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

Now here's a familiar scenario: when I was growing up, my parents, teachers and other such authority figures every now and then found it fit to scold me for lying -- and made it sound like a character flaw, a fearful sin. Of course, they were absolutely right and managed to pass on a very valuable lesson: if you want to survive in this world, you've got to cheat in a way that makes you sound/appear totally honest! And here is a book that can teach you everything you need to know about the origins, mechanisms and usefulness of lying to ourselves and each other. Far from being a morally dubious trait in some "bad" people, it turns out that this is one of our most vital survival strategies. Smith makes some very important contributions to the understanding of our minds from an evolutionary point of view. He convincingly portrays social life as a highly competitive system, and our cooperation with others as a form of allegiance against competitors/enemies. But because it is so difficult and draining to make reliable friends and influence the right people (as you might have noticed after any cocktail party or family gathering), our brains have evolved mechanisms to do most of the job unconsciously, while we merrily engage in (mostly elevating) self-deception and apparently boring small-talk. In fact, recovering some of Freud's most enlightening hypotheses, Smith (along with many other evolutionists quoted in his book) argues that our conscious mind is not at all responsible for making decisions: "only results become conscious". We're like the user-friendly computer screen, as opposed to the hard disk, where all the real important information gets processed. Which means that what's going on even in our yapping heads is not really under our "control" -- at best we are informed of the final verdict (though we actually tend to be given false information by our unconscious!). This split between conscious and unconscious, Smith argues, actually helps us blissfully cheat and manipulate each other without noticing it (thus avoiding unnecessary and possibly violent conflict) -- except when we, all too often, betray ourselves. The book is full of witty and convincing examples of situations in which the gap between our real but unconscious opinions/intentions and our fake but morally/socially acceptable actions becomes visible. With all this social poker taking place on a daily basis, it becomes clear that society itself is mainly sustained by lies and deception, from religion through the judicial system to elections -- like a collective hallucination. (Which would really explain why politicians, celebrities, the media, schools, etc can come up with the greatest imaginable nonsense without anyone feeling particularly insulted -- it's just normal, after all.) Thus, Smith's book may lead to two basic conclusions: 1) Either you are totally honest with yourself (if this were possible at all) and must therefore bluntly and unashamedly lie to others; 2) Or, far

The first reviewer said it right: "Every once in a while a new book appears which lifts the veil off one's eyes." This book amazes me. Why did our brains evolve a split between our conscious mind and subconscious mind? David Livingstone Smith has a hypothesis that makes sense in an astonishing way. Our brains evolved to maximize our survival potential in prehistoric ages. By far the most important survival factor to primitive humans were their relationships to other humans. Most of our brain power evolved for the purpose of getting along in (primitive) society. Man's capacity for deception evolved in response to reciprocal altruism. Reciprocal altruism improved the life of primitive man, so long as the relationships were reciprocal. However, some individuals would cheat. They would find a way to accept the benefits of reciprocal altruism without reciprocating. Anyone who could cheat successfully had a better chance of passing on their genes. In order to cheat successfully, cheaters had to excel at deception. The genes for deceptive ability spread through the gene pool because that survived the best. With widespread deception and cheating, the ability to detect deception also became an important survival factor. Evolution of the human brain became an arms race between the ability to deceive and the ability to detect deception. As deception became more advanced and subtle, so did the detection of it. Neither side, deception nor detection, could keep the upper hand in the arms race. At some point, deception could no longer be conducted effectively enough by conscious lying. When we lie consciously, we give ourselves away by telltale signs and nervousness. The next step in the arms race was self-deception - to split the mind into a conscious and unconscious. The conscious mind could remain innocent of deception, leaving the unconscious mind free to excel at it. This separation of the mind into a conscious and unconscious, though necessary for successful deception, came at a high cost. The conscious part of our minds became deliberately dumbed down. With the conscious mind being dumbed down, the detection of deception also had to move underground, to be handled by the same "Machiavellian module" that engaged in deception. This unconscious portion of the brain is an expert psychologist, highly capable at reading other people's motivations and at manipulating them. Its high intelligence is unavailable to the conscious mind, except what it selectively allows through. This explanation of a deliberately dumbed down conscious mind accompanied by an intelligent self-deceptive subconscious makes sense. Before reading this book I couldn't see why people (including myself) are like that, but it fits. It is observationally true. Another important revelation in this book is the survival role of gossip and idle chit chat. As mentioned, detecting cheaters in primitive society had high survival value. Gossip served the vital role o

