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

by Robert Trivers

  For a parallel in Islam, there is an important distinction in Sufi thinking between the jihad (struggle) against the outside world, called the small jihad, and the jihad against oneself, called the greater jihad. The small jihad is relatively simple: one struggles in group activities against an out-group in order to convert them. In the extreme case, either they are killed or you are, at which point you ascend to heaven. No great problem. But the struggle against oneself is far more difficult, and to reach God’s light, one must succeed in controlling one’s own body. This is a personal struggle that requires controlling your bodily desires (for money, pleasure, satisfaction) in order to purify your soul. These desires occlude self-knowledge, in our system of logic, by encouraging self-deception. In the Sufi system, you must enslave your desires or they will enslave you. And finally, controlling the self is also a useful tool for controlling the outside world. The Greek sage Thales once put the general matter succinctly. “Oh master,” he was asked, “what is the most difficult thing to do?” “To know thyself,” he replied. “And the easiest?” “To give advice to others.” Various Eastern religions also sometimes urge rather extreme systems of physical self-denial to free the individual from its egocentric center.

  INTERCESSORY PRAYER—DOES IT WORK?

  A bizarre belief widespread in many Christian circles is that of the power of intercessory prayer. That is, many people seem to believe that a group of people in a room, scrunching up their foreheads in intense concentration on behalf of someone miles away about to undergo surgery, can have a positive effect on the outcome. Were this to be true, the laws of physics would have to be violated on a daily, even minutely basis, by a deity who chooses to alter reality in response to the pleas of petitioners according to some unknown criterion—a most unlikely structure to the real world. The matter has been put to a test a number of times but often with poorly controlled studies and small sample sizes, precisely the conditions expected to produce a conflicting array of positive and negative findings, feeding the illusion that something may actually be going on.

  Then came a multimillion-dollar study, carefully organized with six hospitals in which groups prayed for given patients from the day before they entered surgery until two weeks later, while another group of patients received no such prayer. Meanwhile, some of those being prayed for were told that they were being prayed for and others were not. Patients were followed for a month after surgery. The results were unambiguous: no effect whatsoever of intercessory prayer on the outcome, no hint of a benefit. So our first question is answered: it has no direct effect.

  But does it have a placebo effect? Does belief in the efficacy of intercessory prayer by the victim give any kind of efficacious benefit? Quite the contrary. Those told they were prayed for had more postoperative complications of every sort than did those who did not know they were being prayed for. One hypothesis is that when told people are praying for you, you interpret your situation as being more dire than it really is, with associated stress. The patients are not being offered anything more than a useless prayer: no talk of cleaning the apartment or keeping their dog alive, no investment in their future, nothing—just the claim of people in intense wishful thinking on their behalf.

  Note that the truly devout have no problem with these new scientific results—God responds to these experiments by simply withholding the usual benefits of intercessory prayer the better to keep scientists (and unbelievers more generally) in the dark. Did not Jesus say, “I will reveal unto babes what I will keep hidden from the wise”?

  RELIGION AND SUPPORT FOR SUICIDE ATTACKS

  There has been an exponential increase in suicide attacks worldwide, at least as measured over the past twenty years. This is a device by which a member of one group sacrifices his or her life to inflict damage (death and otherwise) to numerous or highly important members of another group. There is no question that this behavior could in principle be an effective political (and reproductive) strategy with return benefits to the martyr’s much larger kin group, but there is also no doubt that such behavior easily induces massive return spite. In any case, suicide bombing can serve as a sensitive measure of the degree of willingness to commit violence against an out-group at great personal cost.

  It is of some interest to know the role of religion in all this—pro, con, or otherwise. Recent work has provided a most interesting answer. When measured one way, religious activity makes the participation in (and support of) suicide bombings more likely. When measured another way, religion has no effect. What is the difference? Religion has an external, social aspect and an internal, contemplative one. Across a variety of suicidal conditions (Palestinian surveys, a hostile prime for Israeli settlers), religious attendance (the social aspect) is positively correlated with support for suicide bombings, but prayer (the contemplative) is not. This holds for study after study. In a summary of six religions in as many countries, regular attendance at religious services predicted both out-group hostility and in some cases willingness to be a suicide martyr— but prayer did not. The Sufi outer jihad is run by social interactions, the greater inner jihad by achieving independence through prayer. This is, I think, the double face of religion—outward, hostile, and egocentric; internal, contemplative, and anti-egoistic.

  RELIGION → SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS → WARFARE

  Religions tend to contribute to war in several ways. They encourage an in-group mentality, backed up by a breeding system that increases within-group relatedness (while decreasing between-group relatedness) and they readily provide the shared self-deceptions on which to base group action. But there is one final gift of many religions: self-righteousness. Murder is not only not prohibited (as it is within the group), but it is also sometimes required. It is your moral duty to kill the infidel, the unbeliever, the other. You are doing the Lord’s work—not just your own or that of your group. You are fulfilling more than your manifest destiny—you are the Lord’s executioner. You are helping natural selection along its ordained path. The Bible, as it turns out, warns against this path: “Vengeance is mine,” saith the Lord.

