Why would people deceive themselves? What is the mental architecture that enables the same person to be both deceiver and deceived? How does self-deception manifest itself psychologically? And how do these three questions interrelate? In this article we address these issues with an evolutionary account of self-deception, according to which self-deception evolved to facilitate deception of others. First, we define what we mean by self-deception and describe how self-deception serves the goal of interpersonal deception. We then discuss the non-unitary nature of the mind and how different types of psychological dualism enable the same person to be both deceiver and deceived. Next we describe different varieties of self-deception and the evidence for these different varieties. We then discuss the interpersonal versus intrapersonal nature of self-deception before considering the levels of consciousness at which the self can be deceived. Finally, we contrast our evolutionary approach to self-deception with current theories and debates in psychology.
1. Deception and self-deception
There are many ways to deceive other people. An obvious choice is to tell an outright lie, but it is also possible to deceive others by avoiding the truth, obfuscating the truth, exaggerating the truth, or casting doubt on the truth. Just as these processes are useful in deceiving others, they can also be useful in deceiving the self. For example, if I can deceive you by avoiding a critical piece of information, then it stands to reason that I can deceive myself in the same manner. Thus, we consider various types of self-deception, including biased information search strategies, biased interpretive processes, and biased memory processes. What marks all of these varieties of self-deception is that people favor welcome over unwelcome information in a manner that reflects their goals or motivations (in this sense, our approach to self-deception is consistent with Kunda Reference Kunda1990; Mele Reference Mele1997; Pyszczynski & Greenberg Reference Pyszczynski and Greenberg1987). We also consider classic cases of self-deception such as rationalization and convincing the self that a lie is true.
Our approach consists of treating self-deception as a variety of different processes that are directly comparable to those involved in interpersonal deception. This approach has the advantage of tying self-deception to processes that have been studied in interpersonal deception. But it has the disadvantage that some behaviors are ambiguous concerning whether they should be classified as self-deception. This sort of ambiguity arises to the same degree, however, in the study of interpersonal deception. For example, consider a man who has returned home late from work because he stopped to talk to a female colleague and who is confronted by his wife, who wants to know why he is late. If he responds by claiming his boss gave him an extra assignment, then he is clearly being deceptive. If he responds by saying that he stopped to talk to this female colleague, then he is clearly being truthful. But if he changes the subject – perhaps by saying that dinner smells great – and thereby distracts his wife from her line of inquiry, then it is not clear whether he was deceptive or simply failed to answer the question. There is no way to know if he is deceiving his wife (by avoiding the truth) without knowing his intent in changing the subject or without knowing more about the relationships among him, his wife, and his colleague. In the same manner, when people avoid unpleasant truths in their own lives, it is often impossible to know if self-deception or some other process is at work without knowing more about their motives or situations. Nevertheless, just as interpersonal deception can be studied in the absence of complete confidence in all classifications, self-deception can also be studied despite the inevitability of such ambiguous cases.
Our approach of treating self-deception as information-processing biases that give priority to welcome over unwelcome information also differs from classic accounts that hold that the self-deceiving individual must have two separate representations of reality, with truth preferentially stored in the unconscious mind and falsehood in the conscious mind (see Gur & Sackeim Reference Gur and Sackeim1979). As is clear in our review of information-processing biases in section 5, people can deceive themselves by preventing unwanted information from being encoded in the first place. This act can be demonstrably motivational, for example, if people stop gathering information when they like the early returns but keep gathering more information when they do not (Ditto & Lopez Reference Ditto and Lopez1992). The flexible nature of this information-gathering bias also reveals that people have some awareness that upcoming information may be inconsistent with what they have already discovered. Thus, biases of this sort are consistent with classic definitions of self-deception that emphasize simultaneous knowing and not-knowing, in the sense that the individual consciously knows the welcome information that has been gathered but also has some awareness that unwelcome information could be around the next corner (we refer to this as potential awareness). In this case, however, true knowing of unwelcome information is precluded because the individual ends the information search before anything unwelcome is ever encountered. Thus, the individual need not have two representations of reality to self-deceive. Rather, people can self-deceive in the same way that they deceive others, by avoiding critical information and thereby not telling (themselves) the whole truth.
It is important to note, however, that not all biases in information processing are self-deceptive. For example, biases can reflect cognitive shortcuts, errors, and differential weighting of prior and new information that have nothing to do with motivational concerns (e.g., Chambers & Windschitl Reference Chambers and Windschitl2004). From our perspective, biases in information processing can be considered self-deceptive only when they favor welcome over unwelcome information in a manner that reflects the individual's goals. For example, if bolstering a person's self-image makes that individual more willing to search out negative information about himself (Trope & Neter Reference Trope and Neter1994), we have some evidence that prior avoidance of negative information about the self was motivated and self-deceptive. Similarly, if people spend more time learning about the negative than the positive features of someone else only when they expect that person will reject them (Wilson et al. Reference Wilson, Wheatley, Kurtz, Dunn and Gilbert2004), we again have some evidence that focusing on the negative aspects of another was motivated and self-deceptive. But if biases are impervious to such manipulations or irrelevant to such concerns, then the evidence suggests that they are not self-deceptive. For example, people often rely on peripheral cues such as source expertise when processing arguments about issues that do not concern them (Petty & Cacioppo Reference Petty, Cacioppo and Berkowitz1986). Such biases do not reflect self-deception, but rather are simply evidence that these individuals are insufficiently motivated to study the arguments carefully and are satisfied to rely on a heuristic that experts tend to be correct. We return to this issue of differentiating self-deceptive from non-self-deceptive biases in section 5.
2. Self-deception in the co-evolutionary struggle between deceiver and deceived
If (as Dawkins argues) deceit is fundamental in animal communication, then there must be strong selection to spot deception and this ought, in turn, select for a degree of self-deception, rendering some facts and motives unconscious so as to not betray – by the subtle signs of self-knowledge – the deception being practiced. Thus, the conventional view that natural selection favors nervous systems which produce ever more accurate images of the world must be a very naïve view of mental evolution. (Trivers Reference Trivers and Dawkins1976/2006, p. 20)
In the struggle to accrue resources, a strategy that has emerged over evolutionary time is deception. For example, people frequently lie to those on whom they are dependent to receive resources that might not otherwise be provided (DePaulo & Kashy Reference DePaulo and Kashy1998; Steinel & De Dreu Reference Steinel and De Dreu2004). Indeed, approximately half of people's daily deceptions are intended to gain a resource for the self (DePaulo & Kashy Reference DePaulo and Kashy1998). Such deceptive practices instigate a co-evolutionary struggle, because selection favors the deceived evolving new means of detection and the deceiver evolving new means of deception. Self-deception may be an important tool in this co-evolutionary struggle, by allowing deceivers to circumvent detection efforts (Trivers Reference Trivers and Dawkins1976/2006; Reference Trivers1985; Reference Trivers2000; Reference Trivers, Kappeler and Silk2009).
In the case of deception among humans, there are at least four general categories of cues (beyond fact-finding itself) that people can use to detect deception in others: Signs of nervousness, suppression, cognitive load, and idiosyncratic sources. Nervousness typically results from consideration of the potential costs of detected deception, and thus cues to nervousness can reveal deception (DePaulo et al. Reference DePaulo, Lindsay, Malone, Muhlenbruck, Charlton and Cooper2003). Nevertheless, nervousness is an imprecise indicator of deception, in part because many situations induce nervousness independent of deception – including interrogations themselves – as people are often nervous that they will be falsely accused of deception (Bond & Fahey Reference Bond and Fahey1987). For this reason, reliance on nervousness to detect deception can lead to a high rate of false positives.
Deception can also be detected via physical indicators of the act of suppression. For example, in an effort to control nonverbal signs of nervousness that might reveal deceptive intent, people try to control their face, trunk, and limbs. This act of muscle control leaves telltale cues, such as increased vocal pitch (DePaulo et al. Reference DePaulo, Lindsay, Malone, Muhlenbruck, Charlton and Cooper2003), which then demand countervailing efforts at muscle relaxation. Deception can be detected when control efforts are disjointed or when efforts at relaxation fail to eliminate signs of suppression.
Cognitive load results when people must maintain two types of content simultaneously in working memory. In the case of consciously mediated deception, this means true information to be suppressed and false information to be promulgated. Deception can be detected by cues associated with cognitive load, such as pausing and simplified sentence structure (Vrij Reference Vrij2004; Vrij et al. Reference Vrij, Fisher, Mann and Leal2006). People who are familiar with each other's habits can also detect deception via idiosyncratic signs of nervousness, suppression, and cognitive load, because different individuals reveal their mental states in different ways.
Despite the cues that are available for the detection of deception, research on lie detection suggests that people perform poorly in detecting the deceptions of others. For example, in their review of research conducted with professional lie detectors (e.g., police officers), Vrij and Mann (Reference Vrij, Mann, Riggio and Feldman2005) found an overall detection rate of 55%, barely above chance levels of 50% in these studies. This detection rate is very similar to the 54% that emerged in a huge meta-analysis that included various types of untrained deceivers and detectors (Bond & DePaulo Reference Bond and DePaulo2006). Many have concluded from these studies that humans are poor lie detectors, which would suggest that the selection pressure on deceptive abilities must be weak. But this conclusion is premature, given that research on detection of deception relies extensively on four conditions that heavily advantage the deceiver.
First, most studies involve deception that is of little consequence to the deceiver. As a result, cues associated with nervousness, cognitive load, and suppression are minimized by the fact that unimportant deceptions do not induce these telltale signs (Mann & Vrij Reference Mann and Vrij2006; Vrij Reference Vrij2000; Vrij & Mann Reference Vrij, Mann, Riggio and Feldman2005). Consistent with this possibility, when police officers evaluated videotapes of corroborated truths and lies told in actual criminal interrogations, accuracy increased to 72% (Vrij & Mann Reference Vrij, Mann, Riggio and Feldman2005), and signs of cognitive load and suppression appeared to differentiate liars from truth tellers (Mann & Vrij Reference Mann and Vrij2006). Meta-analysis also supports this conclusion, given that several cues to deception (e.g., vocal pitch) are more pronounced when people are more motivated to deceive (DePaulo et al. Reference DePaulo, Lindsay, Malone, Muhlenbruck, Charlton and Cooper2003).
