled away from the higher-level one.
*How people move up through this of needs
-Freeing of your mind from the demands of low-level needs that lets you be attuned to the very quiet voice of self-actualization

Question 35

Deficiency-based motives

Answer 35

• motives low on the pyramid
• Arise from deprivation
• Escaping unpleasant condition

Question 36

Growth-based motives

Answer 36

• high on the pyramid
• Avoiding an unpleasant state
• Seeking of growth

Question 37

Maslow v.s. Rogers

Answer 37

• Rogers emphasized two motives: self-actualizing tendency and the need for positive regard (affection and acceptance)
• Focus on social needs which for Maslow begin at the third level (Love/Belonging)
• Bottom two levels of Maslow’s pyramid (Physiological and Safety) refers to needs that Roger ignored.
• Maslow believed, as Rogers, that the need for accpetance could be more demanding than the need for self-actualization.
• The structure of the pyramid clearly implied that people can be distracted form self-actualization by the need of positive regard.
• Maslow’s pramid- esteem needs - can be viewed as an elaboration on the need for positive regard
• Seem similar, in many ways, to Roger’s conditions of worth.
• To Rogers, bowing to conditions of worth is bad.
• To Maslow, esteem needs are part of human, although less important than the need for self-actualization
• The two agreed, that esteem needs can get in the way of self-actualization.

Question 38

Maslow’s Self-Actualization

Answer 38

• Everyone has the potential to self-actualize, and everyone has an intrinsic desire to become more and more the person he or she is capable of being.
• Self-actualization is so diffuse a quality, it can appear in virtually any kind of behavior.
• It’s any person who’s in the process of becoming more congruent, more integrated, more complete as a person.
• Some people self-actualize more than others

Question 39

Frequent Self-Actualizers

Answer 39

• Self-actualizers are efficient in thier perception of reality
• Their experience is an extra-sharp focus
• Self-actualizers can spot the confused perceptions of others and cut through the tangles.
• More accepting
• Accept both themselves and others
• Realize they’re not perfect
• Accept the frailties of the people around them as a part of who those people are
• Mental spontaneity
• Creativity without artificiality
• Having a fresh appreiation of life, an excitement in the process of living
• Problem centered
• Problem: enduring questions of philosophy or ethics
• Take a wide view, consider universal issues
• Independent from their culture and immediate environment
• Know relationships require effort- they have deep ties because relationships matter to them, but the ites are often limited to a very few others

Question 40

Transcendent self-actualizers

Answer 40

• so invested in self-actualization that it becomes the most precious aspect of their lives
• More consciously motivated by universal values or goals outside themselves
• More holistic about the world, seeing the integration of all its elements
• Self-actualization almost becomes “universe=actualization”
• See themselves as the tools by which capabilities are expressed, rather than as the owners of the capabilities.

Question 41

Peak experience

Answer 41

• a moment of intense self-actualization
• Has a sense of being connected with the elements of his or her surroundings- perceptions
• There’s also a loss of the sense of time as the experience flows by
• Include awe, wonder, and even ecstasy
• Tends to take you outside yourself
• You aren’t thinking about yourself but rather are experiencing whatever you’re experiencing as fully as possible
• Can occur in a passive way- usually occur when people are acting
• What’s important isn’t what is being done but rather how it’s taking place.
• If you’re completely immersed in it and it’s stretching you as a human being, it can be a peak experience
• Happen more during work than during leisure
• Similar to flow

Question 42

Flow

Answer 42

• so immersed in an activity that it seems to “become” him or her.

Question 43

Existential psychology

Answer 43

• Existence is all anyone has
• Each person is alone in an unfathomable universe
• Stresses that each person must take responsibility of his or her choices.
• Fits the phenomenological orientation in emphasizing the importance of the individual’s unique experience of reality.

Question 44

Dasein

Answer 44

• a concept that’s central to the existentialist view
• A German word= “being-in-the-world”
• The totality of a person’s experience of the self as an autonomous, separate, and evolving entity
• Emphasizes that people have no existence apart from the world and that the world has no meaning apart from the people in it

Question 45

Existentialists on existential dilemna

Answer 45

*life inevitably ends in death, which can come at any time.
*Death is the event no one escapes, no matter how self-actualizing his or her experiences are.
*Awareness of the inevitability of death provokes angst- dread, anguish far deeper than anxiety over incongruity.
*Being and not being- polarity between them
*How should you resond to this realization?
-Retreating into nothingness or having the courage to be
-Whether or not to commit suicide (choose nothingness), thus avoiding the absurdity of a life that will end in death anyway
=Less extreme ways of choosing nothingness: choose not to actu authentically, not to commit themselves to the goals and responsibilities that are part of who they are; drift or go along with some crowd
=When people fail to take responsibility for their live -> Choosing nothingness
-Choose to be
=Assign meaning to his or her existence
=By acting authentically, by being who you are
-Often easiet to let other people decide what’s right and just go along
-Existential psychologists believe that we are all responsible for making the most of every moment of our existence and fulfilling that existence to the best of our ability- inescapable responsibility

