Protesting too much: Self-deception and self-signaling

Protesting Too Much: Self-deception and Self-signaling

Von Hippel & Trivers (VH&T) propose that self-deception has evolved to facilitate the deception of others. However, they ignore the subjective moral costs of deception and the crucial issue of credibility in self-deceptive speech. A self-signaling interpretation can account for the ritualistic quality of some self-deceptive affirmations and for the often-noted gap between what self-deceivers sa...

Protesting Too Much: Revealing Repetitions in Barry Hannahâ•Žs Interviews

Lying and Deception Lying and Self-deception

Questions about truthfulness occur in many contexts—when parents ask their children if they are using recreational drugs, when an employer ask applicants about the reasons they left their last job, when international leaders consider each others’ threats or promises, when voters evaluate candidates’ promises, when physicians consider a patient’s complaint, when at the start of a romantic encoun...

Self-deception and Delusions

According to a traditional view, self-deception is an intrapersonal analogue of stereotypical interpersonal deception.1 In the latter case, deceivers intentionally deceive others into believing something, p, and there is a time at which the deceivers believe that p is false while their victims falsely believe that p is true. If self-deception is properly understood on this model, self-deceivers...

Self-Deception and Choice

We model agents who use self-deception to rationalize and justify actions that can eventually lead them into temptation. Formally, we extend Gul and Pesendorfer’s (2001) framework to three time periods and obtain a special functional form for the temptation utility at the interim stage. Our representation portrays an agent who is tempted (i) to relax her normative attitude towards future indulg...