Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences, Brown University, Box 1978, Providence, RI 02912, USA.
Cognition. 2010 May;115(2):268-81. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2009.12.017. Epub 2010 Jan 25.
The paper sets out to reveal conditions enabling diagnostic self-deception, people's tendency to deceive themselves about the diagnostic value of their own actions. We characterize different types of self-deception in terms of the distinction between intervention and observation in causal reasoning. One type arises when people intervene but choose to view their actions as observations in order to find support for a self-serving diagnosis. We hypothesized that such self-deception depends on imprecision in the environment that allows leeway to represent one's own actions as either observations or interventions. Four experiments tested this idea using a dot-tracking task. Participants were told to go as quickly as they could and that going fast indicated either above-average or below-average intelligence. Precision was manipulated by varying the vagueness in feedback about performance. As predicted, self-deception was observed only when feedback on the task used vague terms rather than precise values. The diagnosticity of the feedback did not matter.
本文旨在揭示能够产生诊断性自我欺骗的条件，即人们倾向于在自身行为的诊断价值上自欺欺人。我们根据因果推理中干预和观察的区别，对不同类型的自我欺骗进行了特征描述。当人们进行干预但选择将自己的行为视为观察时，就会产生一种自我欺骗，以便为自我服务的诊断找到支持。我们假设，这种自我欺骗取决于环境的不精确性，这种不精确性允许人们将自己的行为表示为观察或干预。四个实验使用点跟踪任务来检验这一观点。参与者被告知尽可能快地行动，而快速行动表明智力高于平均水平或低于平均水平。通过改变关于表现的反馈的模糊性来操纵精度。正如预测的那样，只有当任务反馈使用模糊术语而不是精确值时，才会出现自我欺骗。反馈的诊断性并不重要。
