Post-Self-Deception Judgements

This post is by Martina Orlandi who is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Trent University Durham, Canada. Her research focuses on moral psychology, philosophy of mind (including philosophy of artificial intelligence), and philosophy of action. She has a specific interest in practical irrationality and particularly self-deception, self-control, and resilience.

Martina Orlandi

Suppose you’re having a conversation with your old friend Sasha. She casually tells you how her husband has been behaving lately: he’s getting calls at weird times of the day, he’s getting home later than usual, and last week Sasha saw a flirty text message show up on his phone. In spite of all this, Sasha insists that things are good between them and that her husband is faithful. You know that Sasha is self-deceived about this. Her self-deceit lasts for a few months until one day Sasha tells you that she left her husband after he admitted to having an affair. While this news doesn’t surprise you, what comes next is striking: Sasha’s confesses to have known the truth all along.

What should you make of Sasha’s post-self-deception confession? On the one hand, maybe she did know all along that her husband was unfaithful. On the other hand, Sasha has been self-deceived for months, so maybe she isn’t the best judge of her own mental states. These kinds of post-self-deception confessions are common in formerly self-deceived individuals, and they are the topic I explore in my paper “I Knew All Along: Making Sense of Post-Self-Deception Judgments” (published in Synthese in 2024).

Post-self-deception judgments are philosophically interesting because they can pose challenges for accounts of what self-deception is in the first place. Some theories say that self-deceived people only truly believe their own lies, while others say that they may suspect the unwelcome truth. But Sasha’s post-self-deception confession seems ill-suited to the former theories. That is, if Sasha didn’t believe the unwelcome truth, then why would she later confess otherwise?

I think this challenge can be resolved if we argue that, like the beliefs of self-deceived individuals, post-self-deception judgments may also not be reliable. This is the argument that I provide in my paper. I show that those theories of self-deception according to which the self-deceived does not believe the unwelcome truth can say that post-self-deception judgments are themselves an instance of self-deception. In particular, they are caused by the kind of hindsight bias known as “foreseeability”. This is where the individual believes that a past event could easily have been predicted. 

I argue that hindsight bias fits the structure of self-deception because self-deceived people believe against evidence that they would normally take as compelling. This is why Sasha would think, post-self-deception, that her husband’s unfaithfulness could have been easily predicted. It also shows why post-self-deception judgments are not reliable: hindsight bias, by definition, does not accurately track past experiences.

However, characterizing post-self-deception judgments as hindsight bias is bad news for the self-deceived in another way: it poses a threat to their ongoing epistemic practices. This is because psychological research suggests that hindsight bias can impair learning. When we (wrongly) think of the past as easily predictable, we don’t spend time trying to figure out exactly where and how we erred. 

As a result, this can lead us to repeat the same epistemic missteps over and over again. In light of this, I conclude that while coming out of self-deception is typically viewed as a good thing, when formerly self-deceived individuals confess to having ‘known all along’ they might actually be more vulnerable to future instances of self-deception.

"I forgot that you existed": Making people responsible for their memories

This post is Marina Trakas, a philosopher and cognitive scientist interested in the ethical and epistemological aspects of memories of our personal past.

Marina Trakas

In a recent empirical study published in the American Psychologist, researchers from the University of Texas at Austin (Yan et al. 2024) investigated a novel and relatively unexplored factor possibly contributing to the gender gap in science, particularly in citation practices: memory mechanisms. They found that during a free recall task, wherein professors were asked to remember the names of experts and rising stars in their field, male professors (but not their female counterparts) underrepresented women researchers compared to a set of baselines. 

One possible explanation for this finding could be that male professors either did not remember female names or recalled fewer of them due to a lack of memory traces of these names. If they never encoded this information, they cannot remember it, given that this information is not available for retrieval. This explanation seems straightforward, but it is unlikely to be the right kind of explanation. 

Why is it unlikely? Everyone would probably agree that nowadays, it is highly improbable that these male professors never meet or hear about a tenured female colleague working on similar topics. It might occasionally occur in tightly knit inner circles within certain fields where there are only a handful of people working on the topic. However, such instances are quite rare when considering the broader field to which this subfield may belong. But there are more than just intuitive reasons to doubt this initial potential explanation. 

The same researchers conducted a series of additional tests to ensure that the tendency to remember more male names was not simply due to availability. First, they examined the order in which names were recalled: while male professors were unlikely to recall a woman’s name near the beginning of the list, the likelihood of recalling female experts increased as the list progressed, suggesting that female names were indeed available but took more time to come to mind. 

Secondly, to further explore this possibility, they included a recognition task where lists of famous researchers’ names were presented for later recall. Male names were not recognized more frequently than female names, as would have been expected under the availability hypothesis, indicating that female names were just as available as male names. All of this points to an accessibility bias (for a distinction between availability and accessibility, see Tulving & Pearlstone 1966): existing stereotypes, as well as less exposure to female researchers and greater social closeness with male researchers, may make female names less accessible to men when considering whom to cite and whom to invite.

