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Self-deception refers to an individual holding inflated beliefs about their abilities, and it plays a crucial role in human behavior and decision-making. The present study employed event-related potentials (ERPs) technique to explore the neural responses to the impacts of social comparison direction and comparison gap on self-deceptive behavior. They were instructed to predict their performance in the forward-looking paradigm. Behavioral responses and neural reactions during the decision-making process were documented. The behavioral results indicated that, in contrast to the downward comparison condition, participants engaged in upward comparison exhibited more occurrences of self-deception. However, within the context of upward comparison, participants demonstrated a higher frequency of self-deception in the large gap condition compared with the small gap condition. The ERP results showed that induced self-deception under conditions with a large comparative gap between participants and their paired counterparts stimulated larger P300 and smaller N400 amplitude than under conditions with a small gap. However, when participants were in the upward comparison situation, the late positive potential (LPP) amplitude induced by self-deception behavior in the condition of a large comparison gap between participants and paired opponents was larger than that in the condition of a small comparison gap. These results indicated that individuals in the large gap group feel strong unfairness and negative emotions. More importantly, the self-deception induced by the large gap group in the upward comparison situation used fewer cognitive resources than the small gap condition, whereas the individuals in the downward comparison situation did not show the difference in cognitive resources., (© 2024. The Psychonomic Society, Inc.)

In this paper, we explore the phenomenon of "self-deception" within the context of nursing, focusing on how nurses employ this coping mechanism when faced with dissonance, distress, and conflicting situations in clinical settings. Our primary objective is to examine the phenomenon of self-deception using Rodgers' evolutionary method of concept analysis. Focusing on nurses' experiences in challenging situations, our analysis highlights how self-deception is often employed as a coping strategy. According to our conceptual analysis, self-deception in nursing clinical practice highlights tensions between different paradigms and expectations in healthcare settings. These tensions stem from the power dynamics and subservience that nurses often face, which can hinder their ability to advocate for themselves, their patients, and the nursing profession., Competing Interests: Declaration of Conflicting InterestsThe author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Deception is used by plants, animals, and humans to increase their fitness by persuading others of false beliefs that benefit the self, thereby creating evolutionary pressure to detect deception and avoid providing such unearned benefits to others. Self-deception can disrupt detection efforts by eliminating cognitive load and idiosyncratic deceptive cues, raising the possibility that persuading others of a false belief might be more achievable after first persuading oneself. If people self-deceive in service of their persuasive goals, self-deception should emerge whenever persuasion is paramount and hence should be evident in information sharing, generalized beliefs about the self, and intergroup relations. The mechanism, costs, and benefits of self-deceptive biases are explored from this evolutionary perspective., Competing Interests: Conflict of interest statement Nothing declared., (Copyright © 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

A moral model is proposed to understand how men convicted of violence against the partner can feel moral in spite of their past violent behavior and their current violent and sexist attitudes. Because of its appeal to the role of self-deception and its relationship to psychological well-being, it was hypothesized that a rigid conception about what is right and wrong (moral absolutism) is associated with ambivalent outcomes that keep their psychological system in homeostasis. The relationships were specified a priori and tested using path analysis. Several fit indices supported the adequacy of the model and showed that moral absolutism was indirectly related to both psychological well-being and a good moral self-conceptualization through self-deception. At the same time, moral absolutism was related to sexist and violent attitudes and a poor moral self-conceptualization. Future interventions could include strategies to reduce the resistances to change based on the reduction of moral absolutism and self-deception.

The coexistence of cooperation and selfish instincts is a remarkable characteristic of humans. Psychological research has unveiled the cognitive mechanisms behind self-deception. Two important findings are that a higher ambiguity about others' social preferences leads to a higher likelihood of acting selfishly and that agents acting selfishly will increase their belief that others are also selfish. In this work, we posit a mathematical model of these mechanisms and explain their impact on the undermining of a global cooperative society. We simulate the behavior of agents playing a prisoner's dilemma game in a random network of contacts. We endow each agent with these two self-deception mechanisms which bias her toward thinking that the other agent will defect. We study behavior when a fraction of agents with the "always defect" strategy is introduced in the network. Depending on the magnitude of the biases the players could start a cascade of defection or isolate the defectors. We find that there are thresholds above which the system approaches a state of complete distrust., Competing Interests: The authors declare no conflict of interest.

