Abstract
The purpose of this study was to explore the effects of self-control and social status on self-deception. The present study adopted a forward-looking paradigm to investigate how self-control and social status influence self-deception. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to complete 10 questions, after they predicted and completed 40 questions (commonsense judgment materials) either with or without answer hints. The results indicated that the participants had higher predicted scores under conditions with answer hints compared with conditions without answer hints and that the predicted scores were much higher than the actual scores under conditions with answer hints. In Experiment 2, individuals with different self-control traits were chosen to perform the operation and induction of the perception of social status and then complete tests such as Experiment 1. The results showed that differences in the predicted scores between conditions with answer hints and those without answer hints were observed to be greater in individuals with low self-control traits than in individuals with higher self-control traits, however, such differences between individuals with higher and low self-control traits were only observed in conditions with low social status perception, not in the conditions with high social status perception. The findings indicated that compared with individuals with high self-control, low self-control individuals tended to produce more self-deception. In addition, high social status in the individuals’ perception could restrain the influence of low self-control on self-deception, while low social status in the individuals’ perception could increase the self-control’s influence on self-deception.
Highlights
The human brain is incredibly powerful, and it can store, encode, and process massive amounts of information, such as time, space, and even multidimensional concepts
These individuals tend to overestimate their ability and underestimate the role of the answer hints, which maybe lead to self-deception
Procedure In Experiment 1, we found that there was a phenomenon of self-deception under the answer hints condition, so we used this conclusion directly in Experiment 2 to let participants experiment under conditions with answer hints
Summary
The human brain is incredibly powerful, and it can store, encode, and process massive amounts of information, such as time, space, and even multidimensional concepts. Trivers (2011) began to study the concept of self-deception in 1976, after more than 30 years of exploration, he still posited that the study of self-deception was immature. Such research provides many important clues for the study of self-deception, making it possible to explore self-deception (von Hippel and Trivers, 2011). In the field of cognitive psychology, self-deception can often be explained by the motivational theory of self-serving bias. Self-serving bias means that individual who are actuated by some motivation often direct their thoughts toward desirable events or outcomes and away from unsatisfactory events or results (Mcallister et al, 2005). If the participants received good grades, they would overestimate their scores on the exams and believe that they would do well even without answers, which was self-deception based on the motivation of self-promotion (Chance et al, 2011). We wanted to explore the following: What are the factors that affect selfdeception, and how do we better view self-deception?
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