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Last updated: Fri, Sep 13, 2024
Or hear the Proverb (14:8): “The wisdom of the prudent is to know their own way but the folly of fools is deceit."1
Evolutionary anthropologist Robert Trivers published "The Folly of Fools" in 2011. In this book he makes the case, based on biological and neuroscientific evidence, that deception is ubiquitous among humans and through wide swathes of the animal kingdom. Beyond that, self-deception is a built-in feature of human social life and human cognition. Why write such a gloomy book? Because the theory explains important features of life.
"Aggressive conflict and courtship are two biologically old fields of behavior in which self-deception is favored."2 Skills in confrontation and mating are necessary adaptations in a biologic world with scarce resources and sexual reproduction. Biological success (survival and reproduction) depends on success in those arenas, and other-deception is found widely from insects to reptiles to mammals. Deception can be based on physical features (deceptive forms, such as a "snake's head" decorating the tail of a caterpillar) or it can be behavioral. To make this concrete in human behavior, think of boasts, threats, and bluffs in competitions, or of cosmetics in mating and other social situations.
In humans, deception tends to be behavioral. This is a joint product of our large brains, our social existence, and our adaptive wiring. Our biological needs become more powerful the less they are met, yet we and those around us have strong moral feelings that constrain our self-preference. The image of a good angel speaking into one ear while a bad angel speaks into the other may be more than a poetic image.
The theoretical argument for self-deception is that it is easier to deceive others if we are less aware that we are doing that. Concscious lying is hard work for normals.
Trivers cites many examples of the negative results of self-deception. The failure of the space shuttle's o-rings, which resulted in the destruction of both shuttle and crew, depended on the ability of a large highly-professional organization (NASA) to convince itself that the disaster wouldn't happen. Airplane pilots and surgeons made unremarked and uncorrected errors until new protocols forced crews to share power. The examples range from family life to political life. Trivers is particularly concerned about the effect of shared self-illusions on the progress of social science, including in his own specialty.
Deception and self-deception in humans isn't confined to the acceptance of falsities or the denial of facts. It extends to over-confidence in one's abilities and in the state of one's understanding. I've pointed out in earlier sections (Neuroscientific Thinking and Core Intuitions and Core Behaviors) that our innate intellectual tools are prone to much error. We are selective in our attention. We interpret and organize information sometimes haphazardly, at other times into defined slots that constrain our interpretation of input. Much of this happens unconsciously, even while sleeping.
Trivers believes that we have cognitive modules, whether genetically-determined or learned, that act unconsciously to promote deception and self-deception.3 He speculates that we may even have a certain amount of behavioral randomness built into our cognition to make our behavior more difficult to analyze and predict. One benefit of such a feature is that it would make detection of deception more difficult.4
If indeed we are deceitful, then detection of deceit is important. (So self-deceit then is a counter-measure against detection of deceit.) Much psychological study has been done about our ability to detect conscious deception. The best signs of conscious deception are the appearance of nervousness, delays in responses, and various lapses in self-control, all of which indicate that conscious deception imposes a large cognitive load on the deceiver.5 These signs are difficult to read without knowledge of the baseline behavior of the putative deceiver.
Deception occurs even within the family, the natural home of reciprocal altruism and Communal Sharing. Studies have shown that healthier children lie more in childhood. (Health at birth was evaluated using multiple factors.)6 On the other hand, studies have shown recently that pathological liars, very good liars, have increased “white matter,” that is, connections, in the brain's deception areas, suggesting the effects of repeated practice.7
Harsh punishment of children for deception may have the unfortunate effect of driving the deception deeper. If this induces self-deception in the child (to shelter the child from fear and pain), children can learn to avoid reality if it clashes with social demands. The effect is as if the child had learned to avoid reality itself, or at least to avoid its own representations of reality. This hyppothesis jibes with theorizing about the development of conservative authoritarianism.8 (See on a different site my thesis on conservative authoritarianism.)
Both other-deception and self-deception incur the costs of acting out of concert with reality. Successful deceit implies, however, that those consequences aren't immediately clear. The benefits, whatever they may be, accrue to the deceivers, while the costs are paid by others, and are often difficult to associate with the act of deceiving or the actor.
There is evidence that our brain has features that can facilitate errors in self-knowledge and could facilitate self-deception. The brain is composed of two hemispheres, one on the left, one on the right. Although they visually appear the same, they serve different functions. In particular, the left hemisphere contains most of our ability to form and speak language. The right is mute, and must make itself felt by passing information or "commands" to the left.
The two hemispheres are connected by a large cord of white matter (axons) called the corpus collosum. In some cases of severe epilepsy the corpus collosum is cut to prevent the reinforcement of seizures. The patients are then referred to as "split-brain" patients. Such patients are relieved of epilepsy and in other ways seem to function quite normally, except when the two hemispheres are aware of different information.
In 1978 researchers exposed two different pictures to the two eyes of a split-brain individual. The left hemisphere saw a picture of a chicken claw (through the right eye), while the right hemisphere saw a picture of a snowy winter. The patient was asked to point to the picture that represented what he had seen. His right hand (directed by his left hemisphere) pointed to a picture of a chicken, while his left hand pointed to a picture of a snow shovel.
When asked why he had pointed at a shovel, his left hemisphere (which only knew about the chicken claw) answered that, since you have a chicken, the shovel is to clean out the chicken coop. This result is not unique among split-brain people. If you show the message "Walk" to the right hemisphere, the patient may walk out the door, and when asked to explain, will say that they were going out to get a drink of water.9
We apparently have equipment and motivation to construct plausible explanations of our own actions, independently of our true motivations.
Whether or not there are innate modules that facilitate deception, the fact of deception is largely accepted. This leads us back to the human moral sense. Deception is practiced because it leads to advantages to the deceivers, and evolutionary psychologists and game theorists have argued that the large stakes have led to the "evolution of emotions that undergird a desire for justice: the implacable need for retribution, the burning feeling that an evil act knocks the universe out of balance and can be canceled only by a commensurate punishment. People who are emotionally driven to retaliate against those who cross them, even at a cost to themselves, are more credible adversaries and less likely to be exploited...."10
Pinker extends the moral heat over fairness and deception to the need for an authoritative enforcer, quoting the words of authors Martin Daly and Margo Wilson: "The enormous volume of mystico-religious bafflegab about atonement and penance and divine justice and the like is the attribution to higher, detached authority of what is actually a mundane, pragmatic matter: discouraging self-interested competitive acts by reducing their probability to nil."11