The social desirability bias can be considered a two-dimensional construct, consisting of impression management and self-deception. Although social desirability is often considered a threat to the validity of intimate partner violence (IPV) reports, little is known about which dimension is most responsible for this distortion. Furthermore, it is unclear whether social desirability distorts the report of relationship satisfaction. In this study, two instruments that claim to measure social desirability are investigated on their ability to measure impression management and self-deception. Afterward, which dimension (if any) is responsible for a distortion in IPV and relationship satisfaction reports is examined. The survey consisted of the following measures: the Revised Conflict Tactics Scales for IPV, the Couples Satisfaction Index for relationship satisfaction and the Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding, the Limited Disclosure Scale, and the Idealistic Distortion Scale for social desirability. The Limited Disclosure Scale was found to predominantly measure impression management. The Idealistic Distortion Scale did not measure social desirability well and appeared to be a bad measure for relationship satisfaction. Both the reports of IPV and relationship satisfaction were influenced by impression management, but not by self-deception. However, impression management and self-deception only accounted for a small portion of the variance in IPV and relationship satisfaction reports. These results indicate that the social desirability bias, when reporting IPV and relationship satisfaction, is a conscious process, but that its influence on IPV and relationship satisfaction reports might be overrated.

The nature and existence of self-deception is controversial. On a classic conception, self-deceived individuals carry two conflicting representations of reality. Proponents of an alternative, deflationary account dispute this, arguing that putative cases of self-deception simply reflect distorted information processing. To investigate these alternatives, we adapted a paradigm from the "crowd-within" literature. Participants provided two different estimates for each of a series of incentivized questions. Half of the questions were neutral in content, while half referred to undesirable future events. Whereas the first and second estimates for neutral questions did not differ systematically, second estimates for undesirable questions were more optimistic than first estimates. This result suggests that participants were sampling selectively from an internal probability distribution when providing estimates for undesirable events, implying they had access to a less rosy representation of their future prospects than their individual estimates conveyed. In short, self-deception is real., (Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Deception is part of the natural repertoire of adaptive behaviours in many organisms. In humans we see it in all domains of human activity including health care. Within health care, deception can be a matter of concern, but it is also used to protect patients, for instance against overwhelming and negative diagnostics. This paper demonstrates that deception and self-deception are closely interlinked and that self-deception facilitates deception. Furthermore, self-deception tends to be used to reduce the discomfort we feel when we are dishonest (cognitive dissonance). The paper includes references to core psychological mechanisms and ethical aspects., (© 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

In the philosophical literature, self-deception is mainly approached through the analysis of paradoxes. Yet, it is agreed that self-deception is motivated by protection from distress. In this paper, we argue, with the help of findings from cognitive neuroscience and psychology, that self-deception is a type of affective coping. First, we criticize the main solutions to the paradoxes of self-deception. We then present a new approach to self-deception. Self-deception, we argue, involves three appraisals of the distressing evidence: (a) appraisal of the strength of evidence as uncertain, (b) low coping potential and (c) negative anticipation along the lines of Damasio's somatic marker hypothesis. At the same time, desire impacts the treatment of flattering evidence via dopamine. Our main proposal is that self-deception involves emotional mechanisms provoking a preference for immediate reward despite possible long-term negative repercussions. In the last part, we use this emotional model to revisit the philosophical paradoxes., (Published by Elsevier Inc.)

