Abstract
In this chapter, we turn from inferences about other people to inferences about the self. We pay special attention to “motivated beliefs” (i.e., beliefs that respond to incentives rather than evidence) and to the kind of reasoning that sustains these delusions against contradictory evidence. We then add a layer of complexity by considering how well we reason about the motivated beliefs of others, why these inferences are important, and the research we need to better understand this form of reasoning.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsReferences
Aknin, L. B., Barrington-Leigh, C. P., Dunn, E. W., Helliwell, J. F., Burns, J., Biswas-Diener, R., … Norton, M. I. (2013). Prosocial spending and well-being: Cross-cultural evidence for a psychological universal. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 104, 635–652.
Anderson, C., Brion, S., Moore, D. A., & Kennedy, J. A. (2012). A status-enhancement account of overconfidence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 103, 718–735.
Ariyabuddhiphongs, V. (2011). Lottery gambling: A review. Journal of Gambling Studies, 27, 15–33.
Barasch, A., Berman, J. Z., & Small, D. A. (2016). When payment undermines the pitch on the persuasiveness of pure motives in fund-raising. Psychological Science, 27, 1388–1397.
Batson, D. C., Kobrynowicz, D., Dinnerstein, J. L., Kampf, H. C., & Wilson, A. D. (1997). In a very different voice: Unmasking moral hypocrisy. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72, 1335–1348.
Bénabou, R., & Tirole, J. (2011). Identity, morals, and taboos: Beliefs as assets. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 126, 805–855.
Bénabou, R., & Tirole, J. (2016). Mindful economics: The production, consumption, and value of beliefs. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 30, 141–164.
Bentley, J. W., Bloomfield, R. J., Davidai, S., & Ferguson, M. J. (2016). Drinking Your Own Kool-Aid: Self-Deception, Deception Cues, and Persuasion in Meetings. Working paper.
Dana, J., Weber, R. A., & Kuang, J. X. (2007). Exploiting moral wiggle room: Experiments demonstrating an illusory preference for fairness. Economic Theory, 33, 67–80.
Di Tella, R., Perez-Truglia, R., Babino, A., & Sigman, M. (2015). Conveniently upset: Avoiding altruism by distorting beliefs about others’ altruism. American Economic Review, 105, 3416–3442.
Dunn, E. W., Aknin, L. B., & Norton, M. I. (2008). Spending money on others promotes happiness. Science, 319, 1687–1688.
Effron, D. A. (2016). Making mountains of morality from molehills of virtue: Threat causes people to overestimate their moral credentials. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 40, 972–985.
Eil, D., & Rao, J. M. (2011). The good news-bad news effect: Asymmetric processing of objective information about yourself. American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, 3, 114–138.
Fernbach, P. M., Hagmayer, Y., & Sloman, S. A. (2014). Effort denial in self-deception. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 123, 1–8.
Frohlich, N., Oppenheimer, J., & Kurki, A. (2004). Modeling other-regarding preferences and an experimental test. Public Choice, 119, 91–117.
Ganguly, A. R., & Tasoff, J. (in press). Fantasy and dread: The demand for information and the consumption utility of the future. Management Science.
Gneezy, U., Saccardo, S., Serra-Garcia, M., & van Veldhuizen, R. (2016). Motivated Self-Deception, Identity, and Unethical Behavior. Working paper.
Haisley, E. C., & Weber, R. A. (2010). Self-serving interpretations of ambiguity in other-regarding behavior. Games and Economic Behavior, 68, 614–625.
Harris, A. J. L., & Hahn, U. (2011). Unrealistic optimism about future life events: A cautionary note. Psychological Review, 118, 135–154.
Jussim, L. (1991). Social perception and social reality: A reflection-construction model. Psychological Review, 98, 54–73.
Kahan, D. M. (2010). Fixing the communications failure. Nature, 463, 296–297.
Kahan, D. M. (2013). Ideology, motivated reasoning, and cognitive reflection. Judgment and Decision Making, 8, 407–424.
Kahan, D. M., & Corbin, J. C. (2016). A note on the perverse effects of actively open-minded thinking on climate-change polarization. Research & Politics, 3, 2053168016676705.
Kahan, D. M., Peters, E., Wittlin, M., Slovic, P., Larrimore Ouellette, L., Braman, D., & Mandel, G. (2012). The polarizing impact of science literacy and numeracy on perceived climate change risks. Nature Climate Change, 2, 732–735.
Kouchaki, M., & Gino, F. (2016). Memories of unethical actions become obfuscated over time. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113, 6166–6171.
Kruger, J., & Dunning, D. (1999). Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77, 1121–1134.
Larson, T., & Capra, C. M. (2009). Exploiting moral wiggle room: Illusory preference for fairness? A comment. Judgment and Decision Making, 6, 467–474.
Lavner, J. A., Karney, B. R., & Bradbury, T. N. (2013). Newlyweds’ optimistic forecasts of their marriage: For better or for worse? Journal of Family Psychology, 27, 531–540.
Lemay, E. P., & Venaglia, R. B. (2016). Relationship expectations and relationship quality. Review of General Psychology, 20, 57–70.
Lin, S. C., Schaumberg, R. L., & Reich, T. (2016). Sidestepping the rock and the hard place: The private avoidance of prosocial requests. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 64, 35–40.
