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

by Robert Trivers

  Freud’s theory consisted of two parts: self-deception and psychosocial development. The theory of self-deception had many creative concepts—denial, projection, reaction formation, ego defense mechanism, and so on, but these were wedded to a larger system that made no sense at all, the id (instinctual forces heavily based on alleged critical transitions in early life—anal, oral, and oedipal), the ego (roughly, the conscious mind), and the superego (the conscience, or something like that, formed by interaction with parents and significant others).

  His theory of psychosocial development was corrupt, in the sense that it was built on weak and suspect assumptions that had little or no factual support. The argument was heavily centered on sexual attraction within the nuclear family—and its suppression—but there is good reason to doubt that this should be a major offspring concern. Almost all species of animals are selected to avoid close inbreeding, which has real genetic costs, and they have evolved mechanisms—for example, early exposure to parents and siblings causes sexual disinterest—that minimize inbreeding. This is especially true from the offspring’s viewpoint. That is, fathers may gain in relatedness by forcing sex on a daughter (and therefore a child) sufficient to offset the genetic cost, but the daughter is unlikely to benefit sufficiently in relatedness to offset her cost. The son could in principle benefit from impregnating his mother, but selection would be weak at best, the one ending her reproduction while the other is beginning his, and there are other very good reasons for showing deference to one’s mother (especially for a male’s maternal genes).

  Thus, with Freud’s claim that sexual tendencies in the family arose from the unconscious needs of the child, he was committing a classic case of denial and projection—denying the inappropriate sexual advances toward young women by their male relatives (as his women patients were describing to him) and imagining instead that the women were lusting after precisely these couplings.

  He was also obtuse to harsh parental treatment as a cause of offspring malfunction. Once again, his tendency was to blame the victim. One of Freud’s celebrated analyses was that of “Wolf Man,” psychotic since adulthood with sensations of being tormented physically, bound and restricted, and unable to control his fears. Freud conjured this whole syndrome as resulting from the child’s failure to mature properly, getting stuck in some early stage of development, but he never considered the father’s possible role in this—indeed speaks warmly of him as a highly regarded educator with numerous books—even though he was a sadistic educator and parent. He advocated tying children into bed at night and using a series of other torture devices, all in the name of good posture. Alas, he applied his theories to his own children. One boy committed suicide; the other survived to become Freud’s “Wolf Man.”

  The degree to which Freud’s habit of cocaine abuse during his early years helped fuel his grandiosity is impossible to know, but he certainly easily believed in other phantasmagorical things, for example, that the number twenty-nine played a recurring and decisive role in human life, or that thought could be transported instantaneously across wide distances without the use of electrical devices, and so on. What is truly extraordinary is that he was able to build a cult that took over whole sections of psychiatry and psychology, and provided employment for generations of like-minded people, charging high fees, four times a week, to misinterpret the lives of those they were talking to.

  Freud’s own attitude toward empirical verification was nicely summarized when he responded to someone asking if after thirty years of theorizing, perhaps it was time for some experimental testing. Though allowing that experiments could do no harm, Freud said:The wealth of dependable observations on which these assertions rest, make them independent of experimental verification.

  This is an unusual assertion, since it suggests that counterevidence cannot count as actual evidence. Put differently, the worlds of experimental truth and psychoanalytic truth are independent, as indeed they are. Contrast the position of the famous physicist Richard Feynman:It doesn’t matter how beautiful the guess is, or how smart the guesser is, or how famous the guesser is; if the experiment disagrees with the guess, the guess is wrong. That’s all there is to it.

  SELF-DECEPTION DEFORMS DISCIPLINES

  We have seen numerous ways in which self-deception may deform the structure of intellectual disciplines. This seems obvious in both evolutionary biology and the social sciences, where increasing relevance to human social behavior is matched by decreasing rates of progress, in part because such fields induce more self-deception in their practitioners. One common bias is that life naturally evolves to subserve function at higher levels. Not genes but individuals, not individuals but groups, not groups but species, not species but ecosystems, and, with a little extra energy, not ecosystems but the entire universe. Certainly religion seems to promote this pattern, always tempted to see a larger pattern than is warranted. Science provides some hope, since it has a built-in series of mechanisms that guard against deceit and self-deception, but it too is vulnerable to the construction of pseudo-sciences (Freud), not to mention outright fraud. Over the long haul, however, falsehood has no chance, which is why over time science tends to outstrip competing enterprises.

  CHAPTER 14

  Fighting Self-Deception in Our Own Lives

  There are two divisions in my life regarding self-deception: the personal, affecting how I relate to those around me, and the general, which refers to my scientific work and the problem of interpreting society more generally. One is much more intimate and is bound up with the biology of those relationships most important to me. The second is an enterprise that affects the thinking of many more people, but these are usually much more distantly connected to me.

