In more ways than one, human decision-making is not entirely consequentialist. Most prominently, it is non-consequentialist in that people do not make decisions just to maximize the expected utility of consequences. It is also non-consequentialist in that people can make decisions in order to signal information about the causes – as opposed to the consequences – of those decisions. Sometimes people make signals to other decision makers, signals that might be informative or deceptive. Sometimes they make signals to themselves, to convince themselves of the state of nature or of their own personal state. They might want to prove their own talents or capabilities to themselves by signaling information that is true or partially true. Or they might want to signal something to themselves that is uncertain or even false. The latter is a form of self-deception.

Self-deception is particularly handy as a means of exerting or avoiding self-control. When faced with temptation, a good self-deceiver has many options: He or she might convince him or herself that there is no reason to avoid the temptation, that the temptation poses no threat. Or the really skilled self-deceiver might take steps to avoid the temptation by undermining its value or allure. Most self-deception is probably not this straightforward though. As Benabou and Tirole have argued in a series of papers, self-deception often comes in the form of implanting and retrieving memories in a self-serving way, to provide evidence to the self that one is the kind of person that one wants to be, the kind that gives into or rejects temptation.

Much of the empirical work on self-signaling, self-deception, and self-control has been done by psychologists, mostly in the laboratory but some in the field, although the empirical side is also developing rapidly among economists. Much of the theoretical work on these issues has been done by economists who have developed descriptive models of human choice that assign utility to beliefs and anticipated beliefs. We plan to bring together psychologists and economists who work on these issues with the hope of furthering integration between the empirical and theoretical domains in the study of self-deception, its roots in self-signaling, and its consequences for self-control.

Program [detailed in pdf file]

This event has been funded by a French government subsidy managed by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche under the framework of the investissements d'avenir programme reference ANR-11-LABX-0052.

Reference

Self-deception, Self-signaling, and Self-control Workshop, Toulouse, France, June 22, 09:00 to June 23, 2015, 18:00.