Can a Person Gaslight Themselves?

Motivated reasoning & self-deception

Photo by pawel szvmanski on Unsplash

(Audio version here)

Following my last piece, “What Gaslighting Is And Is Not,” several readers, including two psychiatrists and a psychologist, raised the issue of a large grey area between someone deliberately setting about to make someone else doubt their own accurate perception of reality which they also knew to be a reality (as in the play from which the name comes) and someone simply genuinely having a different opinion and stating it straightforwardly. They questioned whether this might be too black and white and whether, often, motivations might be more complex and the individual who is making another person wonder if they are going insane might know on one level that what they were saying is untrue but on another be deceiving themselves or manipulating rhetoric in the service of a larger cause.

One thoughtful commenter, who is a psychiatrist, said s/he had used the term when teachers at their daughter’s school had attempted to make her parents believe that their daughter, who had a neurodevelopmental disorder, was, in fact, a boy. S/he wrote,

There is a weird middle between honestly believing something is true and deliberately misleading another person about something you both know is not. I really do not believe that they thought my daughter was boy. What I think is that they felt that it was morally correct to affirm her new identity regardless of its veracity. They want to be “good people” so badly that the cognitive dissonance is sort of sublimated. Almost like for them it’s both true and not true at the same time. Can a person gaslight themselves?

Another psychiatrist on X said, “I have had a patient say “I am gaslighting myself.” He was responding to a psychologist pointing out that the concept of ‘gaslighting’ is not a recognised one within psychology or psychiatry but a pop reference. Other people had questioned in various ways how much the intention to make someone else doubt reality or even their sanity matters when that is what it feels like to someone on the receiving end.

I think these commenters raise good points and so I wanted to write a follow-up piece that addressed the issue of intention and this large grey area between calculated malevolent deception and sincere and well-intentioned disagreement.

I think this grey area is made up almost entirely of motivated reasoning and self-deception either for personal or ideological reasons. I am not a psychologist but my observations of humans as a human as well as much research into the subject by cognitive psychologists, social psychologists, evolutionary psychologists and neuroscientists leads me accept that we are, in fact, a species much given to these behaviours. I find Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion to be particularly useful for understanding this. In it, he points out that our reasoning abilities and our language evolved significantly later than our most basic intuitions and that believing things in accordance with our tribe’s narrative has very likely been more beneficial to our survival than believing them because they are true. Consequently, we are a species that acts on intuition first and then rationalises it after the fact and we are also inherently ‘groupish’ in our mindset and beliefs. He describes this as humans having, not an inner scientist, but an inner lawyer.

On a personal level, the impulse to deceive oneself and engage in motivated reasoning can often take the form of fairly mild self-deceptions that affect only oneself - “It’s OK for me to have a second slice of chocolate cake even though I’d like to lose weight because ‘cheat days’ are good psychologically and my lack of success in weight loss is probably due to genetics anyway so it’s pointless to even try”. However, it can also be used to rationalise extreme abuse of other people. “You make me hit you. It’s your own fault. You know I’m stressed and hungry when I get in from work but you’re talking at me about your day and dinner isn’t ready. If you didn’t make me so angry, I wouldn’t hit you.”

The first person is deceiving themselves and using motivated reasoning to do so and they will not succeed in achieving their desired weight until they stop doing so. Concerned friends and family may point this out but ultimately, this is not a moral issue and the individual must make their own decisions about whether to become more self-aware about their eating habits or not. The latter is absolutely a moral issue because they are deceiving themselves and engaging in motivated reasoning to avoid taking responsibility for their abuse of another human being. They’re engaging in psychological abuse that seeks to manipulate someone into believing that their violence is the fault of the victim which is not true. The abuser may well be issuing these justifications because deep down they know their behaviour is very wrong but lack the courage, honesty and empathy for others to face their behaviour head on and change it. They’ll be a danger to other people until they face that and change, and should be held entirely responsible for their behaviour.