The objective of this study is to show compatible data with the idea that men who commit intimate partner violence are uninhibited about the moral consequences of their behaviors, probably because they feel certainty about the rightness of their moral values and they strongly deceive themselves to maintain a good moral self-concept, and thus a good level of well-being. To do that, we compare their scores with those obtained by an opposite sample regarding the use of violence, made up of professional male psychologists who work in the social field trying to teach others alternative strategies to violence., (© The Author(s) 2015.)

To some extent, unethical behavior results from people's limited attention to ethical considerations, which results in an ethical blind spot. Here, we focus on the role of ambiguity in shaping people's ethical blind spots, which in turn lead to their ethical failures. We suggest that in ambiguous settings, individuals' attention shifts toward tempting information, which determines the magnitude of their lies. Employing a novel ambiguous-dice paradigm, we asked participants to report the outcome of the die roll appearing closest to the location of a previously presented fixation cross on a computer screen; this outcome would determine their pay. We varied the value of the die second closest to the fixation cross to be either higher (i.e., tempting) or lower (i.e., not tempting) than the die closest to the fixation cross. Results of two experiments revealed that in ambiguous settings, people's incorrect responses were self-serving. Tracking participants' eye movements demonstrated that people's ethical blind spots are shaped by increased attention toward tempting information., (© The Author(s) 2015.)

Self-deception and impression-management comprise two types of deceptive, but generally socially acceptable behaviours, which are common in everyday life as well as being present in a number of psychiatric disorders. We sought to establish and dissociate the 'normal' brain substrates of self-deception and impression-management. Twenty healthy participants underwent fMRI scanning at 3T whilst completing the 'Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding' test under two conditions: 'fake good', giving the most desirable impression possible and 'fake bad' giving an undesirable impression. Impression-management scores were more malleable to manipulation via 'faking' than self-deception scores. Response times to self-deception questions and 'fake bad' instructions were significantly longer than to impression-management questions and 'fake good' instructions respectively. Self-deception and impression-management manipulation and 'faking bad' were associated with activation of medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (vlPFC). Impression-management manipulation was additionally associated with activation of left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and left posterior middle temporal gyrus. 'Faking bad' was additionally associated with activation of right vlPFC, left temporo-parietal junction and right cerebellum. There were no supra-threshold activations associated with 'faking good'. Our neuroimaging data suggest that manipulating self-deception and impression-management and more specifically 'faking bad' engages a common network comprising mPFC and left vlPFC. Shorter response times and lack of dissociable neural activations suggests that 'faking good', particularly when it comes to impression-management, may be our most practiced 'default' mode., (Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

The paradoxical nature of intentional self-deception has led many philosophers to view self-deception as predominantly non-intentional. I propose that approaching self-deception from an agency-theoretic perspective allows us to rescue the idea that self-deception can at least be driven by intention. By modeling the ‘acting as if’ method of self-deception with agential layering, developed by Nguyen [2020. Games: Agency as Art. New York: Oxford University Press], I argue that intention-driven self-deception is no more mysterious than other activities that involve self-effacing ends: ends we must pursue indirectly. That is, self-deception can occur when agents pursue the self-effacing end of forming what they take to be an epistemically unjustified belief by submerging themselves in a layer of agency in which they can act as if they already hold that belief. By intentionally adopting this pretense and shaping their agency around it, they forget that their agency is layered at all, and may thereby form a full-fledged belief. This model avoids objections to views that treat self-deception itself as intentional and does so while appealing only to resources already used to explain our everyday activities. I then apply my model to a core case of bad faith from Sartre to show that intention-driven self-deception can clarify how we are responsible for inauthenticity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to contribute to the discussion of pathological problems that occur in today's "phase transition phenomenon of relationship," this article focuses on "self-deception"—an example of a distorted relationship with oneself. It explores ways to overcome such issues through philosophical counseling. The specific measure is the Self-Dialogue seminar, a part of the Philosophical Counseling Clinical Education (PCCE) program. The second Section, therefore, begins with the question "How do we deal with the phenomenon of self-deception (on the part of the counselor or client) that we might actually encounter in philosophical