Why We Lie: The Evolutionary Roots of Deception and the Unconscious Mind - Hardcover

The Stone Age Mind

Darwin predicted in The Origin of Species (1859) that evolutionary theory would one day provide a new foundation for the science of psychology; but it would be more than a century until the truth in his words was borne out. The change came when advances in our understanding of the genetics of social behavior ushered in the controversial new science of sociobiology, the biological study of the social behavior of humans and other animals. 2 Before the pioneering work of the Harvard biologist Edmond O. Wilson, the study of human social behavior had been dominated by the dogma of cultural determinism. According to this view, which remains prevalent in the social and behavioral sciences, the forces of culture are all-powerful in shaping human behavior. Culture itself is said to be autonomous, standing outside of and relatively untouched by the primitive forces of nature. Primed by the still fresh memory of Nazi eugenics, the effort to "purify" the human race by killing or sterilizing "defectives," many social scientists were deeply suspicious ofany theory purporting to describe the biological foundations of human nature. Some of them luridly portrayed sociobiologists as dangerous neo-Fascists, hell-bent on racism, sexism, and the preservation of the political status quo.3 Over the next three decades, human sociobiology transformed itself into evolutionary psychology, an approach to psychological science that studies the mind from the standpoint of its prehistoric and evolutionary origins. Evolutionary psychology is not just one more school of psychology. It is a perspective on the whole of psychology that claims that we are human animals, and that our minds, no less than our bodies, are products of the forces of nature operating on a time frame of millions of years; human nature was forged from our ancestors' struggle to survive and reproduce. It is difficult to comprehend this expanse of time without some help. Consider it this way: if all the time that has elapsed since the emergence of the first hominids were a single day, the whole period of recorded history, some five thousand years, would occupy only the final two minutes.

Remains of prehistoric skulls suggest that the human brain attained its present form about one hundred fifty thousand years ago. We lived in an environment very different from that of all but a very few human populations today, eventually emerging from prehistory equipped with an array of passions, skills, and mental abilities specifically adapted to life in that primeval habitat. The mind that you and I possess is, in its essentials, a Stone Age mind.

Evolutionary biology does not endorse the popular and reassuring conviction that human minds are tools for self-knowledge and the pursuit of truth. The human mind evolved for the very same reason that all of our other organs evolved; namely, because it contributed to its owners' reproductive success. Nature selected those mental capacities that helped to spread our genes, and those that proved unhelpful were ineluctably snuffed out. Asany seducer knows, honesty and reproductive success are not necessarily good bedfellows. Because deception and self-deception helped our species to succeed in the never-ending struggle for survival, natural selection made them part of our nature. We are deceptive animals because of the advantages that dishonesty reaped for our ancestors, and which it continues to secure for us today. But I am getting ahead of myself. Let me first survey the landscape of human deceit and leave the discussion of its evolution for subsequent chapters.

The Ubiquity of Deceit

Deceit is and probably always has been a major concern of human culture. The founding myth of the Judeo-Christian tradition, the story of Adam and Eve, revolves around a lie. We have been talking, writing, and singing about deception ever since Eve told God "The serpent deceived me, and I ate." Our seemingly insatiable appetite for stories of deception spans the extremes of culture from King Lear to Little Red Riding Hood. These tales are so enthralling because they speak to something fundamental in the human condition. Deception is a crucial dimension of all human associations, lurking in the background of relationships between parents and children, husbands and wives, employers and employees, professionals and their patients, governments and their citizens.

Lying is obliged by its very nature to cover its traces, for in order to lie effectively we must lie about lying. This poses a problem for anyone attempting to prove the ubiquity of deception. Although it is all around us, deception is strangely elusive, "hard to explain, although it is something with which we are all intimately familiar."4 We do not need the surveys and experiments beloved by psychologists to confirm that people often lie to each other, although these, too, have proven to be quite revealing. Tograpple with dishonesty, we have to open our eyes to some unpleasant truths. As the biologist William Hamilton once remarked, evolutionary thinking about human behavior is not difficult in the way that doing physics is. It does not require highly sophisticated mathematics, elaborate instrumentation, or difficult chains of logic. Viewing human behavior through a Darwinian lens is difficult because it radically undermines cherished illusions about human nature. It leads us to violate mental taboos, to enter no-go areas, to open the book of forbidden knowledge. It is "socially unthinkable," exposing the raw nerves of our relationships with...