Self-persuasion does not imply self-deception

Abstract

Existing theory argues that the “self-persuasion” effect, whereby individuals who are incentivized to persuade others adjust their own beliefs to align with their persuasion goals, is a consequence of self-deception stemming from the motive to persuade others. Here, we propose an alternative explanation: we argue that self-persuasion may arise through simply being preferentially exposed to goal-aligned arguments. We then provide empirical evidence supporting our alternative account using pre-registered experiments in which participants were assigned to either an incentivized persuasion task or an incentivized summary task. Both our Study 1 (N = 1609) and Study 2 (N = 2399) found an equal level of self-persuasion in both task conditions. Furthermore, in Study 2, completing a summary task before the persuasion task significantly reduced the subsequent self-persuasion effect (five times less self-persuasion). Together, these results suggest that the “self-persuasion” effect is not actually driven by a motive to persuade. Instead, self-persuasion appears to arise simply due to exposure to goal-aligned information. These findings challenge the conventional wisdom, suggesting that (1) self-deception is not the primary mechanism behind self-persuasion; and (2) when leveraging the self-persuasion effect as a persuasion technique, the motive to persuade is not essential.