Self-deception - the normal and the pathological

8 Self-deception: the normal and the pathological In the previous chapters, I have argued that neuroscience (and allied fields) can shed light on some of the perennial questions of moral theory and moral psychology: the nature of self-control and the degree to which agents should be held responsible for their actions. In this chapter, I explore another puzzle in moral psychology: the nature and existence of self-deception. Self-deception is a topic of perennial fascination to novelists and everyone else interested in human psychology. It is fascinating because it is at once puzzling and commonplace. The puzzle it poses arises when we observe people apparently sincerely making claims that seem obviously false, and against which they apparently possess sufficient evidence. The man whose wife suddenly has many mys- terious meetings, starts to receive unexplained gifts and is reportedly seen in a bar on the other side of town with a strange man has every reason to suspect her of infidelity. If he refrains from asking her questions, or is satisfied with the flimsiest of explanations, and fails to doubt her continued faithfulness, he is self-deceived. Self-decep- tion is, apparently, common in the interpersonal sphere, but it is also a political phenomenon. Western supporters of Soviet communism were often, and perhaps rightly, accused of self-deception, when they denied the repression characteristic of the regime. We say that someone is self-deceived, typically, when they possess sufficient evidence for a claim and yet continue, apparently sincerely, to assert the opposite. Generally, self-deception seems to be emotionally motivated: we do not deceive ourselves about just anything, but only about things that are important to us and which we are strongly motivated to believe. The man who deceives himself about his wife’s faithfulness might not be able to contemplate a single life; the woman who deceives herself about Soviet commun- ism may have her narrative identity closely entwined with her political allegiances. theories of self-deception We often say that the self-deceived person really or ‘‘at some level’’ knows the truth. The formerly self-deceived themselves sometimes make this kind of claim, saying they ‘‘really knew all along’’ the truth concerning which they deceived themselves. Many theories of self-deception take this apparent duality of belief at face value, and therefore devote themselves to explaining how ordinary, sane, indi- viduals are capable of contradictory beliefs. There is no puzzle, everyone acknowledges, with believing things that are mutually contradictory, when the conflict between them is not obvious. All of us probably have inconsistent beliefs in this sense: if we thought about each of our beliefs for long enough, and traced their entail- ments far enough, we could eventually locate a clash. But the self- deceived agent apparently believes two contradictory statements under the same description (or at least very similar descriptions). The husband in our example might believe both that my wife is faithful and my wife is having an affair, which is a bald contradiction, or perhaps, slightly less baldly, my wife is faithful and all the evidence suggests my wife is having an affair. Some philosophers think that not only do the self-deceived believe inconsistent propositions, they are self-deceived because they have deliberately brought about their believing contradictory pro- positions. The best example here is the existential philosopher Jean- Paul Sartre. Sartre (1956) argued that self-deceivers have to know the truth, in order to set about concealing it from themselves. Just as a liar must know the truth in order to deliberately and effectively deceive others, so the self-deceiver ‘‘must know the truth very exactly in order to conceal it more carefully’’ (Sartre 1956: 89). Other theories of self-deception 259 thinkers who, like Sartre, take contradictory beliefs to be character- istic of self-deception also model it on interpersonal deception. Both kinds of lying – to others and to oneself – are supposed to be inten- tional activities. On what we might call the traditional conception of self-deception – defended by thinkers as diverse, and as separated from one another in time, as Bishop Joseph Butler (1970) in the eighteenth century, to Donald Davidson (1986) in the late twentieth century – self-deception is typically characterized by both these features: contradictory beliefs and intentionality of deception. The contradictory belief requirement and the intentionality requirement are both extremely puzzling. How is it possible for someone to believe two blatantly contradictory propositions at one and the same time? How can anyone succeed in lying to him or herself; doesn’t successful deception require that the deceived agent not know the truth? Defenders of the traditional conception of self- deception do not, of course, think that we succeed in lying to ourselves in precisely the same manner in which we might lie to another. Instead, they take self-deception to be an activity engaged in with some kind of reduced awareness. Moreover, they do not assert that the self-deceived believe their