counseling?" and discusses where and how philosophical counseling can intervene in the entire process of self-deception. In preparation for the possibility of encountering different levels of self-deception, the third section examines the contexts of three types of self-deceptions. The fourth section explores the possibility that a client or philosophical counselor can discover and change their own points of deception through the Records of Self-Dialogue seminar. Finally, the article argues that philosophical dialogue, if attained within a community predicated on individual equality and mutuality, can be a valid prescription for self-deception in the modern world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People who, by intention or negligence, deceive themselves put other people at risk of being misinformed. The paper argues that this kind of misinforming other people is to be avoided for largely the same reasons for which lying is to be avoided – regardless of what exactly these reasons are. This makes the ethical evaluation of self-deception in part dependent on the ethical evaluation of lying. In order to bring out this result as clearly as possible, detailed characterisations of the concepts of attempted deception, lying, and self-deception are given. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Pascal famously argued that practical reasoning should lead people to try to form within themselves a commitment to religious practice and obedience, based upon a belief in God. I propose to take a less ambitious argument, which I call the Sensible Argument, and use it to present The Puzzle. I argue that there is a huge puzzle here, about the radical dissonance between the beliefs and practices of many of the purportedly religious. There are, I will argue, good reasons to doubt, concerning many (clearly not all or indeed most) purported religious believers, whether they are indeed believers, or at least whether their beliefs are strong; and religion seems to greatly increase the risks of deception, duplicity, and hypocrisy, as well as self-deception and inauthenticity. By turning towards a religious form of life, one will therefore be adding great morality-related risks. Arguably, if there is a God who deeply cares about individual moral behaviour, he would punish religious moral transgressors more than the secular ones. One is unlikely to be saved from hell (or other severe divine punishment) by becoming religious. If one is going to wager, it seems much more sensible to wager on the secular side. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Basic Buddhist psychology thus blends ethics into its description of the mind. From any of the more prevalent moral perspectives, Buddhism's emphasis on the mind as the locus of moral value might seem to be in danger of myopic solipsism, and the crucial Buddhist idea that the moral quality of mental events is in some sense self-evident - that, to see the mind clearly is to know and motivate right action - is likely to appear to be Buddhism's own form of self-deluding fantasy. The answer is in your mind and in our analysis of what the art does in your mind, as a conditioning factor for your intentions. Buddhist ethics situates moral significance within the mental lives of living beings, and foregrounds mental actions as the key site for moral assessment. [Extracted from the article]

Nothing was more important to Tolstoy than character development. For him, the purpose of life is to grow morally. The purpose of literature — as all art — is to aid that growth. Abstract philosophy and pedantic scholarship are therefore redundant. Indeed, even the psychological novel is a distraction. Moral truths are self‐evident. They are always simple. They are expressed by the humble. They are known by the meek. To become good, all we need to do is peel back the layers of hypocrisy and deceit that have overwrought us. Moral truths are known all over the world, but they are forgotten or covered up. There is nothing like a folktale, a pithy aphorism, or the words of a farm laborer or child to point this out. We may be surprised by what we already know and how deceived we were. All Tolstoy's varied endeavors, his literature, pedagogic theory and philosophy, center on moral conversion and its only legitimate motivation: love. Tolstoy's affront on modern civilization, documented vehemently in his later works sought to teach this lesson. This was a view of character development that had wide ranging impact all over the world, influencing many of the most famous thinkers, educators, and activists of the twentieth century. Tolstoy's stories continue to enthrall and inspire moral transformation. In this article Daniel Moulin explains why. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Agora (0211-6642) is the property of Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, Servicio de Publicaciones and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Neil Levy argues that the importance of acquiring cultural knowledge in our evolutionary past selected for conformist and deferential social learning, and that contemporary bad beliefs – roughly, popular beliefs at odds with expert consensus – result primarily from the rational deployment of such conformity and deference in epistemically polluted modern environments. I raise several objections to this perspective. First, against the cultural evolutionary theory from which Levy draws, I argue that humans evolved to be highly sophisticated and vigilant social learners. Given this, the ubiquity of bad beliefs in the modern world is puzzling: if humans are so smart and