by Chip Walter
Of course over the long haul getting away with it would have to fail, because if it succeeded indefinitely, the spread of bad behavior would unravel the success that sustained the group, something like the way a too–successful parasite will kill off its host (and itself if it succeeds). Ultimately, the bad behavior has to stop, or at least be controlled. If, among a small band of Homo ergaster, for example, food was stolen, personal hoarding got out of hand, slackers consistently failed to pull their weight, or mates continually cheated on one another and refused to protect and care for their families, the group’s social fabric, and the trust that kept it woven, would fly apart. No one would win.
So in the arms race of ever–improving minds, detecting bad behavior would have been an extremely important skill for our ancestors to develop—an antidote to deception. And it turns out they did, at least according to evolutionary psychologists Elsa Ermer, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby.
We all engage in what scientists call social exchange. We agree to do something for someone in exchange for his or her doing something in return for us, either now or in the future. We do this because on some level we believe that the exchange works to our benefit. So does the other person. “You scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours.” Everything from family relationships to world economies rest on this fundamental human behavior. And for our ancestors, it would have been essential to their common survival.
But what happens when you scratch someone’s back and he or she doesn’t scratch your back back? According to tests Ermer, Cosmides, and Tooby conducted with everyone from hunter–gathers in the Amazon to university students in Europe, Asia, and the United States, we humans have unerring radar for sniffing out those who cheat the system; a kind of social immune system that finds and exposes free–loaders. Not that this radar is perfect in all matters of deception. The tests indicated we are not all that skillful at unmasking trickery, infidelity, or accidental cheating, but when it comes to the scratch–my–back–and–I’ll–scratch–yours variety, we are extraordinarily talented.
Uncovering any physical evidence of this special ability to expose cheaters among the dust and bones of our long–lost predecessors is, unfortunately, impossible. There are, to paleoanthropologists’ everlasting sorrow, no fossils of behaviors. But in another study, cognitive scientist Valerie Stone at the University of Denver did find a different kind of physical evidence, this within the human brain, which indicates our ability to suss out social–exchange cheaters is wired somehow into the wetware between our ears, a little like the ability to learn language.3
At the heart of Stone’s investigation is R.M., a man who had in a bicycle accident damaged a rare combination of areas in his brain—his orbitofrontal cortex, temporal pole, and amygdala. R.M.’s accident was tragic for him, but fortuitous for science because all three of these areas are crucial to social intelligence, particularly in making inferences about others’ thoughts or feelings based on, say, an angry tone of voice, a scowl a smile, or a person’s body language.
Stone devised a test for R.M. to see if particular kinds of if–this–then–that statements were more difficult for him to understand than other kinds. She asked him to analyze three different types. One, for example, dealt with precautions. “If you work with toxic chemicals, you have to wear a safety mask.” Others involved descriptive rules. “If a person suffers from arthritis, then that person must be over forty years old.” A third kind of problem dealt with social, scratch–my–back–I’ll–scratch–yours contracts. “Before you go canoeing on the lake, you first have to clean your bunkhouse.”
R.M. had a difficult time correctly answering the social–contract questions, like the one about the bunkhouse. The difference between getting those correct compared with correctly answering the precautionary questions (“If you work with toxic chemicals, you have to wear a safety mask”) was a whopping 31 percentage points.
Stone concluded that uncovering cheaters was so crucial to survival that evolution favored neural wiring optimized for understanding when someone was not living up to his or her promises. As luck would have it, R.M. had injured exactly the parts of the brain involved in this wiring.4
You might think if we were this good at spotting cheaters, we would be equally talented at detecting other kinds of deceptions. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. A few years ago, two psychologists, Charles Bond and Bella DePaulo, wondered exactly how sharp we were when it came to catching others in the act of pulling the wool over our eyes. Rather than conduct their own study, they organized a study of studies, analyzing documents from 206 other research projects focused on various sorts of human deception and our ability to discover it. They pored over no fewer than 4,435 individuals’ attempts to dupe 24,483 others and found that the dupers were unmasked by the dupees only 54 percent of the time, or just a little better than you or I would do if we flipped a coin.
It turns out that one of the reasons we aren’t better at spotting lies is because we have learned to be almost (but not quite) as good at hiding the truth from one another as we are at uncovering it. It’s not that we are horrendously inept at calling out the equivocators among us; we have just learned to improve our lying and fakery. In the ongoing arms race between deceivers and truth seekers, the competition is so close that it’s resulted in a kind of Mexican standoff. According to the research of one of the true pioneers in the field of kinesthetics, or body language, psychologist Paul Ekman, this has resulted in several intriguing insights about the way we behave in one another’s presence.
Sigmund Freud famously wrote in 1905, “No mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.” Ekman and his research collaborators found that the great Austrian psychoanalyst was right, our bodies can often subvert our best attempts to deceive, but not in the most obvious ways and rarely in the ways we read about so often in popular magazines. For example, we are outstandingly skilled at hiding the truth verbally, a little less good at hiding it by controlling our facial expressions and hands, and least effective of all at hiding the ways our legs and feet can reveal our fabrications. The parts of us over which we have the most conscious control are the parts we’ve become particularly good at masking.