When people who have been the victims of such psychological abuse use the term ‘gaslighting’ in such contexts, it probably isn’t very helpful for a random stranger to say, “Well, actually gaslighting refers to a cold and fully conscious manipulation of another person to make them doubt their own sanity as depicted in the play of that name….” The abuse survivor is referring to having been made to doubt their own perception of reality and the effects this psychological abuse has had on their emotional wellbeing. The thought processes of the perpetrator is not and should not be the primary concern of either themselves or the mental health professionals who support them in their recovery.

I, however, am not a mental health professional. I shall leave it to psychologists and psychiatrists to discuss whether this is a useful concept in such scenarios. One psychologist thought not, saying, “Not only does the term gaslighting not come from psychology or psychiatry, it also has nothing to do with “narcissists.” It’s all coming from social media influencers and wannabe influencers chasing online clicks—it has nothing to do with legitimate psychology/psychiatry.” Others agreed with him that such popular discourse was unhelpful to the fields of psychology and psychiatry and the effective treatment of clients. This debate is interesting and relevant to my area of interest which at times includes looking at the use and misuse of psychological concepts around trauma to justify things like trigger warnings, safe spaces and censorship of ideas and language on the grounds that they do psychological harm.

However, I would suggest that this is separate to the concept of gaslighting as used in political discourse to dismiss political opponents as bad faith actors with nefarious motivations, although it does evoke connotations of psychological abuse. For our purposes, I am speaking as a political and cultural commentator looking at the state of political discourse and how we can do it better if we wish to have productive conversations and avoid increasing tribalistic tendencies and polarisation. As these conversations are not that of a therapeutic relationship in which a clinician is in a position to have a strong grasp on what is going on in someone else’s head and their purpose is to help them address that and nobody at all is capable of mindreading, I maintain that accusations of gaslighting are nearly always unhelpful.

This is not to say that there is not also a grey area in political discourse in which someone may be neither consciously and deliberately trying to make somebody else doubt a reality they both know to be a reality nor raising a sincerely held and well-reasoned contrary opinion. Self-deception and motivated reasoning also occur commonly in political and ideological debates. This often occurs when, as the first psychiatrist cited pointed out, somebody truly believes in the moral rightness of their own overall cause and will then manipulate, misrepresent, ignore or engage in sophistry to ignore disconfirming evidence and justify ethical inconsistency when presented with any given scenario that pertains to it. While self-deception and motivated reasoning on a personal level might be described as making excuses and lacking in insight, the same processes on a political or ideological level is probably best understood as apologism and a lack of intellectual honesty.

When I first entered the arena of political and cultural debate, I argued mostly about religion and mostly with highly dogmatic fundamentalist Christians, usually young earth creationists. Because they believed their overall cause to be both factually true and morally right and denying evolution to be central to this, they would engage in some spectacular mental gymnastics to dismiss evidence and engage in sophistry to this end. People who engaged in these arguments alongside me would often refer to this as “lying for Jesus” because it seemed very likely that the creationists knew on one level that their claims were false and their reasoning bad on specific details, but because they were utterly committed to the truth and moral rightness of their end goal, they were willing to engage in whatever form of argumentation would support it. As the psychiatrist said, it was “almost like for them it’s both true and not true at the same time.”

We see this kind of self-deception and motivated reasoning all over the political spectrum and in relation to a variety of ideologies. (Atheists critical of religion are not immune to a spot of strawmanning and point-missing to serve this purpose). We see it when people who have made very strong arguments that no-platforming is a form of censorship when done to their own group then descend to the very same point-missing “You’re not being censored. No-one is entitled to a platform” stance when they wish to prevent speakers they strongly disagree with from being able to speak to people who wish to hear them. We can assume that, on one level, they know that they are making factual claims about what censorship is that are contrary to those they have previously made. Are they gaslighting people who disagree with them in a calculated, deliberate way to make them doubt their own perception of reality which they also see as a reality or are they now seeing reality differently because it suits their end goals?

Similarly, when people who once said that firing people for expressing political views on their own social media accounts represents an authoritarian cancel culture then start reporting people expressing political views they dislike to their employers with a view to getting them fired, surely part of them must recognise that they have gone into a direct reversal on their own previously stated ethical principles. Are they gaslighting those who still believe that this is wrong or do they genuinely believe the difference in views justifies a difference in ethics?