suspicious, why do these characteristics seem so rare in domains such as politics? I argue that the answer rests on the incentives that underlie bad beliefs, and I favorably contrast this explanation with Levy's appeal to epistemic pollution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the connection between lies, deception, and self-deception. Understanding this connection is important because the consensus is that you cannot deceive yourself by lying since you cannot make yourself believe as true a proposition you already believe is false – and, as a liar, you must assert a proposition you believe is false. My solution involves refining our analysis of lying: people can lie by asserting what they confidently believe is true. Thus, self-deceivers need not replace one belief with another; rather, they may just increase existing credence in a proposition they already believe is true. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his notable account of lying in the Doctrine of Virtue, Kant draws a parallel between self-deception and external lying, and argues that the agent who lies throws away her personality and dignity. Challenged by many commentators, this explanatory strategy may suggest that Kant's prohibition of deception would be motivated by a contentious teleological principle. In my account, I reject this suggestion and further show that this parallel can help us better understand the nature of selfdeception. By borrowing elements from outside of Kant's treatment of self-deception in the Doctrine of Virtue, this paper aims to offer an account of Kant's strong condemnation of self-deception, while showing that what is at stake in cases of deception goes far beyond teleological principles. I contend that taking seriously the parallel between lying and self-deception is crucial for avoiding the trap of falling into teleological claims and that, in contrast to what some commentators suggest, the parallel is key to understanding self-deception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A familiar puzzle about self-deception concerns how self-deception is possible in light of the paradoxes generated by a plausible way of defining it. A less familiar puzzle concerns how a certain type of self-deception—being self-deceived about one's own intentional mental state—is possible in light of a plausible way of understanding the nature of self-knowledge. According to this understanding, we ordinarily do not infer our mental states from evidence, but then it's puzzling how this sort of self-deception could occur given that self-deception arises from the mistreatment of evidence. This article argues that to accommodate this kind of self-deception we should accept that sometimes ordinary self-knowledge is inferential, but that this idea needn't be so unappealing. In particular, by showing that such inferential self-knowledge can be both 'transparent' and 'direct', the article argues that it need not imply having an abnormal, 'alienated' relation to the mental state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In two studies, we surveyed the beliefs of undergraduate students (Study 1) and the general public (Study 2) about deceptive behavior, memory functioning, and the effects of lying on memory. We compared participants' beliefs with the current memory and deception literature. Overall, participants in both studies believed that different types of lies (i.e. false denials, feigning amnesia, fabrication) would elicit different memory impairing effects, although they did not know what specific kind of memory impairment (e.g. forgetting, false memory). In line with previous experimental studies, participants experienced difficulties in retrieving memories after falsely denying or feigning amnesia. Moreover, participants believed that lying would impact other people's memory such as that people would start to believe in their own lies. Meanwhile, they also indicated that these effects would be minimal for themselves. Interestingly, our results showed that false denials are used quite frequently in daily life. Finally, we found that undergraduate students' beliefs about memory were in line with scientific evidence, while the general public continues to have erroneous beliefs about memory. When the general public plays a role in the courtroom (e.g. jury members), we recommend involving memory experts in the assessment of reliability of statements when lying was involved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deception is a cognitive-demanding process that entails more than one executive function and is thus associated with an increase in neural activity in specific regions of the brain. The purpose of this review of literature is to highlight the neural networks that facilitate deception, in addition to identifying the motives and conditions that increase one’s likelihood to deceive.This research aims to discuss the neuropsychological evidence of brain structures that subserve human deceptive behavior, especially with an emphasis on the role of the prefrontal cortex and its executive functions. This research is of importance to the field of psychology, as it offers insight into the nature of deception by considering the neural processes involved in different aspects of deception, such as the preparation to lie, intention, and context that is eliciting the need or likelihood to resort to deception. This review of literature will further advance neuroimaging research, because it contributes to the ongoing discussion regarding neuroimaging techniques as a valid instrument for deception detection in the fields of forensic psychology and psychiatry.

