The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life

by Robert Trivers

  And what about the downside? Consider a romantic fantasy. That woman far away is, in fact, your wife-to-be, if not (in full delusional mode) your very soul mate. Now you can pour it on full time in the lab, certain that your romance and (future) sexual life are taken care of. You may send a portion of your earnings to your beloved every week and tell her that since you cannot show your love to her more directly, you take joy in showing it by sending her money. She will be pleased. She will be so pleased she may encourage you in your fantasy. In fact, she may have created it almost single-handedly in the first place.

  Jamaicans have a term for this form of manipulation, called having a “boops.” A boops is typically an older man who supports a young woman—her rent, electricity bill, runaround expenses, perhaps a small car—while receiving minimal sexual favors in return, only the fantasy of what soon will be his. In the optimal case, he receives no sex at all—the more fevered to keep his imagination and the more rewarding his behavior. Once caught up in his fantasy, he hardly wishes to question it. Contrary evidence that in other situations would put you immediately on guard or at least warrant some study is easily brushed aside (say, failure to receive any Christmas present at all while lavishing major ones on her). As one psychiatrist put it, “You do not want little, niggling details of reality to interfere with a good fantasy.”

  Now that someone else is driving your fantasy, it may carry you far from your true interests. Yes, you do wonderful lab work for six months, but if you have really bought into your fantasy, you are suffering numerous immediate costs and must someday suffer a painful de-fantasization in order to reconnect yourself with your actual interests. There can be no doubt that sexual and romantic fantasies, unfulfilled, must rank as among the most costly. Not only is a greater portion of your potential reproductive success on the line, but so is your vulnerability.

  THE PAIN OF BETRAYAL

  If deceit and self-deception in the family have the deepest effects on one’s life, then those concerning sex are the most painful. There is nothing like sexual betrayal for pure pain—nothing like learning a loved partner is betraying you left, right, and center to split your soul in two. Deception and self-deception coming from early family life may be associated with pain akin to chronic arthritis, but with sexual betrayal, the pain is more like being hit by a truck. I believe this is true for both sexes.

  There are at least three elements to this. First, the reversal in fortune can be very large—a child assumed to be your own is not, a life of love assumed to be two-sided goes in one direction only. Second, the (so-called) betrayal often rests on a bed of lies, of willful deception that may have gone on for months or years. You have played your part in all of this, by believing the lies—often with active self-deception or at the very least with failure to show due diligence.

  Finally, the deceptions reach in all directions. Many lies in life are largely between you and the liar. Sexual lies inevitably encompass others, sometimes dozens of others who know a side of your life that you do not, increasing the degree of public shame. For a truly extreme example, consider the dreadful case of Elin Woods, who had to endure the knowledge that her husband, Tiger, had sex regularly with a waitress who worked across the street—at a diner they frequented—seduced the daughter of a next-door neighbor, a family she had known for several years, employed numerous people to hide his sexual life who also interacted directly with her, and then—to top it all off—let a billion people in on the secret. Arnold Schwarzenegger has now pulled off his own stunt along these lines, also available for full public enjoyment.

  Why is sex so often associated with shame? One reason is that sexual activity often acts against self-interest directly—the damaged self. This includes, in principle, masturbation, bestiality, homosexuality—all sexual behavior that fails to benefit self. Unrelated individuals will have no direct self-interest but relatives will—their self-interest is directly harmed by your sexual misbehavior, as may be their reputation. So they may feel special pressure to shame you.

  In principle, your inappropriate sexual behavior can upset many individuals.

  Again the contrast with the family offers insight. We could have grown up under complete subjugation while being sold an ideology of equality, but usually we fall somewhere along a continuum of relative domination and misrepresentation. But infidelity (like pregnancy) is not spread along a continuum. You either are unfaithful or you are not—pregnant or not. The reversal of fortune is often absolute.

  Perhaps you say to yourself, “What’s the appropriate reward for someone who has lied to me, disrespected me, and plundered from me for two years?” and strangulation comes to mind. But should you not strangle yourself as well? Every deception was received and ignored by you. Your own self-deception was manipulated against you, probably both consciously and unconsciously by your partner. The two of you made that bed and lay in it.

  There is often some kind of relationship between the family situation you grew up in and the one you find yourself in. Surely some of the resemblance is both genetic and through imitation. But there are also logically related effects of a different kind. Chris Rock, the American comedian, likes to joke that every woman has “a daddy problem” and you, her current partner, have to pay the price. Imagine dating a woman and taking her one day from an abusive relationship with her father. At first she will be happy, but with any hint that a man strong enough to do that could dominate her worse than her father in other ways, you have a problem on your hands.

  Sexually induced pain is presumably greater the more intimate a couple have been—probably independent of the chance of propagation. Why? Imagine a sex life of relatively modest physical commitment—an embrace, a few kisses, the man climbs on top, and the two enjoy a good copulation. Contrast this with lovemaking that involves the intimate exploration of and numerous loving acts toward the body of the other person, and vice versa. After betrayal, the second is the much more painful of the two, loss in the pleasure of intimacy being the greater and also suggesting greater long-term love lost. And the greater intimacy is more painful to your imagination on both sides—he now has done those things with someone else, giving you a stabbing pain, and you also did such-and-such with him and he has gone elsewhere.