Bond and DePaulo theorize plenty of additional reasons for why our rate of sniffing out deception is hardly better than our ability to accurately predict a coin toss. For one thing, we are fundamentally trusting creatures, predisposed to believe those we deal with because it’s rare that our dealings with them result in a catastrophic or dangerous lie. (If that were the case, we would all be far more paranoid, which would create its own set of unsavory difficulties.) Many of those we spend most of our time with tell us plenty of harmless fibs. How good we look that day, for example, or how funny a joke is; that they were late for a meeting because they had trouble starting their car, or the dog ate the weekly report—that sort of thing. Even if we don’t believe everything we hear (or are pretty sure that others don’t believe everything we say), this variety of truth bending isn’t damaging, and sometimes it’s even constructive. So our tendency to miss untruths might also be a matter of motivation because we aren’t generally dealing with a world–class con artist who is hiding a dangerous whopper that puts our lives on the line. Every day is filled with rationalizations, self–deceptions, white lies, and all varieties of other spin.
The competition that required liars to outfox their dupes, and then dupes to figure out the deception strategies of good liars, and so on, almost certainly contributes to one of the neatest tricks the human mind is capable of—imagining it is not the mind it is, but someone else’s.
If you happened long ago to be engaged in either side of this liar–dupe battle as our ancestors surely were, one of the best weapons you could possible devise would be the ability to shift your point of view and imagine yourself in the shoes of the person who might be lying to you (or the shoes of the person you are trying to deceive). This ability would al
low you to not only imagine the situation from the other person’s viewpoint, but you could look at yourself from the outside and, perhaps, spot flaws in your own dissembling techniques. This is the psychological equivalent of placing two mirrors face–to–face, creating an escalating infinity of images, except in this case you can create an infinity of viewpoints that shift back and forth reacting one to the other. (This recursive ability turns out to be crucial to human consciousness, as we will later see.)
Novelist and screenwriter William Goldman beautifully illustrated this contest when he wrote a scene for his charming, comic send–up of the classic fairy tale, The Princess Bride. A Machiavellian (and hunchbacked) master of deception and intrigue named Vizzini agrees to face off with the book’s masked, Robin Hood–esque hero in a battle of wits. At stake is the book’s beautiful, but flinty, heroine. The two men sit, each with a goblet of wine in front of him. One of the two goblets is deadly, tainted with a poison called iocane. Under the rules of the battle, the masked hero already knows which goblet is poisoned because he put the iocane in it, but Vizzini alone gets to chose which goblet they each must drink from. If he can calculate which goblet has the poison, he will chose not to drink it, killing his rival. The scene unfolds like this …
“Your guess,” he [the masked hero] said. “Where is the poison?”
“Guess?” Vizzini cried. “I don’t guess. I think. I ponder. I deduce. Then I decide. But I never guess.”
“The battle of wits has begun,” said the man in black. “It ends when you decide and we drink and we see who is right and who is dead.” …
“It is all so simple,” said the hunchback. “All I have to do is deduce, from what I know of you, the way your mind works. Are you the kind of man who would put the wine in his own glass, or the glass of his enemy?”
Vizzini then goes on to logically slice and dice the situation, not to mention the psychological makeup of his nemesis, with each deduction making the hero increasingly nervous until at last Vizzini comes to his conclusion.
“I have already learned everything from you,” said the Sicilian. “I know where the poison is.”
“Only a genius could have deduced as much.”
“How fortunate for me that I happen to be one,” says the hunchback, growing more and more amused … “Never go against a Sicilian when death is on the line.”
He was quite cheery until the iocane powder took effect.
The man in black stepped quickly over the corpse.
How did our masked hero win the battle of wits? How could he be so sure his deception wouldn’t be found out, leaving him to drink the poisoned wine? Here’s how: He had spent two years building up an immunity to iocane. It didn’t matter which goblet Vizzini drank from. Both were poisoned! And with that move, he raised the evolutionary stakes. Unfortunately for Vizzini, he fell one step behind in the arms race and was selected out.
Goldman’s little story encapsulates the ongoing battle our ancestors found themselves fighting. In dealing with their increasingly complicated relationships, those early humans who became more skilled at climbing inside the minds of the others around them would more often win the battle of wits. They would also enjoy a decided evolutionary edge because they would excel at practicing deception as well. This makes us a tricky species indeed.
Psychologists call this unique human ability to hop back and forth between our own point of view and someone else’s Theory of Mind or ToM. Uncovering deceit isn’t the only time we use it (though it’s certainly a helpful application). We employ ToM almost every waking moment we are interacting with others or thinking about interacting with them. It is, if you examine it closely enough, the foundation upon which all human social commerce is built. It enables us to empathize, anticipate, and outfox. We exercise it when we talk with one another, or about one another. It’s in play when we lie awake in bed wondering why our spouse or girlfriend or boyfriend did this or said that, or the boss gave us a hard time about the quarterly report, or even why he put his arm around our shoulder and said, “Atkinson, helluva job!” What, we wonder, did he really mean by that? To put it bluntly, we are a species incessantly thinking about what everyone else around us is thinking.
