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Alchemies of the Mind: Transmutation and Misrepresentation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 February 2009

Jon Elster
Jon Elster
Affiliation:
Columbia University
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Extract

At least since the French moralists—Montaigne, Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère—it has been a commonplace that people can fool themselves as well as others about their beliefs and motivations. In this article, I consider some mechanisms of transmutation (deceiving oneself) and misrepresentation (deceiving others), and their impact on behavior. (I refer to these collectively as transformations.) I argue that deception and self-deception are not merely ex post rationalizations of behavior whose real motive and explanation are found elsewhere, but that they have independent causal and explanatory power. If people, that is, did not fool themselves or others about why they do what they do they would act differently. The reason is that deception and self-deception take place under constraints that prevent us from offering totally opportunistic or self-serving rationalizations of what we do. There is a consistency constraint that is induced by the costs of being seen (by oneself or others) as offering inconsistent justifications for one's behavior, and an imperfection constraint diat is induced by the costs of being seen (by oneself or others) as offering justifications that are too blatantly self-serving.

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Articles
Information
Legal Theory , Volume 3 , Issue 2: Special Issue: Rationality , June 1997 , pp. 133 - 176
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1997

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86. Thus, upon the announcement on July 2, 1938, of the arrival of a British emissary, “Hitler started up and said: ‘Gott im Himmel! Don't let him in yet I'm still in a good humor.’ He then proceeded, in front of his staff, to work himself up until his face darkened, he was breathing heavily, and his eyes were glazed.” Bullock, A., Hitler and Stalin 571 (1991).Google Scholar

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