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.