claims in precisely the same way that we generally believe our normal beliefs. Instead, they typically hold that the contradictory beliefs are somehow isolated from one another. Perhaps, for instance, one of the beliefs is held unconsciously. If the husband’s belief that his wife is having an affair is unconsciously held, we may be able to explain how he is able to sincerely proclaim her faithfulness. We might also be able to explain the rationalizations in which he engages to sustain this belief: they are motivated, we might think, by mechanisms that are designed to defend consciousness against the unconscious belief. More recently, however, philosophers have begun to advance deflationary accounts of self-deception. These philosophers point out that the traditional conception is quite demanding: it requires the existence of a great deal of mental machinery. It can be correct only self-deception: the normal and the pathological 260 if the mind is capable of being partitioned, in some way, so that contradictory beliefs are isolated from one another; moreover, typical traditional accounts also require that both beliefs, the consciously avowed and the consciously disavowed, are capable of motivating behavior (the behavior of engaging in rationalization, for instance). Given that the traditional conception is demanding, we ought to prefer a less demanding theory if there is one available that explains the data at least as well. These philosophers thus invoke Occam’s razor, the methodological principle that the simplest theory that explains the data is the theory most likely to be true, in defence of a deflationary account. Deflationary accounts of self-deception have been advanced by several philosophers (Barnes 1997; Mele 1997, Mele 2001). These accounts are deflationary inasmuch as they attempt to explain self- deception without postulating any of the extravagant mental machinery required by the traditional conception. They dispense with the extra machinery by dispensing with the requirements that necessitate it, both the intentionality requirement and the contra- dictory belief requirement. By dispensing with these requirements, deflationary accounts avoid the puzzles they provoke: we need not explain how agents can successfully lie to themselves, or how they can have blatantly contradictory beliefs. Of course, we still need to be able to explain the behavior of those we are disposed to call self- deceived. How are we to do that? Deflationists argue, roughly, that the kinds of states we call self-deception can be explained in terms of motivationally biased belief acquisition mechanisms. We can therefore explain self-decep- tion invoking only mechanisms whose existence has been indepen- dently documented by psychologists, particularly psychologists in the heuristics and biases tradition (Kahneman et al. 1982). Heuristics and biases typically work by systematically leading us to weigh some kinds of evidence more heavily than other kinds, in ways that might be adaptive in general, but which can sometimes mislead us badly. Thus, people typically give excessive weight to evidence that theories of self-deception 261 happens to be vivid for them, will tend to look for evidence in favour of a hypothesis rather than evidence which disconfirms it, are more impressed by their more recent experiences than earlier experiences, and so on. Deflationists argue, and cite experimental evidence to show, that these biases can be activated especially strongly when the person is appropriately motivated. Thus, when someone has reason to prefer that a proposition is true, the stage is set for the activation of these biasing mechanisms. For instance, the anxious coward will test the hypothesis that they are brave, and therefore look for confirming evidence of that hypothesis (setting in motion the confirmation bias); as a result evidence which supports this hypothesis will be rendered especially vivid for them, while evidence against it will be relatively pallid. If this is correct, then self-deception is not intentional: it is the product of biased reasoning, but there is no reason to think the agent is always aware of their bias (neither in general, nor of the way it works in particular cases). Nor is there any reason to think that the agent must have contradictory beliefs. Because the agent is motiva- tionally biased, they acquire a belief despite the fact that the evidence available to them supports the contrary belief: they cannot see how the evidence tends precisely because of their bias. Deflationists claim that their less extravagant theory explains self-deception at least as well as the traditional conception. We have, they argue, no need to invoke elaborate mental machinery, because there is no reason to believe that the intentionality or contradictory belief requirements are ever satisfied. Mele (2001), the most influ- ential of the deflationists, argues that his theory, or something like it, is therefore to be preferred unless and until someone can produce an actual case of self-deception in which the agent has contradictory beliefs, or in which they have intentionally deceived themselves. 