Self-deception facilitates interpersonal persuasion

Self-deception is both commonplace and costly, which raises the question of what purpose it might serve. According to the dominant explanation in psychology and economics, self-deception is an intrapersonal process that fortifies and protects the self from threatening information. An alternative possibility is that self-deception evolved as an interpersonal strategy to persuade others. To investigate interpersonal aspects of self-deception, we gave people a persuasive task and measured their information processing biases and their persuasiveness. Results revealed that people who were financially motivated to persuade another person in a particular direction demonstrated a self-deceptive information processing bias consistent with their persuasive goals. This information processing bias led people to convince themselves of the veracity of their persuasive goal, and subsequently to be more persuasive to others. These findings suggest that self-deception has interpersonal benefits that offset its costs.     

Self-deception in public relations. A psychological and sociological approach to the challenge of conflicting expectations

The paper enquires into the role of self-deception in public relations struggling with discrepancies between heterogeneous stakeholder expectations and organizational interests and particularly between normative expectations of truthfulness and practical temptations of deception. Drawing on theoretical foundations of evolutionary psychology and sociology, we propose a framework for the origins, drivers, and functions of self-deception in public relations. The analysis reveals that under specific conditions self-deception can be an essential mechanism in public relations because it relieves practitioners from tensions driven by conflicting perceptions of truth and legitimacy. Self-deception is most likely to occur in situations of cognitive dissonance for practitioners to balance internal information processing and in situations of normative pressure when practitioners seek to comply with external expectations.     

自欺的人生--浅谈萨特哲学

在萨特看来 ,人是自由的 ,但人为了逃避自由、逃避责任而陷入了自欺的困境。进而 ,萨特阐释了自欺的内部结构和根源。面对自欺的威胁 ,人何去何从呢 ?本文旨在引起人们对人孤独命运的关注和探讨。