Self-deception - the normal and the pathological

On what we might call the traditional conception ofself-deception – defended by thinkers as diverse, and as separatedfrom one another in time, as Bishop Joseph Butler 1970 in theeighteen

and the pathological

In the previous chapters, I have argued that neuroscience (and alliedfields) can shed light on some of the perennial questions of moraltheory and moral psychology: the nature of self-control and thedegree to which agents should be held responsible for their actions Inthis chapter, I explore another puzzle in moral psychology: the natureand existence of self-deception

Self-deception is a topic of perennial fascination to novelistsand everyone else interested in human psychology It is fascinatingbecause it is at once puzzling and commonplace The puzzle it posesarises when we observe people apparently sincerely making claimsthat seem obviously false, and against which they apparently possesssufficient evidence The man whose wife suddenly has many mys-terious meetings, starts to receive unexplained gifts and is reportedlyseen in a bar on the other side of town with a strange man has everyreason to suspect her of infidelity If he refrains from asking herquestions, or is satisfied with the flimsiest of explanations, and fails

to doubt her continued faithfulness, he is self-deceived tion is, apparently, common in the interpersonal sphere, but it is also

Self-decep-a politicSelf-decep-al phenomenon Western supporters of Soviet communismwere often, and perhaps rightly, accused of self-deception, when theydenied the repression characteristic of the regime

We say that someone is self-deceived, typically, when theypossess sufficient evidence for a claim and yet continue, apparentlysincerely, to assert the opposite Generally, self-deception seems to

be emotionally motivated: we do not deceive ourselves about justanything, but only about things that are important to us and which

we are strongly motivated to believe The man who deceives himselfabout his wife’s faithfulness might not be able to contemplate asingle life; the woman who deceives herself about Soviet commun-ism may have her narrative identity closely entwined with herpolitical allegiances.

t h e o r i e s o f s e l f - d e c e p t i o n

We often say that the self-deceived person really or ‘‘at some level’’knows the truth The formerly self-deceived themselves sometimesmake this kind of claim, saying they ‘‘really knew all along’’ thetruth concerning which they deceived themselves Many theories ofself-deception take this apparent duality of belief at face value, andtherefore devote themselves to explaining how ordinary, sane, indi-viduals are capable of contradictory beliefs There is no puzzle,everyone acknowledges, with believing things that are mutuallycontradictory, when the conflict between them is not obvious All of

us probably have inconsistent beliefs in this sense: if we thoughtabout each of our beliefs for long enough, and traced their entail-ments far enough, we could eventually locate a clash But the self-deceived agent apparently believes two contradictory statementsunder the same description (or at least very similar descriptions) Thehusband in our example might believe both that my wife is faithfuland my wife is having an affair, which is a bald contradiction, orperhaps, slightly less baldly, my wife is faithful and all the evidencesuggests my wife is having an affair

Some philosophers think that not only do the self-deceivedbelieve inconsistent propositions, they are self-deceived because theyhave deliberately brought about their believing contradictory pro-positions The best example here is the existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre Sartre (1956) argued that self-deceivers have to know thetruth, in order to set about concealing it from themselves Just as aliar must know the truth in order to deliberately and effectivelydeceive others, so the self-deceiver ‘‘must know the truth veryexactly in order to conceal it more carefully’’ (Sartre1956: 89) Other

thinkers who, like Sartre, take contradictory beliefs to be istic of self-deception also model it on interpersonal deception Bothkinds of lying – to others and to oneself – are supposed to be inten-tional activities On what we might call the traditional conception ofself-deception – defended by thinkers as diverse, and as separatedfrom one another in time, as Bishop Joseph Butler (1970) in theeighteenth century, to Donald Davidson (1986) in the late twentiethcentury – self-deception is typically characterized by both thesefeatures: contradictory beliefs and intentionality of deception.The contradictory belief requirement and the intentionalityrequirement are both extremely puzzling How is it possible forsomeone to believe two blatantly contradictory propositions at oneand the same time? How can anyone succeed in lying to him orherself; doesn’t successful deception require that the deceived agentnot know the truth? Defenders of the traditional conception of self-deception do not, of course, think that we succeed in lying toourselves in precisely the same manner in which we might lie toanother Instead, they take self-deception to be an activity engaged

