Self-Deceptive Decision Making: Normative And Descriptive Insights

Computational modeling of human belief maintenance and decision-making processes has become increasingly important for a wide range of applications. The authors present a framework for modeling the psychological phenomenon of self deception in a decision-theoretic framework. Specifically, The authors model the self-deceptive behavior of wishful thinking as a psychological bias towards the belief in a particularly desirable situation or state. By leveraging the structures and axioms of Expected Utility (EU) Theory the authors are able to operationalize both the determination and the application of the desired belief state with respect to the decision-making process of expected utility maximization.