Lönnqvist, J. E., Rilke, R. M., & Walkowitz, G. (2015). On why hypocrisy thrives: Reasonable doubt created by moral posturing can deter punishment. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 59, 139–145.
Mata, A., & Almeida, T. (2014). Using metacognitive cues to infer others’ thinking. Judgment and Decision Making, 9, 349–359.
Mata, A., Fiedler, K., Ferreira, M. B., & Almeida, T. (2013). Reasoning about others’ reasoning. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 49, 486–491.
Mata, A., Sherman, S. J., Ferreira, M. B., & Mendonça, C. (2015). Strategic numeracy: Self-serving reasoning about health statistic. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 3, 165–173.
McNulty, J. K., & Karney, B. R. (2004). Positive expectations in the early years of marriage: Should couples expect the best or brace for the worst? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 86, 729–743.
Molden, D. C., & Higgins, E. T. (2012). Motivated thinking. In K. Holyoak & B. Morrison (Eds.), Oxford handbook of thinking and reasoning (pp. 319–335). New York: Psychology Press.
Murphy, S. C., von Hippel, W., Dubbs, S. L., Angiletta Jr., M. J., Wilson, R. S., Trivers, R., Barlow, F.K. (2015). The role of overconfidence in romantic desirability and competition. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 41, 1036–1052.
Nettle, D. (2004). Adaptive illusions: Optimism, control and human rationality. In D. Evans & P. Cruse (Eds.), Emotion, evolution and rationality (pp. 193–208). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Oster, E., Shoulson, I., & Dorsey, E. (2013). Optimal expectations and limited medical testing: Evidence from Huntington disease. American Economic Review, 103, 804–830.
Peer, E., Acquisti, A., & Shalvi, S. (2014). “I cheated, but only a little”: Partial confessions to unethical behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 106, 202–217.
Pronin, E., Lin, D. Y., & Ross, L. (2002). The bias blind spot: Perceptions of bias in self versus others. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 28, 369–381.
Quattrone, G. A., & Tversky, A. (1984). Causal versus diagnostic contingencies: On self-deception and on the voter’s illusion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 46, 237–248.
Rodriguez-Lara, I., & Moreno-Garrido, L. (2012). Self-interest and fairness: Self-serving choices of justice principles. Experimental Economics, 15, 158–175.
Schwardmann, P., & Van der Weele, J. J. (2016). Deception and Self-Deception. Working paper.
Shalvi, S., Dana, J., Handgraaf, M. J. J., & De Dreu, C. K. W. (2011). Justified ethicality: Observing desired counterfactuals modifies ethical perceptions and behavior. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 115, 181–190.
Shalvi, S., Gino, F., Barkan, R., & Ayal, S. (2015). Self-serving justifications: Doing wrong and feeling moral. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 24, 125–130.
Sharot, T., & Garrett, N. (2016). Forming beliefs: Why valence matters. Trends in cognitive sciences, 20, 25–33.
Shaw, A., Montinari, N., Piovesan, M., Olson, K. R., Gino, F., & Norton, M. I. (2014). Children develop a veil of fairness. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143, 363–375.
Shepperd, J. A., Waters, E. A., Weinstein, N. D., & Klein, W. M. (2015). A primer on unrealistic optimism. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 24, 232–237.
Simpson, B., Willer, R., & Harrell, A. (2017). The enforcement of moral boundaries promotes cooperation and prosocial behavior in groups. Scientific Reports, 7, 42844.
Sloman, S. A., Fernbach, P. M., & Hagmayer, Y. (2010). Self-deception requires vagueness. Cognition, 115, 268–281.
Stanley, M. L., Henne, P., Iyengar, V., Sinott-Armstrong, W., & De Brigard, F. (2017). I’m not the person I used to be: The self and autobiographical memories of immoral actions. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 146, 884–895.
Stein, R. (2017). “Trumping” conformity: Urges towards conformity to ingroups and nonconformity to morally opposed outgroups. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 70, 34–40.
Taylor, S. E., Kemeny, M. E., Aspinwall, L. G., Schneider, S. G., Rodriguez, R., & Herbert, M. (1992). Optimism, coping, psychological distress and high-risk sexual behavior among men at risk for acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63, 460–473.
Trouche, E., Johansson, P., Hall, L., & Mercier, H. (2016). The selective laziness of reasoning. Cognitive Science, 40, 2122–2136.
Van Leeuwen, N. (2017). Do religious “beliefs” respond to evidence? Philosophical Explorations, 20, 52–72.
Von Hippel, W., & Trivers, R. (2011). The evolution and psychology of self-deception. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 34, 1–56.
West, R. F., Meserve, R. J., & Stanovich, K. E. (2012). Cognitive sophistication does not attenuate the bias blind spot. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 103, 506–519.
Zhang, Y., & Fisbach, A. (2010). Counteracting obstacles with optimistic predictions. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 139, 16–31.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Bonnefon, JF. (2017). Delusions. In: Reasoning Unbound. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-60049-3_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-60049-3_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-60048-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-60049-3
eBook Packages: Behavioral Science and PsychologyBehavioral Science and Psychology (R0)