Self-deception can hurt the one who is in denial, and others. It can come across as being willfully obstinate, not caring about the people around them. Sometimes, it seems that the person deceiving ...

“Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving yourself.”—Ludwig Wittgenstein Self-deception is often easy to recognize in others but far more difficult to recognize in ourselves. With another, we may have ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I write about relationships, personality, and everyday psychology. Have you ever been in scenarios where these thoughts occurred ...

Imagine you committed to delivering a project within a scheduled timeline but failed to meet it. Instead of accepting responsibility and acknowledging the delay, you transfer the blame to one of your ...

People often cheat to win money, get prizes, or beat others. But what if there’s nothing to gain except feeling good about yourself? Would people still bend the rules just to feel a bit smarter, more ...

Lying to yourself -- or self-deception, as psychologists call it -- actually has benefits sometimes. Based on a growing body of research using new experimental techniques to induce and analyze ...

A philosophy team from Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) and the University of Antwerp analyzed the role self-deception plays in everyday life and the strategies people use to deceive themselves. In the ...

Chance, Zoe, Michael I. Norton, Francesca Gino, and Dan Ariely. "Temporal View of the Costs and Benefits of Self-Deception." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108, no. S3 (September 13, ...

Brains. Where would we be without them? They control our thinking, speech, feelings, sight, and hearing. They create and store our memories. They control our breathing and make it possible for us to ...

When given the opportunity, individuals will cheat to feel smarter or healthier, engaging in diagnostic self-deception to convince themselves that their performance is due to their ability and not the ...

Strategy underlies the affairs of national leaders, including how they view and interact with other states — but what if such strategy is borne of self-deception? That’s the thrust of a novel ...