re: #244 freetoken

A big question in anthropology is this: why do humans lie?

Deception it turns out plays a role in the lives of many animals (heck, plants too.)

Yet how does that generate the propensity for humans to continually engage in deception?

Tough question, with lots of sidetracking available.

Humans, with our language ability, appear to use our language skills to deceive quite often. Other animals have to use body and facial expressions, or perhaps chemical methods, or in the case of some birds vocal impersonations.

But we use our language ability to lie, quite often.

Something to keep in mind when discussing Sarah Palin.

All of this came to mind when I just read an online editorial in the Scotsman by well known throw-back Gerald Warner, who in his latest AGW-denial “opinion” piece bald facely stated that the “alarmists” don’t include water-vapor in their calculations. That is just wrong, of course, and out-right lie. But he knows he can repeat it at will and his audience will willingly chose to accept it as true because it reinforces their currently held beliefs.

That is the perverse nature of this human propensity to lie.

It actually pays.

Are any other animals capable of self-deception, I wonder?

Humans are set apart from other species by the way we can conceptualize something so vividly that our physiology reacts: we can imagine a fear-inducing scenario and experience an appropriate, responsive activation of the nervous system. It’s a magical thing, imagination, but it has weird components…one of which is the capacity for self-deception.