Katia Franco is an associate professor in the department of philosophy at California State University, Chico.
A post by Katia Franco
Trust is a fragile thing, especially when it comes to trust in ourselves. Knowing as much as we do about ourselves, having to evaluate the constantly incoming evidence about our own trustworthiness, self-trust is a difficult task to manage. More to the point, trust in ourselves is particularly fragile because it hinges on a delicate issue at the intersection of ethics and psychology: self-deception.
Unlike with interpersonal deception, when one person intentionally misleads another, there is no agreement as to whether self-deception is an intentional act. In fact, the currently dominant view is that self-deception is an understandable and unintentional psychological response to a difficult situation (Bach 1997, Barnes 1997, Johnston 1988, Mele 2001). Under intense psychological pressure, such as anxiety or a strong desire for something to be the case, it makes sense that we might (unintentionally) come to believe something that does not align with the evidence – a sort of self-preservation response. For example, one might be often irritated by someone, and under the psychological pressure to view themselves as a good person, they might misidentify the source of their irritation to be that other person’s bad behavior, rather than the fact that such behavior reminds them of their own bad behavior.
Since it’s unclear that this is something we do intentionally – and even if it were intentional, it’s unclear that it would be a sign of ill will towards oneself – we struggle to morally evaluate self-deception. No matter how understandable (or acceptable, or excusable, or even rational) self-deception may be, it nonetheless stems from and propagates a sense of uncertainty about one’s own intentions towards oneself. This uncertainty is the source of the fragility of trust in ourselves.
One way to resolve the uncertainty that undermines trust in ourselves is to question the moral acceptability (or the excusability, or the rationality) of self-deception. Since this is already being debated (e.g. Barnes 1997, Mele 2001, Levy 2004, Nelkin 2012), I’d like to explore a different direction. A different way to resolve the uncertainty that undermines trust in ourselves is to exercise our imagination. In particular, exercising our imagination can help us be more honest with ourselves, thereby putting us in a better position of reasonably viewing ourselves as trustworthy.
There are two ways in which imagination can help. First, imagination can help us is in identifying possible self-deceptions. Self-deception is not undetectable to oneself: it does leave a trace, since self-deception does not completely remove the psychological pressure and discomfort that gave rise to it, but rather relocates their perceived source. In the earlier example, one still feels consistently irritated by a particular person, and this remaining psychological discomfort can be a clue that imagination can help. Exercising our imagination is part of how we come up with options for action (Kind 2020a), and entertaining self-deception as a possible explanation for the discomfort is the first step towards eliminating it by being honest with oneself.
Thinking of imagining as a way of being honest comes from the perspective (most naturally occupied by artists, psychologists, and therapists) on which we usually distort reality to some degree, if not routinely engage in self-deception. If we entertain such a starting point, then exercising our imagination becomes a necessary first step in freeing ourselves from the habit of distorting reality. We need to imagine things to be different from how we take them to be – ourselves to be different, people and things around us to be different – in order to allow the reality to get through our self-imposed veil of distortion and self-deception.
In cognitive psychology, there is a recognition that there are certain automatic thoughts we have that are directed exclusively at ourselves, as part of a self-monitoring system, rather than as something that comes up in a conversational mode, which makes them harder to spot (Beck 1976, 1991). These automatic thoughts often distort reality – “I am worthless”, “I can’t do anything right”, “I am unlovable” – in ways that can be difficult to detect through introspection except in very particular circumstances. Thus, honesty becomes not only the means of correcting one’s self-image, but a therapeutic target in itself, as protection against your valued goals being hijacked by these automatic difficult-to-detect thoughts (Gorlin 2023). Exercising our imagination, then, can be an important way in which we engage with reality, as unusual as it might sound.
Some see art itself as engaging our imagination to create a space for honesty, which they see as a link to empathy and personal transformation (Ibrahimovic and Kane 2021). “When we play and use our imaginations,” Ibrahimovic and Kane summarize, “we are relaxed, open to what might come up for us, might arrive, explore alternative possibilities. We are more likely to be honest with ourselves and others” (p.8). This way of engaging our imagination as a way of being more honest with ourselves seems similar to how cognitive-behavioral therapists look to imagination to engage their clients with reality.
Thus, entertaining the possibility that we are engaging in self-deception, imagining how it might affect us and how our lives might be instead, if we were honest, might be the most effective way of identifying and eliminating psychological pressure and discomfort, rather than merely temporarily easing it. In our example, being consistently irritated by someone might initially feel like a less stressful response than dealing with reminders of one’s own bad behavior, but this is not ultimately the case. Self-deception is not a full-blooded solution but rather a pressured response to an issue, and imagining that to be the case helps us shed the need for self-deception and be honest instead.