Yet ToM has even broader applications and effect because it provides us with a remarkable talent for running infinite numbers of what–if scenarios, all simply by firing the neurons in our own heads. You can imagine one of our ancestors wondering, “What if the leopard jumps out of that tree? What if I get caught wooing this female? What if I come back with some meat and give it to Woog? Will that get me a little troop cred? Is it worth the trouble?”
What–iffing allows you to not only step into someone else’s place, it gives you the magical power to step into the future and prepare for what might happen next. Or to create parallel universes where you can run multiple scenarios about taking this action or that one, then weighing them to see which might lead to a better outcome; something we call, among other things, imagination. As I write these words, my mind is what–iffing furiously about which are the best scenarios to run by you to make the points I want to make.
Being able to say to ourselves, “If this, then that,” builds the infrastructure of human creativity (more on this a bit later in the book). Scenario building is pure make–believe, a return to that time in our childhoods when we used to say, “Let’s pretend …” It is a way to create and explore possibilities that don’t exist in the real world, but live completely in the universe of our minds, and nowhere else. A remarkable thing.
Misfired Mind Reading
Mind reading, and the abilities that make it possible, can also misfire. (A lot of evolutionary innovations do.) It can make us chronic worriers, stuck in endless loops of stomach–churning scenario building, erecting realities that aren’t real at all while we suffer through them as if they were; percolating endlessly on this or that possibility and applying it to bosses, significant others, children, and just about every decision we make. We may be the proud and mighty scenario–building animal, but we also invented nail–biting, hand–wringing, and acid reflux. Sometimes imagining what someone else thinks can be absolutely paralyzing—how your mother, or the vicar, or even another version of yourself might view your first sexual encounter, for example.
Whatever the uses to which we personally put the mind–reading/scenario–building powers that our ancestors developed, this much is beyond debate: no brain in nature had ever before seen its like. This is, neurologically speaking, inconceivably difficult to pull off. It demands billions of neurons and requires that the newest and most ancient parts of the brain be wired deeply to one another. Valerie Stone’s experiments with R.M. illustrated this. R.M., remember, had damaged his amygdala, whose evolutionary roots are reptilian; the temporal pole, which is part of the limbic/mammalian brain; and the orbitofrontal cortex, which is among the newest cerebral additions to have evolved. Our ancestors were becoming chimeras, of sorts, creatures built out of the spare parts of both ancient and modern evolutionary mutations, an amalgamated animal, both ancient and new, self–aware, yet driven by unconscious, subterranean impulses. In a phrase, we were becoming really complicated.
We can’t know for certain when the rudimentary ability to climb inside another’s mind evolved. Such abilities are almost certainly not the result of a lone adaptation. More likely they resulted from scores of suites of adaptations that surely took an immense amount of time to emerge. One point two million years ago the robust human lines had seen their last days. It was a good run, but the evolutionary path followed by the gracile apes, unlikely as its success was, had won out. Yet, who would have predicted it? Not even a what–iffing creature. Larger brains forced earlier births, earlier births lengthened and complicated childhoods that created minds increasingly shaped by personal experience, which in turn made the mind more creative and adaptable. Brains over brawn.
And as if this wasn’t messy enough, now longer childhoods were producing people that were genetically similar, bu
t behaviorally unique; every troop was loaded with highly complicated individuals, each with her own talents, psychological baggage, foibles, and agendas. Yet they bonded, despite their individual needs and selfish competitions. An odd, astonishing species, or group of species, if ever there was one.
A mix this complicated would still seem doomed to failure. How do you weigh and balance all of these competing needs; manage the increasing complexity of your own motives let alone the motives of those around you while avoiding simultaneously alienating the allies you need? Depending on the situation, did “might make right,” was it better to be conciliatory, or was deception the best path?
It all had to be worked out, and apparently it was, otherwise you and I would not be here. Out of this complexity, these competing needs, a moral ape was born, made possible by the early childhood that had shaped our gracile ancestors. They had managed to find strength in numbers, and a workable code of conduct. It may not have been perfect, but they were successful enough that they had begun to take the species, several species actually, global. They had not only become a moral ape, they had evolved with an irrepressible case of wanderlust.
Chapter Five
The Everywhere Ape
Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.
—J. B. S. Haldane
Our species is the most itinerant and restless animal on the planet. That’s a simple fact. You will find polar bears on the ice sheets of the Arctic, silverback gorillas in the mountains of central Africa, reindeer in northern Europe, tigers in India, and penguins in the Antarctic, but you will find humans in all of those places and more. We are the only mammal that inhabits all seven continents, and it doesn’t matter to us how hot, how high, how humid, or how frigid the geographies are in which we live. We have even found our way, God knows how, to thousands of remote islands around the planet that amount to no more than an oceanbound fleck of dirt that your eye could easily lose looking at a decent–size map—Easter Island, for example, whose nearest inhabited neighbor is more than a thousand water–soaked miles away. We are everywhere. But we weren’t always so. At one time we were almost nowhere. How we went from a few locations to many makes a fascinating story. It also says a lot about who we are.