bad faith

In the existentialist philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, a type of moral self-deception, involving our behaving as a mere thing rather than choosing authentically. In bad faith, we evade responsibility and anxiety by not noticing possibilities of choice, or by behaving in a role others expect of us.

Sartre derives the concept from his metaphysical analysis of being. Humans must strive to escape mere being-in-itself and to achieve their true being, being-for-itself.