Inner Speech as a Cognitive Process Mediating Self-Consciousness and Inhibiting Self-Deception

The cognitive processes which mediate self-consciousness are unknown, although Morin and others have suggested that inner speech may mediate self-consciousness. We developed a questionnaire which measures the extent to which one talks to oneself about oneself. As expected, the correlation between inner speech and self-consciousness was significant. A German version of the 1979 self-deception questionnaire by Sackeim and Gur correlated negatively with the scores on inner speech, suggesting the validity of the questionnaire. We also replicated the negative association between depression and self-deception in a different culture.