Second, most studies do not allow the deceived to question the deceiver. To enhance experimental control and minimize costs, the deceiver is typically presented on videotape, thereby eliminating the possibility of further interaction. This lack of cross-examination minimizes cognitive load, nervousness, and the need for suppression, as the rehearsed lie can be much easier to deliver than a spontaneous answer to an unexpected question.Footnote 1
Third, a substantial portion of the literature on detection of deception has been conducted with the goal of finding cues that reliably identify most deceivers, perhaps because of the potential applied value of general cues to deception. Thus, idiosyncratic signs of cognitive load, suppression failure, or nervousness tend to be missed in such designs.
Fourth, most studies on detection of deception are conducted on people who are unknown to each other. Our ability to detect deception may be poorly suited for this task, because this design feature eliminates the possibility that people can learn to use idiosyncratic cues that might help them determine when a particular individual is lying (DePaulo Reference DePaulo1994; Zuckerman et al. Reference Zuckerman, Koestner and Alton1984). Consistent with this possibility, detection rates increase when people get to know each other (if they feel emotionally close with each other; Anderson et al. Reference Anderson, DePaulo and Ansfield2002) and when lies are told among close friends (DePaulo & Kashy Reference DePaulo and Kashy1998). Such effects are likely to be multiply mediated, but they suggest that cross-examination and idiosyncratic cues could be important in detecting deception.
Consistent with the notion that these four factors reduce detection rates in laboratory studies, diary research suggests that people detect deception at rates that are substantially greater than chance. For example, participants in DePaulo et al.'s (Reference DePaulo, Kashy, Kirkendol, Wyer and Epstein1996) diary study reported that 15–23% of their lies were detected. This rate is already high enough to pose a significant threat – given the loss in reputation and goal attainment when one is perceived as a liar – but DePaulo et al.'s (Reference DePaulo, Kashy, Kirkendol, Wyer and Epstein1996) participants also reported that in an additional 16–23% of the cases they were unsure if their lies were detected.
We suggest that these reports are biased downward, such that people underreport the degree to which others have or might have detected their own deceptions. This downward bias in reporting is likely to emerge due to an asymmetry in the degree to which people accuse others of deception. On the one hand, targets of intended deceptions do not always indicate that they doubt the deceiver even when they do (Jang et al. Reference Jang, Smith and Levine2002). To gain an information advantage and to maintain harmony, people who detect or suspect deception in others sometimes pretend to believe them. On the other hand, it seems unlikely that people indicate that they doubt deceivers when they actually believe them, in part because accusations of deception are a serious charge. This asymmetry suggests that people may often think that others believe their deception when in fact they do not, but will only rarely think that others doubt their veracity when in fact they have accepted their lies.Footnote 2 Thus, it might be the case that not only do the brunt of these 30–40% of cases reported in DePaulo et al.'s (Reference DePaulo, Kashy, Kirkendol, Wyer and Epstein1996) diary study represent detected deceptions, but a portion of the remaining 60–70% might represent detected deceptions as well. For our purposes, it would also be very useful to know what percentage of these detected deceptions emerged from fact-finding and third-party information, and what percentage were based on information derived directly from the deceiver (e.g., via cross-examination). At this point this remains a topic for future research.
In sum, the literature on deception may have grossly underestimated people's ability to detect deception through reliance on studies where (a) the deception is of little or no consequence, (b) the deceived has no opportunity to cross-examine the deceiver, (c) deceiver and deceived are strangers to each other, and (d) there are no repeated interactions between deceiver and deceived. If rates of deception detection are, in fact, substantially higher outside the laboratory than in it, we are led back to the notion of a co-evolutionary struggle between deceiver and deceived. Because successful deception can lead to substantial benefits for the deceiver while imposing costs on the deceived (DePaulo Reference DePaulo and Miller2004), and because unsuccessful deception can lead to substantial costs imposed on the deceiver by people they had endeavored to deceive (Boles et al. Reference Boles, Croson and Murnighan2000; Schweitzer et al. Reference Schweitzer, Hershey and Bradlow2006), those who would deceive are in a perennial struggle against those who would not be deceived. We propose that self-deception offers an important tool in this co-evolutionary struggle by allowing the deceiver the opportunity to deceive without cognitive load, conscious suppression, increased nervousness, or idiosyncratic indicators that a deception is being perpetrated. To the degree that people can convince themselves that a deception is true or that their motives are beyond reproach, they are no longer in a position in which they must knowingly deceive others. Thus, the central proposal of our evolutionary approach to self-deception is that by deceiving themselves, people can better deceive others, because they no longer emit the cues of consciously mediated deception that could reveal their deceptive intent.
Corollary 1 : Cognitive load reveals deception, but it has other costs as well: demands on working memory reduce performance in challenging domains (Schmader & Johns Reference Schmader and Johns2003) and disrupt social functioning (von Hippel & Gonsalkorale Reference von Hippel and Gonsalkorale2005). When people are forced to maintain both truth and lies in working memory, they are thus likely to show reduced ability to engage in other tasks and access other opportunities. This cognitive load required to maintain conscious deception is difficult to avoid, because many deceptions require the deceiver to keep fact and fiction in mind simultaneously to ensure that the former is hidden and the latter is supported.
Self-deception provides a way to avoid this cognitive load. To the degree that deceivers can convince themselves that their deception is indeed true, they are no longer required to maintain the real facts of the case in mind while they focus on promulgating the fiction. Rather, by believing the fiction that they are expressing to others, they can free their mind to concentrate on other matters. Thus, the first corollary to our central proposal is that by deceiving themselves, people are able to avoid the cognitive costs of consciously mediated deception.
Corollary 2 : The best-laid plans often go awry, and lies are no exception to this rule; even careful and well-practiced deceptions can be discovered. This ever-present possibility of detection poses a problem for would-be deceivers, as retribution and exclusion are common responses to detected deceptions (Boles et al. Reference Boles, Croson and Murnighan2000; Schweitzer et al. Reference Schweitzer, Hershey and Bradlow2006). This retribution appears to have deep evolutionary roots, given that people react with strong feelings of anger and other negative emotions when they realize they are being deceived (Haselton et al. Reference Haselton, Buss, Oubaid and Angleitner2005). Such feelings of anger motivate punishment of the offender, even when punishment exacts a cost for the punisher (Fehr & Gächter Reference Fehr and Gächter2002). It is this anger and subsequent punishment that ensures that detection of deception leads to suffering on the part of deceivers, thereby reducing the likelihood of future deception.
Because there are many legitimate reasons people may fail to behave as desired or expected, one solution to the threat of retribution when an apparent deception is uncovered is to co-opt such reasons by pleading ignorance or ineptitude rather than deception. Attribution of intent is critical in determining whether the deceived feels anger and seeks retribution or is willing to forgive (Schweitzer et al. Reference Schweitzer, Hershey and Bradlow2006; Stouten et al. Reference Stouten, De Cremer and van Dijk2006), and thus those who accompany their deception of others with deception of the self are better placed if discovered to avoid retribution. By arguing that they had not intentionally deceived, self-deceivers are more likely than conscious deceivers to avoid retribution. Of course, conscious deceivers can also deceive about their original knowledge and intent, but the cues that are present to give away deception are also present to give away deception about deception. Thus, the second corollary to our central proposal is that by deceiving themselves, people can reduce retribution if their deception of others is discovered.
Implication : Our evolutionary hypothesis about the role of self-deception in service of interpersonal deception hinges primarily on the argument laid out earlier – that despite what the research literature might appear to show, people are actually quite good at detecting deception. This possibility is central to our hypothesis regarding a co-evolutionary struggle and the subsequent origins of self-deception. Just as importantly, this possibility is also central to a proper understanding of deception and its place in social life. Thus, a critical issue for future research in deception and self-deception would be to establish how successful people are at detecting important deceptions occurring in naturalistic settings that allow those who are being deceived to gather further information as they see fit. Future research should also consider whether those who deceive in such settings gain an accurate sense of when their deceptions were successful versus unsuccessful, because there are likely to be situations that lead to clear feedback and others that do not. Although studies such as these are likely to be challenging to design and execute, methodologies involving simultaneous experience sampling within groups of closely interacting individuals may be a promising approach. But whatever the hurdles, it should be clear that research on deception must move beyond the closely controlled studies of the sort described earlier if it hopes to answer these fundamental questions about deception and its detection.
3. Self-deception in service of social advancement
Self-deception can also facilitate the deception of others in a more general sense, in that it can help us convince others that we are better (e.g., more moral, stronger, smarter) than we really are. Thus, the benefits of self-deception go beyond convincing others of specific lies, as self-deception can also help us accrue the more general social advantages of self-inflation or self-enhancement.
People are impressed by confidence in others (Price & Stone Reference Price and Stone2004; Slovenko Reference Slovenko1999). Confidence plays a role in determining whom people choose as leaders (Conger & Kanungo Reference Conger and Kanungo1987; Shamir et al. Reference Shamir, House and Arthur1993), romantic partners (Buss Reference Buss2009; Miller Reference Miller2000; Schmitt & Buss Reference Schmitt and Buss1996), and providers of various social and material services (Brown et al. Reference Brown, Cron and Slocum1998; de Jong et al. Reference de Jong, de Ruyter and Wetzels2006; Westbrook Reference Westbrook1980). Confidence is also a determinant of social influence; confident people are believed more, and their advice is more likely to be followed than people who lack in confidence (Penrod & Cutler Reference Penrod and Cutler1995; Zarnoth & Sniezek Reference Zarnoth and Sniezek1997). To the degree that people can bolster their image of themselves to themselves and enhance their self-confidence, they thereby increase the chances that they will be able to influence others and will be chosen for socially important roles. For this reason, self-enhancement should be ubiquitous and people should believe their own self-enhancing stories. Evidence supports both of these possibilities.
