David
Livingston Smith’s Why We Lie: The Evolutionary Roots of Deception
and the Unconscious Mind follows in the tradition of Steven Pinker’s How
the Mind Works, Matt Ridley’s The Origins of Virtue and Robert
Wright’s The Moral Animal. Like those books, Why We Lie is well-written
and likely to be embraced by fans of evolutionary psychology (as the blurbs on
the back of the hardcover suggest). Readers of these works will find much of
his material familiar. Unfortunately, for those who have a sympathetic, but
more skeptical view towards evolutionary psychology, it will seem a wildly
speculative and generally unsatisfactory mishandling of a potentially fascinating
topic.

The
book’s central idea is that we possess a "Machiavellian module" that
enables us to deceive others and detect deception. This module takes its name
from the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis popularized by the Richard Byrne
and Andrew Whiten’s anthology Machiavellian Intelligence. The
Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis draws on research on non-human primates’
social relationships, which often involve deception. It speculates that brain
size and high intelligence are caused by the selective pressures of social
competition, rather than the more traditional belief that it came from tool use
and other aspects of the physical environment. If this is true, it is quite
possible that our minds have adapted to commonly reoccurring social problems
faced by our Pleistocene ancestors. According to Smith, this module operates
unconsciously, with the paradoxical consequence that we often deceive ourselves
about our deceptions.

What
are we to make of these claims? The notion that we have specialized mechanisms
for social intelligence is a common idea in evolutionary biology, though our
knowledge is currently highly speculative. The modular theory of mind, which
states that the human mind is composed of a large number of domain-specific
modules, also seems to me quite plausible, in some form or other. It is reasonable to believe that there have been selective
pressures to both deceive others and detect lies, possibly resulting in one or
more specialized mechanisms devoted to this task  (There are serious questions
about the nature of modules, their relation, if any, to domain-general
processing devices, their specific domains, etc.  Since Smith wisely refrains
from specific claims about the architecture of his Machiavellian module, we can
ignore this). Similarly, the fact that much of the mind operates unconsciously
is uncontroversial (indeed, if anything needs explaining these days, it’s conscious
thought). The existence of unconscious deception, even without the support of
research in the social sciences, seems likely.

Still,
what possible advantage could self-deception have? One possibility
suggested by Robert Trivers is that self-deception is an adaptive mechanism:
conscious deception often causes distress, partly because of the fear that the
deception will be detected. For this reason, deceivers may not be able to
control subtle tics that alert their victims. But if they, themselves, were
unaware that they were deceiving others, this problem would be eliminated.
Self-deception, then, becomes a tool for more effective manipulation.

            I’m willing to
seriously consider this hypothesis, but it raises questions. An obvious one is
why selective pressures didn’t simply create better conscious deceivers.
Since conmen (and women) and expert poker players seem highly adept at concealing
their lies, this hardly seems impossible. Smith asserts that "if human
beings had the knack of consciously making penetrating inferences about each
other’s motives and strategies, our insights would come at a high price
(146)." This price would be losing the benefits of unconscious
self-deception, since Smith seems to think that folk-psychology must treat
oneself and others equally. This seems to me to be both false and highly
speculative. First, many people do seem to be quite good at consciously interpreting
people’s behavior (it’s something that can be improved through practice).
Applying this knowledge to one’s self may actually be an advantage. Second, why
is it so implausible that our folk psychology could treat our self-conception
and our conception of others differently? Can’t a person with a grossly
inflated self-opinion also make brutally accurate assessments of others?
Smith’s claim needs to be argued.

             The problem is
that induction from natural selection is rather unreliable. Natural selection
depends on previous adaptations, lucky mutations and the physical and social
environment. Just because an explanation sounds plausible, doesn’t mean it’s
correct. Evolutionary psychology is notoriously vulnerable to "just-so
stories," explanations that conveniently invoke selection pressures to
explain all sorts of phenomena, with little independent support. The value of
evolutionary psychology is that it provides a means for developing hypotheses
that can then be experimentally tested. Smith doesn’t give much evidence to
accept Triver’s suggestion.