Question 46

Existential guilt

Answer 46

• over failing to fulfill your possibilities
• Strongest when a person who’s free to choose fails to do so
• But people who are aware are never completely free of existential guilt, because it’s impossible to fulfill every possibility
• Inescapable- part of the cost of being

Question 47

Emptiness

Answer 47

• People have lost faith in values
• Many people no longer have a sense of worth and dignity, partly because they have found themselves powerless to influence forces such as government and big business.
• When people lose their commitment to a set of values, they experience a sense of emptiness and meaninglessness -> turn to others for answers -> answers aren’t there because the problem is really within the person
• You must be responsible for your own actions and that truth can come only from within and from your actions.

Question 48

Terror Management Theory (TMT)

Answer 48

*Begins with the idea that an awareness of one’s eventual death creates existential angst, or terror.
*People respond to the terror by trying to live lives of meaning and value
*People often don’t define the meaning of life on their own
They use a process of social and cultural consensus
-Group identity- how people affirm the value of their lives
-Mortality -> more protective of their own cultural values
-By weaving themselves into a meaningful cultural fabric- a fabric that will last long after they’re gone- they affirm their own value as human beings
-Making people aware of their mortality -> more favorale toward those who uphold their worldview and more negative toward those who don’t.
-Mortality salience -> makes people adhere more to cultural norms themselves; make people act more altruistically
-Threats to your worldview -> thoughts about death
-Remind of mortality -> higher identity seeking; intending to work at projects that were more self-consistent
*Terror management is the reason people view themselves as separate from other animals.
-Think of yourself as animal= reminded of your death because all animals die
*Sex= reminder of your animal nature
-Reminds them of their mortality
-Ascribe aestheic vale to the sex act- romance, cultural standards of beauty
-Animal is transformed to the spiritual
*Propping up self-esteem can establish a sense of one’s value and stave off existential angst
*Confronting mortality motivates people to form close relationships
*The push toward affiliation may be even more important than the affirmation of cultural values

Question 49

Interviews In Assessment

Answer 49

*Self theorist such as Rogers: assessment is a process of finding out what the person is like.
*Offers maximum flexibility
*Lets the person being assessed say whatever comes up
*Lets the interviewer follow stray thoughts and ask questions that might not otherwise occur
Lets the interviewer get a subjective sense of what that person is like from interacting with him or her.
*Requires empathy
-Enter the other person’s private world
-Requires sensitivity to small changes
-Interviewer must repeatedly check the accuracy of your sensing to be sure you haven’t taken a wrong turn
-Important to doing therapy and to being a fully functioning person
*An extensive interview produces a lot of information.
*Problems: hard to compare one with another

Question 50

Content analysis

Answer 50

*grouping the person’s statements in some way and seeing how many statements fall into each group.

Question 51

Measuring The Self-Concept By Q-Sort

Answer 51

*Rogerts for assessing self-concept
-Many variations but the same basic process
-Always involves giving the person a large set of items printed on cards
-The items often are self-evaluative statements, can be phrases, words, or other things
-Asked to sort the cards into piles (one end are most like you and the other end are least like you)
-The piles between two extremes represent graduations and thus contain more cards
-Rules about how many cards can go in a given pile
=People start by sorting very generally
=Look hard at the statements and decide which one or two are most and least descriptive- is forced into self-evaluation by comparing qualities

Question 52

The Personal Orientation Inventory (POI)

Answer 52

*Measure the degree to which people have characteristics of frequent self-actualization
*Consists of paired statements
*People choose the one from each pair that they agree with more.
*Has two scales
-Time Competence: the degree to which the person lives in the present, as opposed to being distracted by the past and future.
=Time-competent people: effectively link the past and future with the present; sense continuity
-Inner directed in the search fo values and meaning
=Self-actualizers: have a stronger tendency toward inner direction in determining their values than people who are less self-actualizing

Question 53

Problems in Behavior, and Behavior Change

Answer 53

• Rogers: lack of congruity within the self creates psychological problems
• Incongruity between experience and self-concept or within the self-concept -> anxiety
• Anxiety= signal of disorganization from the organismic valuing process; especially likely to arise if the person focuses too much on condition of worth and acts in ways that interfere with self-actualization
• When the holistic self is threatened by uncertainty, the person becomes not only more distressed but also more rigid -> hold onto the self that existed before
• Incongruity in one aspect -> stress certainty about other things -> compensate for what’s been threatened
• More zealous or extreme in their beliefs and personal values

