There might be a difference in intentionality and awareness. Concealment (e.g. of negative feeelings like shame or frustration) is something I may decide to enact, intentionally and fully conscious about what I do Irealize my feeling, but others hould not..Deception is about negating the negative feeling, lying to myself," oh no not me", like an automatized response, not a willful act. Before even reaklizing, the negative feeling is pushed away, suppressed as a psychoanalist might say. As a strategy, concealment is fuly compatible with awareness and management of painful sensations, while deception is not.

I wonder of this helps - good luck!

There might be a difference in intentionality and awareness. Concealment (e.g. of negative feeelings like shame or frustration) is something I may decide to enact, intentionally and fully conscious about what I do Irealize my feeling, but others hould not..Deception is about negating the negative feeling, lying to myself," oh no not me", like an automatized response, not a willful act. Before even reaklizing, the negative feeling is pushed away, suppressed as a psychoanalist might say. As a strategy, concealment is fuly compatible with awareness and management of painful sensations, while deception is not.

I wonder of this helps - good luck!

Hello,

 This is interesting to me because I usually think of concealment and deception in terms of stigma management strategies rather than performance strategies. These would both be a form of what Goffman calls "passing " and "covering," that is trying to pass for normal and covering by learning "normal" behaviors.  They would be forms of information control directed at others for camouflage. When directed inwards, this would involved denial or the use of alternate internal narratives as forms of self-care, in your case to enhance performance. Very interesting questions. The phenomenological exploration of these is probably more important than providing readers with answers about them.

Good luck with your research.

Thank you for your contributions! I much appreciate it. I always like inspiration from different backgrounds! To add extra information to the discussion.

Athletes have many coping strategies. When it comes down to self-deception, I can’t find any useful articles about the distinction between (self-)deception and (self-)concealment in sport science. This could be because I'm missing something of course :-)

Because we have so much examples from athletes, I wandered if it's all the same. At the same time I want to group the examples together in a correct way :)

Self-deception:

- Lying to the self about the distance, finish line or how 'easy' it will be (runner)

(focus on the self)

- Athletes telling themselves their opponent is tired by overstating the signs of fatigue, an opponent (cyclist) having an extra bottle of water going up a mountain and telling themselves that's in their advantage (weight :D)

(focus on the self, but using information from opponents)

- Using a motor cyclist as your 'opponent' (imagining it's your real opponent) (e.g. cyclist; time trial)

(focus on the self, but using information from a third party)

Self-concealment?

- Consciously not giving attention to a wound on your leg during a fight (fighter: if I do not see it, it does not exist) 

- Not giving attention to negative information; the same sensation inside the body (pain)

(focus on the self)

Deception?

- Coaches (giving a different lap time to their athletes (e.g. speed skating and not giving the correct time as a coach)), to motivate an athlete he/she can still win)

- scientists (e.g. deceiving a participant; pacing (e.g. Stone et al., 2014))

(third party (coach); no opponent or a virtual one (scientist)

Deception/ Concealment?

(by concealing negative information about yourself)

- not showing any signs as an athlete to opponents (e.g. runners from Ethiopia  are 'silent killers' - going deep, without showing any signs (e.g. breathing) and sometimes just 'stop running'. Leaving their opponents baffled thinking they were going strong.))

(focus on opponent, not giving information about the self)

Misleading?

Deception by misleading the area where the 'negative information' is

- Example: Having problems with your left leg as a fighter (there's a sign for your opponent), and putting bandage around your other leg; having an opponent focus his attention to the wrong leg and winning because of this trick.

(focus on opponent, but misleading the opponent)

Dissociation:

- Daydreaming or humming music during a performance (distraction from pain, by focus on something else)

Side note. At the other hand there's a cultural context for the term self-concealment. Poet Walt Whitman wrote about it in Song of myself in Leaves of Grass. Delivering the famous sentence 'I too am not a bit tamed - I too am untranslatable. I sound my Barbaric Yawp over the roofs of the world.' As far as I understand his poem and the cultural context he grew up, it's about being yourself and people in society hiding their 'true identity' by concealing (negative) information. There's also a twist of group pressure and unwritten rules in society (e.g. Law of Jante, Scandinavia). But I'm getting a bit off track :-)

I've also read a bit about repression in clinical psychology, but I have to set some boundaries for myself how deep down the rabbit hole I want to go.

I can imagine different scientist having a different viewpoint about these words. Besides semantics, My main interest is understanding everything better in sports. Maybe there's also a sports scientist who are willing to share their view?

I have nothing to add to the interesting replies from others.

I am answering this question form a practical and not research point of view. The specific examples will be a compulation  from the time I use to be a primary care provider at a large U.S. military facility.

Disclaimer: This is a fictious patient and any similaries to a actual person is purely coincidental.

This is an alcoholic patient who experinces blackouts and has had his driver's license suspended because of multiple "DUI's". Nevertheless, he emphatically states that he is in control of his drinking because he can stop any time he chooses.

This is self-deception: Believing something about yourself when the evidence proves otherwise. 