"Deceit is the Cinderella of human nature; essential to our humanity but disowned by its perpetrators at every turn. It is normal, natural, and pervasive. It is not, as popular opinion would have it, reducible to mental illness or moral failure. Human society is a network of lies and deceptions that would collapse under the weight of too much honesty." (p 2) David Livingstone Smith has written a stunning book with four aims in view. First, he explains deception and self-deception from an evolutionary perspective, how lying to ourselves soothes the stresses of life and in the process helps us lie efficiently to others. But in order to deceive ourselves, we had to evolve an unconscious region of the brain where truth can be effectively obscured. This ties with the second aim of the book, in which Smith attempts a controversial reconnection between cognitive psychology and the kinds of questions Freud once tried (unsuccessfully) to answer. Like it or not, the unconscious is a reality which must be addressed. Freud may have left us a legacy of crackpot pseudo-science, but some of his findings can be legitimately applied in scientific investigation. Smith gets us started on doing exactly this, and hopefully some of his ideas will be pursued at more length -- and more empirically -- by the scientific community. He uses examples from modern living in describing (the third goal of the book) adaptive functions of the unconscious mind implied by self-deception, showing (even if without the level of empirical proof demanded by scientific inquiry) that we are all natural psychologists, albeit unconscious ones, carefully monitoring one another's behavior, constantly deceiving others and ourselves. This may sound like a wild idea, but it's not. For the author demonstrates (the fourth objective) that our conscious and unconscious perceptions of others are disguised in the gossip, lies, deceptions, and veiled meanings in everyday conversations. One emerges from this book feeling almost like a paranoid schizophrenic. If indeed we tell three lies for every ten minutes of conversation; if indeed we are constantly, and often unconsciously, aiming hidden missiles at people with coded transcripts and veiled meanings; if indeed we are natural born liars with "bodies that secrete deceit"; then the conclusion presses in the opposite direction of received wisdom. Psychiatric professionals teach us that mentally ill and depressed people are self-deceived and out of touch with reality, but evolutionary biology corrects this mythology. Depressives have a better grasp on reality than then most people, because they suffer from a deficit in self-deception. Smith wryly remarks that self-knowledge isn't all that it's cracked up to be. Smith concludes that we know far less about ourselves, and far more about others, then we are aware of knowing. While acknowledging that we can hardly be taught not to deceive ourselves -- even if we could, it would only result in unhappin

Every once in a while a new book appears which lifts the veil off one's eyes. This is just such a book. Smith addresses one the most important issues of our time. Why do we tell lies? Further, why are we so good at telling them? The author tells us that "the evolutionary roots of deception and the unconscious mind"(the subheading of the book) accounts for our ease with lying. The book addresses some of the fundamental aspects of lying - that we are indeed natural born liars, that not only is lying found throughout nature, but that organisms that lie well are successful. In addition, Smith describes the role of unconscious cognition. His use of the term "social poker" illustrates what takes place in communication. Smith goes where no `self-respecting' psychologists these days are willing to go, by discussing `Freudian' ideas. This was refreshing amidst the climate of overwhelming objection to Freud's ideas in psychology. Smith's knowledge of the various areas addressed in the book is profound. His ability to express Darwinian concepts in a clear and reasoned manner is superb. Indeed this book is a `must read' for the scholar, the student, or even the general reader who is interested in human nature. I highly recommend it, and believe that those who read it will find it fascinating and compelling.