The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology (40 page)

It should come as no surprise that the study of self-deception makes for murky science.
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"Awareness" is a region with ill-defined and porous borders. The truth, or certain aspects of it, may float in and out of awareness, or hover on the periphery, present yet not distinct. And even assuming we could confirm that someone is wholly unaware of information relevant to some situation, whether this constitutes self-deception is another question altogether. Is the information somewhere in the mind, blocked from consciousness by a censor designed for that function? Or did the person just fail to take note of the information in the first place? If so, is that selective perception itself a result of specific evolutionary design for self-deception? Or a more general reflection of the fact that the mind can hold only so much information (and the conscious mind even less) Such difficulties of analysis are one reason the science Trivers envisioned two decades ago — a rigorous study of self-deception, which
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might finally yield a clear picture of the unconscious mind — has not arrived.

Still, the intervening years have tended to validate the drift of Dawkins's and Trivers's and Alexander's worldview: our accurate depiction of reality — to others, and, sometimes, to ourselves — is not high on natural selection's list of priorities. The new paradigm helps us map the terrain of human deception and self-deception, if at a low level of resolution.

We've already explored one realm of deception: sex. Men and women may mislead each other — and even, in the process, themselves — about the likely endurance of their commitment or about their likely fidelity. There are two other large realms in which the presentation of self, and the perception of others, has great Darwinian consequence: reciprocal altruism and social hierarchy. Here, as with sex, honesty can be a major blunder. In fact, reciprocal altruism and social hierarchy may together be responsible for most of the dishonesty in our species — which, in turn, accounts for a good part of the dishonesty in the animal kingdom. We are far from the only dishonest species, but we are surely the most dishonest, if only because we do the most talking.

People don't seek status per se. They don't chart out their desired ascent and pursue it as methodically as a field general prosecutes a war. Well, okay, some do. Maybe all of us do sometimes. But the quest for status is also built more finely into the psyche. People in all cultures, whether they fully realize it or not, want to wow their neighbors, to rise in local esteem.

The thirst for approval appears early in life. Darwin had crystalline memories of impressing people with his tree-climbing skills: "My supposed admirer was old Peter Hailes the bricklayer, & the trre the Mountain Ash on the lawn."
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The other side of this coin is an early and continuing aversion to disdain or ridicule. Darwin wrote that his oldest son, at age two and a half, became "extremely sensitive to ridicule, and was so suspicious that he often thought people who were laughing and talking together were laughing at him."
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Darwin's son may have been abnormal in this regard, but that's
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beside the point. (Though it's interesting to note how many psychopathologies, including paranoia, may simply be evolutionarily ingrained tendencies turned up a notch too high.)
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The point is that if he was abnormal, he was abnormal in degree and not in kind. For all of us, avoiding ridicule is, from an early age, little short of an obsession. Recall Darwin's remarks about "the burning sense of shame which most of us have felt even after the interval of years, when calling to mind some accidental breach of a trifling though fixed rule of etiquette."
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Such a hair-trigger mechanism suggests large stakes. Indeed: just as high public esteem can bring great genetic rewards, very low public esteem can be genetically calamitous. In numerous nonhuman primate communities — and in not a few human ones — extremely unpopular individuals are pushed to the margins of the society and even beyond, where survival and reproduction become perilous.
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For that matter, a drop in status at any rung on the ladder carries costs. Whatever your place in society, leaving the sort of impression that exerts upward pressure on it is often worth the trouble (in Darwinian terms), even if the effect is slight.