With regard to ubiquity, self-enhancing biases are evident in a wide variety of domains and strategies among a wide variety of peoples (for a review, see Alicke & Sedikides Reference Alicke and Sedikides2009). Even East Asians, who value humility and harmony over individualistic self-aggrandizement, show self-enhancement in their claims of the superiority of their collectivist qualities (Sedikides et al. Reference Sedikides, Gaertner and Toguchi2003; Reference Sedikides, Gaertner and Vevea2005). Furthermore, like Westerners, East Asians who are lower in depression and stress show this self-enhancement to a greater degree than those who have more psychological problems (Gaertner et al. Reference Gaertner, Sedikides and Chang2008).
People not only self-enhance the world over, but the average person appears to be convinced that he or she is better than average (Alicke & Sedikides Reference Alicke and Sedikides2009). Most of the research on self-enhancement does not allow one to assess whether these aggrandizing tales are self-deceptive or only intended to be other-deceptive, but some of the variables used in this research support the idea that people believe their own self-enhancing stories. For example, in a pair of clever experiments Epley and Whitchurch (Reference Epley and Whitchurch2008) photographed participants and then morphed these photographs to varying degrees with highly attractive or highly unattractive photos of same-sex individuals. Epley and Whitchurch then presented participants with these morphed or unaltered photos of themselves under different circumstances. In one experiment participants were asked to identify their actual photo in an array of actual and morphed photographs of themselves. Participants were more likely to choose their photo morphed 10% with the more attractive image than either their actual photo or their photo morphed with the unattractive image. This effect emerged to a similar degree with a photo of a close friend, but it did not emerge with a photo of a relative stranger. Because people often perceive their close friends in an overly positive light (Kenny & Kashy Reference Kenny and Kashy1994), these findings suggest that people do not have a general bias to perceive people as more attractive than they really are, but rather a specific bias with regard to themselves and close others.
In a second study, participants were presented with an array of photos of other individuals, among which was a single photo of themselves (either their actual photo or a photo morphed 20% with the attractive or unattractive image). Epley and Whitchurch (Reference Epley and Whitchurch2008) found that people were able to locate photographs of themselves most rapidly if they were morphed with an attractive photo, at an intermediate speed if they were not morphed, and most slowly if they were morphed with an unattractive photo. These findings suggest that the enhanced photo most closely matches how people see themselves in their mind's eye, suggesting that they are deceiving themselves about their own attractiveness. Were they aware of this inaccuracy, they would be unlikely to claim the attractive photo to an experimenter who has the truth at her disposal, and they would be unlikely to locate their more attractive self more rapidly than their actual self.
Thus far, the evidence from Epley and Whitchurch (Reference Epley and Whitchurch2008) suggests that self-enhancement biases appear to be inaccuracies that are believed by the self. But are they really self-deceptive? That is, do we have any evidence that the participants in their experiments have unconscious knowledge of what they really look like, or that they have prevented themselves from gaining accurate self-knowledge via motivated processes? At this point we do not. But it is the case that the magnitude of the self-enhancement effect documented by Epley and Whitchurch (Reference Epley and Whitchurch2008) was correlated with participants' implicit self-esteem (as measured by a priming procedure [Spalding & Hardin Reference Spalding and Hardin1999] and the name letter effect [Nuttin Reference Nuttin1985]). This correlation suggests that people systematically distort their self-image not as a function of how much information they have about themselves, but rather as a function of their automatic positivity toward themselves. Nevertheless, the utility of this measure as an indicator of self-deception would be enhanced if it were shown to relate to people's goals or their biases in encoding of information about their appearance (e.g., differential gazing at flattering vs. unflattering images of themselves).
Along with their self-enhancing stories, people also derogate others. Indeed, self-enhancement and other-derogation are opposite sides of the same coin, as people arrive at their self-image via social comparison (Festinger Reference Festinger1954). For this reason all self-evaluations are relative, and the self can be elevated above others either via self-enhancement or other-derogation. Like self-enhancement, derogation of others can also be an offensive tool used in the service of social advancement, as people often derogate their rivals when they are trying to impress (Buss & Dedden Reference Buss and Dedden1990; Schmitt & Buss Reference Schmitt and Buss2001).
As with self-enhancement, derogation of others appears to be both ubiquitous and believed by the self. Some of the best examples of self-deceptive derogation of others can be found in the research of Fein and Spencer. In one of their studies (Fein & Spencer Reference Fein and Spencer1997), non-Jewish participants were told either that they did well or poorly on an IQ test. They were then given a chance to watch a videotape of another student being interviewed for a job, and this individual was portrayed as either Jewish or Christian via her ostensible surname and a photo showing her wearing a Jewish star or a cross. When participants watched the individual they believed was Christian, their ratings of this student were not influenced by whether they had ostensibly failed the IQ test. In contrast, when participants thought they were watching a Jewish student, their ratings were influenced by how well they had done on the IQ test. Those who thought they had done well showed no sign of prejudice. Those who thought they had done poorly, however, rated the Jewish student negatively on a composite of personality traits. Furthermore, these individuals also showed a rebound in self-esteem compared to people who thought they had failed but watched the Christian woman. These findings suggest that people responded to failing an IQ test by denigrating Jews. This denigration appears to have been believed by these individuals, because the more they derogated the Jewish student, the better they felt about themselves. Furthermore, people appeared to have objective information about this person at their disposal, given that they did not rate the Jewish person negatively when portrayed as Christian or when they had not ostensibly failed the test.
The research of Fein and Spencer (Reference Fein and Spencer1997) suggests that people do not derogate others only to make themselves look better in other people's eyes. Rather, they appear to be self-deceptively making themselves look better in their own eyes as well. This interpretation is corroborated by the findings of their second experiment, in which participants who had reflected on their important values (a process that affirms a sense of self-worth: see sect. 5) evaluated the Jewish student the same as they rated the Christian student even after failure. This sort of threat-induced derogation of others documented by Fein and Spencer (Reference Fein and Spencer1997) can also take place outside of awareness (Spencer et al. Reference Spencer, Fein, Wolfe, Fong and Dunn1998), a finding that further suggests that people truly believe their negative impressions of others when they are led to feel bad about themselves. Because downward social comparison is self-enhancing (Wills Reference Wills1981), these findings can be considered the flip-side of the bias documented by Epley and Whitchurch (Reference Epley and Whitchurch2008). Thus, our second proposal is that by deceiving themselves about their own positive qualities and the negative qualities of others, people are able to display greater confidence than they might otherwise feel, thereby enabling them to advance socially and materially.
4. Self-deception and the non-unitary mind
There are a variety of dissociations between seemingly continuous mental processes that ensure that the mental processes that are the target of self-deception do not have access to the same information as the mental processes deceiving the self. For our purposes, these dissociations can be divided into three (overlapping) types: implicit versus explicit memory, implicit versus explicit attitudes, and automatic versus controlled processes. These mental dualisms do not themselves involve self-deception, but each of them plays an important role in enabling self-deception. By causing neurologically intact individuals to split some aspects of their self off from others, these dissociations ensure that people have limited conscious access to the contents of their own mind and to the motives that drive their behavior (cf. Nisbett & Wilson Reference Nisbett and Wilson1977). In this manner the mind circumvents the seeming paradox of being both deceiver and deceived.
4.1. Explicit versus implicit memory
Substantial research now indicates that people maintain at least two types of information in memory. People retain information that they can consciously recollect (assessed via explicit measures such as recall) and information for which they have no conscious recollection (assessed via implicit measures such as degraded word identification). This dissociation between types of memories has the potential to serve as a basis for an adaptive form of self-deception, as the conscious memories could be those that are consistent with the fiction that the person wishes to promulgate, whereas the unconscious memories could be the facts as originally encountered. By maintaining accurate information in unconscious memory, the individual would retain the ability to behave in accordance with the truth, as implicitly assessed memories have been shown to influence a variety of behaviors (Coates et al. Reference Coates, Butler and Berry2006; Kolers Reference Kolers1976; Lee Reference Lee2002; Seamon et al. Reference Seamon, Williams, Crowley, Kim, Langer, Orne and Wishengrad1995).
How might memories selectively retain or be blocked access to consciousness as a function of their utility in self-deception? Although there are probably numerous ways, one possibility is that deception might begin to replace truth in conscious memory simply through the act of reporting the misinformation (via retrieval-induced forgetting; MacLeod & Saunders Reference MacLeod and Saunders2008). Additionally, because the consequences of being caught lying can be severe, and because lies require important deviations from or omissions to actual events, those who practice to deceive often take their practice literally and (at least mentally) rehearse their lies (Vrij Reference Vrij2000). Rehearsal of misinformation can make the source of this information even more difficult to ascertain, with the result that people often come to believe that the inaccurate depiction of events is veridical (Ceci et al. Reference Ceci, Loftus, Leichtman and Bruck1994; Zaragoza & Mitchell Reference Zaragoza and Mitchell1996). According to this possibility, people initiate a deception knowing that they are promulgating a falsehood, but beginning with their initial transmission of the misinformation, they start to unknowingly convince themselves of the truth of their own lie.
This process of self-inducing false memories can then be enhanced by other factors that typically accompany intentional deception of others. For example, to the degree that deceivers create an elaborate and concrete image of the lie they are telling, they may unintentionally exacerbate their self-deception, because vivid imagining makes false memories more difficult to distinguish from accurate ones (Gonsalves et al. Reference Gonsalves, Reber, Gitelman, Parrish, Mesulman and Paller2004; Slusher & Anderson Reference Slusher and Anderson1987). Additionally, social sharing of information can lead to selective forgetting of information that is not discussed (Coman et al. Reference Coman, Manier and Hirst2009; Cuc et al. Reference Cuc, Koppel and Hirst2007) and social confirmation of inaccurate information can exacerbate the false memory effect (Zaragoza et al. Reference Zaragoza, Payment, Ackil, Drivdahl and Beck2001). These social effects raise the possibility that when people collaborate in their efforts to deceive others, they might also increase the likelihood that they deceive themselves. Thus, one consequence of retrieving, rehearsing, and telling lies is that people may eventually recollect those lies as if they actually happened, while still maintaining the accurate sequence of events in a less consciously accessible form in memory (Chrobak & Zaragoza Reference Chrobak and Zaragoza2008; Drivdahl et al. Reference Drivdahl, Zaragoza and Learned2009; McCloskey & Zaragoza Reference McCloskey and Zaragoza1985). Therefore, our third proposal is that the dissociation between conscious and unconscious memories combines with retrieval-induced forgetting and difficulties distinguishing false memories to enable self-deception by facilitating the presence of deceptive information in conscious memory while retaining accurate information in unconscious memory.