character-in with some kcharacter-ind of reduced awareness Moreover, they do notassert that the self-deceived believe their claims in precisely thesame way that we generally believe our normal beliefs Instead,they typically hold that the contradictory beliefs are somehowisolated from one another Perhaps, for instance, one of the beliefs

is held unconsciously If the husband’s belief that his wife is having

an affair is unconsciously held, we may be able to explain how he isable to sincerely proclaim her faithfulness We might also be able

to explain the rationalizations in which he engages to sustainthis belief: they are motivated, we might think, by mechanismsthat are designed to defend consciousness against the unconsciousbelief

More recently, however, philosophers have begun to advancedeflationaryaccounts of self-deception These philosophers point outthat the traditional conception is quite demanding: it requires theexistence of a great deal of mental machinery It can be correct only

if the mind is capable of being partitioned, in some way, so thatcontradictory beliefs are isolated from one another; moreover, typicaltraditional accounts also require that both beliefs, the consciouslyavowed and the consciously disavowed, are capable of motivatingbehavior (the behavior of engaging in rationalization, for instance).Given that the traditional conception is demanding, we ought toprefer a less demanding theory if there is one available that explainsthe data at least as well These philosophers thus invoke Occam’srazor, the methodological principle that the simplest theory thatexplains the data is the theory most likely to be true, in defence of adeflationary account.

Deflationary accounts of self-deception have been advanced byseveral philosophers (Barnes 1997; Mele 1997, Mele 2001) Theseaccounts are deflationary inasmuch as they attempt to explain self-deception without postulating any of the extravagant mentalmachinery required by the traditional conception They dispensewith the extra machinery by dispensing with the requirements thatnecessitate it, both the intentionality requirement and the contra-dictory belief requirement By dispensing with these requirements,deflationary accounts avoid the puzzles they provoke: we need notexplain how agents can successfully lie to themselves, or how theycan have blatantly contradictory beliefs Of course, we still need to beable to explain the behavior of those we are disposed to call self-deceived How are we to do that?

Deflationists argue, roughly, that the kinds of states we callself-deception can be explained in terms of motivationally biasedbelief acquisition mechanisms We can therefore explain self-decep-tion invoking only mechanisms whose existence has been indepen-dently documented by psychologists, particularly psychologists inthe heuristics and biases tradition (Kahneman et al.1982) Heuristicsand biases typically work by systematically leading us to weighsome kinds of evidence more heavily than other kinds, in ways thatmight be adaptive in general, but which can sometimes mislead usbadly Thus, people typically give excessive weight to evidence that

happens to be vivid for them, will tend to look for evidence in favour

of a hypothesis rather than evidence which disconfirms it, are moreimpressed by their more recent experiences than earlier experiences,and so on Deflationists argue, and cite experimental evidence toshow, that these biases can be activated especially strongly when theperson is appropriately motivated Thus, when someone has reason

to prefer that a proposition is true, the stage is set for the activation ofthese biasing mechanisms For instance, the anxious coward will testthe hypothesis that they are brave, and therefore look for confirmingevidence of that hypothesis (setting in motion the confirmationbias); as a result evidence which supports this hypothesis will berendered especially vivid for them, while evidence against it will berelatively pallid

If this is correct, then self-deception is not intentional: it is theproduct of biased reasoning, but there is no reason to think the agent

is always aware of their bias (neither in general, nor of the way itworks in particular cases) Nor is there any reason to think that theagent must have contradictory beliefs Because the agent is motiva-tionally biased, they acquire a belief despite the fact that the evidenceavailable to them supports the contrary belief: they cannot see howthe evidence tends precisely because of their bias

