People can sincerely promote useful falsehoods without conscious base motives

Evidence

In genuine self-deception, people avoid doing things that they have an inkling might reveal what they do not want to know. However, suspecting something is not the same as knowing it to be true. As long as one does not find out the truth, what one believes is not known to be false. Keeping oneself willfully uninformed about an unwanted truth is the main vehicle of genuine self-deception. This is a common self-deceiving way of evading responsibility, as we illustrate in ensuing chapters. By not pursuing courses of action that would reveal the actual state of affairs, individuals keep the knowable unknown (Haight, 1980). Acting in ways that keep one uninformed about unwanted information is self-deception. Acting in prejudicial and mistaken ways is self-biasing. These are different phenomena (Bandura, 2011). — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 704 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: A community can persist on fidelity to an event without any beliefs — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 732; People endorse digressive victimhood claims without believing the principle they invoke — Felix Danbold, Ivuoma N. Onyeador, and Miguel M. Unzueta, Dominant groups support digressive…, 69; Some political falsehoods aim at affirmation of authority, not belief — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New…, 164 (+8 more)

Broader Connections

• Genuine self-deception works by staying willfully uninformed, not by believing falsehoods #complicates (0.75) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 704