Aristotle was a cynic. Sure, the Bible exhorts to “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” but he knew better. “The friendly feelings that we bear for another,” instructed his Ethics, “have arisen from the friendly feelings that we bear for ourselves.”
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Two thousand years later, in 1739, Hume spelled out what the pagan thinker intuited: “I learn to do service to another, without bearing him any real kindness; because I foresee, that he will return my service, in expectation of another of the same kind.” Hume’s Edinburgh neighbor, Adam Smith, penned an often quoted phrase in this vein in The Wealth of Nations: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. Nobody but a beggar chooses to depend chiefly on the benevolence of his fellow citizens.”
Self-love makes the world go round. But, alongside cooperation, could self-love give birth to deception? Could the imperative of self-regard be so great, in fact, as to lead to self-deceit? In his new book, Robert Trivers, a master of evolutionary thought, roams from stick insects and brain magnets to plane crashes and Israeli-Palestinian wars in service of a corollary to Aristotle’s hard-boiled thesis. We humans deceive ourselves, Trivers argues. We do so often, and almost always the better to deceive others for our own personal gain. From misguided estimates of self-worth to false historical narratives of nations, the self-love that spins the world is itself fueled by self-deceit. And the price can be substantial. (...)
Deception is rife in humans for the same reason it is in nature: there are inbuilt clashes of interest, whether it be sexual strategy when it comes to females and males, parental investment when it comes to mothers and fathers, or resource allocation when it comes to parents and offspring. An expert in detecting conflict where others see harmony, Trivers worked out the evolutionary logic behind such relationships in the early 1970s, spawning entire fields in behavioral studies and genetics and giving rise to a number of predictions. One of the starkest of these was the idea that because fathers and mothers have different interests when it comes to the fetus (dad wants the baby bigger than mom does), identical genes on the chromosomes that they have each bequeathed will battle each other over control of embryonic growth. Sure enough, in the 1980s, biologists began to discover genes whose expression levels depended on from which parent they had come. And the gene knows where it came from, following the basic logic of genetic conflict Trivers described years before genomic imprinting was discovered.
Deception, to be truthful, is less of a mind-twister than self-deceit. Like Hume and Smith before him, Trivers understood that giving could serve one’s interests if the rewards of cooperation outweighed its costs. Using the logic of game theory, he showed that the principle of “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” made evolutionary sense. Soon “reciprocal altruism” helped explain otherwise beguiling sacrificial behavior. But benevolence requires a strong sense of justice because a sense of justice is necessary to appreciate dishonesty: after all, in games of trust, especially with lag time, cheaters can wreak havoc. And so, over evolutionary time, an arms race honed in social mammals a growing intelligence. Trivers finds it ironic that “dishonesty has often been the file against which intellectual tools for truth have been sharpened.” But one of the outcomes of this Darwinian dynamic may have also been a genuine instinct for fairness, born of the need to distinguish trustworthy partners from charlatans.
But if evolution has done such a grand job of fine-tuning our senses in the service of detecting deceit, why does all the hard-won information that we extract from the world through our senses often become muddled and deformed in our brains? Why do we project our own traits onto others, repress true memories and invent false ones, lie to ourselves, rationalize immoral behavior, and generally deny inconvenient truths? Seventy percent of people rank themselves better-looking than average, according to a study cited by Trivers; 94 percent of academics (shocking!) think they are better than average, too. Why is this? The answer, Trivers would have us believe, is that the possibility of deceit raises the probability of ever more subtle mechanisms for spotting deceit, which in turn raises the probability of mechanisms for self-deceit. Trick yourself to trick another: what better way to conceal the truth? Self-deception is not a defensive measure meant only to make us feel better; it is a weapon instilled in us by natural selection to help deceive others for our own good.
Two thousand years later, in 1739, Hume spelled out what the pagan thinker intuited: “I learn to do service to another, without bearing him any real kindness; because I foresee, that he will return my service, in expectation of another of the same kind.” Hume’s Edinburgh neighbor, Adam Smith, penned an often quoted phrase in this vein in The Wealth of Nations: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. Nobody but a beggar chooses to depend chiefly on the benevolence of his fellow citizens.”Self-love makes the world go round. But, alongside cooperation, could self-love give birth to deception? Could the imperative of self-regard be so great, in fact, as to lead to self-deceit? In his new book, Robert Trivers, a master of evolutionary thought, roams from stick insects and brain magnets to plane crashes and Israeli-Palestinian wars in service of a corollary to Aristotle’s hard-boiled thesis. We humans deceive ourselves, Trivers argues. We do so often, and almost always the better to deceive others for our own personal gain. From misguided estimates of self-worth to false historical narratives of nations, the self-love that spins the world is itself fueled by self-deceit. And the price can be substantial. (...)
Deception is rife in humans for the same reason it is in nature: there are inbuilt clashes of interest, whether it be sexual strategy when it comes to females and males, parental investment when it comes to mothers and fathers, or resource allocation when it comes to parents and offspring. An expert in detecting conflict where others see harmony, Trivers worked out the evolutionary logic behind such relationships in the early 1970s, spawning entire fields in behavioral studies and genetics and giving rise to a number of predictions. One of the starkest of these was the idea that because fathers and mothers have different interests when it comes to the fetus (dad wants the baby bigger than mom does), identical genes on the chromosomes that they have each bequeathed will battle each other over control of embryonic growth. Sure enough, in the 1980s, biologists began to discover genes whose expression levels depended on from which parent they had come. And the gene knows where it came from, following the basic logic of genetic conflict Trivers described years before genomic imprinting was discovered.
Deception, to be truthful, is less of a mind-twister than self-deceit. Like Hume and Smith before him, Trivers understood that giving could serve one’s interests if the rewards of cooperation outweighed its costs. Using the logic of game theory, he showed that the principle of “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” made evolutionary sense. Soon “reciprocal altruism” helped explain otherwise beguiling sacrificial behavior. But benevolence requires a strong sense of justice because a sense of justice is necessary to appreciate dishonesty: after all, in games of trust, especially with lag time, cheaters can wreak havoc. And so, over evolutionary time, an arms race honed in social mammals a growing intelligence. Trivers finds it ironic that “dishonesty has often been the file against which intellectual tools for truth have been sharpened.” But one of the outcomes of this Darwinian dynamic may have also been a genuine instinct for fairness, born of the need to distinguish trustworthy partners from charlatans.
But if evolution has done such a grand job of fine-tuning our senses in the service of detecting deceit, why does all the hard-won information that we extract from the world through our senses often become muddled and deformed in our brains? Why do we project our own traits onto others, repress true memories and invent false ones, lie to ourselves, rationalize immoral behavior, and generally deny inconvenient truths? Seventy percent of people rank themselves better-looking than average, according to a study cited by Trivers; 94 percent of academics (shocking!) think they are better than average, too. Why is this? The answer, Trivers would have us believe, is that the possibility of deceit raises the probability of ever more subtle mechanisms for spotting deceit, which in turn raises the probability of mechanisms for self-deceit. Trick yourself to trick another: what better way to conceal the truth? Self-deception is not a defensive measure meant only to make us feel better; it is a weapon instilled in us by natural selection to help deceive others for our own good.
by Oren Harman, TNR | Read more:
Photo: Evan-Amos/Creative Commons