  Regarding one’s personal life, the problem with learning from living is that living is like riding a train while facing backward. That is, we see reality only after it has passed us by. Neurophysiologists have shown that this is literally true (Chapter 3). We see (consciously) incoming information, as well as our internal intention to act, well after the fact. It seems as if it is difficult to learn after the fact what to predict ahead of the fact; thus, our ability to see the future, even that of our own behavior, is often very limited. I believe I have learned a lot about my self-deceptions but not in ways that prevent me from repeating them—often exactly. Take one common problem I have involving both conflict and self-deception: Someone does me harm, and I imagine a spiteful response, a nasty letter or some other gesture of contempt. Then the submerged side of me says, “But, Robert, you have been in this situation 614 times already and you have talked yourself into the spiteful action, yet in every case shortly afterward you regret your action. This is no different. Do not do it.” And then the dominant part of my personality comes roaring back. “No, this time is different. This time I will feel satisfied and happy.” And there goes number 615. One form of this error is nicely captured in an ancient Chinese expression: “When planning revenge, build two graves, not one.”

  By contrast, I do imagine—although this may be complete self-deception—that a life dedicated to the pursuit of truth, especially via science and logic, has honed my mind through the years, so that I practice relatively little self-deception in the work domain of my life. In fact, I have become somewhat more critical and exacting, requiring higher levels of significance and better methodologies before committing to evidence. Of course, my logical mind is weaker now but I believe I rarely bend logic to suit personal need. For most scientists, this bending results from competition with fellow scientists for recognition, and here the well-known “tender ego syndrome” of academics leads many of them to downgrade the work of those competing for similar niches in their discipline or outshining them more generally. It has always seemed absurd to me to let such petty personal concerns get in the way of understanding the truth, when that is the entire alleged purpose of your work, yet the tendency toward self-aggrandizement and diminution of others’ achievements seems as strong here as elsewhere in life.
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  On the other hand, I have noticed that the standards regarding my own arguments I am willing to push forward have dropped. I care less about appearing the fool, so I am willing to live with a higher ratio of foolish thought to true insight in my statements. I believe this is a function of age. Get a reputation for being foolish when you are young and people will have very long memories. Being foolish in old age may merely lead people to say, “Well, of course he did get dotty toward the end.” On the other hand, old age can comfortably coexist with some wisdom, most of your relatives being much younger and therefore more equally related on both sides of your genome, with important effects in the deeper future to which you may wish to attend.

  TO FIGHT ONE’S OWN SELF-DECEPTION OR NOT?

  Before we begin, we may well ask whether we should bother fighting in the first place. Self-deception has been favored by natural selection, the better to deceive others and ourselves, so why should we fight such tendencies in ourselves? They are advancing our own evolutionary interests. Surely it must be useful to adjust our self-deception strategically—toward situations where it is most likely to be effective—but oppose it in general. Why? Does this not violate our attachment to evolutionary self-interest?

  My own answer is simple and personal. I could not care less. Self-deception, by serving deception, only encourages it, and more deception is not something I favor. I do not believe in building one’s life, one’s relationships, or one’s society on lies. The moral status of deceit with self-deception seems even lower than that of simple deception alone, since simple deception fools only one organism—but when combined with self-deception, two are being deceived. In addition, by deceiving yourself, you are spoiling your own temple or structure. You are agreeing to base your own behavior on falsehoods, with negative downstream effects that may be very hard to guess yet intensify with time.

  It is worth noting that we have also been selected to rape on occasion, to wage aggressive war when it suits us, and to abuse our own children if this brings us some compensating return benefit, yet I embrace none of these actions, regardless of whether they have been favored in the past. As one evolutionist told me, his genes could not care less about him, and he feels the same way toward them.

  One variable that does enter my thinking is the concept of an evolutionarily stable strategy, defined as one that can’t be driven out of a (well-defined) evolutionary game. As long as being honest, or trying to be, and as long as reducing one’s self-deception, or trying to, are strategies that cannot be driven to extinction, then I am happy to leave the long-term evolutionary outcome to the future. If my strategy of attempted honesty leads by logic to its evolutionary disappearance for good, I need give special thought to the matter, but as long as it is merely evolutionarily stable—perhaps held at low frequencies but not driven extinct—I think I will go with anti-self-deception as my approach to life, my so-called internal strategy, not that I have much hope of achieving it.

  A SERIES OF MINOR VICTORIES FOLLOWED BY A MAJOR DISASTER

  In my life, self-deception is often experienced as a series of minor benefits followed by a major cost. I will be overly self-confident, project that image, and enjoy some of the illusions, only to suffer later on a sharp reversal, based in part on the blindness induced by this overconfidence. I may deny counterevidence to a happy relationship that is, in fact, deteriorating badly, each minor compromise with reality boosting mood temporarily while postponing the reckoning that may arrive with savage force. Denial, as we have seen, is often easy to get started but hard to stop. Put another way, self-deception often ends badly. This is as true of mega-events, such as misguided wars and economic policies, as it is for events in one’s personal life. We may enjoy a temporary benefit of deceiving others and self, but we suffer a long-term cost.