Instead,
he takes for granted the advantages of unconscious manipulation and turns to
psychoanalysis to reveal the nature of this Machiavellian module through the
analysis and interpretation of language. Smith’s idea is that our unconscious
mind is constantly on the lookout for conflicting interests, deception and
manipulation. He suggests that our speech is likely to contain
"unconsciously coded messages" in "situations involving covert
conflicts of interest between the speaker and some other person(s), and in
which it would be disadvantageous to speak openly about these conflicts
of interest (128). (Smith’s italics)" But why would this unconscious
Machiavellian module be represented in verbal behavior? These codes, if they
indeed exist, seem to be some sort of by-product that, for some strange reason,
gets expressed.

Let’s
look at his examples, accepting his interpretations, for the moment, as
correct. In one example, Smith mentions attending a faculty event with his
wife, a much younger woman of color. One of his colleagues brought up out of
the blue the fact that his cousin had recently adopted a child from Africa and that
he was "too old for that sort of thing (129-130)." Smith’s
explanation is that we are witnessing the Machiavellian module in action. But
while there may very well be unconscious forces at play here (ruling out the
possibility that the colleague was simply being nasty), I’m not sure I
understand what this has to do with conflicting interests, deception or
manipulation. If anything, the colleague is unconsciously revealing his
prejudices, exactly the opposite we’d expect from a well-functioning
Machiavellian module!

            Another example
involves a young woman who, on Smith’s interpretation, compares absent
classmates (it was an early morning class on a cold day) to a man who went
hunting, letting his three-year-old child freeze to death in the truck (129).
Once again, while the absent students may have violated an implicit agreement,
this doesn’t seem to have much to do with deception. These two examples are
typical: somebody is expressing something they’d perhaps like to say, but can’t
because of social norms concerning appropriate speech. Perhaps these norms are
so strong that we aren’t even consciously aware of this desire (though this
isn’t obviously the case). For some reason, the desire to communicate is
stronger than the need to keep quiet and the message emerges in a disguised
form.

            Smith suggests
later on in the book that "the adaptive function of encoded communication
is to warn one’s allies of the presence of a social predator (171)." But
I’m not sure this makes sense. If there’s a need to code communication, then we
must be in the presence of threatening rivals. But why would allies be more
adept than enemies at unraveling these unconscious communications? Smith’s
account simply isn’t compelling.

            I suspect that
there are psychological mechanisms for deceiving and detecting deceptions. I
also accept the strong possibility that these mechanisms operate largely
unconsciously. Finally, I would be surprised if they weren’t the product of
selective pressures coming from the social environment. The problem is that Why
We Lie doesn’t have much to offer these three plausible hypotheses. It’s
rife with speculation that doesn’t consider the obvious counterarguments,
considerably weakening its case. We’re left with a few interesting suggestions
and little else.

 

© 2004 Alex Sager

 

Alex Sager is a doctoral candidate at L’Université de Montréal
working on the ethical implications of biotechnology and public policy.

---

David Livingstone Smith
responds to Alex Sager’s review of Why We Lie

 

I am grateful to have this
opportunity to respond to Alex Sager’s highly critical review of my book Why
We Lie: The Evolutionary Roots of Deception and the Unconscious Mind.  I
don’t deny that the book has its faults, and contains much that readers might
want to take issue with, but I think that Sager presents a misleading picture. I
will confine myself to six specific points that cry out for clarification most
urgently.

First, Sager characterizes the
book as "wildly speculative" and "rife with speculation". 
Anyone reading his remarks might conclude that I’ve attempted to palm off wild
and woolly conjecture as sober fact.  In fact, the Why We Lie is avowedly
and necessarily speculative, because it deals with topics that have received
very little empirical scrutiny. I underscore this point repeatedly, some have
said excessively, throughout the book beginning with the Preface, from which I quote:

A book purporting to be scientific, but which builds
arguments on what may seem to be the flimsiest of foundations, is bound to
disappoint some readers.  Where is the experimental data?  I plead guilty of
not having provided adequate empirical support for the distinctive views
advanced in this book.  Although immensely powerful and valuable, experimental
research is not the be-all and end-all of cognitive science. Science is the
disciplined passion to find out, to make sense of the puzzles presented by the
world around us and within us, and to make reasoned extrapolations from what we
already know, or at least think that we know.  The book points the way to
empirical research into self-deception and unconscious communication.  It shows
scientists of the mind where they might look, and just what phenomena they
ought to look for. You might say that this book resides on the borderland
between science-yet-to-be, in a wild place where there are few paths and the
signposts are scarce and difficult to read (p. 4).

