Self-Deception and Self-Construction

by Will Wilkinson on March 12, 2006

A few years back, I had the opportunity to help organize a conference on self-deception with Tyler Cowen and Robin Hanson at Mercatus. I’m now at a Liberty Fund conference in St. Louis on “Liberty, Responsibility, and Lying.” All our readings have been about prohibitions and justifications for lies, deception, etc. The idea that self-deception can drive other-deception has come up a number of times, and this brought me back to the self-deception conference, and some thoughts I’ve subsequently had about it.

Tyler & Robin have a paper that says, very roughly, if we were rational, then we would be Bayesian updaters. If we were Bayesians, every conversation with someone who disagrees with us about some proposition, but who has access to equally good information, and is able to process information at least us well as us, and who is therefore at least as likely as us to be right, ought to lead us to revise downward the probability of truth we assign to the proposition in question. In which case, we would end up changing our minds a lot. (If Tyler or Robin, say, who are each way smarter than I am, and have each forgotten more about economics than I have ever learned, disagrees with me about a proposition in economics, I certainly ought to take that as evidence that I am wrong.) But we don’t really change our minds that much. Instead, we’re fairly instransigent. And sometimes we even revise our probabilities upwards in the face of contrary evidence. So, they argue, we must be pretty self-deceived about the relationship between our beliefs and the truth.

I’ve long been intrigued by this argument. And I’ve actually taken it to heart, to some extent. I’m convinced that I do overestimate the probability that my beliefs are true, and I’m convinced that I ought to take other people’s comparative epistemic advantage more seriously than I am inclined to. (And you too.) And I think this has made me a marginally better person. But I’m not convinced that our failure to be good Bayesians implies self-deception so much as self-construction.

In The Mind’s Past, Michael Gazzaniga argues forcefully that the function of part of the mind/brain (he calls that part the “interpreter”) is simply to make stuff up, to confabulate, in order to create narrative coherence in the stream of consciousness. There is a sense in which the self just is the narrative. But the narrative is constructed in part by confabulation on the part of the interpreter. There is a temptation, but I think it would be a category error, to say that the self is a “fiction.” Compared to what? A really real self? The point is that there is no such thing. No. Rather, the point is that the really real self, the only kind of self there is, is a narrative construction that is built by the mind/brain with little concern for veridical representation. The truth about us is that we, our selves, are streams of truth mixed with untruth. And that is just the way it is.

Now, this is narrative coherence at a very basic experiential level. I think we need it at higher levels, too. Agency requires it. If we’re going to be active units that can choose ends, make plans, enact those plans, and coordinate with others in a way that benefits us, we need a relatively stable self-conception. If our plans, say, are a partial function of our beliefs, but we are willing to change our beliefs every time we confront somebody who knows more than us, then we will keep changing plans. But if we keep changing plans, we will never enact one. But we need to enact plans or we will cease to exist as active units. And, coordination . . . if I come home on Tuesday and announce to my wife that I am now a Democrat, and then come home on Wednesday and announce I am now a Seventh Day Adventist, and then come home on Thursday that I am now an ethical vegetarian and cannot eat the meatloaf, well, my wife isn’t going to be my wife for long. If we were good Bayesians, we would be schizophrenic, we would disintegrate, the self would dissolve. Maybe you reach Nirvana when you destroy the self and become a true Bayesian. But you are not self-deceived in virtue of having a self.

We often associate integrity with being true to ourselves. But when ourselves are, in some sense, false, integrity is. . . what? Integrity, self-coherence, requires . . . falsehood. To be true to the self is to endorse the fabric of truth embroidered with untruth that is the self.

We all self-mythologize and confabulate to varying degrees. People with delusions of grandeur and convictions of surpassing personal exceptionalism may be annoying to the extreme. But there is no escape from some self-constituting delusion. (In my experience, some of the people with the grandest delusions are those living out a narrative of unflinching commitment to authenticity and truth. ) If selves are constructed in part by untruth, it raises vexing questions about our duties to the people we love. (And to ourselves, if we love ourselves.)

When are we required by love or the obligations of friendship to puncture their illusions and press them to center their selves more firmly in truth or more forgiveable fantasy? When we are openly disturbed by their illusions, can we be sure our complaints amount to more than a request that they exchange theirs for ours? When are we required to pass over benign self-constituting myths in silence? Are we required to reinforce and positively encourage them when self-constituting myths are a source of what we admire and love, even if we do not ourselves believe them? Are we required to amend our narratives so that we come to believe them, the better to reinforce and support the best in those we love?

I suspect that the answer to the last two questions is “yes.” And that makes me exceedingly uncomfortable. Because I like to think I have an unflinching commitment to authenticity and truth. But the present deliberation is in part a process of reconsidering the meaning of authenticity and the meaning of truth with regard to the self. So what is it exactly I am committed to? The standards have readjusted. Though a distinction between good self-constitution and bad self-constitution remains, I am wary of allowing too much and acquiescing to what is self-indulgent, rotten, and ignoble. So, we must go forward with wariness, and, let’s hope, good faith.

Viewing 12 Comments

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    Great post. In a stylistic sense too.

