The evolution of deceit
Not long ago, a young man drove onto Robert Trivers’ Jamaica property. Suspicious of the man’s sudden appearance, and convinced he was intent on either extorting money from him or robbing him, Trivers, a Rutgers professor, confronted him about his identity. His first name, the man said, was Steve. “What’s your last name?” Trivers asked. Trivers, one of the world’s leading evolutionary theorists and an expert on deceit, was checking for a behavioral sign that the man was lying, like an absence of hand gestures or longer pauses between words, which indicate “higher cognitive load.” The man paused. And Trivers knew immediately he was right: As it turns out, the man’s real name was Omar.
Trivers, a professor of anthropology and biological sciences, probably knows more about the mechanics and meaning of deception than almost anybody else in the world, and his new book, “The Folly of Fools,” covers pretty much anything you’d want to know about the topic. The book is an attempt to connect the mechanics of deceit to evolutionary science, and takes a broad survey of the areas in which the two overlap, including animal predation, parenting and people’s sex lives. High parasite load, he discovers, for example, is correlated with heightened levels of self-deception, and high levels of deceit, he finds, are closely tied to bad health. Expansive, smart and deep, the book — a relentlessly fascinating and entertaining read — will utterly change the way you think about lying.
Salon spoke to Trivers over the phone about Arnold Schwarzenegger, “don’t ask, don’t tell” and the connection between staying in the closet and HIV.
When you talk about deceit and self-deception what exactly are you talking about?
Well, in verbal terms it would be lying to others and lying to yourself. But deception is much deeper because it doesn’t require language and it’s found in a whole series of other animals.
So what does that have to do with evolution?
If you take a relationship between a man and a woman, the man can be carrying on an affair on the side and it can produce a child. Arnold Schwarzenegger did not tell his wife that that cute little boy that he loved so much was actually his own, by the maid. Maria discovered it when the child was 12 years old. So you can get a reproductive benefit by deception as long as you’re not detected.
Self-deception, by contrast, has been a long problem in human thought. You find it in religion. Minds like Marx and Freud have each claimed to have a theory of self-deception, none of which have stood up. Adam Smith, the economist, wrote a whole book called “Self Deception.” George Orwell obviously had deep insight into certain kinds of self-deception, but nobody has had anything approaching a coherent scientific theory as to why on earth we would lie to ourselves. Working on parent-offspring conflict, I suddenly had this flash of insight: “Ah! If self-deception improves your ability to deceive others, then you would have a strong selective force to get it into your consciousness.”
So we are evolutionarily predisposed to lie to others and ourselves. How does deception play itself out in the animal kingdom?
Let me give you an example. If you’re trying to pick out a moth against the bark of a tree and it has evolved to resemble the bark of the tree more and more precisely, then it becomes a more and more difficult cognitive problem for you to solve. So your cognitive powers of detection, of seeing things, of being able to discriminate very minor differences, those are all being improved. I deliberately use that example because the deceiver is using morphology, not behavior.
Right, so by developing a more deceptive body, the moth is creating an incentive for you to become smarter — and therefore you’re more likely to evolve a more sophisticated brain.
Nobody has worked out a general principle of deception in creatures. Deception, however, seems to be a file against which mental intellectual powers have been sharpened. When it comes to behavior, there is a strong correlation in primates — monkeys and apes — between the relative size of their neocortex and how often they are seen to deceive in nature. The brighter you are, the more complex and devious your deceptions can be.
In children, for example, there’s a strong positive correlation between having higher intelligence at age 4 and more deception. Smart children lie more than slow children. A child that is disabled to the point of lacking verbiage, for example, may deceive you by lunging in one direction and then grabbing something on the other side of you. But they are not going to show sophisticated verbal deceptions.
At what point do babies start deceiving their parents?