%A ZHONG Luojin, RU Taotao, FAN Meng, MO Lei %T The effect of cognitive vagueness and motivation on conscious and unconscious self-deception %0 Journal Article %D 2019 %J Acta Psychologica Sinica %R 10.3724/SP.J.1041.2019.01330 %P 1330-1340 %V 51 %N 12 %U {https://journal.psych.ac.cn/xlxb/CN/abstract/article_4577.shtml} %8 2019-12-25 %X
Academia has a long discussion of self-deception. Self-deception provides fertile ground for research in biology, philosophy, and psychology. Philosophers theoretically discuss the possibility and conditions of the existence of self-deception. Biologists study the applicability of the self-deception from the evolutionary perspective. Psychologists want to provide empirical evidence for the existence of self-deception. Nevertheless, the presentation of self-deception remains controversial. Therefore, an empirical study of self-deception with direct evidence is required to tackle the existence of self-deception. A large number of studies have investigated the existence of self-deception. The results showed that motivation, external or internal, and cognitive vagueness are the triggers of the existence of self-deception. However, it remains unknown whether self-deceived people believe in their own deception interacts with the effect of cognitive vagueness and motivation on self-deception.
In this paper, we investigate whether self-deceived people believe in their own deception influences the self-deception and moderates the effect of cognitive vagueness and motivation on self-deception. We further propose two forms of self-deception: unconscious and conscious self-deception, where those unconscious self-deceived people believe in their own deception while those conscious self-deceived people do not. As cognitive vagueness and motivation have different effects on the two forms of self-deception, we further investigate whether the two forms of self-deception share the same processing mechanisms.
Following the research paradigm of