4.2. Explicit versus implicit attitudes
Just as memories can be relatively inaccessible to consciousness, so too can attitudes. And just as inaccessible memories can influence behaviors, so too can attitudes that are relatively inaccessible to consciousness (Greenwald et al. Reference Greenwald, Poehlman, Uhlmann and Banaji2009; Nock et al., Reference Nock, Park, Finn, Deliberto, Dour and Banaji2010). Attitudes that are difficult to access consciously can be measured with implicit procedures, for example, via reaction time tests such as the Implicit Association Test (IAT; Greenwald et al. Reference Greenwald, McGhee and Schwartz1998). The study of implicit attitudes is not as well developed as the parallel research program in the domain of memory, but here again the evidence indicates that people maintain two different types of attitudinal information (Fazio & Olson Reference Fazio and Olson2003; Wilson et al. Reference Wilson, Lindsey and Schooler2000). Sometimes implicit and explicit attitudes overlap substantially, and sometimes they differ dramatically (Nosek et al. Reference Nosek, Smyth, Hansen, Devos, Lindner, Ranganath, Smith, Olson, Chugh, Greenwald and Banaji2007). Although dissociations between implicit and explicit attitudes tend to be more common in cases where implicit attitudes are socially undesirable, such dissociations emerge across a variety of domains (Hofmann et al. Reference Hofmann, Gawronski, Gschwendner, Le and Schmitt2005). As is the case with memory, the coexistence of different implicit and explicit attitudes provides fertile ground for self-deception.
An example of how dual attitudes play a role in self-deception can be found in research that shows that socially undesirable implicit attitudes drive behavior when attributions for behavior are ambiguous, whereas socially desirable explicit attitudes drive behavior when attributions are clear. In a demonstration of this effect, Son Hing et al. (Reference Son Hing, Chung-Yan, Hamilton and Zanna2008) found that white Canadians low in both implicit and explicit prejudice toward Asians did not discriminate between white and Asian job applicants who were equally qualified for the job for which they had applied, regardless of the clarity of their qualifications. When the applicants' qualifications were ambiguous, however, people low in explicit but high in implicit prejudice were more likely to hire the white than the Asian job applicant. In such a manner, low explicit/high implicit prejudice individuals are able to hide their prejudiced beliefs and their discriminatory behavior from self and other. Thus, our fourth proposal is that the dissociation between implicit and explicit attitudes lends itself to self-deception by enabling people to express socially desirable attitudes while nevertheless acting upon relatively inaccessible socially undesirable attitudes when they can maintain plausible deniability.
4.3. Automatic versus controlled processes
Controlled processes involve conscious effort, awareness, and intention and can be stopped at will, whereas automatic processes take place in the absence of effort, awareness, and intention and typically run to completion once initiated (Bargh Reference Bargh, Wyer and Srull1994). It is now apparent that automatic and controlled processes make independent contributions to numerous social tasks, and that these processes can be dissociated (Chaiken & Trope Reference Chaiken and Trope1999). Research on automatic goal activation has demonstrated that a wide variety of goal-directed behaviors that appear to be consciously directed can take place automatically, often with the goal itself outside of conscious awareness (Chartrand et al. Reference Chartrand, Huber, Shiv and Tanner2008). Because these unconscious goals can sometimes run counter to people's consciously stated goals, people can consciously hold goals that are socially desirable and supported by their peers or family while simultaneously holding unconscious alternative goals that are socially undesirable or otherwise unacceptable to peers or family (Chartrand et al. Reference Chartrand, Dalton and Fitzsimons2007; Fitzsimmons & Anderson, in press). Furthermore, because automatically activated responses to the environment can be executed without awareness (Lakin et al. Reference Lakin, Chartrand and Arkin2008), people can engage in socially undesirable goal-directed behavior but remain oblivious to that fact. For example, a student whose parents want her to be a physician but who wants to be an artist herself might follow her conscious goal to major in biology and attend medical school, but her unconscious goal might lead her not to study sufficiently. As a consequence, she could find herself unable to attend medical school and left with no choice but to fall back on her artistic talents to find gainful employment. By deceiving herself (and consequently others) about the unconscious motives underlying her failure, the student can gain her parents' sympathy rather than their disapproval. These findings and possibilities suggest our fifth proposal, that the dissociation between automatic and controlled processes facilitates self-deception by enabling the pursuit of deceptive goals via controlled processing while retaining the automatic expression of actual but hidden goals.
5. Varieties of self-deception
We begin our review of the evidence for self-deception by describing biases that represent the front end of the information-processing sequence (i.e., information gathering and selective attention). Self-deception at this stage of information processing is akin to failure to tell the self the whole truth. We then discuss varieties of self-deception that represent the middle of the information-processing stream (e.g., memory processes). These are processes that involve obfuscating the truth. We then conclude this discussion with types of self-deception that involve convincing the self that a falsehood is true.
An important question that must be addressed with regard to all of these instances of biased processing is whether they reflect self-deception or some other source of bias. Two manipulations have proven useful in addressing this issue: self-affirmation (Sherman & Cohen Reference Sherman, Cohen and Zanna2006; Steele Reference Steele and Berkowitz1988) and cognitive load (e.g., Valdesolo & DeSteno Reference Valdesolo and DeSteno2008). When people are self-affirmed, they are typically reminded of their important values (e.g., their artistic, humanist, or scientific orientation) or prior positive behaviors (e.g., their kindness to others). By reflecting on their important values or past positive behaviors, people are reminded that they are moral and efficacious individuals, thereby affirming their self-worth. A cornerstone of self-affirmation theory is the idea that specific attacks on one's abilities or morals – such as failure on a test – do not need to be dealt with directly, but rather can be addressed at a more general level by restoring or reaffirming a global sense of self-worth (Steele Reference Steele and Berkowitz1988). Thus, self-affirmation makes people less motivated to defend themselves against a specific attack, as their sense of self-worth is assured despite the threat posed by the attack.
Self-affirmation manipulations can be used to assess whether information-processing biases are self-deceptive. If a particular bias represents unmotivated error, then it will be unaffected by self-affirmation. For example, if people rely on a heuristic to solve a problem for which they do not have the knowledge or interest to use the appropriate algorithm, self-affirmation should not reduce their use of this heuristic. In contrast, if the bias represents a self-deceptive process that favors welcome over unwelcome information, then this bias should be eliminated or attenuated by self-affirmation (see Correll et al. Reference Correll, Spencer and Zanna2004; Sherman et al. Reference Sherman, Cohen, Nelson, Nussbaum, Bunyan and Garcia2009). Such an effect for self-affirmation not only provides evidence for the role of motivation in the information-processing bias but also indicates that the person had the potential to process the information in a less biased or unbiased fashion. In this manner, self-affirmation manipulations can test our self-deception criterion that the person is aware of the welcome information but at the same time also had potential awareness of the unwelcome information.
It should be noted, however, that our perspective on the interpersonal purpose of self-deception suggests that although self-affirmation should attenuate or eliminate many self-deceptive biases, it should only do so when the self-deceptive bias serves the general goal of enhancing the self. That is, when self-deception is in service of social advancement via self-enhancement, self-affirmation should attenuate or eliminate the self-deception because the affirmation itself satisfies the enhancement goal. In contrast, when people self-deceive to facilitate their deception of others on a particular issue, self-affirmation should have no effect. Here the goal of the self-deception is not to make the self seem more efficacious or moral, but rather to convince another individual of a specific fiction that the self-deceiver wishes to promulgate. Self-affirmation is irrelevant to this goal. Unfortunately, this distinction between general self-enhancement and specific deception is not always easily made. Nevertheless, when deception concerns a specific topic, self-affirmation should not influence self-deceptive practices unless the affirmation makes people decide that the deception itself is unnecessary or unimportant (e.g., if reminders of their self-worth make people less motivated to deceive others about their errors or poor behavior).
A second method for evaluating whether an information-processing bias is self-deceptive involves manipulation of cognitive load. Such manipulations typically require people to keep some information in memory (e.g., an eight-digit number) while they are engaged in the primary task of the experiment (e.g., forming an impression). Although manipulations of cognitive load do not address the motivational issues that underlie self-deception, they do address the issues of cost and potential awareness. If cognitive load leads to the elimination or attenuation of a particular bias, then the evidence suggests that the biased processing was actually more effortful than unbiased processing. Such a finding suggests that the individual was potentially aware of the unbiased information but was able to avoid it by engaging in the type of mental gymnastics described in the remainder of this section.
5.1. Biased information search
5.1.1. Amount of searching
There are many situations in daily life in which people avoid further information search because they may encounter information that is incompatible with their goals or desires. For example, on the trivial end of the continuum, some people avoid checking alternative products after they have made a purchase that cannot be undone (Olson & Zanna Reference Olson and Zanna1979). On the more important end of the continuum, some people avoid AIDS testing out of concern that they might get a result that they do not want to hear, particularly if they believe the disease is untreatable (Dawson et al. Reference Dawson, Savitsky and Dunning2006; Lerman et al. Reference Lerman, Croyle, Tercyak and Hamann2002). This sort of self-deceptive information avoidance can be seen in the aphorism, “What I don't know can't hurt me.” Although a moment's reflection reveals the fallacy of this statement, it is nonetheless psychologically compelling.