In this paper, I defend the view that self-deception is a moral failure. Instead of saying that self-deception is bad because it undermines our moral character or leads to morally deleterious consequences, as has been argued by Butler, Kant, Smith, and others, I argue the distinctive badness of self-deception lies in the tragic relationship that it bears to our own values. On one hand, self-deception is motivated by what we value. On the other hand, it prevents us from valuing those things properly. I argue that we owe it ourselves to take seriously our own values, by striving to properly value them. This gives us both prudential and moral reasons to avoid self-deception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Advisors frequently have an interest in the decisions their advisees make, forcing advisees to distinguish their advisors' unbiased beliefs from their self-interested bias. This task is likely to be especially hard when psychological forces distort advisors' beliefs to make some of their bias sincerely held. In our first experiment, we show that advisors bias both their recommendations and their own actions toward their persuasion goal, and that advisees are better at distinguishing between the unbiased, sincerely biased, and insincerely biased parts of their advisor's recommendation when they meet face-to-face to discuss, compared with when they receive only a written recommendation. Our second experiment shows that advisees distinguish their advisor's bias from their advisor's unbiased beliefs more accurately when the advisors are asked to provide fact-based information about their own actions. Both experiments show that post-report interactions are more helpful for identifying insincere bias than sincere bias. Data Availability: All raw data (excluding identifiable information), data processing code for tabulated analyses, and full experimental materials are available from the authors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study is to identify homogeneous profiles based on the five moral foundations in a sample of 376 men undergoing court-mandated treatment for violently abusing their partners. To understand better the meaning of these new profiles as well as their temporal consistency, the profiles were related to different outcomes of the current psychological treatments, before and after a prescribed one, such as self-deception, moral self-concept, benevolent sexism, and hostile sexism. Results from Latent Profile Analysis and Latent Transition Analysis showed good fit for a four-profile solution. This solution was stable from Time 1 to Time 2, both in terms of the scores on the moral foundations and the participants included in each profile. The participants included in each profile were called "Sacralizers", "All for one", "Moral outsiders", and "Purists". Comparing with standard samples and consistent with the predictions of the moral foundation theory and the sacredness hypothesis, their scores on the moral foundations were clearly different by excess or defect. Those tending to exaggerate or sacralize the moral concerns ("Sacralizers" and "Purists") were the most self-deceived, the less hostile sexists, and the ones with the highest moral self-conceptualization. Future research will have to test the role of the moral variables in the psychological treatments and think of strategies to change the importance that men convicted of domestic violence give to the five moral foundations, but at least two strategies seem to be needed: one to reduce the exaggerations and another to increase the deficits of the moral foundations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Political Self-Deception, Galeotti carves out valuable space for the analysis of behaviour on the part of political leaders that lies between straightforward deception and honest mistakes. In these comments I consider whether the concept of self-deception can travel from the political to the academic arena, to illuminate problems in how political theorists treat empirical data in the course of their normative work. Drawing on examples from the literature on the social bases of self-respect, I show that political theorists too are vulnerable to the motivationally biased treatment of data. I suggest that this problem can helpfully be located on the same broad terrain Galeotti outlines, between lying and mistakes. I also identify some potential analogues, for the academic sphere, of Galeotti's proposed remedies for political SD. The paper goes on to reflect on how Galeotti herself employs empirical evidence in developing her account of self-deception. In particular, I challenge the empirical basis of her assumption that political self-deception is significantly more predictable, and therefore preventable, than