Whether the impression is accurate is, by itself, irrelevant. When a chimp threatens a rival, or responds to a threat from one (or from a predator), its hair stands on end, making it seem larger than life. Vestiges of this illusion can be seen in people whose hair stands on end when they're frightened. But as a rule, humans do their self-inflating verbally. Darwin, in speculating about when in evolution the regard for public opinion became so strong, noted that "the rudest savages" show such a regard "by preserving the trophies of their prowess" and "by their habit of excessive boasting."
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In Victorian England, boasting was frowned on, and Darwin was an expert on how not to do it. Many modern cultures share this taste, and in them "excessive boasting" is merely a phase through which children pass.
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But what is the next phase? A lifetime of more measured boasting. Darwin himself was good at this. In his autobiography, he noted that his books "have been translated into many languages, and passed through several editions in foreign countries. I have heard it said that the success of a work abroad is the best test of its enduring value. I doubt whether this is at all trustworthy; but judged by this
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standard my name ought to last for a few years."
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Well, if he really doubted that this standard is trustworthy, why judge by it?

Presumably, how much blatant boasting you do depends on the credible means of self-advertisement in your social environment (and was probably calibrated by feedback from kin and peers early on). But if you don't feel even some urge to disseminate news of your triumphs, however subtly, and some reluctance to talk widely about your failures, you aren't functioning as designed.

Does such self-advertisement often involve deception? Not in the grossest sense. To tell huge lies about ourselves, and believe them, would be dangerous. Lies can be found out, and they force us to spend time and energy remembering which lies we've told to whom. Samuel Butler, himself a Victorian evolutionist (and the man who noted that a hen is just an egg's way of making another egg) observed that "the best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way."
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Indeed. There are kinds of lies that, being slight, or hard to discredit, are hard to get tangled up in, and these are the sorts of lies we should expect people to tell. Among fishermen, the notorious and heartfelt embellishment of "the one that got away" has become a staple source of humor.

Such distortion may initially be conscious, or, at least, half-conscious. But if it goes unchallenged, the vague awareness of exaggeration can subside upon successive retellings. Cognitive psychologists have shown how the details of a story, even if false, embed themselves in the original memory with repetition.
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It goes without saying that the fish got away through no fault of the fisherman's. The assignment of blame and of credit, an area where objective truth is elusive, offers rich terrain for self-inflation. The tendency to attribute our successes to skill, and our failures to circumstance — luck, enemies, Satan — has been demonstrated in the laboratory and, anyway, is obvious.
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In games where chance plays a role, we tend to chalk up our losses to the luck of the draw and our victories to cleverness.

And we don't just say this; we believe it. Darwin was an enthusiastic backgammon player and, not surprisingly, he often won when playing against his children. One of his daughters recalls that "we
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kept a list of the doublets thrown by each, as I was convinced that he threw better than myself."
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This conviction is familiar to losing backgammon players everywhere. It helps preserve our belief in our competence and thus helps us convince others of it. It also provides a steady source of income for backgammon hustlers.

Self-aggrandizement always comes at the expense of others. To say that you lost a game through luck is to say that your opponent won through luck. And even leaving aside games and other openly competitive endeavors, to toot your own horn is to mute other horns for status is a relative thing. Your gain is someone else's loss.

And vice versa: someone else's loss is your gain. This is where the unconscious pursuit of status can turn nasty. In a small group (a group, say, the size of a hunter-gatherer village), a person has a broad interest in deflating the reputations of others, especially others of the same sex and similar age, with whom there exists a natural rivalry And again, the best way to convince people of something, includ ing their neighbors' shortcomings, is to believe what you're saying. One would therefore expect, in a hierarchical species endowed with language, that the organisms would often play up their own feats, downplay the feats of others, and do both things with conviction. Indeed, in the social psychology laboratory, people not only tend to attribute success to skill and failure to circumstance; they tend to reverse the pattern when evaluating others.
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Luck is the thing that makes you fail and other people succeed; ability works the other way around.

Often the derogation of others hovers at a barely detectable level, and it may disappear if they are kin or friends. But expect it to reach high volume when two people are vying for something that there's only one of — a particular woman, a particular man, a particular professional distinction.
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One reviewer who savaged
The Origin of Species
was Richard Owen, an eminent zoologist and paleontolo gist who had his own ideas about how species might change. After the review came out, Darwin noted that "the Londoners say he is mad with envy because my book has been talked about." Had Owen self-servingly convinced himself (and hence others) that a rival's work was inferior? Or had Darwin self-servingly convinced
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himself (and hence others) that a man who threatened his status was driven by selfish motives? Probably one or the other, and possibly both.

