To thine own self deceive

Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution points to a discussion of a German study: "The road to the unconscious self not taken: Discrepancies between self- and observer-inferences about implicit dispositions from nonverbal behavioural cues" published in European Journal of Personality. The abstract:

To what extent can individuals gain insight into their own or another person's implicit dispositions' We investigated whether self-perceivers versus neutral observers can detect implicit dispositions from nonverbal behavioural cues contained in video feedback (cue validity) and whether these cues are in turn used as a valid basis for explicit dispositional inferences (cue utilization). Across three studies in the domains of extraversion and anxiety we consistently obtained reliable cue validity and cue utilization for neutral observers but not for self-perceivers. An additional measure of state inferences in Study 3 showed that one reason for the lack of mediation in self-perceivers is their reluctance to use their state inferences as a basis for more general trait inferences. We conclude that people have a blind spot

with respect to the nonverbal behavioural manifestations of their unconscious selves, even though neutral observers may readily detect and utilize this information for dispositional inferences.
The basic premise is the inability of people to accurately perceive themselves, in particular when it conflicts with their previous conception of self. This reminds me of a study outlined at the BBC "Spot the Fake Smile". The basic premise there is that people have a very hard time to identify fake smiles versus real ones, and that it may even be beneficial that we wrongly precieve others as genuinely happy and friendly, even if we now deep down that they are unhappy or even lying to us. So not only do we deceive ourselves about ourselves, but also about others, but maybe that's not always a bad thing.