  CHAPTER 13

  Self-Deception and the Structure of the Social Sciences

  There is structure to our knowledge. Take science, for example, with its various subdisciplines of mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, and others. Or history and philosophy and philology. Or literature, biography, and poetry. How do processes of self-deception affect the structure of knowledge? We have already addressed history; here I wish to focus on social biology and the social sciences, economics, cultural anthropology, and psychology. If we believe, as we have seen over and over, that self-deception deforms human cognitive function among individuals, airline pilots, governmental agencies, war planners, and so on, how can we not imagine that our very systems of knowledge are not likewise systematically deformed?

  Of course, I can pretend no overview of this immense subject—all of knowledge itself—but several points strike me as important. First, we expect knowledge to be more deformed, the more deformation is advantageous to those in control. If you are trying to land a missile more accurately or transmit knowledge more quickly, you will be drawn to science itself, which is based on a series of increasingly sophisticated and remorseless anti-deceit and anti-self-deception mechanisms. It seems likely that the enormous success of science in part reflects this feature. Second, it seems manifest that the greater the social content of a discipline, especially human, the greater will be the biases due to self-deception and the greater the retardation of the field compared with less social disciplines. It may be that the intrinsic complexity of social phenomena impedes rapid scientific progress, but modern physics is very complex, and its findings were unearthed by procedures relatively unimpeded by self-deception. The study of history seems to be a conflict between a few honest historians trying to gain a true picture of the past and the greater number, who are primarily interested in promoting an uplifting view of the group past—in short, a false historical narrativ
e.

  Another possibility regarding the development of social disciplines is that a prior moral stance regarding a subject may influence the development of theory and knowledge in that subject—so that, in a sense, justice may precede truth (and false justice, untruth). Let us begin with this topic.

  PRECEDENCE OF JUSTICE OVER TRUTH?

  The usual assumption within academia is that we will derive a theory of justice from our larger theory of the truth. But what if our prior stance regarding justice impedes our search for the truth? For example, an unconscious bias toward an unjust stance will invite cognitive biases in favor of this stance. The “truth” that one produces on the justice of a situation will have been distorted by the prior commitment to an unjust position. In short, injustice invites self-deception, unconsciousness, and inability to perceive reality, while justice has the opposite effect. This can be a very pervasive effect in life. That is, we can construct social theory—at the microlevel, marriage, family, job; at the macrolevel, society, war, etc.—and think we are pursuing the truth objectively, but we may only be fleshing out our biases. This suggests that an early attachment to fairness or justice may be a lifelong aid in discerning the truth regarding social reality. Of course, if your attachment is to pseudo-justice, one may have exactly the opposite effects. It is possible to use an alleged attachment to justice defensively—for example, to prohibit outside knowledge from entering your discipline—which may lead you far from truth, as we shall see for cultural anthropology. Behavior may cause belief, as I have been arguing, but that still leaves open the question of what causes the behavior in the first place, that is, the just or unjust stance.

  SUCCESS OF SCIENCE IS BASED ON ANTI-SELF-DECEPTION DEVICES

  The success of science appears in great part to be due to a series of built-in devices that guard against deceit and self-deception at every turn. First, everything is supposed to be explicit. Famous mathematical proofs (Godel’s theorem) begin with a set of all the symbols used and what they mean. By contrast, in the social sciences, entire subdisciplines may flourish in the interstices of poorly defined words. Scientific work is supposed to be described explicitly in detail, with terms and methods defined to permit the work to be repeated exactly in its entirety by anyone else. This is the key guard against untruth: repeating work to see whether the same results emerge. Think of the number of tantalizing hoaxes that are dismissed because they can’t pass this first hurdle—for example, achieving atomic energy via cold fusion. Of course, full-time hoaxes, such as psychoanalysis, preclude experimental tests at the outset (in favor of such bedrock data as clinical lore). The requirement for exact description permitting exact repetition applies not just to experimental work but also to any way of gathering data that reveals patterns of interest.

  Experiments are conducted under controlled conditions—that is, with certain key variables held constant and/or varied in a logical and systematic manner. The results are then subjected to a statistical apparatus that has grown very sophisticated in the past one hundred years. Very complex sets of data can now be rigorously searched for information regarded as statistically significant. By convention, data that can be generated by chance more than 5 percent of the time are rejected as unreliable. For important results, such as medical findings, we prefer an error rate of 1 percent or less. Finally, meta-analyses can be performed on large numbers of related studies to see what statistically valid generalizations can be made across the full range of evidence. Every single one of these advances tends to minimize the opportunities for deceit and self-deception. They also permit us to rank information by degree of reliability (statistical significance) and effect size (weak or strong).