Second, in connection with Trivers’
theory of self-deception, Sager asks why natural selection did not turn us into
better conscious deceivers instead of self-deceivers.  I had thought
that the most plausible answer to this question was implicit in my discussion
as well as in Trivers’ classic accounts: conscious deception is risky, costly
and relatively inefficient.  All conscious mental states are potentially
public, and it can be hard work making sure that the cat never gets out of the
bag, especially when engaged in sustained social interaction with the persons
whom one is attempting to deceive.  Master poker players, con-artists and other
virtuosos of conscious deception have to be intensely vigilant to pull off
their feats of mendacity.  Unconscious deception is a lot easier and probably much
more efficient.

Third, Sager states that I seem
to think that ‘folk psychology must treat oneself and others equally.’ I never
made such a silly claim.  In fact, in Appendix II of Why We Lie presents
a list of the ways in which we skew our perceptions, memories and reasoning in
self-serving ways.   My argument turns the idea, commonplace in the philosophy
of mind, that we make sense both of ourselves and of others by applying a
single interpretative framework and not on the notion that we apply
this framework in precisely the same way to both self and other.

Fourth, Sager claims that I ‘turn
to psychoanalysis’ to understand the nature of unconscious Machiavellian
intelligence.  Given the contemporary consensus that psychoanalysis is not scientifically
credible, this makes the book sound rather wacky. Although the general verdict on
psychoanalysis expressed in Why We Lie is explicitly negative, I do not regard
all things Freudian as prima facie worthless. I give Freud his due as a
pioneer of the neuroscientific theory of mind and probably the first architect
of a detailed theory of unconscious cognition.  I also call attention to a few
remarks in the psychoanalytic literature that may provide valuable clues about
how unconscious social intelligence operates.  Freud hinted in 1913 that the
human brain might be endowed with a cognitive module specifically adapted for
making inferences about others’ concealed mental states and his Hungarian
colleague Sándor Ferenczi suggested, almost two decades later, suggested that such
unconscious inferences are expressed in verbal disguise. The latter part of the
book develops these ideas in an evolutionary biological context and in a more
contemporary scientific idiom.

Fifth, Sager states that he does
not understand how my vignettes purporting to illustrate unconscious communication
cohere with my larger theoretical claims. To give just one example, I describe introducing
my youthful and extremely attractive Caribbean wife to an academic colleague of
roughly my own age.  The colleague then remarks, seemingly out of the blue,
that his cousin adopted a child from Africa and was ‘too old for that sort of
thing’. In the book, I suggest that the remark about a child from Africa was an
unconscious portrayal of my Black wife, and that the cousin who was ‘too old’
represented me.  Sager remarks "I’m not sure I understand what this has to
do with conflicting interests, deception or manipulation."  In fact, I claim
only that the presence of covert conflicting interests drives this phenomenon. 
Deception and manipulation are often present, but they are not necessary.  I assumed
€“ apparently wrongly €“ that there was an obvious connection between this particular
interpretation and my more general theoretical position.  Spelling it out, the driving
force behind my colleague’s remarks may have been covert sexual rivalry
concerning a reproductively valuable female.  In unconsciously presenting my
youthful wife as a ‘child’ and myself as ‘too old’ he disparaged the
relationship.  This was all concealed in a seemingly innocuous and manifestly
irrelevant story about one of his relatives.

Finally, Sager is unhappy
with my claim that the adaptive function of these veiled messages is to alert allies
to the presence of a social deviant.  He argues that because deviant individuals
would also be able to decode unconscious meanings, the disguise would serve no real
purpose. This completely misses the point.  If I am in a crowd and somebody
steals my wallet I might yell "Stop, thief!’   I don’t care that the thief
understands what I’m saying, because the purpose of yelling is to alert the
crowd.  By the same token, it doesn’t matter that the person tagged as a social
predator understands the meaning of an unconscious message, because, I suggest,
the point of the message is to galvanize other members of the community.  I don’t
think we unconsciously encode Machiavellian messages prevent others from
understanding them. I think it’s far more likely that we encode them primarily to
preserve the fog of self-deception that envelops our social lives but which,
paradoxically, helps us to promote our interests by deceiving and manipulating
others.

