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

by Robert Trivers

  Humor permits discussion of taboo topics and the views of disempow-ered groups. Also, people know self-deception is negative and costly but necessary, so humor permits us to bring out this truth for enjoyment and consumption—we are all self-deceivers. Humor permits a kind of societal-level criticism in which no one need be threatened—it is all just a joke.

  DRUGS AND SELF-DECEPTION

  Recreational drugs and self-deception are obviously intimately connected. For one thing, drug use is often, to varying degrees at least, harmful and addiction almost invariably so. I am speaking of a wide range of both legal and illegal chemicals with effects from mild to severe: marijuana, alcohol, tobacco, uppers, downers, cocaine, heroin, and so on. Hence, this cost must be rationalized to the mind and, through the mind, to others. Thus, self-deception is a virtual requirement of drug use. I remember the first time I tried cocaine, I said to myself, “Why, this drug will pay for itself! I am so much more clear-headed and will get so much more work done while using it.” Of course, in reality the drug was very expensive and entirely counterproductive where work was concerned. Huey Newton and I used to joke that we could practice drug abuse without self-deception, thus reducing or wiping out the cost, but it was a lie. Even the pleasant joke served to minimize the problem.

  A second effect of drug use is often to separate our daily life into an up phase while using the drug and a down phase while recovering from it. This tends to split our personalities into two parts that then may be in conflict. The hungover self may remonstrate with the drunken self of the night before (and more generally), but the drunken state will usually forget all of this as soon as its time comes. It is tempting to imagine that the hungover self is more conscious of the two selves than is the drunken self. The latter is into enjoyment and would wish to suppress information from the other self that might cut into the pleasure. But in the hungover state, you are very aware of what went on the night before. Perhaps when you are drunk, your hungover self watches with dismay and attempts to call out—and sometimes (thank God) some information gets through.

  My reason for imagining that the hungover self is the more conscious of the two rides partly on an analogy to split personalities. Many years ago, it was shown that among those rare people with two personalities, the second personality usually emerged in early adulthood and may have been strikingly different from the first. The first could be a shy and retiring British gentleman, the second a flamboyant Spanish fellow with a taste for flamenco. Typically the first personality knew nothing about the second, while the second had been watching the first for many years. Thus, therapy to unite such an individual into a single personality usually focuses on the second personality as the primary one. By analogy, then, the drunken self is like the first personality: it does not know that there is a second personality watching it.

  A third factor of some importance is that the cost of drug use/abuse is often experienced as physiological pain, which you are then tempted to add to the pain of a given social interaction and to project it onto those around you. So the pain of arguments is that much greater, but, denying your own responsibility for that portion of the pain due to your drug use, you project your full anger onto the other person. Abusive drunks—surely we have all met one or two by now, if not in the mirror—fit the mold. So drug addicts tend to be irritable and morally righteous about it at the same time.

  Finally, let us not forget that decisions made while high—while feeling an unnatural affinity for those close by, while feeling especially good about the future—are expected often to be biased away from one’s true interests, just as the drug boosts us from our natural states. It would be nice to know the answer to the question: Are relatively more self-deceived individuals relatively more likely to be drug addicts? One expects the answer to be yes, but I do not know of any evidence. Certainly it is commonly claimed that con artists and thieves end up ensnared by a hard drug—and I have seen several such cases myself—but for the rest of us people, semi-addicted to milder stuff, I do not know.

  Another problem that baffles me is whence the anti-pleasure bias? It is often said by opponents of medical marijuana that we already have legal drugs that promote appetite or suppress pain, so why should we give in to illegal ones? Yet the latter also give pleasure, so that you survive with good appetite and feeling better, so why is the latter not a virtue but an impediment? In fact, I now believe the ideal medicine for a root canal is, in fact, cocaine, and not its chemical analogs (procaine) that numb the pain but don’t make you feel good.

  VULNERABILITY TO MANIPULATION BY OTHERS

  Socially, a potential cost of self-deception is greater manipulation (and deception) by others. If you are unconscious of your actions and others are conscious, they may manipulate your behavior without your being aware of it. Consider the story of a man who insisted, “You can’t make a town man drunk.” This occurred in rural Jamaica some thirty-five years ago, when a man from Kingston (“town”) was passing through and bragging at a bar. Of course, we locals resisted his view and for a while there was a spirited argument. Then one local had a bright idea: he switched sides. He agreed with the town man—you can’t make a town man drunk—and bought him a drink. Soon we all caught on, switched sides, and bought the man a drink. The town man was now in drunkard’s paradise : everyone agreed with his opinions and everyone was buying him drinks. He got drunker and drunker, finally swaying on his chair, then falling to the ground, then vomiting, then slipping and falling in his own vomit. I say this not with pride but to describe the truth: we doubled over with laughter—as he sunk each step lower, we howled the more in pleasure. As Huey Newton was fond of saying, we owned him. We could have robbed him, killed him—he no longer had any control over his destiny. This is a terrible danger in self-deception—not that he was truly deluded into thinking it was impossible to make a Kingstonian drunk but that he had entered into fantasy land, selling one and then believing the fantasy had been bought by others. He was completely unaware of what was going on and he could have died from this as certain as from a heart attack.