  The acid test of science is its ability to predict the future, in particular, hitherto unknown facts. Yes, light really is bent by gravity (per Einstein); in an eclipse of the sun, the apparent position of stars in the nearby background was altered by the sun’s gravity. The same principle operates on much more humble work. That ants produce a 1:3 ratio of investment in the sexes (unlike almost all other animals) was first predicted on kinship grounds alone (the female ants producing the ratio are three times as related to their sisters as to their brothers, unlike almost all other species) and has been confirmed by detailed evidence from dozens of scientific studies. Of course, scientists will pretend that “predictions” lack any foreknowledge, when in fact they are “post-dictions.” This is the beauty of Einstein’s prediction compared to that concerning ants: How on earth could Einstein have had advance information about the apparent positions of stars during a solar eclipse more than ten years into the future? By contrast, one can easily bone up on ant sex ratios before launching one’s prediction.

  There is one more key requirement to true science. Science asks that, whenever possible, knowledge be built on preexisting knowledge. Key assumptions may already be contradicted (or supported) by preexisting knowledge, and where no such knowledge exists, science suggests the value of producing it. Errors in the foundation—of both buildings and disciplines—are the most costly. Yet there is surprising resistance in many quarters of social science to adopt—much less embrace—this feature of real science.

  The structure of the natural sciences is as follows. Physics rests on mathematics, chemistry on physics, biology on chemistry, and, in principle, the social sciences on biology. At least the final step is one devoutly to be wished and soon hopefully achieved. Yet discipline afterdiscipline—from economics to cultural anthropology—continues to resist growing connections to the underlying science of biology, with devastating effects. Instead of employing only assumptions that meet the test of underlying knowledge, one is free to base one’s logic on whatever comes to mind and to pursue this policy full time, in complete ignorance of its futility.

  By contrast, mathematics gave physics rigor, physics gave chemistry an exact atomic model, and chemistry gave biology an exact molecular model. And biology? You would think it would have much to give—most important, an explicit, well-tested theory of self-interest, but also a vastly expanded set of evidence, including a detailed understanding of many underlying variables (immunological, endocrinologic, genetic) that would otherwise remain obscure.

  THE MORE SOCIAL THE DISCIPLINE, THE MORE RETARDED ITS DEVELOPMENT

  In physics, we imagine precious little self-deception. What difference does it make for everyday life whether the gravitational effect of the mu meson is positive or negative? None at all. So the field is expected to advance relatively unimpeded by forces of deceit and self-deception—with one exception. Physicists will overemphasize the importance and value of their work to others. They will talk of producing “a theory of everything” and make other grand claims, but their social utility, in my opinion, is primarily connected to warfare. Their major function has been to build bigger bombs, delivered more accurately to farther distances, and this has probably been their main function reaching back into prehistory. When I read of nine billion euros spent on a supercollider in which tiny particles are accelerated to incredible speeds and then run into one another, I think “bombs.” This factor may lead to more resources being directed toward physics and to some subareas than is objectively sensible, but it is unlikely to have much effect on constructing theory.

  In my opinion, a key to the development of the very solid and sophisticated science of physics is the complete absence from its subject matter of social interactions or social content of any sort. More generally, I imagine that the greater the social content of a discipline, the more slowly it will develop, because it faces, in part, greater forces of deceit and self-deception that impede progress. Thus, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and economics have direct implications for our view of ourselves and of others, so one might expect their very structure to be easily deformed by self-deception. The same can be said for some branches of biology, especially social theory and (separately) human genetics. Many of these illusions have in common that function is interpreted at a higher level than is warranted (for exa
mple, society instead of individual).

  SELF-DECEPTION IN BIOLOGY

  For roughly a century, biologists had the social world analyzed almost upside down. They argued that natural selection favored what was good for the group or the species, when in fact it favors what is good for the individual (measured in survival and reproduction), as Darwin well knew. More precisely, natural selection works on the genes within an individual to promote their own survival and reproduction, which is usually equivalent to what is beneficial for the individual propagating the genes. Yet almost from the moment Darwin’s theory was published, scientists in the discipline reverted to the older view of benefit as serving a higher function (species, ecosystem, and so on), only now they cited Darwin as support for their belief. In turn, the false theory was just the kind of social theory you would expect people to adopt in a group-living species whose members are concerned with increasing one another’s group orientation. This theory also can be used to justify individual behavior by claiming that such behavior serves group benefit (for example, murder justified as population regulation) and can be used to create the ideal of a conflict-free world.

  For example, take the classic case of male infanticide, first studied in depth in the langur monkeys of India, and now known for more than one hundred species. Male murder of dependent offspring (fathered by a previous male) was rationalized as a population-control mechanism that kept the species from eating itself out of house and home. Male murder thus served the interests of all. Of course, it did no such thing. Since a nursing infant inhibits its mother’s ovulation, murder of the infant brought the bereaved mother into reproductive readiness quicker, which aided the male’s reproduction but at a cost to the dead infant and its mother. In some populations, as many as 10 percent of all young are murdered by adult males—each murder gaining on average only two months of maternal time for the new male. These deaths are unrelated to population density (as would be expected if they served a population-regulation function), but they are correlated with the frequency with which males take over new groups. What this work shows is that an enormous social cost can be levied every generation by natural selection on males, even though there is only a modest male gain (two months of female labor) compared with the female loss (twelve months of maternal care).