how do we know if we're lying to ourselves?

Fight Club (1999)

We are all lying to ourselves, at least sometimes.

We all have an idea of the people we want to be, and then we have the people we are. It seems unlikely that those two things are always in sync, and we are prone to revisionism when they are not. We manufacture reasons to believe we have been deeply wronged to justify lashing out because of petty frustrations. We tell ourselves we are staying in bad relationships because we are happy, not because we are afraid of change.

Self-deception precludes the vulnerability and honesty necessary to form meaningful, healthy connections. It skews our judgments while pursuing our Good Life, whether through inducing complacency or overconfidence. And perhaps most importantly, it prevents us from actually becoming the people we want to be.

Sometimes, after time has passed, we can retrospectively realize our self-deception. But in the moment, it’s often hard to separate the truth of how we “fundamentally” feel from the emotions we can induce in ourselves through what’s essentially self-gaslighting. And self-gaslighting is remarkably effective when the fiction is one we want to believe.

Perhaps you could invoke Bayes. You could recognize that someone with a hypothetical Undesirable Attitude would be likely to convince themselves they have the Desirable Attitude, so thinking that you have the Desirable Attitude shouldn’t significantly update your beliefs in its truth. This itself isn’t that useful, but you could combine this with some outside view reasoning, where you look for examples of how most people in similar situations to yours feel to get a sense of the base rate.

…Except then you’d have to account for other people’s self-reporting bias which suffers from the same unreliability. Also, you might get a lot of false positives, where you genuinely had a statistically unlikely Desirable Attitude but concluded it was self-deception.

It seems, then, that we need another signal that can add precision to our introspection. And that signal is as follows: we are more likely to be lying to ourselves when we are engaging in internal monologue.

An internal monologue is the experience of having concrete, “narration-style” thoughts as opposed to passive experiences. This argument maybe doesn’t apply to people with a constant internal monologue, or those who have none. But it seems like most people’s internal lives are some combination of subconscious thought and active monologue: most of our day-to-day moments are spent instinctively receiving and reacting to external stimuli, but in certain moments — e.g. when faced with difficult choices that require serious deliberation — our thoughts morph into something that resembles language as we try to articulate our feelings and ask ourselves questions.

Internal monologuing treats the self as a subject for discourse. The act of thinking in words is an act of talking to yourself — an act that separates your consciously-rationalizing self from the tangle of emotions that forms the foundation for who you are.

“Girl Before a Mirror” (1932)

This is more likely to happen when there’s a divergence between your actual feelings and what you want your feelings to be. Consider a situation where you correctly believed you had romantic feelings for someone. The phenomenal experience of attraction would be easy and wordless: it’s a happy nervous flutter in your chest, memories of their smile lingering in your mind, fantasies of you together occupying your imagination. You might have monologue-thoughts about whether it would be appropriate to date them, or whether or not they reciprocate, but the descriptive thought “I am attracted to them” would rarely cross your mind.

Now consider a situation where you had romantic feelings for someone and mistakenly convinced yourself that it was platonic. Your mind would be reaching for the unintuitive conclusion (given your true feelings). Hence, it needs to articulate an explanation that is painstakingly precise, threading the needle between fiction and reality, that your subconscious has a chance of believing. Painstakingly precise justifications involve more careful use of language which can only be delivered through internal monologue.

Also, you will internally monologue more often in the dishonest case. Because your mind needs to override your feelings with force, each romantic fantasy your mind conjures needs to be followed by a conscious justification or platonic interpretation. Eventually your heart might even come to believe it, but the maintenance of that deception disproportionately involves such narration. No daydreams of “platonic fantasies” are springing to your mind, so all you are left with are the thoughts you tell yourself.

In other words, when you lie to yourself, your voice rings in your ears.

So when we notice our thoughts getting closer and closer towards materializing into words, that’s a good signal for us to be suspicious of self-deception. Of course, this is only one signal among many, and we should use context clues to narrow down situations more at risk of self-deception than others. Am I facing an emotionally charged situation where I would really not want to have the Undesirable Attitude? From an outsider’s perspective, does it seem plausible that I could have the Undesirable Attitude that I’m denying? These factors all can help us identify situations where it is most relevant to look for self-deception to begin with.

With that being said, there’s two problems worth addressing:

Problem #1: Omitted variable bias (or, “people actually have difficult feelings in hard situations”)

Self-deception is likely in emotionally charged situations. However, emotionally-charged situations are also likely to involve messy and complex honest feelings that require careful thought — and thus internal narration — to understand. This problematic correlation can weaken the reliability of the internal monologue signal.

To illustrate, imagine you snap at your partner in a moment of frustration, causing them to confront you. That is a high-stakes situation where you have incentives to self-deceive so you feel justifiable to your partner. But simultaneously, that is also a case where you probably do have complicated feelings that had been latently simmering for a while that would require intentional unpacking. So when the internal monologue happens, how do you know which case you’re in?

The answer to this puzzle lies in the previous discussion of frequency. Self-deception requires more constant internal narration to maintain. So start by accepting whatever conclusion you’ve come to for the time being; if the conclusion is dishonest, your mind will be unable to passively exist with it —- and instead, you’ll be repeating your self-justification back to yourself when you’re lying awake at night.

Problem #2: The self-defeating trap

Someone (perhaps a Kantian!) could point out that the strategy also faces an executional problem: checking for an internal monologue is self-defeating because the act of checking causes you to internally monologue.

This is because self-evaluation necessitates deliberate meta-thinking (i.e. thinking about thinking). When you do this self-checking, you’re no longer passively feeling; you’re asking yourself what was I feeling? / how was I feeling it? and in that process, you put words to your experiences.

Or, alternatively, think of it as asking someone to not imagine a pink elephant and having one immediately jump to mind. The moment I start wondering, am I thinking consciously right now?, my thoughts immediately materialize into words. This can muddy your self-analysis, where it becomes difficult to distinguish your recognition of your current narration from whether or not you’ve been having it the entire time.

So what now? Well, this explanation of the problem makes it seem a bit more real than it actually is. In reality, the way this self-checking works is that it’s something you realize in the moment the monologue is happening. You’re pacing around in your room, thinking thoughts and working yourself into agitation, and then you are hit with a bolt of clarity and realize oh shit I’m monologuing to myself. There is no time-lag between the experience of monologuing and the self-assessment. If anything, a cloudy impression of a time lag should probably be a sign that you weren’t consciously thinking thoughts just prior.

But in case the self-defeating argument is actually a serious concern for some, one solution can be to try describing your feelings out loud. Do the words come more naturally to you than usual? If you’ve already been articulating your feelings to yourself in an internal monologue, you are less likely to struggle to find the right phrasing to verbally describe your emotions. The words will come with the ease of a story you have told many times before — with the first person to receive this particular fiction being yourself.

(Thanks to Ethan Jiang for thoughts on the draft.)