Controversies in the psychological literature abound when it comes to intrapsychic phenomena, and self-deception is no exception. Self-deception is naturally difficult to measure, because it is difficult to discern whether a person is unconsciously aware of the truth or not. It is even more difficult to distinguish it from other mental distortions, particularly cognitive dissonance. This essay provides an overview of several theories that define self-deception and that may shed light on the connection between self-deception and cognitive dissonance. Ultimately, this article will conclude that self-deception is a process that arises from cognitive dissonance and contains additional motivation beyond reducing psychological discomfort. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay To begin, let's look at a theory that posits that self-deception evolved as a psychological defense mechanism against an unpleasant world. This theory, constructed by Hippel and Trivers (2011), proposes that self-deception provides an evolutionary advantage by allowing an individual to deceive others by minimizing signals that would betray their deception. Deception of others can have enormous benefits for the deceiver, while placing the deceived person in a position where the cost of a false accusation would be high. Thus, by attenuating or eliminating signals that would reveal conscious deception, those who engage in self-deception gain an evolutionary advantage. Additionally, self-deception allows a person to reduce the cognitive load of deception, because they do not need to keep both the known truth and the deception in their mind. Hippel and Trivers identify several methods of information processing bias that could have helped develop this advantage and contributed to self-deception. Hippel and Trivers study four information processing biases: biased information seeking, interpretation biases, memorization errors, and rationalization. People can avoid encountering a truth that is inconsistent with their goals (an example of such a goal would be to retain one's existing beliefs) by stopping a search before reaching that information, seeking only information that is consistent with their objective, or by only attending to the information they want to see. These are all examples of confirmation bias and contribute to self-deception through biased information seeking. It is also possible to have a biased interpretation of data even when information regarding two opposing camps is presented by engaging in selective skepticism of the data that does not coincide with the initial belief. The third information processing bias, memorization errors, can arise through a self-enhanced recall bias, meaning that it is easier to remember positive actions the self has performed than actions negative. This could contribute to the evolutionary advantage of self-deception in the general sense; a person has a social advantage if he can convince others that he is better than he really is, and it is easier to convince others if one is convinced that he really is better. Likewise, rationalizing the motivations behind a behavior could also have a benefit by creating the narrative that a person's bad behavior was unintentional or stemmed from a reasonable motive, so that the person maintains a positive light on eyes of society. Hippel and Trivers include intheir discussion of the evolutionary development of self-deception that, although it probably originally developed as an advantage in deceiving others, the positive feeling it arouses toward oneself could have led to the use of self-deception outside of situations in which others are also deceived. This secondary form of self-deception that is only beneficial to oneself and not socially advantageous is incredibly similar to what cognitive dissonance describes. Although Hippel and Trivers do not explicitly mention cognitive dissonance, they characterize a form of self-deception that is easily linked to Festinger's (1957) original theory. Cognitive dissonance theory explains how people attempt to reduce the psychological discomfort of unjustified behavior by changing their attitude. Self-deception may result from this reduction of cognitively dissonant thoughts through the motivation to maintain a belief about oneself, such as the belief that one is rational or consistent. This motivation could lead someone to not only reevaluate their attitudes, but also to self-deceive about their actual behavior or original motivations. Khalil (2017) directly disagrees with Hippel and Trivers' characterization of self-deception and attempts to systematically distinguish self-deception. from any other self-distortion, including cognitive dissonance. Khalil critiques the evolutionary explanation proposed by Hippel and Trivers by refuting the idea that self-deception is ultimately beneficial; he cites two main ways in which self-deception does not seem to lead to an advantageous outcome. First, Khalil cites studies that have shown that others are better able to assess when a person is deceiving themselves than the person initiating the deception, potentially undermining the advantage that self-deception deception has to also deceive others. Second, self-deception often leads to self-destructive behavior by convincing oneself that the behavior is actually beneficial. Khalil insists that this runs counter to an evolutionary advantageous understanding of self-deception. Although he does not offer an explanation as to the origin of self-deception, Khalil provides an elaborate definition of self-deception. He defines self-deception as follows: “For an agent to commit self-deception, he must first be aware ex ante, at a deep level, that a decision is not optimal. Second, the agent must invent a “fact” or an ad hoc reconstruction of the facts to make the decision seem optimal. That is, a person self-deceives when they know in advance that a decision will not be in their best interest and then construct a fact or revise existing facts to make the decision appear better than it actually is. This definition of self-deception logically runs counter to the theory of evolutionary advantage by including only deceptions that result in suboptimal decision-making. Khalil further explains what he believes is defined as "self-deception" by differentiating it from cognitive dissonance. The main distinction proposed in Khalil's article between cognitive dissonance and self-deception is the need for ex post justification, ex post justification, or vindication. based on actual results rather than predictions, is necessary for self-deception but not for cognitive dissonance. Khalil states that "reducing cognitive dissonance is understood as 'bridging' the painful gap between material utility and ethical utility." The painful gap is that emotional discomfort associated with cognitive dissonance. Self-deception is a distortion of the facts surrounding,10001354