Content area
Full Text
In 1989, Leonard Berkowitz and Patricia Devine argued that Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance had come, largely for reasons having little to do with its virtues, to be abandoned or ignored by investi- gators in social psychology.1 One consequence of this, they suggested, was that researchers "studying some of the most important effects it could have been used to predict" and to explicate, simply "overlooked" any role that might have been played by dissonance.2 A few years later, Elliot Aronson, a student of Festinger and one of the pioneers of disso- nance theory, made a similar point, noting that Lord, Ross, and Lepper's then (and now) classic study3 on the biased assimilation of evidence "is easily derivable from dissonance theory," pointing out that Festinger had made the "identical prediction" in A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. 4 Of late, though, social psychological work in the dissonance tradition is un- dergoing something of a renascence, and in this essay I try to make the case that if we opt for a deflationist5 account of self-deception, we would do well to remedy, or at least to re-examine, the relative current absence of dissonance and dissonance reduction in our understanding of the motivational basis and nature of the process of self-deception.
In particular, I'll argue that the appeal to dissonance and dissonance reduction can assist us in providing a fully satisfying explanation of how the self-deceiver's inquiry is itself motivated. One of the striking features of central cases of self-deception - features that a traditionalist6 about the phenomenon is apt to exploit - is the apparently strategic nature of the subject's inquiry. A self-deceiver often, for example, displays remarkable credulity and resistance in her effort to settle a question of the form "p or not-p?" Evidence that strikes us as pathetically nonprobative is frequently regarded by the self-deceiver as a sufficient basis upon which to settle her question. Why should this be so? How is it that one's evidentiary standards come, in motivated fashion, to be lowered? Moreover, in other circumstances, self-deceivers resist the import of data, data that strike us as obviously sufficient for the settling of the question. Indeed, very often we can "rub the noses" of self-deceivers in what we take to be the truth,...