Deflationists claim that their less extravagant theory explainsself-deception at least as well as the traditional conception We have,they argue, no need to invoke elaborate mental machinery, becausethere is no reason to believe that the intentionality or contradictorybelief requirements are ever satisfied Mele (2001), the most influ-ential of the deflationists, argues that his theory, or something like it,

is therefore to be preferred unless and until someone can produce anactual case of self-deception in which the agent has contradictorybeliefs, or in which they have intentionally deceived themselves.1Inwhat follows, I shall attempt to meet Mele’s challenge: I shall showthat there are cases of self-deception in which the self-deceived per-son has contradictory beliefs The evidence comes from the study ofdelusions

a n o s o g n o s i a a n d s e l f - d e c e p t i o n

Anosognosia refers to denial of illness by sufferers It comes inmany forms, including denial of cortical (i.e., caused by brain lesion)deafness, of cortical blindness (Anton’s syndrome) or of dyslexia(Bisiach et al.1986) Here I shall focus on anosognosia for hemiplegia:denial of partial paralysis (hereafter ‘‘anosognosia’’ shall refer only tothis form of the syndrome) As a result of a stroke or brain injury,sufferers experience greater or lesser paralysis of one side of theirbody (usually the left side), especially the hand and arm However,they continue to insist that their arm is fine Anosognosia is usuallyaccompanied by unilateral neglect: a failure to attend, respond ororient to information on one side (again usually the left side) of thepatient, often including that side of the patient’s own body (personalneglect) Anosognosia and neglect usually resolves over a period of

a few days or weeks However, both have been known to persistfor years

It is worth recounting some clinical descriptions of sia, in order to give a flavor of this puzzling condition Asked to movetheir left arm or hand, patients frequently refuse, on grounds whichseem transparent rationalizations: I have arthritis and it hurts tomove my arm (Ramachandran1996); the doctor told me I should rest

anosogno-it (Venneri and Shanks 2004); I’m tired, or I’m not accustomed totaking orders (Ramachandran and Blakeslee 1998); left hands arealways weaker (Bisiach et al.1986) Sometimes, the patients go so far

as to claim that they have complied with the request: I am pointing;

I can clearly see my arm or I am clapping (Ramachandran1996); allthe while their paralyzed arm remains at their side

It is tempting to see anosognosia as an extreme case of deception It looks for all the world as if the excuses given by patientsfor failing to move their arms are rationalizations, designed to protectthem from an extremely painful truth: that they are partially paral-yzed However, most neurologists deny that anosognosia should beunderstood along these lines They point out that it has some fea-tures which seem puzzling on the psychological defence view

self-In particular, a motivational explanation of anosognosia fails toexplain its asymmetry: it is rare that a patient denies paralysis on theright side of the body Anosognosia is usually the product of righthemisphere damage (most commonly damage to the inferior parietalcortex) that causes denial of paralysis on the left (contralateral tothe lesion) side of the body Most neurologists therefore argue that

it must be understood as a neurological, and not a psychological,phenomenon (Bisiach and Geminiani1991)

Clearly, they have an important point: any account of sognosia must explain the observed asymmetry Anosognosia isindeed a neurological phenomenon, brought about as a result of braininjury Most other kinds of paralysis or disease, whether caused bybrain injury or not, do not give rise to it However, it may still bethe case that anosognosia is simultaneously a neurological and apsychological phenomenon Perhaps, that is, neurological damageand motivation are jointly necessary conditions for the occurrence ofanosognosia

