Deception and Self-Deception

Peter Schwardmann and Joel van der Weele
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Joel van der Weele: University of Amsterdam

No 25, Rationality and Competition Discussion Paper Series from CRC TRR 190 Rationality and Competition

Abstract: Why are people so often overconfident? We conduct an experiment to test the hypothesis that people become overconfident to more effectively persuade or deceive others. After performing a cognitively challenging task, half of our subjects are informed that they can earn money by convincing others of their superior performance. The privately elicited beliefs of informed subjects are significantly more confident than the beliefs of subjects in the control condition. By generating exogenous variation in confidence with a noisy performance signal, we are also able to show that higher confidence indeed makes subjects more persuasive in the subsequent face-to-face interactions.

Keywords: Overconfidence; self-deception; motivated cognition; persuasion; deception (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D03 D83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-03-23
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp and nep-hpe
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (60)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Deception and Self-Deception (2016)
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