Last Ape Standing: The Seven-Million-Year Story of How and Why We Survived (12 page)

Something similar was happening among our direct ancestors on the plains of Africa a million years ago, with an important additional ingredient. The driving force behind the evolutionary change wasn’t
merely the size of the group; it was the complexity of the relationships inside it. Our ancestors were much smarter than Dunbar’s primates, and the dynamics of their relationships would have been more complicated. After all, at that time they were the smartest creatures on earth. Greater intelligence is a multiplier of complexity because it increases the number of
factors
in relationships. It adds more variability, more motives, more intrigue and nuance, and, in turn, drives up the advantages of possessing the additional neuronal firepower needed to constantly calibrate exactly why people are acting the way they are, and more particularly why they are acting toward
you
the way they are.

Human relationships are dynamic and fluid. They change constantly. Rarely do we unquestionably love, or entirely distrust, the people in our lives. Mostly our relationships slide along a continuum in a never–ending exchange of interpersonal, emotional, and mental calculations. The social lives of our ancestors may not have reached the Machiavellian proportions of the Soviet politburo, the court intrigues of Henry VIII, or even the office politics of
Mad Men
, but, generation by generation, you can be sure they were getting increasingly complicated. And that would have required the introduction of a new and powerful behavior: deception. Or more precisely, as you will see, our ability to detect deception.

At this point in the evolution of life on earth, deception was clearly far from new. Prevarication is an essential part of existence and has been for far longer than our kind has been around. Venus flytraps pose as beautiful flowers to lure their quarry to their doom. A leopard’s spots or a chameleon’s changing colors dupe prey and predator alike. Young spider monkeys have been known to fake predator calls so they can scatter their elders who are dining on recently found food, then pilfer the goods before others in the troop are any the wiser. The cake for natural deception might have to go to a particular shallow–water anglerfish (there are many species) that looks remarkably similar to a rock encrusted with sponges and algae. At the end of its head extends a thin spine that supports a piece of itself that would be the envy of every avid reader of
Field & Stream
magazine. It looks exactly like a small living creature right down to the pigment along its flanks and “eyes” at the top of its faux head. The anglerfish even wiggles the bait so that it seems to be swimming along just like any number of
other fish in the sea. When a hungry fellow fish arrives to take the bait, the angler gulps it down before it has even realized it is the hunted, and not the hunter.

There is, however, a difference between these deceptions and the human variety. The human sort that was shaping up a million years ago was conscious, which is to say planned and driven not purely by genetics. In these ancestors we begin to see the evolution of chicanery in the service of self–interest at a level never before seen, the deliberate, premeditated variety.

In some ways cheating of this sort was inevitable. It is the flip side of the primal moral code that was evolving at the same time. As early humans found ways to cooperate and trust one another—which was absolutely necessary if they hoped to survive—wasn’t it equally inevitable that deception would also emerge? It was, after all, a powerful way to serve personal ends without having to deal with the overt danger of direct confrontation inside the troop—a perfectly understandable, even brilliant, adaptation when you consider the circumstances. Deception was an accommodation, a kind of compromise, except that only one party was in on the secret. If you can cheat and get away with it, you’re riding on the backs of others to your benefit (and their detriment) without anyone’s knowing it or becoming even the slightest bit upset about it. Not a bad ploy, if you can get away with it.

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 allow 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?”