  There is little doubt that pain from a relationship is among the worst of pains. With physical pain, you can almost always do something to ease it, but with emotional pain, you have to wait until it eases itself. The pain is felt on the inside and the outside—there is a social dimension that only adds to the personal. Remember that betrayal often links your partner to a web of lies involving many others—people who knew but did not speak, and so on.

  Another very painful part of the interaction is that when evidence suggests that a long-term relationship is hopeless, the best strategy may be to cut the relationship in half, discard the other person, and minimize interactions, but this in itself is very painful, as if you are cutting yourself in two. Grown up between the two of you may be multiple lines of communication, now severed, so that you suffer extreme social deprivation. Two or three phone calls a day give way to oppressive silence. The sharing of joys, of minor insights, of hopes and fears, all fall by the wayside. The desire to reestablish contact—even hostile contact—is almost overwhelming. You find yourself talking to the person, and not usually in a nice way, either. If you engage in spiteful behavior or fantasize about payback time, you risk being caught in a passionate embrace, not warm but passionate, time-consuming, painful, costly, and negative.

  We now have come full circle, from some of the most tender, loving, and physically exciting moments in our lives to some of the bitterest memories, as victims of lies, treachery, and even public shaming. From love to murderous impulses. This transformation is not created by self-deception but is fed by it at every stage.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Immunology of Self-Deception

  So far we have concerned ourselves with an individual’s relationship to the outside world—his or her c
ompetitors, friends, mates, and family. How does success or failure in each of these relationships involve deceit and self-deception? What kinds of self-deception are special to each realm, and what are their costs? But there is also an inner world that has strong effects on the costs and benefits of self-deceptive behavior (costs and benefits, as usual, are ultimately defined and measured by their effects on survival and reproduction). This inner world consists of a very large number of parasites (which cause disease)—invading organisms bent on eating us from the inside—and a very complex immune system of our own arrayed against them.

  The importance of this world to self-deception comes primarily from the fact that the immune system is very expensive. It can act as an immense reservoir of energy and proteins and is very flexible—benefits and costs can be transferred to other functions at the flick of a molecular switch. Divert resources to attacking another male for possible immediate reproduction? Let’s deal with disease later. Such decisions have very important downstream effects on health, freedom from disease, and ultimately survival and reproduction. And many of these decisions, as we shall see, involve choices between psychological states with differing degrees of self-deception. Put differently, self-deception may have strong negative or, less often, positive effects on the immune system and therefore survival and reproduction—in short, reproductive success (RS).

  The inner world is populated by a series of antagonistic actors, mostly parasites—that is, species specialized to attack and devour us from the inside but also including cancer cells, mutated forms of one’s own cells now replicating out of control. Parasites come in such major categories as viruses, bacteria, fungi, protozoa, and worms. They cause an enormous array of diseases: malaria, AIDS, rheumatic fever, tuberculosis, pneumonia, dysentery, smallpox, mumps, whooping cough, and elephantiasis, to name only some of the deadlier forms. Indeed, it is a sobering thought that more than half of all species on earth are parasitic on the other half—and this is a gross underestimate of the relative frequency of the two, since species of parasites are usually much smaller and harder to detect than are their host species. Most parasites have relatively mild effects, but in aggregate effects on RS, the inner world of parasites is almost as important as the outer, causing perhaps as much as 30 percent of total mortality every generation. This huge selective force has generated a very large, complex, and highly diverse system to counter the internal enemies—our immune system.

  The immune system sends many cellular types to detect, disable, engulf, and kill invading organisms. One part, the innate immune system, is automatic, acts as the first line of defense, and does not rely heavily on learning. The second is based on experience and learning, the preferential production of defenses against parasites one has already encountered. This system produces as many antiparasite defenses (antibodies) as there are parasites. It has been called our “sixth sense,” directed inward to spot invaders as well as cancer cells and stop them. This kind of defense, with a detailed memory of past parasitic attacks, is so important it is found even in bacteria (whose parasites are viruses).

  So disease is important and we invest heavily in protecting ourselves from it—nothing surprising there. What does this have to do with deceit and self-deception? Surprisingly enough, the answer is “a lot.” As we shall see, hiding one’s sexual orientation (or HIV status) is costly—not just in social relations and identity but in impaired immune function and associated early death. Shame, guilt, and depression are all associated with depressed immune function, but shame has greater effects than does guilt. Sharing thoughts about a trauma—even with a private journal—is associated with improved immune function. Good marriages appear to be associated with immune benefits and bad ones with immune costs. Meditation that improves mood also improves immune function. Religiosity is associated with better immune function, as is optimism. And so on. In short, there seems to be a general rule that suppressing the truth is costly to immune function and health, as is negative affect. The key is to understand why. Why should psychological suppression of reality be associated with immune costs and sharing reality or facing it, with immune benefits? And why should an upbeat personality be associated with immune benefits, and depression with immune costs?

