George Ainslie a1 a1 Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Coatesville, PA, 19320
ainslie@coatesville.va.gov
Abstract
“Self-deception” usually occurs when a false
belief would be more rewarding than an objective belief in the short
run, but less rewarding in the long run. Given hyperbolic discounting
of delayed events, people will be motivated in their long-range
interest to create self-enforcing rules for testing reality, and in
their long-range interest to evade these rules. Self-deception, then,
resembles interpersonal deception in being an evasion of rules, but
differs in being a product of intertemporal conflict.
