Nobody is immune from self-deception and self-delusion!

"Nobody is immune from self-deception and self-delusion. We all have intricate, subliminal defense mechanisms that allow us to retain beliefs that are dear to us, despite contravening facts. September 11, the Iraq debacle, and the Lehman Brothers' bankruptcy vividly demonstrate that the "elite" suffer from these failures of common sense as much as anybody else. A Caltech colleague, the physicist Richard Feynman, said "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool." Our pathological propensity for interpreting any event in the light of what we want to believe is exactly why double-blind experimental protocols are so essential in science and medicine. They root out the experimentalist's hidden biases, which otherwise contaminate the results."