  Perhaps the most important aspect of the immune system in this regard is its enormous cost, measured in energy and protein consumption. These resources can easily be diverted for other purposes. No one has figured out yet how to estimate the aggregate cost of the immune system, whether in energy or in other critical units, but there can be no doubt that it is large, probably on the order of the brain itself (20 percent of resting metabolic energy). We turn first to this key point.

  THE IMMUNE SYSTEM IS EXPENSIVE

  The beginning of wisdom about our immune system is to understand that it is extremely costly, both in energy and in the building blocks of life, proteins. It is ongoing and active twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. To keep it running, every two weeks (roughly the maximum life span of many white blood cells), the body produces a set of cells greater in volume than two grapefruits. Some immune cells are among the most metabolically active cells in the body. Each of several thousand B cells specialized to produce antibodies grinds out about two hundred antibodies per second. Put differently, in one day’s time, they generate their own weight in antibodies, the proteins that bind to parasites and disable them. Of course, they can manage this feat for only about a day and a half and must be continually replenished. Because the immune system employs a bewildering array of cell types in a very complex manner, nobody has come close to estimating its total metabolic cost, though survival costs of heightened immune activity have been measured in several bird species. Mice lacking an immune system have been created in the lab, but these animals are prone to infections of every sort and must be maintained in sterile or near-sterile conditions, where they do not thrive, in part because they are not exposed to the useful bacteria we depend upon (for digestion and skin health, for example).

  Scientists have been able to show that the short-term immune response to an immediate parasite attack typically is costly in energy. Fever is often a response because it is harder on the parasite than on the host, but for every 1 degree C increase in human temperature due to fever, there is about a 15 percent increase in metabolic rate (roughly translated: the rate at which we consume energy), so the response is costly. Immunizations, which merely mimic parasite attack, commonly elevate metabolic rate by about 15 percent for several days, while real attacks impose twice the metabolic cost per unit time. This is measured not only in energy but also protein consumed—as much as 20 percent loss in total body protein in sick humans, while in some sick rats more than 40 percent of muscle protein is broken down and new synthesis is sharply reduced. Chickens reared in germ-free environments enjoy about a 25 percent gain in body weight compared to those raised in conventional environments. Of course, this reflects absence of immune costs as well as those of the parasites themselves. The metabolic requirements of mammals raised in germ-free environments drops by as much as 30 percent. Supplying antibiotics in food is associated with growth gains in birds and mammals on the order of 10 percent. The take-home message should be clear. Inside us is a system of which we are mostly unconscious that is vast, powerful, and very expensive. As we shall see, it has numerous psychological correlates, cause and effect often go in both directions, and processes of self-deception produce striking effects.

  It is also striking that about one-tenth of all the proteins our cells produce are promptly degraded and their peptides recycled—a wasteful process involving largely two cell organelles specialized for this purpose (the proteosome and lysosome). Some of this involves regulating proteins that are being produced at too high numbers or are misshapen, but the rest consists of grinding up proteins made by viruses, bacteria, and cancerous cells, both to mediate their effects and to recognize them for future attack.

  Thus the immune system is expensive in both energy expended and proteins consum
ed. But this also means that it is an energy and protein reservoir that can be drawn on for other purposes—and this is probably the key to understanding many of its behavioral and psychological correlates.

  One piece of evidence for how expensive (and important) the immune system is comes from “sickness behavior”—the cost the immune system imposes on the rest of the body when it needs to repair itself. Right after the immune system has fought off a parasitic invader—let us say a virus or bacteria—it is physiologically exhausted. It has drawn down heavily on its own resources to deal with the invader, and it now needs to rebuild itself to be ready for the next one. To do this, it induces a state of torpor, apathy, and lack of interest in life in the larger organism—the “blahs.” This is achieved by releasing a hormone (a particular cytokine) that acts on the brain to make the person anhedonic, that is, not taking pleasure in anything. In rats, this can be shown experimentally by releasing into healthy individuals the immune cytokine that targets the brain—the rat simply will not work as hard (on a treadmill) for sugar or other rewards.

  To me, this finding was especially striking because I had always thought you felt bad after the initial attack of parasites (disease) because you were still fighting them, perhaps just mopping up operations but still enough to keep the immune system busy. Now I see that the immune system—fresh from heroic work on the barricades—merely wants to rebuild itself, and can we kindly help out by becoming inactive? To redirect energy to itself, the immune system makes other activities unrewarding so they will no longer be sought out. Internally you experience this as akin to depression. Would we suffer it better if we understood its purpose and went along with the program? Stay in bed; do not try to eat or have sex or pursue other activities that are usually fun but that make demands on the immune system and its regeneration—be satisfied with a “vacation from pleasure.” Preserve your energy and be humble. Things will soon get better.