This same patient attends a party and has an alcoholic blackout. He is aware that he cannot remember the latter part of the night. 

The following week, he runs into a woman he met at the party. She inquires why he never called her as promised. He remembers meeting the woman but not the rest of the night. He gives a plausible excuse and avoids providing any details, allowing her to fill in the gaps of that night. He arranges a date with her in the near future.

This is self-concealment: Not allowing others to discover flaws, weaknesses or negative qualities of ones self. 

Hi, I can suggest as an interesting reference, Ernest R. Hilgard's "Divided Consciousness". I do not know how well his work has stood up to subsequent scrutiny, but it provides a fascinating analysis of dissociative states, self-hypnosis, etc. I am not an expert in these phenomena, though I have studied attentional processes in general.

I suspect there are levels of self-deception across a spectrum, and they might be linked to the spectrum of dissociative phenomena. I agree with Hans van Laake's analysis that deceiving other athletes about your condition isn't self-concealment, it's simply concealment (i.e. self is a superfluous adjective) - a form of deception.

What does self-deception mean at the level of cognitive processes / mechanisms? Intentional forgetting and thought suppression are real phenomena that can be demonstrated in laboratory conditions (though attempts at thought suppression can have an effect counter to what is intended). These are intentional processes and probably can be considered special versions of the inhibitory processes that act across levels or different domains of cognition. Attention can also be intentionally directed at particular information, to the exclusion of other information.

I would speculate that self-deception can be explained through the operation of these basic processes. Our ability to impose this control on the knowledge that is consciously accessible can be improved with practice, may be moderated by context and motivation, and by prior knowledge. Perhaps with enough practice and/or great enough motivation to exclude that information from mind, we could achieve self-deception. Thus, for example, knowledge which is consciously accessible to us in one context, might through our own force of will become actively inhibited in another; and in this other context we might even demonstrate beliefs that are in conflict with those that we usually manifest. 

I wonder if Sartre's discussion of 'bad faith' would be relevant here. Sartre has many examples in Being and Nothingness and his literary work of this concept which, seems to me, to do the work you want. From a phenomenological point of view one can, on Sartre's view, negate key aspects of oneself in order to project a different, and potentially false, view of oneself or one's capacities. The woman who leaves her hand as if it were an inanimate thing to dissolve the romantic touch of a lover; the denial of one's freedom to enable one to persevere (an added example). I would see such a displacement of conscious intention to fit your examples. For Sartre the concept does show the contradictory nature of the nothingness that lies in consciousness - most other views assume the 'self' is there to know when, in fact, it may only 'be' when there is emergent action and the recognition of others (ie how one changes when one is perceived). These are just some hopefully useful suggestions.

Repression, self-concealment and rationality/emotional defensiveness: The correspondence between three questionnaire measures of defensive coping

T Ritz, B Dahme - Personality and Individual Differences, 1996 - Elsevier

This article may be useful? It may be helpful to see self concealment and self deception as coping mechanisms for thoughts which may be unhelpful when competing?

Self-deception refers to me how I perceice my self,

self-concealment refers to the picture of me projected to others

Self-deception : the act of deceiving oneself : the state of being deceived by oneself

Self-concealment  “a predisposition to actively conceal from others personal information that one perceives as distressing or negative.” (Larson and Chastain,1990).

Great reading!

I am NOT a philosophy student, but a space technology person!

I do remember Self-Deception was cited as one primary reason for NASA Challenger Shuttle disaster in 1986!

So do you agree that ultimately PRIDE and INSTITUTIONAL LOYALTY also have something to do while talking about Self-deception and self-Concealment?

Fascinating enquiry. The answer above, from Hans van Laake, that self deception might have to do with directing one's attention to a current project does have at least one support from a well known, earlier scholar of SD. Herbert Fingarette published a monograph, called 'Self Deception', in 1969, with an update essay in 1998, which can be found in the Philosophical Quarterly (vol 47) for that year. Fingarette argues that there is no paradox about SD  It is an essential mechanism of one's mind in setting oneself to do a task, or pursue a course in life. His sad little vignette of 'Harriet', the self deceiving would-be academic who never quite makes the cut is memorable. Self concealment is very different.  It may be accompanied by self deception - one may 'put on a good front' for oneself as well as for others. But self concealment can be quite calculated. I have seen boxers feign hurt in order to gain the opportunity to administer a sucker punch.  Self concealment seems essentially communicative in a way that SD is not.

Interesting question Rick.

I don't characterise Self-deception as "lying to yourself". From a systemic perspective, I consider it to be more a process of preventing feedback from having any effect, which evolves over time to become more and more effective in deceiving "the self". But, and it is a big BUT, it can never be 100% effective otherwise the person's system would not know there was anything that needed to be avoided. In these cases, it ceases to be self-deception and instead becomes delusional.

I have written about this from a practical rather than academic viewpoint at:

http://www.cleanlanguage.co.uk/articles/articles/27/1/Self-Deception-Delusion-and-Denial/