ano-V.S Ramachandran is one prominent neuroscientist whointerprets anosognosia along these lines Ramachandran (1996;Ramachandran and Blakeslee 1998) suggests that the observedasymmetry can be explained as a product of hemispherical speciali-zation The left hemisphere, he argues, has the task of imposing acoherent narrative framework upon the great mass of informationwith which each of us is constantly bombarded If we are not to beparalyzed by doubt, we need a consistent and coherent set of beliefsthat makes sense of most of the evidence available to us In order topreserve the integrity of this belief system, the left hemisphereignores or distorts small anomalies Since any decision is usuallybetter than being paralyzed by doubts, ignoring anomalies is gen-erally adaptive However, there is a risk that the agent will slip intofantasy if the left hemisphere is allowed to confabulate unchecked.The role of keeping the left hemisphere honest is delegated to theright hemisphere It plays devil’s advocate, monitoring anomalies,and forcing the more glaring to the agent’s attention

There is a great deal of independent support for Ramachandran’shemispherical specialization hypothesis In particular, evidencefrom cerebral commissurotomy (‘‘split-brain’’) patients is oftenunderstood as supporting this view On the basis mainly of thisevidence, Gazzaniga (1985; 1992) has suggested that the left hemi-sphere contains an ‘‘interpreter,’’ a module which has the task

of making sense of the agent’s activities using whatever sources ofinformation are available to it When it is cut off from the source

of the true motivation of the behavior, the left hemisphere fabulates an explanation Many researchers have followed or adaptedGazzaniga’s suggestion, because it seems to explain so many observedphenomena

con-For our purposes, the hemispherical specialization hypothesis

is attractive because it neatly explains the asymmetry characteristic

of anosognosia When the right hemisphere is damaged, the lefthemisphere is free to confabulate unchecked It defends the agentagainst unpleasant information by the simple expedient of ignoringit; it is able to pursue this strategy with much more dramatic effectthan is normal because the anomaly detector in the right hemisphere

is damaged But when the right hemisphere is intact, denial of illness

is much more difficult On the other hand, when damage is to the lefthemisphere, patients tend to be more pessimistic than when damage

is to the right (Heilman et al.1998) Ramachandran suggests that thispessimism is the product of the disabling of the protective lefthemisphere confabulation mechanisms

I do not aim to defend the details of Ramachandran’s account ofanosognosia here However, I suggest that it is likely that the bestaccount of the syndrome will, like Ramachandran’s, explain it assimultaneously a neurological and a psychological phenomenon.Only a combination of neurological and psychological mechanismscan account for all the observed data Non-motivational theories ofanosognosia cannot do the job alone, as I shall now show

Some theorists suggest that anosognosia is the product of animpairment which makes the disease difficult for the patient to

detect (Levine et al.,1991) A syndrome like neglect is, for its subject,relatively difficult to discern; absence of visual information is notphenomenally available in any immediate way Somewhat similarly,anosognosia for hemiplegia may be difficult to detect, because thepatient may have an impairment that reduces the amount andquality of relevant information about limb movement There areseveral possible impairments that could play the explanatory rolehere Patients may experience proprioceptive deficits, they mayexperience an impairment in feedback mechanisms reporting limbmovement (Levine et al.1991), or they may experience impairments

in ‘‘feedforward’’ mechanisms, which compare limb movements to

an internally generated model predicting the movement (Heilman

et al.1998)

These somatosensory explanations of anosognosia face a mon problem: the mechanisms they propose seem far too weak toexplain the phenomenon Suppose it is true that anosognosics lackone source of normally reliable information about their limbs, oreven that they take themselves to continue to receive informationthat their limb is working normally via a usually reliable channel;why do they nevertheless override all the information they receivefrom other reliable sources, ranging from doctors and close relatives

com-to their own eyes? After all, as Marcel et al (2004) point out, theimpairments produced by hemiplegia are not subtle: it is not justthat patients fail to move their arms when they want to They alsofail to lift objects, to get out of bed, to walk It is extremely difficult

to see how lack of feedback, or some other somatosensory deficit,could explain the failure of the patient to detect these grossabnormalities

