 The collective entrenches self-deceptive beliefs by providing positive reinforcement by others sharing the same false belief, as well as protection from evidence that would destabilize the target belief. There are, however, limits to how entrenched such beliefs can become and remain self-deceptive. The social support cannot be the sole or primary cause of the self-deceptive belief, for then the belief would simply be the result of unwitting interpersonal deception and not the deviant belief formation process that characterizes self-deception. If the environment becomes so epistemically contaminated as to make counter-evidence inaccessible to the agent, then we have a case of false belief, not self-deception. Thus, even within a collective a person is self-deceived just in case she would not hold her false belief if she did not possess the motivations skewing her belief formation process. This said, relative to solitary self-deception, the collective variety does present greater external obstacles to avoiding or escaping self-deception, and is for this reason more entrenched. If the various proposed psychological mechanisms of self-deception pose an internal challenge to the self-deceiver’s power to control her belief formation, then these social factors pose an external challenge to the self-deceiver’s control. Determining the how superable this challenge is will affect our assessment of individual responsibility for self-deception as well as the prospects of unassisted escape from it.