  This must be a very general and important cost of self-deception. You are trying to deceive others socially by being unconscious of a critical part of social reality. What if others are conscious of that very part while you are not? Your entire environment may be oriented against you, all with superior knowledge, while you peer out, ignorant and hobbled by self-deception. In the town man’s case, it was his sense of superiority that served as a resource mined by those surrounding him.

  PROFESSIONAL CON ARTISTS

  Bless Bernie Madoff. He has brought con artists back to public attention and given them the attention they deserve, almost as much as when Ponzi swindled thousands of people out of hundreds of thousands of dollars in a pyramid scheme—where early investors are paid high returns, not out of actual earnings but out of the donations of others joining the scheme. As word of mouth spreads about the high returns, more and more want to join the fun. By definition, such an operation can’t continue indefinitely. Typically those who invest early and depart early earn a nice return, as does the swindler himself, though he also may suffer later prison time. Everyone else loses—most people, everything they invested. Madoff stole a staggering $50 billion. He was a classic swindler; smooth and attractive in style, he made you pursue him. Many times he told people “the books are closed” on investment with him, only later to relent and permit them to lose their money with him. As always, some people did not buy in and a few spotted the scheme for what it was. This is what we have expected all along: an evolutionary game, with multiple actors, caught in a frequency-dependent interaction such that most actors will not be forced out of the game anytime soon, and new strategies are always appearing. Incidentally, one of Madoff’s victims had just published a book on gullibility when he learned that it applied to himself: he lost $400,000. In self-defense, he said he was only trying to buy a safe investment with modest returns (more than 10 percent annually) for his family. Modest? Wha
t positive feature in the universe increases by more than 10 percent annually, year after year?

  Most con artists operate on a much smaller scale. They are professional thieves whose art consists of extracting money voluntarily from others, as did Madoff, just on a much smaller scale. They often survive on the unconsciousness, including self-deception, of their victims, as did Madoff. Here it is useful to distinguish between the “long con” and the “short con.” The long con may run for several days, may result in tens of thousands of dollars lost at the end, and often involves activating the victim’s system of self-deception, while the short con is usually over in a matter of minutes for a few dollars and typically involves lulling the victim into temporary unconsciousness regarding a key variable. During long cons, the victim is often put into a trance-like state of mind, as one of his or her weaknesses, often greed, is amplified by the con artist. Because the same illegal or “special situation” can, in principle, be repeated indefinitely, there is no upward limit to the victim’s fantasies, an easily exploitable resource to help overcome contradictions should they arise. Victims in this state are said to “glow” and to be easily spotted by other con artists. Getting the victim into that state is called “putting him under the ether”—presumably into a deep state of self-deception.

  As it looks to the victim: “You’re experiencing the ride singing ‘yo ho ho it’s a pirate’s life for me’ but you never see any of the trappings of the ride itself.” The con artist induces an internal ride in the victim that is very satisfying but is hard to view sideways so as to see where, in fact, the ride is taking you. Once we have taken the bait, we stop asking questions, much as people do in the instrumental phase of any activity, that is, when they are carrying out a project. In the memorable phrase of a great con artist of the street, “I plucked his dreams right out of his head and then sold them back to him—and at a good price, too!”

  Incidentally, con artists demonstrate again the importance of frequency-dependent effects. At low frequency they do well, at high frequency not so well. A shopkeeper may be fooled once by a short-change game but usually not twice. The con artist must always be on the move to fresh victims. Here the density-dependent effect occurs directly through learning (and also passing this information on to others), while in other systems it is genetic and may require several generations of selection to show an effect.

  A medium-length con (about two hours and netting $40) was run against me years ago in Jamaica. I was leaving Kingston one Saturday morning when a short, wiry man hitched a ride. When I asked him where he was going, he said Caymanas Racecourse, the local horse-racing track. He was a jockey—in fact running in the day’s third race, as he proved to me, pointing to his name on the racing form, a name he had introduced at the very beginning of our relationship. He had recently lost his car in an accident, which had also left him broke. After further discussion, it was proposed that I invest in a gambling scheme—betting, as is perfectly legal, on the day’s races, based on his insider knowledge. I remember my thought processes well. As a seasoned virtual Jamaican, I knew that the races were entirely fixed ahead of time, the general public betting not on horses but on how the race would be thrown. The very fact that this man was proposing such a financially advantageous scheme to me (I provide the cash for betting based on his special knowledge, proceeds to be split evenly) was a testament to my fluency in Jamaican culture—my general likability, if you will, augmented by my cultural competence. Why else had we hit it off so quickly? And it was a scheme that was foolproof as far as his stealing from me was concerned: we would buy matching sets of tickets. Our payoffs were yoked. And now that I had made the key breakthrough, it could be repeated ad libitum, $2,000 won this time, $20,000 the next, and so on.

  I do remember one feature of his style that was off-putting: he called me “boss” more than once. This is something I have never liked but in this situation it jarred with my self-image as a fellow Jamaican: someone able to get this opportunity in part because I was not a boss. At one point I asked him not to call me “boss,” as if to say, “please, don’t interfere with my fantasy.”