Similar sorts of biased information search can be seen in laboratory studies. Perhaps the clearest examples can be found in research by Ditto and colleagues (e.g., Ditto & Lopez Reference Ditto and Lopez1992; Ditto et al. Reference Ditto, Munro, Apanovitch, Scepansky and Lockhart2003), in which people are confronted with the possibility that they might have a proclivity for a pancreatic disorder. In these studies people expose a test strip to their saliva and are then led to believe that color change is an indicator of either a positive or negative health prognosis. Ditto and Lopez (Reference Ditto and Lopez1992) found that when people are led to believe that color change is a good thing, they wait more than 60% longer for the test strip to change color than when they believe color change is a bad thing. Studies such as these suggest that information search can be biased in the amount of information gathered even when people are unsure what they will encounter next (see also Josephs et al. Reference Josephs, Larrick, Steele and Nisbett1992). Thus, it appears that people sometimes do not tell themselves the whole truth if a partial truth appears likely to be preferable. We are aware of no experiments that have examined the effect of self-affirmation or cognitive load on amount of information gathered, but we would predict that both manipulations would lead to an elimination or attenuation of the effect documented by Ditto and Lopez (Reference Ditto and Lopez1992).
5.1.2. Selective searching
Information search can also be biased in the type of information gathered. Although one never knows for sure what lies around the next corner, some corners are more likely to yield welcome information than others. Thus, politically liberal people might choose the New York Times as their information source, whereas politically conservative individuals might choose Fox News (Frey Reference Frey and Berkowitz1986). In such a manner, people can be relatively confident that the brunt of the information they gather will be consistent with their worldview, even if they do not know what tomorrow's headlines will bring.
Laboratory studies have examined this sort of biased information search, in part by assessing the conditions under which people are interested in learning negative information about themselves. One conclusion from this research is that the better people feel about themselves, the more willing they are to face criticism.Footnote 3 For example, Trope and Neter (Reference Trope and Neter1994) told participants that they were going to take a social sensitivity test and asked whether they would like feedback on their assets or liabilities. When participants had just ostensibly failed an unrelated spatial abilities test, or had not taken the test, they showed a slight preference for feedback on their assets. In contrast, when bolstered by the experience of ostensibly having performed very well on the spatial abilities test, participants were more interested in learning about their liabilities, presumably in service of self-improvement. In a related vein, Armitage et al. (Reference Armitage, Harris, Hepton and Napper2008) demonstrated that smokers were more likely to take an antismoking leaflet if they had been self-affirmed by reflecting on their prior acts of kindness (see also Harris et al. Reference Harris, Mayle, Mabbott and Napper2007). These data implicate potential awareness of unwanted information by showing that people tend to search for welcome information but are capable of searching for unwelcome information when their self-enhancement goals have been met. Thus, it appears that people are often able to avoid telling themselves the whole truth by searching out those bits of truth that they want to hear, but they are also willing to face uncomfortable truths when feeling secure (Albarracín & Mitchell Reference Albarracín and Mitchell2004; Kumashiro & Sedikides Reference Kumashiro and Sedikides2005).
5.1.3. Selective attention
When information is perceptually available and need not be actively discovered, people can still bias their encoding by selectively attending to aspects of the available information that they would prefer to be true. For example, if a person is at a dinner party where one conversation concerns the dangers of smoking and the other concerns the dangers of alcohol, she can choose to attend to one conversation or the other – and may do so selectively if she is a smoker or a drinker. In such a case she would likely be aware of the general tone of the information she is choosing not to gather, but by not attending to one of the conversations, she could avoid learning details that she may not want to know.
This sort of effect has been documented in a variety of different types of experiments. For example, in a study of proactive coping, Wilson et al. (Reference Wilson, Wheatley, Kurtz, Dunn and Gilbert2004) convinced participants that they might be chosen or were highly unlikely to be chosen for a hypothetical date. When participants believed they might be chosen, they spent slightly more time looking at positive than negative information about their potential partner. In contrast, when they believed that they were highly unlikely to be chosen, they spent more time looking at negative information about their potential partner. Thus, when people faced almost certain disappointment, they directed their attention to information that would make their upcoming rejection more palatable.
Although measures such as reading time provide a good indicator of the amount of information processing, attention can be assessed more directly. Eye-tracking studies provide some of the clearest evidence of where people direct their attention, and such studies have also shown that people are often strategic in their attentional decisions (Isaacowitz Reference Isaacowitz2006). For example, older adults look toward positive stimuli and away from negative stimuli when in a bad mood (Isaacowitz et al. Reference Isaacowitz, Toner, Goren and Wilson2008). This attentional bias clearly implicates potential awareness, as some encoding of the negative must take place for preferential attention to be directed toward the positive. This effect did not emerge among younger adults, suggesting that older adults are more likely than younger adults to rely on selective attention for mood repair. In a case such as this, it appears that older adults sacrifice informational content in service of emotional goals. This strategy might be sensible for older adults who have greater immune challenges than their younger counterparts and thus reap greater benefits from maintaining happiness (see sect. 6). As with the strategy of ending information search early, selective attention can allow people to avoid telling themselves the whole truth.
5.2. Biased interpretation
Despite the strategies just described for avoiding unwelcome information, there remain a variety of circumstances in which such information is nevertheless faithfully encoded. Under such circumstances, unwelcome information can still be dismissed through biased interpretation of attitude-consistent and attitude-inconsistent information. In the classic study of this phenomenon (Lord et al. Reference Lord, Ross and Lepper1979), people who were preselected for their strong attitudes on both sides of the capital punishment debate were exposed to a mixed bag of information about the efficacy of capital punishment. For example, some of the data with which they were presented suggested that capital punishment was an effective crime deterrent, whereas other data suggested that it was not. Given that the findings were new to participants, logic would suggest that they would coalesce at least to some degree in their attitudes. In contrast, people ended the experiment more polarized than they began it.
Lord et al. (Reference Lord, Ross and Lepper1979) discovered that this attitude polarization was a product of biased interpretation of the data. People who were in favor of capital punishment tended to accept the data as sound that supported capital punishment but reject the data as flawed that opposed capital punishment. Those who were against capital punishment showed the opposite pattern (see also Dawson et al. Reference Dawson, Gilovich and Regan2002). This selective skepticism appears to be self-deceptive, as it is attenuated or eliminated by self-affirmation (Cohen et al. Reference Cohen, Aronson and Steele2000; Reed & Aspinwall Reference Reed and Aspinwall1998) and cognitive load (Ditto et al. Reference Ditto, Scepansky, Munro, Apanovitch and Lockhart1998). These findings suggest that people have potential awareness of an unbiased appraisal, given that they appear to be relying on their motivational and mental resources to be differentially skeptical. Thus, selective skepticism appears to be a form of self-deception rather than simply an objective devaluation of new information to the degree that it is inconsistent with a large body of prior experience (see also, Westen et al. Reference Westen, Blagov, Harenski, Kilts and Hamann2006).
As a consequence of this selective skepticism, people are able to encounter a mixed bag of evidence but nevertheless walk away with their original beliefs intact and potentially even strengthened. Because they are unaware that a person with a contrary position would show the opposite pattern of acceptance and rejection, they are able to convince themselves that the data support their viewpoint. Thus, it seems that by relying on their considerable powers of skepticism only when information is uncongenial, people are able to prevent themselves from learning the whole truth.
5.3. Misremembering
Even if people attend to unwanted information, and even if they accept it at the time of encoding, this does not guarantee that they will be able to retrieve it later. Rather, information that is inconsistent with their preferences may simply be forgotten or misremembered later as preference-consistent or neutral. Thus, a person might have great memory for the details of his victory in the championship tennis match but very poor memory for the time he lost badly. Indeed, this latter memory might also be distorted to implicate his doubles partner or the unusual talents of his opponent. In section 4, we discussed theoretical mechanisms by which deceptive information might remain in consciousness and truthful information might be relegated to unconsciousness, but what evidence is there that memory is selective in this sort of fashion? Unfortunately, we know of no evidence showing how intending to deceive others can lead to self-deception as described in section 4, but there is evidence that other motivational sources can lead to selective forgetting processes.
First, when people put effort into self-improvement, but the improvement does not materialize, they can manufacture the gains they wish they had made by misremembering how they used to be. For example, Conway and Ross (Reference Conway and Ross1984) demonstrated that after taking a study skills class, people misremembered their prior study skills as lower than they rated them originally, thereby supporting their belief that their skills have improved. They then later misremembered their subsequent course performance as better than it was to maintain the fiction of improvement. Through processes such as these, people are able to purge their memories of inconvenient truths, thereby preventing themselves from knowing the whole truth, even if they accurately encoded it in the first instance.
Health information can be similarly distorted in memory (Croyle et al. Reference Croyle, Loftus, Barger, Sun, Hart and Gettig2006). In Croyle et al.'s research, participants were given cholesterol screening, and one, three, or six months later tested for their memory of their results. Respondents showed highly accurate memory of their risk category (89% correctly recalled this information), and this accuracy did not decay over six months. Nevertheless, even in the context of this apparently easy memory task, respondents were more than twice as likely to recall their cholesterol as being lower rather than higher than it really was.
This sort of memory bias can also be seen in recollection of daily experiences, whereby people have better recall of their own good than bad behavior but do not show this bias in their recall of the behaviors of others (D'Argembeau & Van der Linden Reference D'Argembeau, Van and Linden2008). This self-enhancing recall bias is also eliminated by information that bolsters people's self-image (in this case, doing well on a test; Green et al. Reference Green, Sedikides and Gregg2008), suggesting that people have potential awareness of both positive and negative information about the self. Thus, people's memories appear to be self-enhancing, sometimes containing information that is biased to be consistent with preferences and sometimes just failing to contain the whole truth.
5.4. Rationalization
Even if one's prior misdeeds are accurately recalled by self and others, it is still possible to avoid telling oneself the whole truth by reconstructing or rationalizing the motives behind the original behavior to make it more socially acceptable. For example, after eating a second helping of cake that leaves none for those who have not yet had dessert, a person could explain that he had not noticed that there was no other cake, or that he thought more cakes were available elsewhere. Here it is not memory of the misdeed that is critical, but interpretation of the motivation that underlies that deed.
Again, laboratory evidence supports this sort of rationalization process. For example, von Hippel et al. (Reference von Hippel, Lakin and Shakarchi2005) demonstrated that when cheating could be cast as unintentional, people who showed a self-serving bias in another domain were more likely to cheat, but when cheating was clearly intentional, self-serving individuals were no more likely to cheat than others. These data suggest that some types of self-serving biases involve rationalization processes that are also common to some types of cheating. Indeed, people also cheat more when they are told that free will is just an illusion (Vohs & Schooler Reference Vohs and Schooler2007), suggesting that they rationalize their cheating in these circumstances as caused by life situations rather than their own internal qualities.