1 In what follows, I shall attempt to meet Mele’s challenge: I shall show that there are cases of self-deception in which the self-deceived per- son has contradictory beliefs. The evidence comes from the study of delusions. self-deception: the normal and the pathological 262 anosognosia and self-deception Anosognosia refers to denial of illness by sufferers. It comes in many forms, including denial of cortical (i.e., caused by brain lesion) deafness, of cortical blindness (Anton’s syndrome) or of dyslexia (Bisiach et al. 1986). Here I shall focus on anosognosia for hemiplegia: denial of partial paralysis (hereafter ‘‘anosognosia’’ shall refer only to this form of the syndrome). As a result of a stroke or brain injury, sufferers experience greater or lesser paralysis of one side of their body (usually the left side), especially the hand and arm. However, they continue to insist that their arm is fine. Anosognosia is usually accompanied by unilateral neglect: a failure to attend, respond or orient to information on one side (again usually the left side) of the patient, often including that side of the patient’s own body (personal neglect). Anosognosia and neglect usually resolves over a period of a few days or weeks. However, both have been known to persist for years. It is worth recounting some clinical descriptions of anosogno- sia, in order to give a flavor of this puzzling condition. Asked to move their left arm or hand, patients frequently refuse, on grounds which seem transparent rationalizations: I have arthritis and it hurts to move my arm (Ramachandran 1996); the doctor told me I should rest it (Venneri and Shanks 2004); I’m tired, or I’m not accustomed to taking orders (Ramachandran and Blakeslee 1998); left hands are always weaker (Bisiach et al. 1986). Sometimes, the patients go so far as to claim that they have complied with the request: I am pointing; I can clearly see my arm or I am clapping (Ramachandran 1996); all the while their paralyzed arm remains at their side. It is tempting to see anosognosia as an extreme case of self- deception. It looks for all the world as if the excuses given by patients for failing to move their arms are rationalizations, designed to protect them from an extremely painful truth: that they are partially paral- yzed. However, most neurologists deny that anosognosia should be understood along these lines. They point out that it has some fea- tures which seem puzzling on the psychological defence view. anosognosia and self-deception 263 In particular, a motivational explanation of anosognosia fails to explain its asymmetry: it is rare that a patient denies paralysis on the right side of the body. Anosognosia is usually the product of right hemisphere damage (most commonly damage to the inferior parietal cortex) that causes denial of paralysis on the left (contralateral to the lesion) side of the body. Most neurologists therefore argue that it must be understood as a neurological, and not a psychological, phenomenon (Bisiach and Geminiani 1991). Clearly, they have an important point: any account of ano- sognosia must explain the observed asymmetry. Anosognosia is indeed a neurological phenomenon, brought about as a result of brain injury. Most other kinds of paralysis or disease, whether caused by brain injury or not, do not give rise to it. However, it may still be the case that anosognosia is simultaneously a neurological and a psychological phenomenon. Perhaps, that is, neurological damage and motivation are jointly necessary conditions for the occurrence of anosognosia. V.S. Ramachandran is one prominent neuroscientist who interprets anosognosia along these lines. Ramachandran (1996; Ramachandran and Blakeslee 1998) suggests that the observed asymmetry can be explained as a product of hemispherical speciali- zation. The left hemisphere, he argues, has the task of imposing a coherent narrative framework upon the great mass of information with which each of us is constantly bombarded. If we are not to be paralyzed by doubt, we need a consistent and coherent set of beliefs that makes sense of most of the evidence available to us. In order to preserve the integrity of this belief system, the left hemisphere ignores or distorts small anomalies. Since any decision is usually better than being paralyzed by doubts, ignoring anomalies is gen- erally adaptive. However, there is a risk that the agent will slip into fantasy if the left hemisphere is allowed to confabulate unchecked. The role of keeping the left hemisphere honest is delegated to the right hemisphere. It plays devil’s advocate, monitoring anomalies, and forcing the more glaring to the agent’s attention. self-deception: the normal and the pathological 264 There is a great deal of independent support for Ramachandran’s hemispherical specialization hypothesis. In particular, evidence from cerebral commissurotomy (‘‘split-brain’’) patients is often understood as supporting this view. On the basis mainly of this evidence, Gazzaniga (1985; 1992) has suggested that the left hemi- sphere contains an ‘‘interpreter,’’ a module which has the task of making sense of the agent’s activities using whatever sources of information are available to it. When it is cut off from the source of the true motivation of the behavior, the left hemisphere con- fabulates an