Question 54

Therapy

Answer 54

• Rogers: therapy is essentially one of reintegrating a partially disorganized self.
• Reversing the processes of defense to confront the discrepancies between the elements of the person’s experience
• The conditions of worth that distorted the person’s behavior in the past must be lifted.
• The person still needs positive regard, but it must be unconditional -> feel able to confront the discrepancies
• Removing the conditions of worth -> allow the person to focus more fully on the organismic valuing process, the inner voice that knows what’s good and bad for you -> allows reintegration of the self
• People are less defensive when they’re accepted for who they are than when they’re accepted in an evaluative, conditional way.
• Unconditional positive regard= key to therapy
• Must be given from the person’s own frame of reference- acceptance for who you think you are
• Empathy is necessary to get an adequate sense of what the client is like- provide meaningful acceptance -> show unconditional positive regard -> facilitate reintegration of his or her personality
• Sometimes, people undertake therapy to satisfy a condition of worth.
• People who are trying to change for self-determined reasons will do better than people who are trying to make similar changes to satisfy conditions of worth.

Question 55

Client-centered therapy/person-centered therapy (Rogers)

Answer 55

• the client takes responsibility for his or her own improvement
• If people with problems can be put in a situation in which conditions of worth are removed, they should naturally reintegrate themselves.
• Therapist displays empathy and unconditional positive regard -> lets the clinet escape temporarily from conditions of worth and begin exploring aspects of experience that are incongruent with the self.
• Therapist remains nondirective and nonevaluative, showing no emotion and giving no advice
• Therapist: remove the pressure of conditions of worth
• By avoiding evaluative comments -> avoids imposing additional conditions of worth
• Tries to help clients gain clear perspective one thier own feelings and experiences
• Reflecting back to the client, in slightly different ways, things the client is saying, so the client can re-examine them from a different angle.

Question 56

Two variations on the reflection procedure in Client-centered therapy/person-centered therapy

Answer 56

• Clarification of feelings

* Restatement of content

Question 57

Clarification of feelings

Answer 57

• express feelings about things, either directly in words or indirectly in other ways
• Therapist repeats the expressions in different words -> make the client more aware of what his or her true feelings are, simply being reminded of the feelings can help this to happen -> allows the nature and the intensity of the feelings to become more obvious to the client -> puts the client into closer touch with the experience

Question 58

Restatement of content

Answer 58

• more intellectual and less emotional

* Ideas in the client’s statements- the cognitive content of what he or she says

Question 59

Beyond Therapy to Personal Growth

Answer 59

• Humanistic psychologists: therapy isn’t a special process of fixing something that’s wrong and then forgetting about it
• It’s on a continuum with other life experiences
• A person who’s living life to the fullest should always engage in more or less the same processes as occur in therapy
• Provide a way for people who have average lives- or even very good lives- to further enrich their experiences and to self-actualize even more completely
• Rogers- fully funtioning person: ideal way of life
• Personal growth throughout life should be a goal for every requires that the people with whom you interact be genuine and open, with no holding back and no putting up false fronts.
• Requires empathic understanding together with unconditional positive regard
• Similar to Maslow’s view on self-actualization: growht isn’t a goal that’s reached once and then cast aside. It’s a way of living to be pursued throughout your lifetime.

Question 60

Self-Actualization and Self-Determination: Virtues

Answer 60

• Represents an optimistic and positive view of human nature
• People are intrinsically good-naturally motivated to be the best they can be
• That motive will be expressed in everyone, as long as other circumstances don’t interfere too much
• Practical virtue of the humanistic view
• Emphasizes the importance of fully appreciating your own life and maintaining close contact with your own feelings
• Provides a strategy for living that many people have used to enrich their lives

Question 61

Problems

Answer 61

*Lack of precision
-Hard to generate research from the theories
-It might be necessary to study as many types of behavior as there are people being studied
*Quality that was just described as a virtue: its optimistic, positive view of human nature
-Arbitrary, naive, sentimental, and romantic
-Has no basis other than the theorists’ belief that people are inherently good
*Idea that everyone’s self-actualization should be encouraged
-If this principle were carried to its extreme, it would require that everyone live life to the fullest, regardless of the consequences for anyone else.
-Result of such unrestrained self-expression would be chaos.
=Create serious conflict whenever one person’s self-actualization interfered with someone else’s self-actualization
*The optimistic overtones that permeate so much of humanistic psychology are largely missing from the writings of the existentialists
-Humanists such as Rogers and Maslow: fulfilling quality that can come from making your own way in the world
-Existentialists: doing this is hard and can be painful
=Living honestly- confronting harsh realities and absurdities and rising above them
=Can be difficult to reconcile the warm, glowing optimism of the one view with the darkness and angst of the other
*Concept of free will
-Theorists who emphasize self-actualization and self-determination- assume that people can decide for themselves what to do at any point in their lives
-Others regard this conception of free will as a convenient fiction, an illusion that is misleading at best