Then the question that arises is: what should we do to remember better and have more inclusive memories in academia? Let’s revisit the availability hypothesis and the accessibility hypothesis, as they both suggest different approaches.

A strong interpretation of the availability hypothesis would suggest that when women and people from underrepresented groups in academia are not cited or invited to participate in academic activities, it is simply because their names are not available to those making decisions, who are often men. Their names do not come to their mind because there is no trace of them at all. Perhaps an initial stereotype influenced perception, attention, or encoding processes, resulting in the information about a less frequently encountered female researcher not being retained for later recall. 

However, it is not the male professor’s fault for not remembering that female researcher. Although the male professor could have made more effort to pay attention to her, there is nothing else he could have done after that initial stage. He has no control over memory processes after that stage, as consolidation processes are mostly unconscious and involuntary. Therefore, male researchers cannot be held responsible for these non-inclusive memories that overlook female researchers. 

This holds true in two ways: these memories cannot be properly attributed to them as expressions of their agency, much less as expression of their values; and these men cannot be held accountable for their memories, as it would not be reasonable for others to have specific expectations and demands regarding what they should remember when they have no control over it (for the distinction between attributability and accountability, see Zheng 2016). In conclusion, a strong interpretation of the availability hypothesis suggests that people cannot be held even minimally responsible for their memories: who we remember or forget, and how we remember the past, are largely beyond our control.

A strong interpretation of the accessibility hypothesis paints a completely different picture of the responsibility for our memories, suggesting that we bear some level of responsibility. Thus, male researchers can be blamed for misremembering or forgetting the names of female researchers when considering citations or invitations. Since many of these names have been encoded and are indeed accessible, albeit at a slower rate than those of their male counterparts, failing to remember them or remembering them only as a last resort indicates a form of vice. But what kind of vice? To address this question, it would be useful to examine the actions that these male researchers could have taken to exhibit greater virtue in remembering.

Firstly, they could have exercised more caution and refrained from blindly trusting the first names that came to mind. Blindly trusting the first memories that come to mind in all circumstances can be pernicious, both to others and oneself (for instance, when influenced by a negative mood, only recalling negative aspects of a past experience that reinforce that mood). We do not always have to believe the first memory that pops up in our mind; we can adopt various epistemic attitudes toward memory, including skepticism toward spontaneously recalled memories (Trakas 2021). When such memories have the potential to cause harm and there are no time constraints, consciously and voluntarily exercising our metacognitive abilities to better control and monitor our memories can help prevent or mitigate their potential negative effects.

For example, deliberately focusing on and examining a past experience that initially appears entirely negative can lead to the recollection of more neutral or even positive aspects of that experience. Similarly, concentrating on and thoroughly searching for experts’ names in their field can enable male researchers to remember a more diverse range of names and avoid solely focusing on their socially close male colleagues who come to mind first. These processes of monitoring and control can involve conscious, voluntary mental actions, where one attempts to enhance one’s own memories by searching within one’s own mind, or conscious, voluntary pragmatic actions that entail interaction with the external world and others, such as consulting other colleagues or conducting online literature searches, an option also highlighted by the authors of the aforementioned empirical study (Trakas 2019).

The issue is that these actions do not happen automatically. Engaging in them first requires certain kinds of knowledge. Understanding our own memory capabilities and limitations is crucial to determine when these additional actions are needed. For instance, knowing if one struggles to recall the names of female colleagues when organizing an event, or often tends to automatically endorse the first memories that come to one’s mind, is essential for recognizing when extra effort is necessary to have better memories. However, it is not just knowledge about our individual memory abilities that is important; understanding the general workings of memory may also be crucial. 

Preliminary findings from an ongoing study I am conducting with psychologist Ryan Daley (Gordon College, US) and philosopher Kate Finley (Hope College, US), as part of a project supported by the Summer Seminars in Neuroscience and Philosophy (Duke University/Templeton World Charity Foundation), suggest that certain metaphors used to conceptualize memory may lead to misconceptions about how memory functions. 

The more people consider memory as akin to a hard drive, recording device, or mental time travel, the less likely they are to believe that memory can be biased and influence our decisions and actions towards others, potentially causing harm. While we are still researching whether these memory metaphors also impact memory performance, it is plausible that socially circulating concepts and beliefs about memory, internalized by individuals, also shape their processes of memory monitoring and control, as well as their beliefs and evaluations of their own memory abilities.