When feminists who claimed that they’d be less fearful of meeting a bear in the woods than a man maintain that Amy Cooper’s call to the police on meeting an angry man in the woods who appeared to be threatening her dog could only be motivated by racism, are they gaslighting her? Do they now believe that women should not be fearful of men or did they not believe they should in the first place? Or are they intersectionals who believe that anti-racism takes precedence over feminism and women can and should adjust their fear responses accordingly?

In all these examples, people certainly seem to be engaging in motivated reasoning but are they consciously aware of this? Are they deliberately gaslighting others by telling them that what they perceive as true or morally right or a helpful intuition are false, morally wrong and a bigoted intuition even though they know this not to be the case? Or are they deceiving themselves too?

I would make a radical suggestion here. For the purposes of improving the state of our interactions on issues of politics and culture, it does not matter. Attempting to mindread whether somebody is being deliberately dishonest about something they really know to be true or right or whether they have succumbed to motivated reasoning that has affected their judgement on what is true or right or whether they are arguing in good faith consistently is almost never helpful. This is partly because unless you know the individual well personally, your judgement will be based on your own biased speculation. It is mostly because in every one of those situations, if you decide the person is worth engaging with (deciding they are not is also perfectly reasonable) the best thing to do is genuinely engage with the ideas being presented.

If someone you disagree with is telling you something is true or morally right and they know it is not but just want to make you doubt your own perception of reality, the best thing to do is engage with them in good faith and show that it is not. Accusing them of gaslighting, even if they are, does not address the issues of what is true or right. Also, your perception that this is what they are doing could be wrong and you lose the opportunity to show them, or anybody else watching that their views are not true or right.

If someone you disagree with is telling you something is true or morally right and they really think it is in the moment but this is because they are deceiving themselves and engaging in motivated reasoning, the best thing to do is engage with them in good faith and and show that it is not. Accusing them of gaslighting will not help them to recognise their inconsistency if they are at all inclined to do so and you also lose the opportunity to show anybody else watching that their views are not true or right and that they are inconsistent.

If someone you disagree with is telling you something is true or morally right and they really think it is and think so consistently, the best thing to do is engage with them in good faith and show that it is not. Accusing them of gaslighting will not present them or anybody watching with any reason to change their mind, but engaging with them honestly might do so. Also, occasionally you might find that you are the one who needs to change their mind.

I am frequently accused of being overly charitable and having too much faith in the general reasonableness and good motivations of other people. Maybe I do, but I don’t think so. This is also not the primary reason that I try to engage with people with the assumption that they are in mind. I wrote this probably a decade ago and I stand by it.

Unless you have a really solid reason to think that someone is gaslighting you - for example, you come across an exchange in which they announce the intention to try to try to make people doubt their own sanity by convincing them of things that aren’t true - assume that they are not. It’s the only way to achieve anything. Accusing people of being dishonest and a bad person will never convince any sincere and well-intentioned person to listen to you and consider your views. It will never convince anybody who has become inconsistent and is engaging in motivated reasoning to recognise that this is what they are doing.

Some people can be very cynical and assume that nobody ever changes their mind or recognises and addresses their own inconsistencies but, in fact, they do. They might not do so in the moment, because humans hate to be wrong but that same hatred of being wrong may well cause them to reflect and adjust their views privately and this be evident the next time they address the issue. We should encourage this and make it easier. It can be very tempting to pounce on someone who is backing away from a view they once held which you strongly disagreed with, and challenge them on it in order to get them to say, “I was wrong and you were right” and thus ‘win.’ Don’t. Not if you actually want to incentivise people to change their mind in your direction. Just be quietly glad that you and others who share your views seem to be having a positive influence.

So, can a person ‘gaslight’ themselves? If this means “Can people deceive themselves and engage in motivated reasoning?” then yes, they absolutely can. All of us can and do. Every single one of us. The best we can do is try to be self-aware about it, notice our cognitive dissonances and inconsistencies and challenge them with honest introspection. And when we engage with others and suspect they are doing this, we can point it out in ways that incentivise and make it easier for them to stop doing it.

Do accusations of gaslighting help with this at all?

No. No, they do not.