political lying. My discussion seeks to show that, in addition to its intended contribution to the study of political deception, Political Self-Deception offers a valuable perspective on recent debates about the place of empirical evidence in political theory. However, approaching the book from this methodological angle reveals, in turn, some weaknesses in the empirical foundations of one of Galeotti's own key normative claims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Political Self-Deception, Galeotti considers (and rebuts) two 'realist' objections. Galeotti's realist argues that there is no need for the overly complex concept of self-deception, since self-serving lies and manipulation are descriptively and normatively sufficient; and that in any case, deception in democratic politics is sometimes justifiable. In response, Galeotti offers explanatory, moral, and normative reasons why self-deception is a helpful concept in international politics: it helps us better understand the political reality of deception, and guides us in how to avoid or mitigate it. In this comment, I wish to revisit the realist objections, and to provide a more nuanced and more robust version of them. In doing so, I raise questions about the relationship between self-deception and the failure of political judgement, about the moral evaluation of deception in democratic politics, and about the normative implications of Galeotti's analysis for political responsibility and for prophylactic measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the alleged "selectivity problem" for Alfred Mele's deflationary position on self-deception, a problem that can allegedly be solved only by appealing to intentions to bring it about that one acquires certain beliefs, or to make it easier for oneself to acquire certain beliefs, or to deceive oneself into believing that p. This article argues for the following thesis: (1) the selectivity problem does not undermine this deflationary position on self-deception, and (2) anyone who takes it to be a problem for this position should regard it as being just as serious a problem for those who advocate the intention-featuring solution at issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is widely assumed that a literal understanding of someone's self-deception that p yields the following contradiction. Qua self-deceiver, she does not believe that p , yet – qua self-deceived – she does believe that p. I argue that this assumption is ill-founded. Literalism about self-deception – the view that self-deceivers literally self-deceive – is not committed to this contradiction. On the contrary, properly understood, literalism (non-trivially) excludes it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study aims to explore the cognitive basis of self-deception on the basis of the participants' performance on a deception task and its relation to other cognitive variables. A total of 130 healthy participants (58 males & 72 females) of the age range of 18-25 years having a minimum educational qualification of 'passed grade XII' were screened and selected for the study using General Health Questionnaire 28. By using an interview format, the researcher collected personally significant information from the participants to be used later in the deception task. An android based mobile application was prepared to generate and administer the deception task. The participants were also assessed on Stroop Task (www.onlinestrooptest.com), Eyesenck Personality Questionnaire (1975); Rotter's Locus of Control Scale (1954); Rosenberg's Self-Esteem Scale (1965); Generalized Self-Efficacy Scale (Schwarzer & Jerusalem, 1995). Statistical analysis revealed self-deception is related to personality and cognitive inhibition. The results were discussed in light of recent literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People often hear classic allusions such as plugging one’s ears while stealing a bell, drawing cakes to satisfy one’s hunger, and the emperor’s new clothes. These allusions reflect a principle that people believe in nonexistent phenomena to satisfy their desires, also called self-deception. The current research used three experiments to examine the impact of social status and cognitive load on self-deception, and further to explore the inner connection about cognitive load and self-deception. The results found that deceiving individuals of high social status can play a role through the intrinsic mechanism of involuntary conscious memory (ICM). The higher the cognitive load of the deceiver, the greater the possibility of deception. The study demonstrated that involuntary conscious memory is the internal mechanism of self-deception, further explore the origin of self-deception, and enrich the self-deception theory.

