Abstract

At least since the French moralists—Montaigne, Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère—it has been a commonplace that people can fool themselves as well as others about their beliefs and motivations. In this article, I consider some mechanisms oftransmutation(deceiving oneself) andmisrepresentation(deceiving others), and their impact on behavior. (I refer to these collectively astransformations.) I argue that deception and self-deception are not merely ex post rationalizations of behavior whose real motive and explanation are found elsewhere, but that they have independent causal and explanatory power. If people, that is, did not fool themselves or others about why they do what they do they would act differently. The reason is that deception and self-deception take place underconstraintsthat prevent us from offering totally opportunistic or self-serving rationalizations of what we do. There is aconsistency constraintthat is induced by the costs of being seen (by oneself or others) as offering inconsistent justifications for one's behavior, and animperfection constraintdiat is induced by the costs of being seen (by oneself or others) as offering justifications that are too blatantly self-serving.