Bruce Hood - The Domesticated Brain - A Pelican Introduction (Pelican Books)

Nobody likes to be lied to and yet just about everybody lies. A lie is a deliberate attempt to generate a false belief to manipulate situations. We can either withhold important information or implant false information through deception so as to control the thoughts and behaviours of others. If someone says they do not lie, then (a) they don’t know what a lie is, (b) they don’t have anyone to lie to, or (c) they’re lying.

Diary studies kept for a week reveal that fewer than one in ten of us say that they did not lie at all during this period. 77Many think that lying means making things up, but it also includes not fully disclosing all the information when it is relevant. Of course, sometimes there is a good reason to lie. If a murderer turns up at our house asking where their intended victim is hiding, then clearly we should lie if we know the answer. This would be a justified lie because it would be morally wrong to disclose the whereabouts of the victim. We cannot and should not always tell the truth.

To lie is to be human and even if it were possible not to lie, then it would not be preferable. How often do we lie to prevent hurting someone’s feelings? Not only would it be excruciatingly embarrassing if we always told the truth, but eventually relationships would break down and social cohesion would grind to a halt. Sheldon Cooper, the savant physicist in The Big Bang Theory comedy, is constantly struggling with this aspect of normal human social interaction. If you always told the truth, you would lose friends and partners fast. We need to lie in order to keep the peace.

In fact, most lies are not directed at making others feel better about themselves because we are twice as likely to tell lies that affect what others think about us. 78People tell lies to enhance their self-esteem, to get others to like them or to gain respect. They also lie to avoid punishment. Such lying is done to conceal our true feelings, motives, plans and actions because we believe that others will judge us more negatively if we reveal the truth.

The trouble with lying is being found out. Very often, it is not so much the act but rather the deception and loss of trust that is the most distressing aspect of lying. To avoid exposure as a cheat, lying is a powerful incentive and so there is a constant battle to deceive others and detect those who deceive us. Domestication is supposed to teach us how to get along with each other but sometimes that requires learning how to deceive to avoid being rejected or punished.

Would I lie to me?

One way to avoid being detected is to convince ourselves that we are in fact telling the truth. This is our capacity for self-deception. 79The sociobiologist Robert Trivers argues that we have developed the capacity for self-deception so that we may deceive others more easily by not emitting cues that reveal that we are lying. 80When people are forced to maintain the truth and a lie simultaneously, this places demand on their executive functions to ensure that they tell a consistent story that does not contradict itself. Depending on the extent of the lie, the deceiver is likely to become entangled in a web of deceit. By deceiving ourselves we can better deceive others.

Self-deception has many advantages and opportunities. Self-deception enables us to help convince others that we are better than we really are. 81We like others to be confident, especially when we feel vulnerable, and that confidence in us, in turn, perpetuates the initial lie to ourselves. From lovers to leaders, we prefer those who exude confidence and are more willing to believe what they say and follow their recommendations. By enhancing our self-image through deception, we are increasing our perceived illusion of control, which in turn reduces uncertainty in our choices and improves performance. Also, the more that we engage in self-deception, the more we come to believe our own stories. This is because of the reconstructed nature of recall and the problem of false memories. Participants forced to make up fictitious stories about a short movie they had watched eventually came to believe their own lies after two months. They could no longer tell the difference between the truth and the fiction that they had created. In short, self-deception becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The path to self-deception is an easy one to take. Most of us already believe that we are above average on all the important social traits of beauty, wit and intelligence. We are more likely to take the credit when things turn out right. Eight out of ten of us assume that everything is going to turn out better for us. Divorce rates in the West are currently at 40 per cent, which means that two out of every five couples will split, but not surprisingly, when asked, no newly-wed couples think that they will separate in the future. 82Even divorce lawyers, who should know better, think they are not likely to get divorced. People literally see themselves in a more positive light.

It has often been assumed that we engage in self-deception as a defence mechanism to protect ourselves from harsh reality. That’s why many of us avoid going to the doctor’s to take a diagnostic test or wait longer in the hope of good news. Trivers thinks otherwise. He believes self-deception is an offence mechanism that facilitates our manipulation of others. When we self-deceive, we are generating a positive spin to impress others. Moreover, self-deception has one final twist, in that we are more likely to forgive and not punish others when they show all the signs that they are not aware that they are deluded. We can almost forgive someone who has fallen into their own trap of self-deception. It is as if they are not responsible for their actions.

Saying sorry

Another important component of domestication is knowing when to apologize. When we say sorry, we are telling the victim that we regret our actions but, most importantly, that we value who they are. If we did not care, we would not say sorry. This is one reason why we are more likely to forgive someone when they apologize, but should we believe them? After all, it is easy enough to say sorry if you think that it will get you off the hook. When we deceive we are more likely to be given the benefit of the doubt, but if our scam is revealed then the retribution is much more severe. 83Apologies can backfire when we discover the act was intended to harm the injured party. Then the perpetrator is obviously trying to dupe the victim, which is why we cannot easily forgive someone who apologizes after deliberately trying to take advantage.

False apologies generally work because it is in our nature to believe what we are told. We are a species that relies on information and advice from others and so it makes sense to trust them. ‘She told me that she thinks you are really attractive’ or ‘I would not eat that if I were you!’ are just two sorts of statements that could change the course of our lives. If you did not believe what you were told, then you would not survive very long. It is in our interest to trust others.

Children start out as fairly gullible creatures, trusting what they are told. Part of the fun of being an adult is our ability to easily trick children and they generally enjoy the deception. Fantasy, magic, jokes and unexpected surprises work particularly well with children because they trust adults are telling the truth. This makes a lot of sense because they are naïve. They are not in a position to check the truth of many of the claims they hear. Imagine trying to pass on information if everything you said was taken with a degree of scepticism. Schooling children would be impossible if they always doubted.

This bias to believe even shows up in our brain activity. Neuroscientist Sam Harris put adults in a scanner and asked them to decide whether statements were true or false. 84Irrespective of whether participants agreed with the statement, were not sure or rejected it, the PFC was activated. However, when participants rejected statements as false, this decision activated other regions of the brain, including the ACC and the caudate that are both involved with negative emotions. They also took significantly longer to reject statements. This finding supports an idea originally proposed by the seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, who wrote that merely contemplating an idea leads to the assumption that it is correct and that rejecting it as untrue is more difficult. We want to believe what we are told. We prefer to trust.