Ryan McKay

Who they are

This page records the public professional record only. Nothing adverse is recorded and no motive is attributed.

His Royal Holloway research portal page lists him as Professor of Psychology there since 2010 and head of the Morality and Beliefs Laboratory. He held earlier postdoctoral posts at Tufts University, the University of Zürich and the University of Oxford. His work centres on belief and identity, including political belief formation and the relation between religion and morality.

Nothing else about his career was checked for this page.

Key papers

McKay, R., Mijović-Prelec, D., & Prelec, D. (2011). Protesting too much: Self-deception and self-signaling. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 34(1), 34-35. doi:10.1017/S0140525X10002608.

McKay, R., Langdon, R., & Coltheart, M. (2009). Sleights of mind: Delusions and self-deception. In T. Bayne & J. Fernández (Eds.), Delusion and Self-Deception, Psychology Press, pp. 165-185. The chapter argues that motivation's access to belief formation is of potentially crucial theoretical utility, and considers how self-deception might fit within a shared theoretical framework.

Key ideas

The 2011 commentary says that von Hippel and Trivers's evolutionary view overlooks the subjective moral costs of fooling oneself and the question of how credible self-deceptive statements are. The authors propose a self-signalling interpretation, which they say can explain the ritualistic quality of some self-deceptive affirmations and the gap between what people in this state say and what they actually believe.

The difference from Trivers is the audience. For Trivers the audience is other people, and the belief is a tool for moving them. In the self-signalling reading the audience is the self, and a statement is evidence about what kind of person one is.

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