A mother in court hears evidence that her son has committed a serious crime. While others are convinced of his guilt, she remains unpersuaded. This is an example of self-deception, which is seen as a key factor in modern issues such as imposter syndrome and eating disorders. We had a talk about this phenomenon with Stephen Gadsby (Centre for Philosophical Psychology), who has focused his research on self-deception.
1. You illustrate self-deception with the situation of a mother not believing that her son has committed a crime. Are there also more common instances of this phenomenon?
The mother in the courtroom is an extreme case, but the basic phenomenon is widespread. For example, when you ask people how they rate themselves in terms of desirable traits like intelligence, attractiveness, and so on, most will rate themselves as above average. But of course, all of us can’t be above average. This ‘better-than-average’ effect is found in all areas of life. For example, one study showed that 90% of academics believe that their teaching was above average, compared to their peers.
Another example that mirrors the mother case is the so-called ostrich effect, where people avoid information that might be painful to learn. For example, many refuse to find out the results of medical screenings and investors check on their investments far less when the market is down (and they are more likely to have lost money).
2. What is the use of self-deception?
This was a big focus of my research. The literature usually focuses on one of two reasons for why people self-deceive: emotional reasons or social reasons.
People deceive themselves because it makes them happy. This makes sense when we think of the kinds of things people deceive themselves about. It is feels good to think that you are smarter or better at your job than your peers and it hurts to find out you have a disease or have lost money, so that’s why people deceive themselves in those areas.
Another body of research focuses on the social benefits of self-deception. For example, if you believe that you are good at your job then you might be able to persuade other people of that and reap the social benefits of doing so (accolades, promotions, and so on).
During my fellowship, I became interested in a relatively overlooked reason for self-deception: sometimes we deceive ourselves because it motivates us. This has mostly been studied in students. In the lead-up to an important exam, many students will focus on how ill-prepared they are and how difficult the exam might be. In doing this, they overestimate their likelihood of failing the exam. But because they overestimate this likelihood, it motivates them to study harder and prepare more diligently—to avoid the probability of failure. So they gain a motivational advantage by deceiving themselves into believing that failure is likely.
3. Can you know that you are deceiving yourself?
It is generally assumed, especially by philosophers, that self-deception has to be unconscious. The idea is that if you were aware that you were deceiving yourself, then it couldn’t possibly succeed. The standard argument here is that in cases of interpersonal deception, where someone else tries to deceive me, if I know what they are trying to do, then I simply won’t be fooled. This gives one answer to the question of how self-deception occurs, we are unconsciously biased towards desirable beliefs.
However, I became interested in the possibility that people deceive themselves consciously and deliberately. I poured through all sorts of literature to find examples of this, but the clearest example came from the aforementioned research on students overestimating their likelihood of failure in upcoming exams. When these students are asked why they focus on how unprepared they are and all the things that could go wrong, many will simply say they do it to help motivate themselves. So this is a case of self-deception that appears to be both conscious and deliberate.
4. How did behavioural economics offer a framework for your research?
A big part of my research focused on not only how people deceive themselves but why they do it, by asking what the benefits of self-deception are. This explanatory focus was inspired by behavioural economic approaches to the belief. These state that just as people derive utility (i.e. benefit from) their possessions, they also derive utility from their beliefs.
Economists explain why people purchase goods and services by referring to the utility of those goods and services. The suggestion is that we can explain why people are attracted to beliefs in much the same way. As I touched on before, this utility can come in different forms (emotional, social, motivational). So for this approach, understanding and categorising the different forms of belief-utility and how they relate to one another is important, which is what my theoretical work focused heavily on.
As this was an interdisciplinary grant, I also conducted experiments on self-deception using insights and techniques from behavioural economists. I mentioned how students sometimes deceive themselves for the sake of self-motivation. Following this insight, I argued that this can help us to understand the so-called imposter syndrome, where highly successful and intelligent individuals believe that they are less competent and talented than their peers. Some of these ‘imposters’ might be underestimating their competence and talent because they get a motivational advantage from doing so.
During my fellowship, I ran a number of experiments to test for the role of self-deception in the imposter syndrome. One of the predictions of the behavioural economic framework of self-deception is that financially incentivising accurate beliefs will reduce self-deception. If I pay you money based on how accurate your beliefs are then accurate beliefs have a higher utility, they are (literally) worth more.
I tested this out on groups of graduate students suffering from imposter syndrome. I compared participants with low levels of the imposter syndrome against participants with high levels of the imposter syndrome. All the participants completed an intelligence test and then estimated their score and how well they did compared to other participants. As expected, the low imposter syndrome group overestimated how well they performed, both objectively and comparatively, while the high imposter syndrome group underestimated. However, when we told high imposter syndrome participants that they would be paid for forming accurate beliefs about their performance, the difference disappeared.
5. Could you explain how this ties to your current work on eating disorders?
A big puzzle in eating disorder research is why sufferers of these disorders value thinness with such intensity. Why do they believe that thinness is so important that it is worth risking your life over? To understand those beliefs, we can ask the same question that economists say we should be asking about self-deception: what are the benefits of those beliefs?
When you look at the literature, especially the literature that involves interviewing people with lived experience, it shows that sufferers of eating disorders gain a lot from valuing thinness with such intensity. For example, people with a current or former diagnosis of anorexia describe how believing that thinness was of paramount importance simplified their lives considerably. If the only thing that matters is being thin, then all you have to worry about is losing weight—all of life’s other difficulties (problems at school or parents getting divorced) fade into the background. So that suggests that beliefs about the paramount value of thinness are adopted and maintained in eating disorders because they provide this benefit. Better understanding these benefits is (partly) the focus for my current (senior) FWO fellowship.