self-deceit
His life was full of lies and self-deception.
Self-deception is a way we justify false beliefs to ourselves.
They weave such a web of self-deception that they cannot tell the difference between dream and reality.
Self-deception may not always be a flaw and may even be beneficial at times.

SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

Not believing
(that's) a likely story!idiom
anti-science
anti-scientific
are my eyes deceiving me?idiom
as if!idiom
authority
foot
iconoclasm
iconoclastic
in denial
in your dreams!idiom
incredulity
joke
salt
satisfied
since whenidiom
take something with a pinch of saltidiom
tell me another one!idiom
worship
yeah

Examples of self-deception

self-deception
From the libertarian perspective, such self-deception is naturally understood as an expression of our freedom.
But some people, owing to ignorance, self-deception, or willful blindness, do not see that this is a task calling for cooperation of an unprecedented kind.
Their feeling of security was a self-deception, they were effacing an aspect of reality, a phenomenon which, in clinical psychiatry, is labelled denial.
This bit of deception, even if it was only self-deception, disturbed many of us, and we persuaded him to stop.
Various philosophers have pondered the question of how self-deception is possible.
Concealers who believe that their lies are morally less bad than those of falsifiers are indulging in self-deception.
The stir that this result created among generative linguists is evidence of remarkable self-deception on the part of many of them.
Their answer is that pride can motivate this choice and self-deception can maintain it in the face of unhappiness.
Commitment to revealed-preference theory also seems to involve self-deception.
It is not cussedness, or blindness, or willing self-deception that leads him to believe this.
Unhappily, it is a method, which lends itself very readily to self-deception.
In this case, because the desire in question is short term, it is difficult to distinguish self-deception from a real change in desire.
Now it is clear that the pride of this people was the product of self-deception, counting the whole world as insignificant in their view.
Indeed, psychoanalytic theory suggests that self-deception can work only if there is more than a little truth in the deception.
The cogito recognizes things and gets in the details, moving among spaces while invoking and imagining other sights and spaces, prone to self-deception.
See all examples of self-deception
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.