explanation. Many researchers have followed or adapted Gazzaniga’s suggestion, because it seems to explain so many observed phenomena. For our purposes, the hemispherical specialization hypothesis is attractive because it neatly explains the asymmetry characteristic of anosognosia. When the right hemisphere is damaged, the left hemisphere is free to confabulate unchecked. It defends the agent against unpleasant information by the simple expedient of ignoring it; it is able to pursue this strategy with much more dramatic effect than is normal because the anomaly detector in the right hemisphere is damaged. But when the right hemisphere is intact, denial of illness is much more difficult. On the other hand, when damage is to the left hemisphere, patients tend to be more pessimistic than when damage is to the right (Heilman et al. 1998). Ramachandran suggests that this pessimism is the product of the disabling of the protective left hemisphere confabulation mechanisms. I do not aim to defend the details of Ramachandran’s account of anosognosia here. However, I suggest that it is likely that the best account of the syndrome will, like Ramachandran’s, explain it as simultaneously a neurological and a psychological phenomenon. Only a combination of neurological and psychological mechanisms can account for all the observed data. Non-motivational theories of anosognosia cannot do the job alone, as I shall now show. Some theorists suggest that anosognosia is the product of an impairment which makes the disease difficult for the patient to anosognosia and self-deception 265 detect (Levine et al., 1991). A syndrome like neglect is, for its subject, relatively difficult to discern; absence of visual information is not phenomenally available in any immediate way. Somewhat similarly, anosognosia for hemiplegia may be difficult to detect, because the patient may have an impairment that reduces the amount and quality of relevant information about limb movement. There are several possible impairments that could play the explanatory role here. Patients may experience proprioceptive deficits, they may experience an impairment in feedback mechanisms reporting limb movement (Levine et al. 1991), or they may experience impairments in ‘‘feedforward’’ mechanisms, which compare limb movements to an internally generated model predicting the movement (Heilman et al. 1998). These somatosensory explanations of anosognosia face a com- mon problem: the mechanisms they propose seem far too weak to explain the phenomenon. Suppose it is true that anosognosics lack one source of normally reliable information about their limbs, or even that they take themselves to continue to receive information that their limb is working normally via a usually reliable channel; why do they nevertheless override all the information they receive from other reliable sources, ranging from doctors and close relatives to their own eyes? After all, as Marcel et al.(2004) point out, the impairments produced by hemiplegia are not subtle: it is not just that patients fail to move their arms when they want to. They also fail to lift objects, to get out of bed, to walk. It is extremely difficult to see how lack of feedback, or some other somatosensory deficit, could explain the failure of the patient to detect these gross abnormalities. More promising, at first sight, are theories that explain diffi- culty of discovery as the product not of somatosensory deficits, but of cognitive or psychological problems. On these views, anosognosia might be the product of confusion, (another) delusion or of neglect itself. In fact, however, these explanations do not suffice. It is true that some patients are highly delusional (Venneri and Shanks 2004) self-deception: the normal and the pathological 266 and anosognosics exhibit greater cognitive dysfunction, on average, than other stroke victims (Jehkonen et al. 2000). However, the degree of confusion is rarely sufficient to explain the anosognosia, and some patients exhibit no confusion at all (Jehkonen et al. 2000). Nor does anosognosia always co-occur with other delusions. Neglect accounts fare no better. Cocchini et al.(2002) report the case of a young male with anosognosia, who became aware of his paralysis when his left limbs were moved into the right half of his visual field. However, not all patients with neglect also suffer from ano- sognosia, indicating that neglect is not a sufficient condition for the latter; moreover, not all anosognosics suffer from neglect, indicating that it is not a necessary condition (Bisiach et al. 1986; Jehkonen et al. 2000). Neither somatosensory impairment nor cognitive impairment is by itself sufficient to explain anosognosia. Might they nevertheless be jointly necessary? This seems to be the view of Davies et al. (2005). They advance a ‘‘generic’’ two-factor theory to explain ano- sognosia, where the first factor is an unspecified neuropsychological anomaly, and the second factor is some kind of cognitive impair- ment. It is difficult to assess this proposal, since it is more a pro- grammatic statement setting out directions for future research then a serious attempt at an adequate explanation; it is therefore deliber- ately left empirically