Modeling Self-deception within a Decision-Theoretic Framework

Computational modeling of human belief maintenance and decision-making processes has become increasingly important for a wide range of applications. In this paper, we present a framework for modeling the human capacity for self-deception from a decision-theoretic perspective in which we describe processes for determining a desired belief state, the biasing of internal beliefs towards the desired belief state, and the actual decision-making process based upon the integrated biases. Furthermore, we show that in some situations self-deception can be beneficial.