The Neural Basis of Self Deception

The Neural Basis of Self Deception1Being adaptively wrongIn a vacuum, perception should evolve to be increasingly accurateSelection pressure on deceptionThus, pressure to detect deceptionAdaptive to believe your own deception2Self-deception for self-enhancementNon-specific self-deceptionGain social influence by bolstering individuals self image/self confidenceHowever, even if self enhancement is adaptive overall, sometimes it will cause maladaptive behavior

3HypothesesTo be adaptive, self-enhancing views must be believed by the individualThus, people (and animals) should act on these self-enhanced beliefs as if they were trueEven if the consequences might be maladaptive4Key initial questionsDo people create self-enhancing images that they truly believe?5

6Epley and Whitchurch (2008)

7Epley 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. 8Our proposed fMRI experimentAdaptation of Epley and Whitchurch (2008)Take multiple photographs of participants at initial sessionAlso measure self esteem (implicit and explicit) and other variables.Morph the photographs to be 20% more or less attractive (experimenter too)9First fMRI Task

10Second fMRI Task

11Brain response to the self-faceUddin et al. (2005)

12Brain response to the self-face

What would we expect?In the implicit condition, response peaks should be shifted toward attractive faces. This shift should correspond to reaction time data.Its possible wed also find implicit self esteem correlated with this pattern of activation.14What 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 activation15IssuesHard 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 attractivenessNature of me vs other judgement may make it hard to look at experimenter face activity as a control16Behavioural experimentsVarying peoples beliefs that self-enhancing views will be relevant to interpersonal interactions in the near future. Does this elicit biased information gathering?17Potential designsUsing 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.18