© 2004 David Livingstone Smith

 

---

Alex Sager
Replies to David Smith

Smith
complains that I ignore his repeated admissions that his book is "avowedly
and necessarily speculative". This wasn’t my intention. Speculation, even
speculation from "a wild place where there are few paths and the signposts
are scarce and difficult to read" is, in my opinion, a valuable and
entirely respectable activity. Smith is right not to limit scientific to
empirical research. Still, it is important, when searching for imaginative
solutions, to have a clear idea of how your ideas might be supported by
empirical research. There is a crucial difference between mere
speculation and speculation that can genuinely contribute to what we know. I
did not mean to criticize Why We Lie simply for being speculative;
rather, I had doubts about the plausibility of its speculations and whether or
not they could eventually lead to anything more.

I will try to
make this clearer with an example. When reading Why We Lie, I was
surprised to see no reference to Lena Cosmides and John Tooby’s justly famous
article "Cognitive Adaptations for Social Exchange", which can be
found in the anthology The Adapted Mind. In this article, Cosmides and Tooby
point to the well-known fact that even people with a background in logic and
science do surprisingly bad on relatively simply problems like the Wason
selection task. In Wason selection tasks, subjects asked to falsify a
conditional hypothesis of the form If P then Q, using a set of four
cards, with letters and numbers written on each side. For example, the cards
could be A, D, 3 and 4, and the conditional might read: "If the card has a
vowel on one side, then it has an odd number on the other." Subjects are
invited to turn over two cards and usually choose the A and the 3. The correct
answer is the A and the 4; the 3 is irrelevant since the conditional doesn’t
say that every odd number must have a vowel on the back. A 4 card with a
vowel on the other side, on the other hand, would effectively falsify the
conditional.

What is interesting about
this task is that people’s scores are significantly higher when you substitute
the abstract content and present four cards representing rules from social
contracts. To use an example cited by Cosmides and Tooby, the cards might read "drinking
beer", "drinking coke", "25 years old" and "16
years old" and the conditional could be "If there person is drinking
beer, she must be over 21." In this case, it is obvious that the correct
cards are "drinking beer" and "16 years old". To explain
the fact that people do much better with these examples, despite the fact the
abstract reasoning is identical, Cosmides and Tooby employ evolutionary
reasoning. They suggest that one of the fundamental problems encountered by our
hunter-gatherer ancestors is cheating, people who violate social contracts. This
suggests that there may have been selective pressures that rewarded individuals
who were capable of detecting cheating. This leads them to posit that we have
evolved a "cheater-detector module" especially designed to foil
contract violators.

I don’t want to dwell on
this example or necessarily endorse it, but rather to distinguish it from much
of Smith’s book. In my opinion, this cheater-detector module is a perfectly
respectable scientific hypothesis based on evolutionary reasoning. It is supported
by empirical experiments on the Wason selection task and Cosmides and Tooby
attempt to support their hypothesis by discussing competing interpretations of
this evidence. We can also see how further experiments and evidence could serve
to confirm or refute it.

Contrast Smith’s use of Triver’s
account of deception. Like Cosmides and Tooby’s example, it uses evolutionary
reasoning, but it’s often difficult to decide how his hypotheses could be
developed or confirmed. When I asked why evolution didn’t simply create better
conscious deceivers I was making a point about evolutionary reasoning: it
always needs something else, a background of evidence, experiments and theories
which limit the scope of interpretation. Smith may be right that "conscious
deception is risky, costly and relatively inefficient", but he should also
realize that these claims are absolutely fundamental to his entire argument and
need further support. How should we characterize deception in general? How
risky, costly and inefficient is conscious deception? In what ways? In what
domains? Are there essential differences between conscious and unconscious
deception? What evidence can be brought to bear on these questions? What
experiments could we conduct to further our understanding? I realize that Smith
is working in a relatively novel domain and that it would be unfair to hold him
to an unreasonable high standard, but this is the sort of work that needs to be
done. The point is this: if we are simply relying on evolutionary speculation
to support our theory, we’re on very flimsy ground.