More promising, at first sight, are theories that explain culty of discovery as the product not of somatosensory deficits, but ofcognitive or psychological problems On these views, anosognosiamight be the product of confusion, (another) delusion or of neglectitself In fact, however, these explanations do not suffice It is truethat some patients are highly delusional (Venneri and Shanks2004)

diffi-and anosognosics exhibit greater cognitive dysfunction, on average,than other stroke victims (Jehkonen et al 2000) However, thedegree of confusion is rarely sufficient to explain the anosognosia,and some patients exhibit no confusion at all (Jehkonen et al.2000).Nor does anosognosia always co-occur with other delusions Neglectaccounts fare no better Cocchini et al (2002) report the case of ayoung male with anosognosia, who became aware of his paralysiswhen his left limbs were moved into the right half of his visualfield However, not all patients with neglect also suffer from ano-sognosia, indicating that neglect is not a sufficient condition for thelatter; moreover, not all anosognosics suffer from neglect, indicatingthat it is not a necessary condition (Bisiach et al 1986; Jehkonen

et al.2000)

Neither somatosensory impairment nor cognitive impairment

is by itself sufficient to explain anosognosia Might they nevertheless

be jointly necessary? This seems to be the view of Davies et al.(2005) They advance a ‘‘generic’’ two-factor theory to explain ano-sognosia, where the first factor is an unspecified neuropsychologicalanomaly, and the second factor is some kind of cognitive impair-ment It is difficult to assess this proposal, since it is more a pro-grammatic statement setting out directions for future research then aserious attempt at an adequate explanation; it is therefore deliber-ately left empirically underspecified However, to the extent towhich the account is assessable, there are good reasons to think that

it is unpromising, at least as it currently stands

One reason Davies et al refuse to pin their account to anyparticular first factor is that they are well aware that the impairments

of sufferers differ from case to case As we have already seen, a range

of impairments could play a role in the aetiology of anosognosia,since many different impairments could make the degree of difficulty

of discovery greater We also saw, however, that these impairments

on their own are rarely or never sufficient to explain anosognosia.The second factor therefore needs to carry a great deal of explanatoryweight And Davies et al are a little more forthcoming on the second

factor than on the first They suggest that it is likely to be a memorydeficit.

Though anosognosics often do have memory problems, vious studies have claimed to demonstrate a double dissociationbetween memory impairment and anosognosia (Berti et al 1996).Davies et al argue that these studies overlooked some very subtlememory impairments: examining nine patients with persisting uni-lateral neglect they revealed a range of memory impairments, somesubtle Despite previous negative findings, Davies et al thereforebelieve that memory impairments might explain anosognosia, whensuch impairments are paired with a neuropsychological anomalywhich makes discovery of hemiplegia more difficult

pre-There are, I suggest, several problems with the suggested model

of anosognosia First, if the memory deficits Davies et al point to are

to do the work of explaining the delusion, they ought to be relativelysevere A subtle deficit cannot explain how sufferers manage tooverlook glaring anomalies in action and control But it is surelysubtle deficits that must be in question, if Davies et al are right inclaiming that previous studies that explicitly examined memoryoverlooked the deficits in question Second, even in their own smallstudy, degree of memory impairment was not predictive of presencenor degree of anosognosia Finally, it is difficult to see how memoryimpairments explain the concurrent failures of anosognosics; how,for instance, does a memory impairment explain a patient’s claimthat they are currently clapping and can hear the sound?

These considerations do not demonstrate that a two-factormodel cannot succeed Davies et al have not committed themselves

to any first or second factors, and it may be that an alternative secondfactor will succeed where memory impairment has failed Indeed, Isuspect that a two- or possibly a three-factor model will eventuallysucceed in explaining anosognosia However, I suggest we need tolook to motivational factors, as a second or a third factor inexplaining the syndrome Anosognosia is motivated denial of illness;

in other words, anosognosics are self-deceived