Having said that, imagining that we might be engaging in self-deception is easier said than done, which is why the second way in which exercising our imagination can help is to make honesty with ourselves more salient as an option. Imagining being honest with ourselves can take many forms: imagining what we might be honest about, how it might feel, what consequences it might have, how it would affect our daily lives, which events such honesty might prevent or bring about, how others might think of us, etc. Sweeping and vague or focused and detailed, imagining being honest need not be a sober attempt to make whatever we’re imagining fit the world as it actually is as closely as possible (an “instructive use” of imagination, Kind 2020a). It can be a wild and fantastical flight of fancy, where being honest with oneself is easy, comes naturally, and involves no hurt feelings (a “transcendent use” of imagination, Kind 2020a). Simply imagining being honest with ourselves, in any way, can help us bring it about, because it makes this possibility more salient or available to us.
As Tversky and Kahneman (1973) have shown, the ease with which certain events or scenarios come to mind – their “availability” to our mind – is sometimes interpreted by us to be a sign of its frequency or probability. What’s more, the associative bonds between the ease with which something comes to mind and its probability are strengthened by repetition. To paraphrase from Harris (2000), mental availability increases subjective likelihood; that is, the more we think about something, the more likely we think it will happen. So, the more we think about being honest with ourselves, the more available this possibility will become.
Making honesty with ourselves more available is an important step in increasing our chances of actually being more honest with ourselves, especially when we think of imagination as a skill (Kind 2020b). Skills that can be learned, practiced, and improved benefit greatly from mental practice that involves imagination with mental imagery in particular. This improvement due to mental imagery is better known in the case of motor skills (e.g. Jeannerod 1994, Fridland 2021), but I see no reason to expect that imagining oneself being honest would be any different, especially if we are visually imagining some of the motor components of it, like saying certain things, or acting in a particular way. This seems particularly helpful in our example, in that one might imagine abandoning one’s own bad behavior and acting differently in specific circumstances, so that one is no longer irritated by someone’s else bad behavior because it is no longer a reminder of one’s own. The more we imagine being honest with ourselves, whatever form it takes, the more available this possibility becomes, the likelier we are to act that way, and the more skilled at it we become.
Thinking of imagination as a skill, the practice of which can make us more honest with ourselves and better connect us with reality of who we are can sound at odds with the flat-footed stereotype of (perhaps over-active) imagination being the skill at the heart of lying and further departure from reality. But if imagination is a skill, then it can be used either with good intentions or otherwise, and it can be equally effective either way, in proportion to the skillfulness of its user. As we exercise our imagination in the pursuit of greater honesty with ourselves, we can put ourselves in a better position of reasonably viewing ourselves as trustworthy, counteracting the fragility of trust in ourselves.
References
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Barnes, A. 1997. Seeing through Self-Deception. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Beck, A. T. 1976. Cognitive therapy and the emotional disorders. International University Press.
Beck, A.T. 1991. Cognitive therapy: A 30-year retrospective. American psychologist, 46(4), 368-375.
Fridland, E. 2021. Skill and strategic control. Synthese 199, 5937–5964.
Gorlin, E.I. 2023. Changing for real, not just for pretend: a proposed framework for understanding and therapeutically promoting self-honesty. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/dsj8z
Harris, P. L. 2000. The work of the imagination. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
Ibrahimovic, J. and Kane, C. 2021. Fostering Honesty, Disruption and Exploration: Starting points.
Jeannerod, M. 1994. The representing brain: Neural correlates of motor intention and imagery. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 17(2), 187–202.
Johnston, M. 1988. Self-Deception and the Nature of Mind. In B. McLaughlin and A. O. Rorty (eds.), Perspectives on Self-Deception. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Kind, A. 2020a. What imagination teaches. In E. Lambert and J. Schwenkler (Eds.), Becoming someone new: Essays on transformative experience, choice, and change. Oxford University Press. 133-146.
Kind, A., 2020b. The skill of imagination. In E. Fridland and C. Pavese (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Skill and Expertise. Routledge. 335-346.
Levy, N. 2004. Self-Deception and Moral Responsibility. Ratio (new series), 17: 294–311.
Mele, A. 2001. Self-Deception Unmasked. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Nelkin, D. 2012. Responsibility and Self-Deception: A Framework. Humana Mente Journal of Philosophical Studies, 20: 117–139.
Tversky, A. and Kahneman, D. 1973. Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability. Cognitive psychology, 5(2), 207-232.