William von Hippel

Who they are

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

A Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin fellow profile lists him as Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, and as a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg in 2008 and 2009. His project there combined methods from social cognition with the evolutionary perspective of Trivers to understand how people fool themselves. The same profile records an interest in ageing and self-control.

A University of Queensland School of Psychology page for a 2019 public lecture describes him as a professor there with a BA from Yale University and a PhD from the University of Michigan, and says he has published more than 100 papers and chapters. The same page names his book The Social Leap, an evolutionary account of social intelligence and life satisfaction. Nothing else about his career was checked for this page.

Key papers

von Hippel, W., & Trivers, R. (2011). The evolution and psychology of self-deception. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 34(1), 1-16. doi:10.1017/S0140525X10001354.

von Hippel, W., & Trivers, R. (2011). Reflections on self-deception. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 34(1), 41-56. doi:10.1017/S0140525X10003018.

Soldà, A., Ke, C., Page, L., & von Hippel, W. (2020). Strategically delusional. Experimental Economics, 23(3), 604-631. doi:10.1007/s10683-019-09636-9.

von Hippel, W., Lakin, J. L., & Shakarchi, R. J. (2005). Individual differences in motivated social cognition: the case of self-serving information processing. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, as listed in the Wissenschaftskolleg profile.

Key ideas

The 2011 article argues that self-deception evolved to make deceiving other people more effective. It hides the cues that could reveal a conscious lie, reduces the cognitive load of lying and can limit retribution if the lie is found out. The same article proposes that the self can be both the one misled and the one misleading through dissociations among conscious and unconscious memories, conscious and unconscious attitudes, and automatic and controlled processes.

The 2020 experiment tested a consequence. Participants were paid either for accurate beliefs about their test performance or for convincing others that they had performed well. Those who expected to persuade overestimated their performance more and, given the chance, biased their information search toward positive feedback. The authors report suggestive evidence that the higher confidence made participants more persuasive.

Because he co-wrote both the theory and the second experiment, weighing the two together calls for a note: the first experimental test, by Peter Schwardmann and Joël van der Weele in 2019, came from a separate pair of authors.

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