  I believe this is a general rule in life, that the cost of ignorance takes a while to kick in, while the benefit of self-deception may be immediate. Long ago, work on rats proved that these kinds of connections—that is, those with a time delay—are among the most difficult for an organism to learn. Immediate rewards and costs are obvious, long-term life effects much more difficult to discern. In addition, there is a strong tendency to discount future effects compared to current ones so that long-term negative effects may be especially difficult to register. In what follows, I will try to sketch out a few anti-self-deception devices that may prove useful in life. There must be many, many more.

  SIGNALS OF UNDERLYING MENTAL SCREW-UPS

  Imagine you are washing dishes and carelessly smash a wineglass against the sink bottom, splintering it. What were you thinking about while you did this? If you are like me, more often than not, you were thinking of something hostile and foolish to do to someone else. In this particular case, I was imagining telling a woman something she did not need to know or wish to hear. The splintered glass served as a warning to me. As I picked up the fragments, I meditated on the stupidity of what I had just been contemplating, vowing that whatever I did, it would not be what had been in my mind when I shattered the glass. Likewise, I once tore off half my lower lip while shaving and simultaneously calling (in my mind) someone a motherfucker. Motherfucker, indeed—he was capable of mutilating me at a distance of miles.

  I think the power of this correlation first occurred to me when I was driving off the campus of the University of California, Santa Cruz, around sunset one evening. I was driving too fast and cursing out in my mind a colleague with whom I had had an argument. Just as I peaked by calling him a punk in my mind, I nearly ran over two students trying to cross the intersection. They cursed and shook their fists, and I shook mine back, but it soon occurred to me that I had nearly run over two completely innocent bystanders over my conflict with the colleague. It did not take long to realize that the behavior I was contemplating was almost as self-destructive in its domain as my actual behavior was dangerous to others. I vowed to temper my language. I have no idea what my near-victims vowed.

  It is not just anger. The other day I managed to break my plastic door handle while trying to enter my car. It was enthusiasm that did it—overexcitement planning a premature and overly positive e-mail as interpreted after the fact. I stored the message, later rewrote it, and later still, sent it.

  I have found this rule so often in my life that it is one of the few things I actually think I have learned, at least on a short-term basis: avoid actions that are being contemplated while you are screwing up during ongoing life. As I age, I find myself scrutinizing my errors more finely—not just broken wineglasses but an unexpected lurch or tripping over the curb or some minor social failure—for deeper correlated mental mistakes. Occasionally the problem is so well hidden that I may go through several mistakes, including a broken glass and a dropped computer, before I see it. For example, I may be slowing down my work because I am unconsciously afraid of negative reaction to it when it is completed. When conscious, the remedy is obvious: speed up the work, if necessary by frequently cursing out the individual causing the slowdown.

  CORRECTING FOR OUR OWN BIASES

  As we have just seen, it is possible consciously to correct for a bias in yourself that you have noticed—in that case, negating intended behavior associated with mishaps in ongoing behavior. Sometimes you can correct your biases quantitatively. For example, I long ago noticed that when asked for my straight-from-the-heart, no-thinking estimate of a variable, I tended to overshoot by 30 percent in the positive direction. So when I wanted to know the approximate truth, I just subtracted 30 percent from my first estimate.

  Consider another example. In which order do you search for something? Do you start first with the most likely place to find it and then search each successive place in descending order of likelihood? Or do you do it the other way around—start with the least likely and move up? The only rational system is the first—you minimize costs by always searching where the expected returns are highest—but most of my life I have done it exactly the other way around. Why? I believe it may have b
een a response to relatively harsh paternal reaction when I failed to turn up with what I had been sent to find. If you are very fearful as you set out to search for something, you may be tempted to start with the last place you would expect to find it—having eliminated this, you then move to a more hopeful alternative, and so on. Your mood goes right up until the very last choice, whereas in the rational search, you try your best shot first. If it fails, you start to panic; as each succeeding one fails, your panic grows. In one situation, hope grows; in the second, panic. Whatever the cause of my aberrant behavior, I see the pattern and how foolish it is, so I act consciously to counteract the bias, forcing my brain to focus first on the most likely place to find what is missing and then move steadily down from there. Yet my very first move is often still in the wrong direction, and only then does the correction set in.

  I also noticed a curious fact about my mind where arithmetic is concerned. I grew up before calculators and I learned numerous tricks to solve arithmetic problems quickly. But if you put a dollar sign in front of the numbers, my mind short-circuited. I added when I should have subtracted, multiplied when I should have divided. I had to remove the dollar signs and reinsert them only at the end. I also had to proofread my work more carefully. When you are copying a long number and want to make sure you have made no mistakes, you can read through the numbers again, comparing them directly, but the better way is to read through them backward. That way, unconscious mental biases that may prevent you from seeing the error twice in a row are very unlikely to do so. Professional proofreaders often use the same device.