The Neural Basis of Self Deception

1. The Neural Basis of Self Deception

2. Being adaptively wrong In a vacuum, perception should evolve to be increasingly accurate Selection pressure on deception Thus, pressure to detect deception Adaptive to believe your own deception

3. Self-deception for self-enhancement Non-specific self-deception Gain social influence by bolstering individual’s self image/self confidence However,even if self enhancement is adaptive overall, sometimes it will cause maladaptive behavior

4. Hypotheses To be adaptive, self-enhancing views must be believed by the individual Thus, people (and animals) should act on these self-enhanced beliefs as if they were true Even if the consequences might be maladaptive

5. Key initial questions Do people create self-enhancing images that they truly believe?

7. Epley and Whitchurch (2008)

8. Epley and Whitchurch (2008) Authors suggest that people may indeed be internalizing their self-enhanced images of the self to the point where they truly see themselves this way.

9. Our proposed fMRI experiment Adaptation of Epley and Whitchurch (2008) Take multiple photographs of participants at initial session Also measure self esteem (implicit and explicit) and other variables. Morph the photographs to be 20% more or less attractive (experimenter too)

10. First fMRI Task

11. Second fMRI Task

12. Brain response to the self-face Uddin et al. (2005)

13. Brain response to the self-face

14. What would we expect? In the implicit condition, response peaks should be shifted toward attractive faces. This shift should correspond to reaction time data. It’s possible we’d also find implicit self esteem correlated with this pattern of activation.

15. What else? Second half of the experiment more exploratory. Not entirely sure what will show up when task is explicit. Possibility that those whose explicit and implicit self esteem is out of alignment will show a different pattern here. Possibility of other interesting patterns of brain activation

16. Issues Hard to tell exactly what a participant is doing in the fMRI (Devue and Bredart, 2011) Possibility that some brain activation to self over other might be pleasure at own face, which would increase with attractiveness Nature of me vs other judgement may make it hard to look at experimenter face activity as a control

17. Behavioural experiments Varying people’s beliefs that self-enhancing views will be relevant to interpersonal interactions in the near future. Does this elicit biased information gathering?

18. Potential designs Using the morphed facial attractiveness paradigm, could have people ‘familiarise’ themselves with morphed and real self and other faces when they either believe an important opposite-sex interaction is coming up. We could then measure whether people spend more time looking at attractive morphs under motivating conditions. We could also measure whether this increased their performance relative to controls.