In an evolutionary context, trusted signals or cues provide individuals with the opportunity to manipulate them to their advantage by deceiving others. The deceived can then respond to the deception by either ignoring the signals or cues or evolving means of deception–detection. If the latter happens, it can result in an arms race between deception and detection. Here, we formally analyse these possibilities in the context of cue-mimicry in prey–predator interactions. We demonstrate that two extrinsic parameters control whether and for how long an arms race continues: the benefits of deception, and the cost of ignoring signals and cues and having an indiscriminate response. As long as the cost of new forms of deception is less than its benefits and the cost of new forms of detection is less than the cost of an indiscriminate response, an arms race results in the perpetual evolution of better forms of detection and deception. When novel forms of deception or detection become too costly to evolve, the population settles on a polymorphic equilibrium involving multiple strategies of deception and honesty, and multiple strategies of detection and trust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humans routinely deceive themselves when communicating to others, but no one knows whether other animals do the same. We ask whether dishonest signaling between crayfish meets a condition required for self-deception: dishonest individuals and honest individuals escalate aggression according to their signals of strength rather than actual strength. Using game theory, we predicted how an animal's knowledge of its strength should affect its decision to escalate aggression. At the evolutionary equilibrium, an animal that knows its strength should escalate aggression according to its strength, relative to the expected strength of its opponent. By contrast, an animal that knows only its size should escalate aggression according to its size, relative to the size of its opponent. We tested these predictions by staging encounters between male crayfish (Cherax dispar) of known sizes and strengths. Consistent with a model of self-deception, crayfish escalated aggression based on the sizes of their claws relative to those of their opponents, despite the fact that size poorly predicts strength. Males who were weak for their size escalated disputes less often, but their aggression far exceeded the level predicted by a model of self-awareness, suggesting these crayfish were largely ignorant of their deception. Animals that fail to recognize their own dishonest signals may win disputes with stronger opponents without engaging in costly combat. Our game-theoretical approach can be used to identify potential cases of self-deception in nonhuman animals, enabling comparative studies of this behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People often hear classic allusions such as plugging one's ears while stealing a bell, drawing cakes to satisfy one's hunger, and the emperor's new clothes. These allusions reflect a principle that people believe in nonexistent phenomena to satisfy their desires, also called self-deception. The current research used three experiments to examine the impact of social status and cognitive load on self-deception, and further to explore the inner connection about cognitive load and self-deception. The results found that deceiving individuals of high social status can play a role through the intrinsic mechanism of involuntary conscious memory (ICM). The higher the cognitive load of the deceiver, the greater the possibility of deception. The study demonstrated that involuntary conscious memory is the internal mechanism of self-deception, further explore the origin of self-deception, and enrich the self-deception theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to doxastic accounts of self‐deception, self‐deception that P yields belief that P. For doxastic accounts, the self‐deceiver really believes what he, in self‐deception, professes to believe. I argue that doxastic accounts are contradicted by a phenomenon that often accompanies self‐deception. This phenomenon – which I term 'secondary deception' – consists in the self‐deceiver's defending his professed (deceit‐induced) belief to an audience by lying to that audience. I proceed to sketch an alternative, non‐doxastic account of how we should understand self‐deception in terms of the self‐deceiver's misrepresentation of himself as believing that P. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We all need to resort to deception, either with ourselves (denial, self-deception, mystification) or with others (with modalities, such as impression management, social desirability), to a greater or lesser extent. Lies, in their broader meaning, are interpreted as something rather adaptive, useful, and necessary in our socioaffective world. In particular, self-deception is a highly interesting psychological concept in the clinical population, namely, in drug dependents, as it serves as a mechanism for maintaining addiction. The objective of this study was to create and explore the validity and psychometric properties of a short self-deception scale (SDQ-12), derived from the IAM-40 and emphasizing the manipulation and mystification dimensions. Participants in this study included a group of drug dependents (alcoholics and drug abusers) under treatment (n = 417) as well as a group of adults from the general population (n = 124) (total N = 541), selected using simple random sampling. Across the sample, 63% of individuals were male, with a mean age of 38.65 years (S.D. = 10.61). Empirical exploration of the SDQ-12 items using exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis revealed that the instrument has a clear structure matching the theoretically relevant proposed dimensions of mystification and manipulation. Internal consistency was verified (Cronbach’s alpha coefficient = .85), and confirmatory factor analysis revealed that the two-dimensional model provided an appropriate fit to the data. In addition, manipulation was greater in young male individuals, with significant differences found in mystification and manipulation between the general population and alcoholics and drug abusers. Our study supports the clinical and research importance of the SDQ-12 scale, due not only to its diagnostic efficacy but also to its novel nature, its importance, and its relevance. It could be particularly useful for evaluating the substantial components of self-deception in the addict population, thus guiding therapists in their diagnostic and interventional role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]