I've been thinking a lot lately about self-deception. That phrase conjures in my mind images of intentional behavior, possibly in response to trauma or something, but I'm interested more generally in the difficulty of inferring things about oneself based on one's past actions. I think developing one's instinct for catching this could go a long way towards fighting traditional impediments to getting things done effectively (eg, akrasia); as such this would a very important epistemic rationality skill.

In particular, I'm thinking of a study which purported to show that people have significantly more difficulty judging their own historical mental states based on recordings of their actions than they do other people's; the paper hypothesized that maybe this was to allow for better lying in the ancestral environment (no need to act when you legitimately believe you'll be keeping that promise, despite all evidence to the contrary). If someone happens to have that study on hand I'd love to find it again.

If anyone has any good paper-length reading material on or related to this topic, please share. If I can find good material, and if there's interest, I'll try to write something up.