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Annoyance comments on Instrumental vs. Epistemic -- A Bardic Perspective - Less Wrong
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Since I doubt anyone present is interested in my opinions on the seduction community, I'll just respond to the theater example. Entertaining an idea or indulging a fantasy that you are a skilled manipulator is wildly different from deceiving yourself into believing it. Thinking about the idea - turning it over in your mind, considering the ramifications and the ways you'd act differently if it were so - can of course affect your behavior.
But this isn't a special feature of entertaining ideas or fantasizing. Priming happens. Read a list of words about old age and Florida and you'll walk slower; think about Iago's machinations and you'll stand and speak in a cold and calculating way. Choosing to prime yourself to achieve a theatrical goal is just a way of self-consciously harnessing that mechanism for your own ends.
"Entertaining an idea or indulging a fantasy that you are a skilled manipulator is wildly different from deceiving yourself into believing it. "
Distinguishable, yes - but as far as much of our minds are concerned, there is no difference. They tend to treat an imagined or hypothetical scenario as though it were actual data and actual conclusions - and the more clearly the situation is envisioned, the more strongly the pseudobeliefs are held, the more powerfully they'll respond.
People tend to become what they pretend to be. The longer and more intensively the pretense is maintained, the more likely they'll come to believe it themselves.
Remember, too, that we derive our ideas about ourselves by observing our own actions and then making up stories to account for them. If you can induce people to act as though they believed something, they'll tend to conclude that they believe it, and act accordingly in the future.
Exaggeration. There is a difference. There is a major difference. It's just that there's also major overlap left over.
Cognitive dissonance works as a sort of an inference to the best explanation when people behave in ways they don't understand. An actor on stage understands exactly why he acted the way he did: he's an actor, pretending to be someone else. There's no reason for cognitive dissonance to come into play.
The higher functions of the actor's mind know that, yes. Do all of the lower functions?
We know that putting our faces into the expressive configurations associated with emotional states induces those feelings in ourselves, even though people know that the expressions are completely artificial and that they have no reason to feel that way.
I suspect you're trying to create a sophisticated explanation for the behavior of some very unsophisticated cognitive modules.