    Allow me to ramble for a moment.

    Suppose my identity is constituted around "an unflinching commitment to authenticity and truth." Then isn't it possible to retain a kind of "meta-identity" even if one's beliefs and commitments change relatively quickly? That is, because of my conception of myself as a truth-seeker, I revise my beliefs regularly in light of new evidence. In this sense, my identity changes. But in a broader sense, this constant revision is simply the outgrowth of my meta-identity--my conception of myself as a tireless truth-seeker.

    I'm not sure how this fits in with your post, but I thought I would just throw it out there.

    Another point, which you may be suggesting. When we're talking about the self, then false beliefs about oneself in some sense become true. For example, suppose I'm very shy and unconfident person. And then I begin to believe certain falsehoods about myself--that I really am confident and outgoing. As a consequence of these false beliefs, I am now confident and outgoing. In other words, these beliefs are now true. Thus there is a pragmatic justification to certain beliefs about ourselves because these beliefs are true or false depending on whether we hold them. I should, from a pragmatic perspective, believe that I'm confident and outgoing so that these beliefs become true.

    Similarily, maybe I should encourage false beliefs in others so that their character/happiness/whatever improves in response to holding these false beliefs. But perhaps these beliefs are now true once they hold them? What should I do?!
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    Very interesting ethics and epistemology.

    "Psychocentrism" may be almost inevitable, reflected in and semi-necessary to our temperaments and bio-psychological profile (measured by the MBTI, but the point doesn't depend on agreeing with MBTI). Thus different "truths" from equally plausible sources are more and less incorporable. The underlying "narrative" creates or responds to a kind of force-field matrix?

    Rorschach's comment at the truth&authenticity seeking blog One Cosmos is a good example of some of the dilemmas you mention.
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    A very interesting post. It fits nicely with my current acts of introspection.

    I think you could describe part of this issue as a difference between strategy and tactics. Strategy has much to do with your values. It forms a generic set of contraints to your future actions. If strategy was more specific, it would harm you if you encountered an unanticipated situations.

    From this follows that a nice base strategy would be to stick to your values, which may include being open to re-evaluation of your values. In theory at least, one would develop an highly adapted set of values fairly quickly. Ofcourse, adapted to your environment, so one could change a lot if you'd move to a whole different country.

    The most important thing that you can share would be your personal values. If one of your values is to stick to your promises (or adhere to the law), you could coordinate based on that. Ofcourse you could have some 'higher' values. If one of your values is honesty to improve cooporation, you should tell others about those higher values, so they know beforehand you won't keep your promises or adhere to the law in particular cases, depending on what specific higher values you may have.

    So I think constantly updating your beliefs wouldn't have to hurt cooperation or coordination, because a fairly stable stragey will develop over time in everyone of us.

    Aside from that, I wouldn't be surprised if someone who first describes himself as a Replublican would later describe himself as a Democrat (or Seventh Day Adventist), because describing yourself as a Republican already exposes the fact that such a person is willing to subscribe to a specific ideology, and even identify with it. I wouldn't count on someone to subscribe to a particular ideology forever. I believe such believes are not neccesarily stable.
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    "Are we required to reinforce and positively encourage them when self-constituting myths are a source of what we admire and love, even if we do not ourselves believe them? Are we required to amend our narratives so that we come to believe them, the better to reinforce and support the best in those we love?"

    No, and no. Can you give an example of loving someone because of their lies? Unless you've got a suicidal friend with a self-image and eating disorder such that telling them they are fat results in their demise, it is far more kind to help a friend to see what part of the narrative is true and what can become true.

    I suppose it is odd for me to say this since the story of me is such a dramatic narrative, but it IS real because it is made up of the things I've done, the thoughts and experiences I've had. So, while a dull historian could relate the facts of my life in a dry and sleep-inducing way, he would not be doing justice to the true story of me.

    And no, how could it be better to believe the lies about someone you value? Isn't one of the nice things about having real friends/ loves that you _know_ them including their flaws? It is not dishonest to encourage a potential before it is made even partially-actual. Or am I in such denial about my friends and loves that I don't even know which false stories I've bought? Please be a friend [my truth-telling version of a friend that is] and tip me off.
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    Will, it sounds like you have unexpectedly met the Buddha on your road. You know what to do now, right?
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    Jeff, Yup.
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    Actually, supposing that action or political commitment requires committment to very general propositions like:

    (e) capital markets allocate resources efficiently,
    (f) marriage is the natural way to organize human families, or
    (g) people are naturally egocentric (or benevolent)

    is IN ITSELF a common form of self-deception.

    Happily, I think that we can act and reflect quite well without affirming or denying these kind of propositions. Indeed, the idea that we need to adhere to them (or their negations) in order to construct our selves is a very destructive myth. Trying to get people to come around to your views on these kinds of propositions sows discord, produces factions, and distracts people from the real practical problems at hand.

    Not that I don't think ideologies are interesting, but
    we have to see them for what they are.
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    A thought-provoking post, Will.

