Consider a person who is deceiving others.  He/she will begin to reveal signs pointing to this insincerity.  Self-deception allows someone to believe his/her own deceit.  As a result, he/she will not show signs of being dishonest.  He/she will appear to be telling the truth.

Often people mislead themselves into believing something that they do not want to be true.  Alfred Mele called this “twisted” self-deception.  It can be very destructive, and it could become a self-fulfilling prophesy.  Imagine a person who believes he/she is going to fail.  That person may begin to fear this failure.  These fears will give rise to actions in the person that might actually cause him/her to fail.

Robert Merton wrote that the “self-fulfilling prophecy is, in the beginning, a false definition of the situation evoking a new behavior which makes the original false conception come ‘true’. This specious validity of the self-fulfilling prophecy perpetuates a reign of error. For the prophet will cite the actual course of events as proof that he was right from the very beginning.”

Also related is reverse wishful thinking.  This is when a person believes that because something is bad, it is likely to happen.  (One could reduce this to pessimism.)  The person anticipates the worst possible outcome.  He/she prepares for it, waits for it, and oftentimes fears it.  Much like twisted self-deception begetting a self-fulfilling prophesy, reverse wishful thinking can have devastating results.

Some will argue that self-deception proves that humanity is superior to other living creatures because we actually have the ability to lie to ourselves.  The act is an abstraction or cogitation.  The process of creating fiction can only occur in creatures with brains intricate enough to permit this kind of thinking.

Yet when I see a house-cat free from duties and responsibilities, lethargically spending hours on a windowsill without the threat of betrayal or the capacity for dejection, I begin to wonder which of us really is the more admirable species.