But knowledge alone is clearly insufficient. Engaging in mental or pragmatic actions to form better memories also requires certain virtues. Not only the epistemic virtue of seeking knowledge about one’s own memory and memory in general, but also, and more importantly, other epistemic virtues such as avoiding overconfidence in one’s memories, being open to revising one’s own memories, and being receptive to others’ perspectives on a shared past, among others. These virtues, which can collectively be termed mnemonic humility, as they all relate to recognizing the limitations and fallibility of memory, are essential for motivating mental and pragmatic actions in our pursuit of better memories.

Virtue and knowledge appear to be deeply intertwined in memory enhancement. Neither is alone sufficient, but both are indispensable. As they enable us to exert some degree of control over our memory processes after encoding, we can be held responsible for misremembering and forgetting, in a twofold sense. Memories can be attributed to individuals since they are, at least in part, reflections of their agency and values, and thus, of their selves. Therefore, it is reasonable to expect that individuals would be held accountable for their erroneous, distorted memories, and memory omissions.

This is certainly an imperfect duty, meaning that “we cannot simply ignore it, but we are not obliged to dedicate all our time and resources to it” (Zheng 2016, p. 73). It also ultimately relies on people’s good intentions, which are grounded in moral values such as equality, justice, and inclusion, and perhaps even a sense of caring towards others, including strangers. A person who is racist, misogynistic, or narcissistic will never engage in these additional metacognitive actions because they lack the inherent motivation: to be fair, inclusive, and compassionate towards others. They may even deliberately suppress a memory if a female name spontaneously comes to mind (see this). Fortunately, there are individuals out there, including within academia, who possess good intentions. As I have attempted to demonstrate, these individuals are also morally responsible for remembering better and more inclusively.

Responsible Agency and the Importance of Moral Audience

Today's post is by Anneli Jefferson and Katrina Sifferd. Anneli is a lecturer at Cardiff University who works in the philosophy of psychology, moral philosophy, and the intersection of the two. Katrina is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at Elmhurst College. In this post they discuss their recent paper in Ethical Theory and Moral Practice.

Anneli Jefferson

Accounts of responsibility often underestimate the importance of the social environment. Other people are vital to the development and maintenance of moral agency: As social beings, we calibrate our moral compass to our moral audience. When deciding whether it is acceptable to eat the last piece of cake, not to disclose extra earnings on a tax return or spank our children as a form of punishment, we do this with an eye to what’s considered acceptable by our social environment. The reactions of others highlight the existence and importance of moral norms by providing us with feedback, directly and indirectly.

Katrina Sifferd

One account that does take an ecological approach is Victoria McGeer’s scaffolded reasons-responsive view; she argues that what makes us morally responsible agents is precisely that we are susceptible to being held to account and to adjust our moral judgment and actions in the light of moral feedback. However, this view faces certain challenges. First, some agents (e.g. autistic people) seem less attuned to the reaction of their (neurotypical) social environments but are generally no less moral and law abiding. Second, in some cases moral audiences can give morally bad feedback: for example, they can encourage misogynistic or racist behaviour. In a recent article we advocate for an ecological approach to responsibility that recognises the importance of moral audiences and attempt to answer these two concerns.

We argue that audience feedback in the form of blame and praise, reward and punishment plays both an informational and a motivational role in moral agency. The informational role – where we are given information about what is right and wrong – is more central in moral development and when facing new moral challenges. The motivational role remains relevant throughout our lives and keeps us in alignment with our social environment. 

Autistic persons form social attachments and are motivated to align themselves with moral expectations. They also make use of the informational role in development, although sometimes moral feedback will have to be more explicit than it might otherwise be. Autistic individuals may however be less reliant on social feedback for ongoing calibration of behavior and rely more on moral rules and principles. As we have discussed elsewhere, this may not be a weakness, and can in some cases be a strength, especially when it comes to avoiding the human tendency for moral slippage and making exceptions to moral rules (e.g., “Half the people I know lied on their tax forms, why shouldn’t I?”).

The human tendency for moral slippage is well illustrated in scenarios where societal sub-groups justify behavior that is in tension with their professed values, or when new problematic values are acquired from one’s social environment. This is the second challenge to ecological accounts: moral audiences can shape us in problematic ways. Think about the way people’s moral views can shift to accommodate current interests. One prominent example is the disconnect between climate commitments and actual behaviour. 

Flying is socially acceptable despite our keen awareness of climate change. More extreme examples are those where societies or subgroups of society adopt norms that justify oppression. A historical example was the widespread acceptance of slavery; current day examples include the views of Incels, who create a self-reinforcing social environment that justifies misogyny and violence towards women. Being a social creature that calibrates their moral compass to what is being reinforced in one’s immediate social environment is a risky business.

This doesn’t mean that ecological views of responsibility are psychologically incorrect. Our moral agency is dependent on societal audiences, for better or worse and to varying degrees. Given this, it is important to be aware that moral audiences are limited in their outlook, and that one good place to look for possible sources of those limitations is self-interest. We also ought to evaluate our moral norms for consistency, and to seek out new moral audiences, especially audiences comprising of those who may be negatively impacted by our behaviour.

