Abstract:  The current study aim to explore the research methods, generational origins, cognitive mechanism and some problems to be solved of self-deception in this filed. Recently, researches have found that self-deception have three different ways of definition based on its motivational characteristics, and most psychologists paid more attention to the third definition. On the research methods about self-deception, the most applicable questionnaire was Self-Deceptive Enhancement (SDE), and the most operational classical paradigm was Dot-Tracking Task. Research results revealed that the direct motivation of self-deception was to adjust psychological state at any period of cognitive process, so it’s possible to prevent self-deception by changing the individual psychological states or promoting to hazily perceive things. Future studies should focus on how to adjust the psychological states of an individual for better to utilize self-deception, and adopted the dot-tracking task to explore the time course, cognitive mechanism and neural basis of self-deception by combining the event-related potential and fMRI.

Key words:  self-deception, research methods, psychological states, cognitive mechanism