More direct evidence for this sort of rationalization can be found in the hypocrisy research of Valdesolo and DeSteno (Reference Valdesolo and DeSteno2008). In their study participants were given the opportunity to (a) choose whether to give themselves or another individual an onerous task or (b) randomly assign the onerous task to self versus other. When given this opportunity, nearly all participants chose to give the onerous task to the other participant rather than rely on random assignment. Observers were not asked to make the choice themselves but rather watched a confederate make this same self-serving choice. When asked how fair the choice was, observers rated the act of choosing rather than relying on random assignment as less fair than it was rated by those who had actually made this choice. This hypocrisy in self-ratings shown by those who chose to assign the onerous task to another was eliminated by cognitive load, suggesting that participants have potential awareness of the unfairness underlying their judgments.
Research on misattribution reveals evidence of similar rationalization processes. A classic example can be found in Snyder et al.'s (Reference Snyder, Kleck, Strenta and Mentzer1979) research on avoidance of disabled people. In Snyder et al.'s experiment, participants chose a seat from two options – one next to a person who was disabled and one next to a person who was not disabled. In front of each empty seat there was a television, and the two televisions sometimes showed the same program and sometimes a different program. Snyder et al. (Reference Snyder, Kleck, Strenta and Mentzer1979) found that when the televisions were showing the same program, the majority of participants sat next to the disabled person, presumably to demonstrate to self and other that they were not prejudiced against disabled people. In contrast, when the televisions were showing different programs, the majority sat away from the disabled person. These data show that people only avoided the disabled person when they could rationalize their behavior as caused by external factors.
Similar effects have been documented in differential helping rates for African versus white Americans, with a meta-analysis showing that whites are less likely to help African Americans than fellow whites, but only when there are actual situational impediments to helping, such as distance or risk (Saucier et al. Reference Saucier, Miller and Doucet2005). When people cannot attribute their non-helping to such situational factors, they apparently feel compelled to help African Americans at equal rates to whites. In cases such as these, people are not denying or misremembering their cheating, self-serving choices, avoidance, or lack of helping. Rather, they are denying the socially undesirable motives that appear to underlie their behaviors by rationalizing their actions as the product of external forces.
5.5. Convincing the self that a lie is true
The classic form of self-deception is convincing oneself that a lie is true. This sort of self-deception can be difficult to verify, as it is difficult to know if the person believes the lie that they are telling others, given that situations that motivate lying to the self typically motivate lying to others. Nevertheless, there are examples of experiments in which this sort of process has been shown. Most of these examples rely on research paradigms in which the experimenter knows the truth, so the participant has little or nothing to gain interpersonally by lying and often has much to lose, given that lying makes the individual look vain, foolish, or deceptive.
5.5.1. Self-deception accompanied by neurological damage
A clear example of this sort of self-deception can be found in the split-brain research of Gazzaniga and colleagues, which relies on participants who have had their corpus callosum severed and are thereby unable to communicate directly between the two hemispheres. Gazzaniga (Reference Gazzaniga, Ito, Miyashita and Rolls1997) described a series of experiments with split-brain patients that suggest that the left hemisphere confabulates when necessary to explain one's own behavior. In one such study a split-brain patient was presented with an apparatus that displayed a chicken foot to the left hemisphere (via the right visual hemifield) and a snowy scene to the right hemisphere (via the left visual hemifield). The participant was then asked to point with each hand at the picture that most closely matched what was seen. The left hemisphere directed the right hand to point at a chicken head, and the right hemisphere directed the left hand to point at a shovel.
When Gazzaniga asked the participant why his left hand was pointing at the shovel, he created a quandary. Because the right hemisphere does not initially have access to speech centers, and thus is functionally mute in early split-brain patients, the participant could not accurately answer this question. The left hemisphere, which has access to speech, did not know why the left hand was pointing at a shovel. Nevertheless, rather than responding that he did not know why he was pointing at the shovel, the participant invented an answer – in this case, the plausible story that chickens make a lot of waste and the shovel is necessary to remove this waste. This study reveals an individual who self-deceives only to avoid the uncertainty caused by his lack of awareness of the source of his own behavior (a situation that is likely to be very common; see Nisbett & Wilson Reference Nisbett and Wilson1977). Nevertheless, this motivation appears to be sufficient to cause the person to invent a reason for his behavior and then apparently convince himself of the accuracy of this fiction.
Other examples from the neuropsychological literature can be found in various types of brain and body damage, in response to which the individual is motivated to maintain certain beliefs that are at odds with reality. For example, anosognosia is a prototypical self-deceptive disorder, in which people who have sustained an injury to some part of their body deny the reality of their injury. Ramachandran (Reference Ramachandran2009) described an anosognosic woman who denied that her left arm was paralyzed. He wrote:
An intelligent and lucid patient I saw recently claimed that her own left arm was not paralyzed and that the lifeless left arm on her lap belonged to her father who was “hiding under the table.” Yet when I asked her to touch her nose with her left hand she used her intact right hand to grab and raise the paralyzed hand – using the latter as a “tool” to touch her nose! Clearly somebody in there knew that her left arm was paralyzed and that the arm on her lap was her own, but “she” – the person I was talking to – didn't know. (Ramachandran Reference Ramachandran2009)
As can be seen in this description, the patient had awareness that her left arm was paralyzed, as indicated by her use of her right arm to move it, but she appeared to suffer from lack of awareness as well, suggesting self-deception. Consistent with this interpretation of anosognosia, a recent study (Nardone et al., Reference Nardone, Ward, Fotopoulou and Turnbull2007) presented disabled individuals with neutral and threatening words relevant to their immobility (e.g., walk). Those who were aware of their disability showed rapid disengagement from the threatening words, as indicated by more rapid response to a dot presented elsewhere on the screen in the presence of threatening than neutral words. In contrast, anosognosic individuals were less able to disengage from the threatening words, showing a slower response to the dot probe when paired with threatening versus neutral words. These data highlight implicit awareness of the disability in anosognosia, despite its explicit denial.
Cases such as these involve damage to the right hemisphere, which appears to prevent individuals from recognizing the logical inconsistency in their belief systems. Similarly, cases such as the one documented by Gazzaniga also require damage to the brain (the corpus callosum) for the individual to be denied access to information in some parts of the brain that is available to others. In the case of selective access of information to consciousness, however, individuals with no damage to the brain also experience this situation regularly, as reviewed earlier. Thus, there are also studies of individuals deceiving themselves when they are neurologically intact. We turn now to such evidence.
5.5.2. Self-deception unaccompanied by neurological damage
A ubiquitous variety of self-deception can be found in research on perceptions of control. Perceptions of control appear to be necessary for the maintenance of psychological and physical health (Cohen Reference Cohen1986; Glass & Singer Reference Glass and Singer1972; Klein et al. Reference Klein, Fencil-Morse and Seligman1976). When people are deprived of actual control, they often endeavor to regain a sense of control. In a self-deceptive example of this effect, Whitson and Galinsky (Reference Whitson and Galinsky2008) found that when people are led to feel low levels of personal control, they perceive illusory patterns in random configurations and are more likely to endorse conspiracy theories to explain co-occurring world events. Importantly, these effects did not emerge when people had self-affirmed, suggesting potential awareness of the absence of patterns and conspiracies. Similar findings have been documented by Kay et al. (Reference Kay, Gaucher, Napier, Callan and Laurin2008), who argued that beliefs in a controlling God and a strong government serve people's need for control. Consistent with their reasoning, differences in the percentage of people who believe in God between countries can be predicted by the insecurities of existence within countries (e.g., availability of health care, food, and housing), with increased insecurity associated with increased religiosity (Norris & Inglehart Reference Norris and Inglehart2004). Such a finding suggests the possibility of self-deception on a worldwide scale.
Another example of individuals deceiving themselves can be found in the research of Epley and Whitchurch (Reference Epley and Whitchurch2008) reviewed earlier, in which people more rapidly located photos of themselves when the photo had been morphed to be more attractive than when the photo was unaltered. This finding suggests that people's self-image is more attractive than their actual one, as the enhanced self provides a quicker match to their internal template than the actual self. Finally, experiments in cognitive dissonance also suggest that people are facile at lying to others and then coming to believe their own lies. For example, when they believe that they have freely chosen to tell another person that a tedious task is actually interesting, people soon believe that the task really is interesting (Festinger & Carlsmith Reference Festinger and Carlsmith1959), and again this effect is eliminated by self-affirmation (Steele & Liu Reference Steele and Liu1983).
6. Who is the audience for self-deception?
Thus far we have argued that self-deception evolved to facilitate deception of others, but the examples of self-deception described in section 5 appear to be directed primarily toward the self. If self-deception evolved to deceive others, why is there so much evidence for self-deception that appears to be intended only for the self? There are three answers to this question.
First and foremost, although Trivers (Reference Trivers and Dawkins1976/2006) originally suggested that self-deception might have evolved to facilitate the deception of others over 30 years ago, this suggestion has not been taken seriously in the empirical literature. Rather, the tradition in psychology has been to treat self-deception as a defensive response to an uncongenial world (a point to which we return in sect. 7). As a consequence, to the best of our knowledge no one has examined whether self-deception is more likely when people attempt to deceive others. Thus, the theoretical possibility of self-deception in service of other deception remains just that, and the evidence described in section 5 stems primarily from studies in which the motives appear to be more intrapersonal than interpersonal.
Second, to the degree that self-deception allows the individual to carry on with greater equanimity and confidence, it serves the general interpersonal goal of self-enhancement described in section 3. Most of the cases of apparently self-directed self-deception from section 5 would fit under this explanatory rubric. For example, if individuals selectively gather information in a manner that enables them to deny to themselves that they are at risk for a health disorder (as in Ditto & Lopez Reference Ditto and Lopez1992), then they are better positioned to convince others that they would make reliable and vigorous sexual or coalitional partners. That this pattern of self-deception makes them less capable of dealing with an impending health threat might have been a relatively small price to pay in an ancestral environment where there was little that could be done in any case. A similar interpersonal logic might underlie self-deceptions that help people maintain conviction in their beliefs (e.g., Lord et al. Reference Lord, Ross and Lepper1979) and give them a sense of control over the world (e.g., Whitson & Galinsky Reference Whitson and Galinsky2008).