Intruders in the Mind

In this post, Pablo López–Silva and Tom McClelland present their new edited book, Intruders in the Mind: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Thought Insertion (OUP 2023).

Thought insertion is a rare delusion most often found among those suffering from schizophrenia. It is characterised by subjects reporting that entities have introduced thoughts or ideas into their minds. Although the structure of these reports shows similarities, the external agents that subjects identify are highly variable: some identify individuals such as celebrities or relatives; some identify groups such as aliens or the government; others identify objects like radios, houses or trees. In an oft-cited case, one patient reports ‘…thoughts are put into my mind like “Kill God”, it’s just like my mind working, but it isn’t. They come from this chap, Chris. They are his thoughts’ (Frith, 1992, p. 66). 

This delusion raises a host of philosophical questions about the phenomenology of thought, our sense of ownership and agency over our own thinking and the boundary between self and world. This then feeds into more concrete questions about what causes these delusions and how they can be effectively treated. Intruders in the Mind is the first edited collection dedicated to this under-explored phenomenon and brings together work from philosophers, psychologists and psychiatrists. The collection is divided into four sections that deal with different aspects of thought insertion.

The first section - ‘Characterizing Alien Thoughts’ - considers how best to describe and define thought insertion. Roberta Payne offers a revealing personal account of her own experience of schizophrenia, anchoring the collection in the lived-experience of those suffering from the delusion. Clara Humpston & Matthew Broome draw on patient experiences to shed new light on the question of whether delusions of thought insertion are best characterized as beliefs. Following a phenomenological approach, Aaron Mishara, Pablo López–Silva, Cherise Rose & Andreas Heinz explores the often-neglected physicality of inserted thoughts i.e. patients’ describing thoughts as inserted into their minds as having physical properties. 

Pablo López-Silva

In Chapter 4 Michelle Maisse draws on ecological psychology, enactivism and phenomenology in her account of thought insertion as a disruption to how affordances for mental action are disclosed to the subject. In the fifth chapter Sam Wilkinson explores the contrast between inserted thoughts and auditory-verbal hallucinations and, in Chapter 6, Jasper Feyaerts & Wouter Kusters propose that schizophrenia is characterised by an attitude of preoccupation with and reflection on the world that is deeply akin to the attitude to the world adopted by philosophers.

The second section - ‘Explaining Thought Insertion’ - targets the problem about the aetiology of thought insertion. Catherine Cazimir & Al Powers explore the mechanistic and neural commonalities between thought insertion and auditory-verbal hallucination. Pablo López–Silva & Álvaro Cavieres then look at the merits and limitations of a predictive-processing approach to thought-insertion. In Chapter 9 Kengo Miyazono proposes a two-factor account according to which thought-insertion involves both experiential alterations and cognitive alterations. 

In the tenth chapter, Emilia Vilatta also proposes a multi-factorial model. Synthesising a deficit approach and motivational approach, she offers a nuanced account of the causal role played by different elements in the production of inserted thoughts. Finally, Peter Langland–Hassan offers an alternative account of thought insertion. He characterizes the delusion as a form of persecutory delusion that requires a distinctive form of clinical intervention.

The third section - ‘Experimental and Therapeutic Approaches to TI’ - begins with a chapter by Elisa Brann, Eamonn Walsh, Mitul A. Mehta, David A. Oakley & Quinton Deeley who propose experiments that might be able to produce relevant alterations in experience under controlled conditions. In Chapter 13 Alice Pailhès, Jay Olson & Gustav Kuhn suggest that experimental research can draw lessons from the practice of magic, including how magicians putting thoughts into people’s minds. 

Kentaro Hiromitsu & Tomohisa Asai shed light on the neurobiological underpinnings of thought insertion by focusing on the role played by the cerebellum. Working at the interface of theory and therapeutic practice, Susana Ochoa’s chapter argues that schizophrenia involves metacognitive dysfunction and explores what this means for therapeutic interventions. 

Tom McClelland

The fourth and final section - ‘Beyond the Phenomenon’ - focuses on how thought insertion challenges entrenched assumptions regarding the ontology of thought. Jordi Fernández argues that the experience of owning one’s conscious state is the experience of being committed to the content of that state, suggesting that thought insertion is a disruption to that sense of commitment. 

In the the final chapter of the edited book, Johannes Roessler challenges the common ‘no-subject’ interpretation of thought insertion according to which subjects are aware of thoughts without being aware of themselves as the thinker of that thought. 

Taken as a whole, the collection yields much-needed insights into the perplexing phenomenon of thought insertion. Beyond this, it serves as a valuable example of how disciplinary boundaries can be broken down in the pursuit of a greater understanding of the mind.