Self-deception and impaired categorization of anomaly

One hundred and forty community volunteers were prescreened for upper and lower quartile scores using the Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding [BIDR; Paulhus, D.L. (1988). Assessing self-deception and impression management in self-reports: The Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding. Unpublished manual. Vancouver, British Columbia; University of British Columbia, Measurement and control of response bias. In J. P. Robinson, P. R. Shaver, & L. Wrightsman (Eds.), Measures of personality and social-psychological attitudes (pp. 17–59). San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 1991], and classified into stable High (n=14) and Low (n=15) self-deception groups using the Self-Deceptive Enhancement subscale of the BIDR. Participants identified normal and anomalous computer-displayed playing cards [following Bruner, J. & Postman, L. (1949). Journal of Personality, 18, 206–223], presented for short ( 16 ms), then increasingly longer durations. High and low self-deceivers identified the normal cards equally rapidly. Highs, however, took twice as many trials as lows (M=11.21, S.D.=9.65, vs. M=5.00, S.D.=3.87) to identify the anomalous card correctly twice (t [16.85] corrected for unequal VARIANCES = −2.25, P=0.019, one-tailed). Self-deception thus appears associated with impaired categorization of anomaly.