The keen sensitivity with which people detect the flaws of their rivals is one of nature's wonders. It takes a Herculean effort to control this tendency consciously, and the effort must be repeated on a regular basis. Some people can summon enough restraint not to
talk
about their rivals' worthlessness; they may even utter some Victorian boilerplate about a "worthy opponent." But to rein in the perception itself — unending, unconscious, all-embracing search for signs of unworthiness — is truly a job for a Buddhist monk. Honesty of evaluation is simply beyond the reach of most mortals.

If advertisement is so deeply ingrained in people, why are there self-deprecators? One answer is that self-deprecation is without cost when everyone knows better, and can actually have some benefit; a reputation for humility boosts the credibility of subtle boasting. (Witness Darwin.) Another answer is that the genetic program for mental development is very complex and unfolds in a world full of uncertainty (a world quite unlike the ancestral environment); don't expect all human behavior to serve genetic interest. The third answer is the most interesting: social hierarchy has, via natural selection, had some ironic effects on the human mind. There are times when it makes good evolutionary sense to have a genuinely low opinion of "yourself and to share that opinion with others.

The whole origin of status, remember, lies in the fact that some neighbors — some of a chicken's fellow chickens, say — are too formidable to challenge profitably. Genes that build brains that tell the animal which neighbors are worth challenging, and which aren't, flourish. How exactly do the brains convey this message? Not by sending little "Challenge" or "Don't Challenge" subtitles across the eyeball. Presumably, the message travels via feeling; animals feel either up to the challenge or not up to it. And animals at the very bottom of the hierarchy — animals that get pummeled by all comers — will get the latter feeling chronically. You could call it low self-esteem.
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In fact, you could say that low self-esteem evolved as a way to reconcile people to subordinate status when reconciliation is in their genetic interest.

Don't expect people with low self-esteem to hide it. It may be in their genetic interest not only to accept low status, but, in at least some circumstances, to convey their acceptance of it — to behave submissively so that they aren't erroneously perceived as a threat and treated as such.
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There's nothing necessarily self-deceptive about low self-esteem. Indeed, any feeling designed to keep people from aspiring to more than they can attain should, in theory, bear at least rough correspondence to reality. But not always. If one function of low self-esteem is to keep high-status people satisfied with your deference, then its level, strictly speaking, should depend on how much deference it takes to do that; you may, in the presence of someone powerful, feel a deeper humility — about your intelligence, for example — than an objective observer would see as warranted. The anthropologist John Hartung, who in 1988 raised the possibility of self-deceptively lowering self-esteem — "deceiving down," he called it — has come up with another kind of example. Women, he suggested, may sometimes falsely subordinate themselves to men. If, say, household income depends partly on the husband having high self-esteem at the workplace, a woman may find herself unwittingly "building her husband's self-confidence by providing a standard of lower competence."
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An ingenious experiment has shown how deeply the truth about ourselves can be buried. When people hear a recorded voice, their galvanic skin response (GSR) rises, and it rises even more if the voice they hear is their own. Surprisingly, when people are asked whether the voice is theirs, they are, on average, right less often than is their GSR. What's intriguing is the pattern of error. After self-esteem is lowered, by making subjects "fail" on some contrived task, they tend to deny that the voice is theirs even though their GSR shows that at some level they "know" the truth. When self-esteem is raised, they start claiming other voices as their own, although again their GSR shows that somewhere within, the information is tallied correctly. Robert Trivers, reviewing this experiment, wrote, "it is as if we
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expand ourselves ... when succeeding and shrink our presentation of self when failing, yet we are largely unconscious of this process."
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