Third, Smith
takes exception to my claim that he "seems to think that folk-psychology
must treat oneself and others equally". Perhaps I wasn’t sufficiently
clear, but it was directed at his claim that social inferences of oneself and
of others must take place within the same framework. I was particularly struck
by a particular passage which I will now quote in length:

Mother
Nature has seen to it that the conscious mind is relatively blind to the
nuances of social behavior. It is easy to understand why this turned out the
way it did. If human beings had the knack of consciously making penetrating
inferences about each other’s motives and strategies, our insights would come
at a high price. Self-deception would become much more difficult, and this
would rob us of its vital benefits. To understand why, consider a physiological
analogy. It is impossible for a person to damage his or her eyes in such a way
as to make the unable to see only certain kinds of objects. [€¦] If one is
blind, one loses a whole dimension of experience. The same principle
applies to the social "blindness of the conscious mind, which provides us
with relatively impoverished portrayals of both our own actions and motives and
those of others. All social inferences flow from a common set of assumptions,
an informal folk-psychological theory of human nature. If the theory is biased,
it will deliver faulty appraisals of everyone: not only of oneself, but
also of other people. [€¦] The knife of self-deception cuts two ways: you cannot
maintain a highly distorted conception of yourself side by side with a true
estimate of others.

To begin with,
the physiological analogy is purely rhetorical. There is no reason to think
that any principles taken from physical blindness also apply to social
blindness. Leaving that aside, why is it that all "social inferences flow
from a common set of assumptions"? I question Smith’s claim, despite the
fact it is "commonplace in the philosophy of mind", that we use a single
interpretative framework. Once again, where is the evidence that supports this?
I’m not willing to rely on the authority of philosophy of mind. Smith himself may
in fact contradict it by drawing attention to the fact that "we skew our
perceptions, memories and reasoning in self-serving ways". If this is the
case, why is it necessarily the case that we use the same interpretative
framework? Couldn’t it be possible that we use two (or more) interpretative
frameworks? After all, how exactly do we count interpretative frameworks? I don’t
pretend to know how to resolve this problem, but believe that agnosticism is
the correct stance. Once again, we need more evidence.

Fourth, I hadn’t
meant to dismiss psychoanalysis or Freud. Like Smith, I believe both contain
valuable insights. Unlike Smith, I am extremely skeptical that "unconscious
inferences [of a cognitive module adapted for making inferences about others’
concealed mental states] are expressed in verbal disguise". Nothing Smith
has said convinces me that the analysis of speech is a valuable tool for
revealing the unconscious mind. What bothers me is I don’t see how, once we
have a number of plausible sounding interpretations, we can decide between
them. In some ways, I think the history of psychoanalysis shows this: the "correct"
interpretation often seems to have more to do with the particular theorist’s
idiosyncrasies than any really convincing theory. The result is something
closer to literary criticism, something which may be of therapeutic value, but
is unlikely to increase our knowledge of the mind. I don’t see how Smith’s
placing "these ideas in an evolutionary biological context and in a more
contemporary scientific idiom" limits plausible interpretations. The
example of Smith’s colleague’s story about his cousin being too old to adopt a
child from Africa may have undertones of sexual rivalry, etc., but is this obvious?
Is the remark necessarily unconscious? Aren’t there other competing
interpretations? Couldn’t his colleague simply having been (misguidedly)
attempting to demonstrate affiliation? Isn’t it possible that his remark was
completely coincidental? Finally, how are we going to resolve these questions? I
can imagine different people having competing intuitions and I’m not sure how
we could determine which ones are the best.

Finally, I’m
not sure Smith makes clear the adaptive value of veiled messages that point out
social deviants. Smith claims that this messages work in the same way that he
might yell, "Stop thief!" to alert the crowd that someone has stolen
his wallet. But is it really unimportant that the culprit social predator
understands these veiled messages? Smith suggests that these messages serve
simply to "galvanize other members of the community." But I’m puzzled
why we would evolve complex and most likely costly mechanisms for sending and
decoding messages if not to conceal them. Smith believes it has to do with
preserving "the fog of self-deception that envelops our social lives but
which, paradoxically, helps us to promote our interests by deceiving and
manipulating others". As my remarks above show, I’m still not convinced
that this follows.

© 2004 Alex Sager

Categories: Psychology