Why We Lie to Ourselves: The Roots and Recollections of Self Deception
You don’t ever deceive yourself, do you? Of course not! Me neither.
Psychologists and counsellors deal with self deception all the time, helping clients to identify and explore the myriad ways in which they enable themselves to believe things which they ‘know’ to be untrue. The good ones also deal with it all the time within themselves: attempting to observes themselves in the act of self deception, bringing the cool light of self-awareness into the darker corners that can so easily be obscured by a little internal bait-and-switch.
Recent research is now offering some solid food for thought as to why we deceive ourselves in the first place — the potential advantages of self deception, how it may have come to evolve, and the counterbalancing costs associated with it. Could it even be rational at times to believe that which evidence strongly indicates is false?
As a ‘BBS Associate’ — part of an international community of authors, referees and commentators drawn upon by the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences — I recently received this abstract by psychologist William von Hippel (University of Queensland) and anthropologist Robert Trivers (Rutgers):
Abstract: In this article we argue that self-deception evolved to facilitate interpersonal deception by allowing people to avoid the cues to conscious deception that might reveal deceptive intent. Self-deception has the additional advantages that it eliminates the costly cognitive load that is typically associated with deceiving and it can minimize retribution if the deception is discovered. Beyond its role in specific acts of deception, self-deceptive self-enhancement also allows people to display more confidence than is warranted, with a host of social advantages. The question then arises of how the self can be both deceiver and deceived. We propose that this is achieved through dissociations of mental processes, including conscious vs. unconscious memories, conscious vs. unconscious attitudes, and automatic vs. controlled processes. Given the variety of methods for deceiving others, it should come as no surprise that self-deception manifests itself in a number of different psychological processes, and we discuss various types of self-deception. We then discuss the interpersonal vs. 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 and consider some of the costs associated with self-deception.
The paper has been selected as a target article for open peer commentary at the prestigious journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences, one of the foremost print publications in its field. If you’d like to have a look at the full text of the paper, the pre-print is available here: von Hippel and Trivers Preprint: “The Evolution and Psychology of Self-Deception”.
The journal employs a fairly unique quality-control system whereby commentaries are accepted only from people called ‘BBS Associates’ or those nominated by BBS Associates; and to be eligible to become a BBS Associate, you must either have had work previously accepted for the journal (or refereed for them), or been nominated by someone who has. As a BBS Associate myself since publishing with them in the late 90s, I’m happy to nominate others to write commentary for the article. So if you have relevant expertise in this area, and no other BBS Associate is available to you, please drop me a note via the site’s contact page and let me know a bit about your background and what you would like to contribute via published commentary.
About the Journal
Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS) is an international, interdisciplinary journal providing Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial current research in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences. Commentators must be BBS Associates, or suggested by a BBS Associate. If you are not a BBS Associate, please follow the instructions linked below:
http://journals.cambridge.org/BBSJournal/Inst/Assoc
6 Responses (2 Discussion Threads) to “Why We Lie to Ourselves: The Roots and Recollections of Self Deception”
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A gene for self-deception? (Hmm?) Unless they mean that behaviour is learned and hence passed on via social systems. In which case ‘evolutionary’ doesn’t have much meaning so far as I can see.
I guess inter-personal self-deception might be interesting – it is usually is taken to be intra-personal I think. I do think we need a social sense of the self, so this may hold some insight.
The idea of levels of self-deception sounds interesting.
The authors sound confident they are not deceiving themselves (hmm).
If you’d post a link to the paper when it’s published I’d be grateful – presuming I’m allowed to read it. Thanks.
Allowed to read it?? The link is in the post, Evan: the full text is available as a PDF well in advance of publication in the paper journal.
Enjoy!
Oh, I thought ‘pre-print’ might mean a draft or something. Thanks, Evan
I don’t really see what an evolutionary perspective adds. There is the difficulty of imagining what a self-deception gene would actually look like. This doesn’t mean they don’t give a good account of how self-deception functions so that people do better socially – just that the evolutionary perspective doesn’t add anything to the account. When its based on ‘if Dawkins is right’ and this ‘ought to lead to selection pressure’ on a behaviour, it just seems dodgy.
They don’t seem to provide any arguments for why the evolutionary perspective should be preferred. They provide evidence that it hasn’t been explored and show that the existing data could be interpreted as consistent with this perspective but no reason why it should be preferred. If they want to argue that the evolutionary perspective would be better I don’t see any argument from them about this.
Their idea that self-deception is for self-enhancement is either quite naive or needs to pay close attention to what ‘self-enhancement’ means. Is the self of ‘self-enhancement’ the picture a person has of themselves. If this is a ‘negative’ picture does self-enhancement mean believing more ‘bad’ things about oneself? What evolutionary advantage would this convey? There seems to be a need for another layer of the self, not just conscious and unconscious but picture of self and human organism (with all the potentials and limitations this has).
Is mental health about goal achievement? Should Socrates have accepted exile? Was his not doing so a sign of mental ill health?
I have a problem with motives being taken account of in an evolutionary perspective, as seems necessary when talking about whether people are deceiving themselves or not.
I like that they see the that behaviour occurs in response to context. Some of their suggestions for future research are interesing. I don’t see how any of the proposals would help choose between existing frameworks and their evolutionary one.
Thanks as ever Greg for offering us the opportunity to ‘get in’ and comment – are you going to write a commentary Evan?
Me? No. It would just be critiquing something without a practical outcome. Taking apart evolutionary psychology is fun but it would be just for my amusement. (How quickly people have forgotten the nastier side of eugenics. Mutual Aid psychology anyone? Kropotkinite perspectives on collaboration?)