Other classic examples of intrapersonally oriented self-deception also have important interpersonal consequences. For example, people tend to be unrealistically optimistic about their future (Armor & Taylor Reference Armor, Taylor and Zanna1998; Taylor & Brown Reference Taylor and Brown1988; Weinstein Reference Weinstein1980). This optimism can have self-deceptive origins; for example, people high in self-deception – measured via Sackeim and Gur's (Reference Sackeim and Gur1979) Self-Deception Scale – have been shown to be more likely than people low in self-deception to perceive an upcoming onerous task as a challenge (i.e., within one's capabilities) rather than a threat (i.e., overwhelming one's capabilities; Tomaka et al. Reference Tomaka, Blascovich and Kelsey1992). In this sense, self-deceptive optimism appears to create a self-fulfilling prophecy, as confidence in eventual success leads optimists to greater perseverance in the face of difficulties (Carver & Scheier Reference Carver, Scheier, Snyder and Lopez2002; Solberg Nes & Segerstrom Reference Solberg Nes and Segerstrom2006). As a consequence of these processes, optimists gain numerous social and financial benefits over their less optimistic counterparts (Assad et al. Reference Assad, Donnellan and Conger2007; Brissette et al. Reference Brissette, Scheier and Carver2002; Carver et al. Reference Carver, Kus and Scheier1994; Segerstrom Reference Segerstrom2007).
Finally, it is also possible that this system of self-deception that evolved to deceive others becomes applied in intrapersonal domains because of the good feelings that it brings the individual. By analogy, consider masturbation, another intrapersonal activity that has origins in an interpersonal system. Masturbation presumably emerged in primates because we evolved to enjoy copulation (thereby facilitating reproduction), but with the later evolution of hands rather than hooves or claws, we found a way to experience that enjoyment when circumstances conspire against sharing it with others. Self-directed self-deception might be analogous to masturbation in the sense that self-deception evolved for interpersonal purposes, but people found a way to use it to enhance happiness when circumstances conspire against other methods. So long as the consequences of this self-deception are fitness neutral or biologically affordable, self-deception might have leaked into a variety of intrapersonal domains that have important consequences for human happiness.
Indeed, the analogy to masturbation remains apt in this regard, as masturbation might be fitness neutral or even fitness positive among males, because it might enhance sperm quality by shedding older sperm (Baker & Bellis Reference Baker and Bellis1993). Thus, primates appear to have found a way to enhance their happiness with little if any cost to inclusive fitness. Similarly, although the spread of self-deceptive practices in the pursuit of happiness would clearly bear a cost to the degree that people sacrifice information quality for hedonic gains, such practices might also be fitness neutral – or even fitness positive – to the degree that people reap the gains brought about by happiness itself (Fredrickson Reference Fredrickson1998; Reference Fredrickson2001).
As with optimism, happiness has important interpersonal consequences; people experience increased social and financial success when they are happy (Boehm & Lyubomirsky Reference Boehm and Lyubomirsky2008; Fredrickson et al. Reference Fredrickson, Cohn, Coffey, Pek and Finkel2008; Hertenstein et al. Reference Hertenstein, Hansel, Butts and Hile2009; Lyubomirsky et al. Reference Lyubomirsky, King and Diener2005). Others are attracted to happy people and put off by sad people, for a variety of reasons (Bower Reference Bower and Forgas1991; Frijda & Mesquita Reference Frijda, Mesquita, Kitayama and Markus1994; Harker & Keltner Reference Harker and Keltner2001; Keltner & Kring Reference Keltner and Kring1998). As the aphorism goes, “laugh and the world laughs with you, cry and you cry alone.” Because humans are a social species wherein individuals achieve most of their important outcomes through coordinated or cooperative actions with others, attracting others to oneself and one's causes is an important achievement with notable fitness consequences (Fredrickson Reference Fredrickson1998; Reference Fredrickson2001). Thus, to the degree that people generally maintain a sunny disposition, they are likely to be more effective in their goal pursuits.
Happiness is also important for physical well-being, given that there are immune benefits to feeling happy and immune costs to feeling sad (Cohen et al. Reference Cohen, Alper, Doyle, Treanor and Turner2006; Marsland et al. Reference Marsland, Pressman, Cohen and Ader2007; Rosenkranz et al. Reference Rosenkranz, Jackson, Dalton, Dolski, Ryff, Singer, Muller, Kalin and Davidson2003; Segerstrom & Sephton Reference Segerstrom and Sephton2010). Because threats to health loom larger late in life, particularly from cancers and parasites (World Health Organization 2009), happiness may be even more important in late than early adulthood. Consistent with this possibility, older adults are more likely than younger adults to focus on and remember positive rather than negative information (Mather & Carstensen Reference Mather and Carstensen2005; Mather et al. Reference Mather, Canli, English, Whitfield, Wais, Ochsner, Gabrieli and Carstensen2004). Thus, it appears that late life happiness is maintained in part by the knowledge avoidance form of self-deception, as older but not younger adults look away from negative information and toward positive information when they are in a bad mood (Isaacowitz et al. Reference Isaacowitz, Toner, Goren and Wilson2008). Enhanced immune functioning may offset the informational costs of this aging positivity effect.Footnote 4
7. At what level of consciousness is the self deceived?
At the beginning of this article we rejected the classic claim that self-deception must involve two separate representations of reality, with truth preferentially stored in the unconscious mind and falsehood in the conscious mind. Rather, our biased processing perspective suggests that the individual can self-deceive in a variety of ways, some of which prevent even unconscious knowledge of the truth. Nevertheless, such a possibility does not preclude classic forms of self-deception, and here we consider the question of how the truth is represented in different forms of self-deception. We begin with types of self-deception in which conscious and unconscious knowledge are aligned and inaccurate, that is, cases in which individuals believe consciously and unconsciously in the veridicality of the deceptive information. We propose that this sort of self-deception should occur in two types of situations.
First, self-deception should exist at both conscious and unconscious levels when individuals prevent themselves from ever encoding the unwelcome truth. For example, Ditto and Lopez (Reference Ditto and Lopez1992) documented how individuals who are pleased with the early returns often stop gathering information before they encounter unwanted information, and thus their self-deception has prevented unwanted information from entering either conscious or unconscious knowledge. Such individuals might be aware that their information gathering strategy could have influenced the nature of their knowledge, but such awareness is likely to be rare, as (a) there is no set standard for how much information a person should gather in most settings, and (b) there is often no specific reason to believe that the next bit of information would have been contrary to that which had already been gathered.
Second, self-deception should also exist at both conscious and unconscious levels in many (although probably not all) cases of self-enhancement. In such cases individuals have a lifetime of gathering and processing information in a manner that favors the self, and it would probably be difficult if not impossible for them to parse out the impact of their long-term processing strategies on their understanding of the world. Support for this possibility can be found in two types of effects. First, as Epley and Whitchurch (Reference Epley and Whitchurch2008) demonstrated, people are faster to identify their more attractive self than their actual self in an array of faces. This finding suggests that the enhanced version of the self is likely to be represented in memory below consciousness awareness, as unconscious processes tend to be more rapid than conscious ones (e.g., Neely Reference Neely1977), and conflict between conscious and unconscious processes leads to slower rather than more rapid responses (e.g., Greenwald et al. Reference Greenwald, McGhee and Schwartz1998). Second, research on the convergence of implicit and explicit self-esteem reveals that individuals who show high implicit and high explicit self-esteem appear not to be defensive, whereas individuals who show high explicit but low implicit self-esteem appear to be the most defensive and narcissistic (Jordan et al. Reference Jordan, Spencer, Zanna, Hoshino-Browne and Correll2003). Because defensive and narcissistic individuals tend not to be well liked (Colvin et al. Reference Colvin, Block and Funder1995; Paulhus Reference Paulhus1998), this research suggests that the interpersonal benefits of self-enhancement are most likely to be realized if people believe their self-enhancing stories at both conscious and unconscious levels.
In contrast to these situations are classic cases of self-deception in which the conscious mind is deceived but the unconscious mind is well aware of the truth. This should be common in cases of self-deception intended to facilitate deception of others on specific issues. Under such circumstances individuals often have a limited time frame in which to convince the self of the truth of the deception that they wish to promulgate, and thus the types of memory processes outlined in section 4 are likely to lead to conscious recollection of the deception but implicit memory of the truth as originally encountered. Thus, it seems likely that self-deception can vary in the depth to which the self is deceived, with some processes leading to deception of conscious and unconscious aspects of the self and other processes leading to deception of only conscious aspects of the self.
8. Contrasting our approach with other approaches
Our evolutionary approach to self-deception is based on the premise that self-deception is a useful tool in negotiating the social world. According to this viewpoint, self-deception is best considered an offensive strategy evolved for deceiving others. In contrast to this viewpoint, most prior research on self-deception considers it a defensive strategy, adopted by individuals who are having difficulty coping with a threatening world. In this research tradition, the hedonic consequences for the self-deceiver are considered to be the primary outcome of self-deception. From an evolutionary perspective, however, hedonic consequences are not an important endpoint themselves, but only a means to an end, such as when they lead to enhanced immune functioning or greater interpersonal success, as described in section 6.
The most important consequence of this prior emphasis on hedonic consequences is that the field has been focused on what we would regard as a secondary aspect of self-deception. From our perspective, the study of self-deception as if it is a “psychological immune system” (Gilbert et al. Reference Gilbert, Pinel, Wilson, Blumberg and Wheatley1998; Wilson & Gilbert Reference Wilson and Gilbert2003) or a suite of “positive illusions” (Taylor & Brown Reference Taylor and Brown1988) intended to enhance or restore happiness is somewhat akin to the study of masturbation as if this is the purpose for which the sexual system was designed. Such an approach to sexuality would lead to worthwhile findings about some of the affective consequences of sexual behavior, but by ignoring the interpersonal purpose of sexuality, this approach would miss most of the important questions and answers.