underspecified. However, to the extent to which the account is assessable, there are good reasons to think that it is unpromising, at least as it currently stands. One reason Davies et al. refuse to pin their account to any particular first factor is that they are well aware that the impairments of sufferers differ from case to case. As we have already seen, a range of impairments could play a role in the aetiology of anosognosia, since many different impairments could make the degree of difficulty of discovery greater. We also saw, however, that these impairments on their own are rarely or never sufficient to explain anosognosia. The second factor therefore needs to carry a great deal of explanatory weight. And Davies et al. are a little more forthcoming on the second anosognosia and self-deception 267 [...]... plastic glasses each half full of water Non-anosognosics raised it by placing their good hand under the middle of the tray and lifting But anosognosics attempted to lift it by placing their right hand on the right side of the tray and lifting, despite the fact that the left side remained unsupported Of course, the glasses immediately fell to the ground 269 270 s e l f - d e c e p t i o n : t h e n or m a... motivated to form or retain the belief that their limb is healthy because they have the concurrent belief (suspicion) that it is significantly impaired and they are disturbed by this belief (suspicion) The conjunction of conditions (1) and (3) yields contradictory belief if anosognosia is self-deception, and anosognosics satisfy these conditions then there are cases of self-deception in which agents have contradictory... identical What they could not – consciously – see was that one house was in flames on its left side However, when they were asked which house they would prefer to live in, they picked the other – non-burning – house Even though the houses looked identical to them, they preferred one to the other.2 Third, there is observational evidence that the explicitly denied knowledge guides some of the behavior of... at work in common-or-garden self-deception It is certainly possible that anosognosic (or otherwise pathological) self-deception is the only kind characterized by contradictory beliefs; perhaps this kind of self-deception requires a breakdown in normal brain processes However, given what we know, and what we can plausibly speculate, about anosognosia, it is reasonable to suspect that the processes at... many non -pathological cases On hypothesis (1) above, when that is the case, and the subject is appropriately motivated, self-deception may occur It is also likely that normal anomaly detector strength varies from person to person, and across time Probably anosognosics can deny such a glaring anomaly as their paralysis only because they have suffered neurological damage But most cases of self-deception. .. hemisphere each (the confabulatory belief in the left hemisphere and the unwanted knowledge in the right); more recently, he has suggested that the beliefs are represented in different ways, so as to avoid direct conflict between them (Hirstein 2005) In one or other of these ways, ordinary self-deceivers satisfy the dual-belief requirement However, Hirstein argues that anosognosics do not satisfy the dualbelief... to the agent is sufficient to attribute the corresponding belief to them This is a deep issue, and one I cannot aim to resolve here Suffice it to say that the higher the degree of availability, the better the case for attribution of the belief We have seen that the proposition that their arm is fine is highly available to the agent: immediately available to consciousness in response to queries about their... paper well to the right of the actual halfway mark, since they see only part of the line Similarly, they may not consciously register the left side of a drawing Marshall and Halligan (1988) showed neglect a no s o g n o s i a a n d se l f - d e c e p t i o n patients drawings of houses, placed so that the leftmost part of the houses fell in their neglected field The patients reported that the houses looked... intentionally self-deceive because they satisfy (2), then (3) is satisfied But it is also satisfied if (2) primes mechanisms that bias the agent into self-deception To that extent, satisfaction of all three conditions does not entirely rehabilitate the traditional conception of self-deception Nevertheless, it comes close, inasmuch as it requires contradictory beliefs of the self-deceived Finally, these are not... of the neurological damage, the information that the arm is paralyzed is relatively inaccessible to the patient It may be indistinct (‘‘dim,’’ as Anton put it in his seminal 1899 paper) Availability, as we have already seen, comes in degrees; the lower the degree of availability, the less glaring the anomaly and the greater the corresponding ease for the patient to deny her paralysis In this hypothesis, . in which the self-deceived per- son has contradictory beliefs. The evidence comes from the study of delusions. self-deception: the normal and the pathological. admitting their paralysis (Ramachandran self-deception: the normal and the pathological 274 and Blakeslee 1998; Cocchini et al. 2002). Clearly, the knowledge