  We bought $80 worth of matching bets, many coupled with each other, so that should multiple horses come in, the winnings would be very large, but if a single horse failed, we would win nothing. No problem for me, I thought. This is as near to a sure thing as I have seen in my lifetime. Let’s maximize gains! The first horse did come in, as my friend crouched down on the imaginary winner and whipped it home—in a bar where we were now drinking. Didn’t he have to run in the third race? Again, this caused some small internal unease because of the obvious contradiction—not only did he risk being late for his own race, but he also risked arriving drunk—but I was willing to suppress the truth to maintain the fantasy. I dropped him at the track and continued on my way. Within four races, all of my bets were busted. Rounding a corner too quickly, now half drunk, I struck a rock and had to change a tire. Outside in the broiling-hot Jamaican sun, the truth had plenty of time to sink in. The man knew nothing about the track, was certainly not a jockey, and could no more predict the future than I but he was only too happy to have a series of risky bets bought for him by a complete stranger who, as an additional bonus, would deliver him to the track.

  The whole experience now seems to be a metaphor for self-deception itself: the smooth and seamless takeoff, the intoxicating heights, the occasional doubts easily brushed aside, followed by reality itself and an appreciation of the growing costs: no longer just the monetary losses but also an inability to deal with moment-to-moment reality. The upside is temporary and psychological, while the downside is real and enduring.

  LIE-DETECTOR TESTS

  Given the importance of perceiving deception, for example, in spotting an intended “terrorist,” there is a great demand for anyone who can scientifically uncover a lie—hence, the vaunted lie-detector test and a series of new ones, accessing deeper regions of our brains. The classical test measures three variables: heart rate, breathing amplitude, and galvanic skin response (GSR), a measure of physiological arousal. A series of innocuous questions are interspersed with incriminating ones, and systematic deviations in the underlying three measures are recorded. Especially significant, it is argued, are contrasts between key lies (“did you kill Betty Sue?”), to which only the perpetrator is guilty, and much more minor infractions, to which most people are probably guilty (“did you ever steal from your office?”). The guilty are presumed to respond more to the main question and the guiltless to the harmless lie. But these hard and fast rules rarely work so well in real life, and some people appear nearly completely unresponsive to variation in these questions.

  The only question that gives truly reliable results is called the “guilty knowledge test.” Among otherwise innocuous questions is one interspersed that refers to a fact that only the criminal could know—the victim was lying on a red satin sheet before she met her demise. Any deviation from the background responses is evidence of deception—high arousal, low arousal, anything different from the responses to questions about which the person is ignorant.

  I once inadvertently experienced the benefits of the guilty knowledge test when I was trying to counsel a youngster (thirteen years old) about his unfortunate tendency to steal his neighbors’bicycles, an escalation of his previous petty larceny. I told him, “Don’t steal; don’t steal your neighbors’tools; don’t steal your neighbors’ toys.” At first his eyes showed alarm as I talked about stealing, but as I ran down my boring list, he visibly relaxed and looked me in the eye. Then I added “and don’t steal your neighbors’bicycle.” Suddenly his eyes darted up, down, and around, until I continued droning through my list and he relaxed again. Guilty knowledge.

  There is now a raft of new lie-detector tests coming out of neurophysiology and heavily funded by “antiterror” money coursing through the US government. Each test tends to claim high success, but this is usually based on modeling neurophysiological data after the fact against known
honest and deceptive responses in a study population to gain the tightest fit. The tightness of the fit is then highlighted, but this is an illusion. The key is whether your method applied to a fresh set of subjects gives any fit at all, much less the high one claimed.

  Another weakness of this line of work is the tendency to believe that lying per se gives off cues—not a particular kind of lie in a particular kind of situation. Contrast two kinds of lies. A little recorded lie you have waiting and ready for an expected question—where have you been the past two hours? This lie should light up memory areas of the brain, among others. By contrast, a simple denial, in which you suppress the truth and assert a falsehood, should light up areas involved in cognitive control. And so on. But at this time we are nowhere near devising a neurologically valid lie-detector test.

  CHAPTER 9

  Self-Deception in Aviation and Space Disasters

  Disasters are always studied in retrospect. We will not have an experimental science of the subject anytime soon. Disasters range from the personal—your wife tells you she is leaving you for the mailman—to the global—your country invades the wrong nation, with catastrophic effects all around. Disasters, of course, are expected to be closely linked to self-deception. There is nothing like being unconscious of reality to make it intrude upon you in unexpected and painful ways. In this chapter we will concentrate on one kind of disaster—airplane and space crashes—because they typically are subject to intensive investigation immediately afterward to figure out the causes and avoid repetition. For our purposes, these accidents help us study the cost of self-deception in-depth under highly controlled circumstances. The disasters produce a very detailed and well-analyzed body of information on their causes, and they form a well-defined category. As we shall see, there are repeated ties to self-deception at various levels: the individual, pairs of individuals (pilot and copilot), institutions (NASA), and even countries (Egypt).