    I'm not sure that I agree with you, though, about how often people would change their minds if they were Bayesians. To take the example that you give, once you knew that X% of the population were Democrats and Y% were Republicans, and you knew something about the demographics of the two parties (how intelligent, how well-informed, etc.), there wouldn't be much that you could learn just from talking to someone. You might learn a little from good arguments, with arguments about other people's credibility as judges of the truth (and as judges of credibility, and as judges of meta-credibility, and, ...) often playing a larger role than arguments about the facts, but your beliefs wouldn't be all that much more malleable than they are today. The exception would be when you're first learning about a new topic and you're figuring out what positions are out there - a true Bayesian wouldn't be immediately drawn to certain congenial positions the way that people tend to be in the real world.

    You're right that Bayesianism would involve drastic changes to the self. It is important to distinguish between a Bayesian (or a few Bayesians) in our society and a society full of Bayesians. In the latter case, I think that our concept of "belief" would cease to exist. In the actual world, if the information possessed by humanity implies that proposition A has a 90% chance of being true and that there is a 10% chance of alternative proposition B being true (and A being false), then there will still be some zealous advocates and diligent researchers who believe in B and are committed to making the best possible case for B (and against A). In Bayesian Land, if A vs. B was an important question, we'd probably still want some people to specialize and become B advocates, turning pro-B investigation and advocacy into a part of their identity, but these people (like everyone else) would still say that p(B)=.1 & p(A)=.9. Under one concept of belief ("think true"), these people would believe in A, but in another sense (which is more pragmatic and more closely related to the self) they would be B-believers.

    Javier, when people are one way (e.g. shy) and they develop a narrative that says that they are a different kind of person (e.g. outgoing), there's evidence that some of their behaviors will tend to become consistent with their narrative (e.g. they'll choose to go to a museum with others rather than alone) while many aspects of their behavior (especially those involving less deliberation) remain consistent with how they had been (e.g. they won't spend that high a percentage of their time talking with others). Social psychologist Timothy Wilson has a lot to say about this in his book Strangers to Ourselves, which probably covers a lot of the same ground as Gazzaniga's book, thoughWilson thinks that the unconscious system is a part of the self along with the "interpreter".
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    If we were Bayesians, every conversation with someone who disagrees with us about some proposition, but who has access to equally good information, and is able to process information at least us well as us, and who is therefore at least as likely as us to be right, ought to lead us to revise downward the probability of truth we assign to the proposition in question. In which case, we would end up changing our minds a lot.

    The second sentence does not necessarily follow from the first If you have enough data so that your prior has a particularly sharp shape, then you're not going to end up changing your mind much simply from receiving one more piece of information, so long as you continue to also encounter information which reinforces your existing prior. Bayes' Theorem itself predicts that. And of course the paper you link to discusses the question of whether multiple possible priors from the same initial evidence are rational, another important point here.

    Indeed, there is a decent amount of evidence that people do react in at least somewhat a Bayesian way.

    It is important to distinguish between a Bayesian (or a few Bayesians) in our society and a society full of Bayesians. In the latter case, I think that our concept of “belief” would cease to exist.

    Ah, but what about a society where everyone is a Bayesian except about a few matters about which he or she feels qualified to have an independent judgement? Or, to put it another way, a society where being an "expert" or professional in a field is essentially synonymous with not performing Bayesian updates? Actually, what's more accurate, though, is that simply being an expert means having a sharper prior distribution, due to having more prior data. Thus updates occur much more slowly.

    I disagree with this statement from the paper:
    "Mary's best public estimate of John's next estimate must instead equal Mary's current best estimate."

    Unlikely, given how people argue. In the experiment as set up, it is extremely likely that, after John first gives his estimate of the car's age, Mary will initially offer not her current best estimate, but her original estimate of the car's age before hearing John's next estimate. Not only does this seem intrinsically fairer, but each can then offer a subsequent estimate that will give the other an estimation of the initial confidence in the original first guess, by seeing how far the new best estimate moved. This is naturally because the two respondents do not have identical priors; one or the other may have more experience or better judgement in estimating the age of a car.
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    Indeed, I just read Hanson's paper from 2002, and it (as I expected it must) depends on common priors, which is patently not true in the experimental case of car age estimation.
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    I agree with Blar and John Thacker - a Bayesian would not fluctuate wildly in response to each new person he met. A Bayesian's beliefs should instead follow a random walk.

    We can't excuse our disagreement by claiming that it would be impossible or unreasonable since we would have to dissolve our sense of self.
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    I think this has a lot of connection to my current obsession which is 'rational self-interest. I need to back-track some of your references and think about it. First thoughts... self is a confabulation that fills in the blind spot of awareness, but there's no neat line to be drawn around it. Isn't social confabulation the foundation of our communal life? The really real self is like the really real value of money - nutritional value, nil; calorific value negligable. I only like the stuff because the nice people at Walmart collect it. Its value depends on 'confidence', ie shared belief. I am aware of the fictional nature of the value of money, but I still function economically. Likewise I can function also with an awareness of the fictional nature of myself; there is no reason I can see why it should make me unstable. If political and religious identities are all fictional, I won't be jumping from one to another all the time, any more than I am likely to throw my pay-check on the fire because I realise that money has no intrinsic value.

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