Scholars from many disciplines have investigated selfdeception, but defining self-deception and establishing its possible benefits have been a matter of heated debate — a debate impoverished by a relative lack of empirical research. Drawing on recent research, we first classify three distinct definitions of self-deception, ranging from a view that selfdeception is synonymous with positive illus...

With Internet censorship on the rise around the world, a variety of tools have proliferated to assist Internet users to circumvent such censorship. However, there are few studies examining the implications of censorship circumvention under international law, and its related politics. This paper aims to help fill some of that void, with an examination of case studies wherein global communication...

Immigrant versus Native Businesswomen: Proclivity and Performance Career positions in German economic life are still male-dominated, and the driving forces behind success are not yet well understood. This paper contributes to a better understanding by classifying success stories in self-employment and business careers, and by investigating differences between native women (both from West and Ea...

The self-discrepancy between one’s actual self and one’s ideal self, which is associated with negative emotional states (e.g., depression) or unhealthy lifestyles (e.g., eating disorders), is mostly caused and intensified by exposure to unrealistic images of others (e.g., celebrities or magazine models). Drawing from regulatory focus theory, the current study examines whether creating self-rese...

Most people believe that they know themselves better than anyone else knows them. However, a complete picture of what a person is like requires both the person’s own perspective and the perspective of others who know him or her well. People’s perceptions of their own personalities, while largely accurate, contain important omissions. Some of these blind spots are likely due to a simple lack of ...

Throughout the 1990s the debates about human rights and development have increasingly converged. The article asks whether the emerging human rights-based approach to development, honed in the period of revisionist neo-liberalism, can deliver meaningful improvements to the African crisis? It begins by outlining the evolution of the rights-based development agenda in order to understand how the p...

This study investigated the mediating effect of self-talk between positive and negative statements made by teachers and students' academic self-concepts (reading, mathematics, and learning) . Participants were 269 students in grades 3-7 at a middle-class, metropolitan, Australian elementary school. A research assistant administered the following instruments: (1) the "Significant Others Statemen...

Von Hippel & Trivers (VH&T) propose that self-deception has evolved to facilitate the deception of others. However, they ignore the subjective moral costs of deception and the crucial issue of credibility in self-deceptive speech. A self-signaling interpretation can account for the ritualistic quality of some self-deceptive affirmations and for the often-noted gap between what self-deceivers sa...

Research and theoretical developments on the theory of cognitive dissonance are reviewed. After considering the self-consistency, self-affirmation, and aversive consequences revisions, the authors review research that has challenged each of the revisions and that supports the original version of the theory. Then, the authors review the action-based model of dissonance, which accepts the origina...

Individuals often imitate each other to fall into the typical group, leading to a self-organized state of typical behaviors in a community. In this paper, we model self-organization in social tagging systems and illustrate the underlying interaction and dynamics. Specifically, we introduce a model in which individuals adjust their own tagging tendency to imitate the average tagging tendency. We...