Thus, in many ways the arguments outlined in this article call for a fundamental change in our approach to the problem of self-deception. The research described in sections 4 and 5 provide ample evidence for the psychological processes involved in self-deception and for the manner in which they protect people's beliefs and desires from a contrary reality. But because self-deception has been viewed as a defensive response to an uncongenial world, there is virtually no research that considers the interpersonal opportunities that might lead to self-deception. For example, research suggests that heterosexual men enhance their self-presentation when they meet attractive women (Buss Reference Buss1988), and women rate other women as less attractive when they are themselves ovulating (Fisher Reference Fisher2004).Footnote 5 The current approach suggests that men should actually believe at least some of their self-enhancement, and women should believe their more negative evaluations of others as well. That is, these strategies should be more effective if people are not just posturing but actually accept their own self-inflating and other-deflating stories. To test these possibilities, one could assess whether the presence of attractive women causes men to show greater self-enhancement in their information-processing biases and whether ovulation causes women to show greater derogation of rivals in their biases as well.
Future research could also address the utility of self-deception in specific acts of deception of others. For example, people could be put in a situation in which they must lie or otherwise deceive and their use of various self-deceptive strategies reviewed in section 5 could be examined. In such a setting they could be assessed for the degree to which they stop their search early when they encounter initial information that is consistent with their deceptive goals, avoid information that appears potentially inconsistent with an upcoming deception, show biased interpretation of information that is consistent versus inconsistent with an upcoming deception, and show better recall for deception-consistent than deception-inconsistent information. Importantly, the utility of such strategies could be assessed by examining the degree to which these information-processing biases are associated with increased effectiveness in deceiving others. As noted earlier, similar biases should also be invoked by situations that enhance the interpersonal need to appear confident and efficacious. And if these information-processing strategies reflect self-deception, then the degree to which people show biases under these circumstances may be moderated by individual differences in the tendency to self-deceive. For example, these effects should be stronger among people who show greater self-enhancement in the Epley and Whitchurch (Reference Epley and Whitchurch2008) paradigm than among people who do not show such self-enhancement.
The current approach to self-deception is also relevant to a series of debates that have been percolating for some time in psychology, in which self-enhancement (self-deception) is pitted against self-verification (reality orientation). In the first of these debates, researchers have asked whether self-enhancement motives are stronger than self-verification motives (see Swann, in press). From an evolutionary perspective this is not a meaningful question to ask, because it is akin to asking whether thirst is stronger than hunger. Just as the desire to eat versus drink is jointly determined by the current needs of the individual and the quality of resources available to satisfy hunger versus thirst, the desire to self-verify versus self-enhance should be jointly determined by current need states and the quality of available verifying and enhancing opportunities. Indeed, the research on self-affirmation described in section 5 highlights the fact that when people's self-enhancement needs are met, they become more willing to self-verify in negative domains. Thus, both enhancing and verifying needs are likely to be present nearly all of the time, and their relative strength will vary as a function of the social and material benefits they can accrue for the individual at any particular moment. Self-verification allows people to accurately gauge their abilities and behave accordingly, and self-enhancement allows people to gain an edge beyond what their actual abilities provide them.
In the second of these debates (e.g., Sedikides et al. Reference Sedikides, Gaertner and Toguchi2003 vs. Heine et al. Reference Heine, Lehman, Markus and Kitayama1999), researchers have argued about whether self-enhancement is pan-cultural or a uniquely Western phenomenon. From our perspective, this debate has gotten off track because of its emphasis on the role of positive self-regard rather than interpersonal goals as the source of self-enhancement. Because self-enhancement induces greater confidence, our perspective suggests that it will emerge in every culture in which confidence brings social and material gains. If a culture exists in which people benefit in various social and material domains by being meek and self-doubting, then individuals in such a culture should not self-enhance in those domains. From an evolutionary perspective, however, people in all cultures should benefit from enhancing those qualities that are necessary to win confrontations and secure mates. Because individual differences in abilities and proclivities enable some individuals to win conflicts and mates by physical means, others to win them by intellectual means, and still others by displays of kindness, artistic abilities, and so forth, one would expect that self-enhancement should similarly emerge in different forms for different individuals, but should do so in every culture on earth.
This debate has also become caught up in issues of measurement focused on how to properly assess self-enhancement in different cultures. Because the rules of social engagement vary widely across different cultures, it should come as no surprise that in some cultures people are unwilling to claim to be better than others. Again, however, the self-deceptive goal of self-enhancement is to believe one is slightly better than one really is, and thus explicit claims are less important than implicit beliefs. Indeed, self-enhancing claims are often likely to be evidence of bad manners or poor socialization, whereas exaggerated beliefs in one's abilities in domains that are necessary to win confrontations and secure mates should be universal.
In the third of these debates, people have asked whether enhancing self-views or accurate self-views reflect greater mental health (e.g., Colvin & Block Reference Colvin and Block1994 vs. Taylor & Brown Reference Taylor and Brown1994). This debate has shades of the second, given that again a balance of the two and knowing when each is appropriate should reflect the best strategy for goal achievement, and thus should be reflective of mental health. This debate has also gotten bogged down in the misperception (noted by Taylor & Brown Reference Taylor and Brown1994) that if a little self-enhancement is a good thing, then more can only be better. Biological systems rely on balance or homeostasis, and too much of even a good thing disrupts this balance. Thus, from an evolutionary perspective, it is obvious that the benefits of self-enhancement depend on proper dosage. Too much self-enhancement might not only be hard to believe oneself but might strike others as preposterous or mentally unbalanced (Colvin et al. Reference Colvin, Block and Funder1995; Paulhus Reference Paulhus1998) and might also lead to complacency and poor preparation in the face of real problems. This is not evidence, as Colvin et al. (Reference Colvin, Block and Funder1995) and Paulhus (Reference Paulhus1998) suggested, that self-enhancement is socially maladaptive. Rather, this finding simply highlights the fact that self-deception remains in permanent tension with veridical perception.
Finally, similar to the second debate, our interpersonal perspective on self-deception suggests that the key to understanding whether self-enhancement is a sign of good versus poor mental health is whether people believe their own self-enhancing story. Self-enhancement is useful only to the degree that it is self-deceptive, because only when it is believed by the self will others accept the enhanced self as genuine. If the claims ring hollow or if the claimants appear to be trying unsuccessfully to convince themselves, then this is a sign of failed self-deception and is likely to be an indicator of poor social functioning and poor mental health. This perspective suggests that much of the evidence showing that self-enhancement and other “positive illusions” are a sign of poor mental health comes from studies in which no differentiation is being made between people who are convinced versus unconvinced by their own self-enhancing claims.
As noted earlier, people who are high in explicit but low in implicit self-esteem are the most defensive and narcissistic (Jordan et al. Reference Jordan, Spencer, Zanna, Hoshino-Browne and Correll2003), and thus it seems likely that self-enhancement only brings benefits to the degree that it is believed both consciously and unconsciously. For this reason, we would predict that individuals who show convergence in their explicit and implicit measures of self-enhancement will confirm Taylor and Brown's (Reference Taylor and Brown1988; Reference Taylor and Brown1994) claims that self-enhancement is a sign of good mental health. Nevertheless, there may still be the occasional individual who shows extreme but convergent self-enhancement, and from an evolutionary perspective, this is not likely to be a successful interpersonal strategy and therefore unlikely to be a sign of good mental health. Such individuals may not come across as defensive, but they are likely to appear deluded.
9. Costs versus benefits
Finally, it is worth considering the costs versus benefits of self-deception. Because self-deception requires a mental architecture that sometimes favors falsehoods, those features of our mental landscape that allow us to self-deceive are likely to have attendant costs. Although we have focused thus far on the possibility that self-deception can be beneficial, it is also worth considering the costs. The most obvious cost of self-deception is loss of information integrity – with the resulting potential for inappropriate action and inaction – but there are likely to be other costs as well. For example, consider the case of memory discussed in section 4.1, in which we outlined how source confusions can facilitate self-deception in people's efforts to deceive others. Research suggests that some individuals are more likely than others to have difficulty differentiating the source of their memories, with the result that they are more susceptible to the implantation of false memories (Clancy et al. Reference Clancy, Schacter, McNally and Pitman2000). Such individuals suffer the cost of greater memory failures and therefore poorer foresight and greater manipulation by others. But they should also be more capable of self-deception in their efforts to deceive others, as retrieval of their lies should make it particularly difficult for them to differentiate the source of the false information. In this manner the costs associated with their poor source-monitoring capabilities might be offset by the gains associated with their greater likelihood of deceiving others.
At a more general level, the overarching fact that the mind might have evolved to self-deceive – and therefore to be tolerant of inconsistencies between information in the conscious and unconscious mind – raises the possibility that this weapon of deception might be capable of being turned upon the self. That is, self-deception might be imposed by others. For example, an abusive spouse who rationalizes his abuse as a product of his partner's failings might also convince her that she is to blame for his abuse. Consistent with this sort of possibility, system-justification theory as elaborated by Jost and colleagues (Jost et al. Reference Jost, Banaji and Nosek2004; Jost & Hunyady Reference Jost and Hunyady2005), argues that there are a variety of motivational reasons why people support the status quo, even when they are clear losers in the current system with very little likelihood of improving their situation. Such system-justifying beliefs among those at the bottom of the social ladder serve the purposes of those at the top of the ladder, in part by preventing agitation for social change. This argument suggests that system justification might be considered a variety of self-deception imposed onto low-status individuals by high-status people who benefit when those beneath them accept their low status as legitimate and do not struggle against it. This argument also suggests that the consequences of self-deception might be wide ranging, as a process that evolved to facilitate the deception of others appears to have effects that manifest themselves from an intrapersonal all the way to a societal level.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Preparation of this manuscript was supported by fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin, and by grants from the Australian Research Council and the Biosocial Research Foundation. We thank Michael Anderson, Marzu Banaji, Pablo Briñol, David Buss, Bella DePaulo, Tony Greenwald, Wilhelm Hofmann, Geoffrey Miller, Srini Narayanan, Steve Pinker, and Constantine Sedikides for helpful comments on an earlier draft of the manuscript.
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