A few weeks ago I made a draft of a post that was originally intended to be about the same issue addressed in MBlume’s post regarding beneficial false beliefs. Coincidentally, my draft included the same exact hypothetical about entering a club believing you’re the most attractive person in the room in order to increase chances of attracting women. There seems to be a general agreement with MBlume’s “it’s ok to pretend because it’s not self-deception and produces similar results” conclusion. I was surprised to see so much agreement considering that when I made my original draft I reached a completely different conclusion.
I do agree, however, that pretending may have some benefits, but those benefits are much more limited than MBlume makes them out to be. He brings up a time where pretending helped him better fit into his character in a play. Unfortunately, his anecdote is not an appropriate example of overcoming vestigial evolutionary impulses by pretending. His mind wasn’t evolutionarily programmed to “be afraid” when pretending to be someone else, it was programmed to “be afraid” when hitting on attractive women. When I am alone in my room I can act like a real alpha male all day long, but put me in front of attractive women (or people in general) and I will retreat back to my stifled self.
The only way false beliefs can overcome your obsolete evolutionary impulses is to truly believe in those false beliefs. And we all know why that would be a bad idea. Furthermore, pretending can be dangerous just like reading fiction can be dangerous. So the small benefit that pretending might give may not even be worth the cost (at times).
But there is something we can learn from these (sometimes beneficial) false beliefs.
Obviously, there is no direct casual chain that goes from self-fulfilling beliefs to real-world success. Beliefs, per se, are not the key variables in causing success; instead, these beliefs give rise to whatever the key variable is. We should figure out what are the key variables that arise and find a systematic way of getting those variables.
With the club example, we should instead figure out what behavior changes may result from believing that every girl is attracted to you. Then, figure out which of those behaviors attract women and find a way to perfect those behaviors. This is the approach the seduction community adopts for learning how to attract women—and it works.
Same goes with public speaking. If you have a fear of public speaking, you can’t expect to pretend your fear away. There are ways of reducing unnecessary emotions; the ways that work, however, don’t depend on pretending.
I wasn't thinking only of negs, but also of freeze-outs, compliance frames (e.g. "introduce your friends, it's the polite thing to do"), qualification hoops ("so what makes you so special?"), etc. Even the use of lock-in props can be tied to self-esteem ("you're not a thief, right?").
This is what I'm referring to, in that women with higher self-esteem have a lower tolerance for these things, when used by someone who lacks an adequate sense of humor or self-esteem of their own. Whereas women with lower self-esteem will feel more compelled to respond and jump through the hoops, not because of the guy, but because her own emotions give her no other choice -- even if she then hates herself afterward for her actions.
Self-esteem of course is just a convenient buzzword; it may not precisely refer to the personality variable I'm describing. One author calls it "differentiation" - the ability to separate one's self from the opinion of others, and notes that relationships between people with two widely-separated levels of differentiation won't last long. I've experienced it myself, both from the high- and low-differentiation positions.
It's technically possible to have low self-esteem in some ways, and yet still have high differentiation, so self-esteem is probably the wrong word to use. I just didn't want, early in the discussion, to have to spell out the definition of another word when self-esteem was reasonably close.
Anyway, this is what I was trying to say: a low-differentiation PUA will get low-differentiation partners, because those are the only ones they'll be able to hook and keep. And the field of game training has moved increasingly towards teaching things that increase differentiation: i.e., non-reactivity, lack of outcome dependence, strong personal frames, etc.
I agree with you.
Another personality variable that might come into play is a person's self-monitoring behavior.
This is exactly what I am planning on teaching. I believe that structured game is mostly for people who already have these things, but are at a loss when it comes to what they need to do once in front of a woman. But the majority of people who need help lack skill in both areas.