DAVID LIVINGSTONE SMITH
The author of 'Why We Lie' on Homo mendax and the culture of deceit
Martha: "Truth and illusion, George; you don't know the difference."
George: "No, but we must carry on as though we did."
-Edward Albee,
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
In his new book, Why We Lie: The Evolutionary Roots of Deception and the Unconscious Mind, philosopher and evolutionary psychologist David Livingstone Smith charts a universe that is ambiguous, unstable, duplicitous, and downright deceitful. It's as if every move we made were, on some level, false, "redeemed" only by what we might reveal, poker-style, by way of a "tell." In Smith's view, human individuals are essentially divided against themselves for our social and physical survival. Whereas Sissela Bok's groundbreaking 1978 ethical study, Lying, examined the unstable parameters of truth and lies within a framework of moral choice, Smith says that much of this behavior is beyond our conscious control. Physical - hence genetic - survival lies at the root of the human capacity for deceit and self-deception. Smith is concerned with the mental apparatus of deception and self-deception as it has evolved in homo sapiens, how it operates across a social dynamic, and how it seems to have broken down as the size and complexity of human societies have outstripped its capacity for correction.
In the political season of 2004, it might be the question of the moment: When did homo sapiens - literally, "wise men" - become, collectively, "wise guys"? Following a Skeptic Society lecture at CalTech, Dr. Smith took a few moments to crack wise with CityBeat.
CityBeat: You say that "It was probably only after spoken language arrived that humans became able to lie to themselves." Yet, if other primates and infants can engage in deceptive behaviors, isn't it likely that they can also lie to themselves?
David Livingstone Smith: Think about a non-human species, say, two cats in a fight. Before they fight, they puff themselves up and make their fur stand on end so they look bigger and more formidable. Well - do they believe themselves to be bigger when they do that? It's difficult to say. But certainly with the evolution of language it becomes possible for us to misrepresent ourselves to ourselves. It's hard for me to conceive of self-deception without language, although I would concede that it's possible. But with language, it's a slam-dunk.
Is what we call "consciousness" - that thin veneer of largely unconscious mental operations - simply equivalent to behavior?
No, there's a distinction. Imagine a robot that's a perfect simulacrum of you. Now, whether or not that robot that looks and behaves just like you, does it also have the same sort of experiences you do? No. So you can't reduce consciousness to behavior. Consciousness is a convenient way of representing ourselves to ourselves. What we present to ourselves does not have any guarantee of its truth whatsoever. We write novels about ourselves in consciousness.
So it's a fiction?
To a great extent, yes. Let's call it historical fiction. There has to be a significant amount of fact or else we'd be completely off the wall all the time. But that element of fact is highly embellished by our self-serving biases and wishful thinking and so forth. Back in the 1950s, the social psychologist Solomon Asch conducted some classic experiments demonstrating that social pressures run so deep that they can actually alter our perceptions.
In unconsciously monitoring each other's behavior and its meaning, can we correct it?
I don't think so. I take a slightly extreme view, which originated with Freud, and which a number of contemporary cognitive scientists buy into, that really all of our mental states are unconscious. If consciousness is simply a display of a bit of output from unconscious states, it doesn't give us any vantage point for correcting anything at all.
Do motive and intent have any real meaning?
Yeah, I think they do. A good example is altruism. Some people say that evolutionary biology or psychology shows us that there's no such thing as altruism - because we can understand altruism as a way of furthering our genetic interests. Well, that doesn't say that there's no such thing as genuine altruism. What it says is that our inclination towards altruistic acts has an evolved function. The evolved function is very, very different from the motive. The two things might cohere, and they might not.
It seems very unstable - both perceptually and behaviorally.
It is very unstable. Our conscious lives are much more like dreams than we normally imagine.
Within the context of actual facts or physical events, is the concept of independent or unbiased judgment a false one?
Well, if you mean by unbiased "totally independent of the position and the interests of the observer," I would say, yes, it is false. But normally, we mean it in a much more relative fashion. Independence of judgment is something that we strive for. It's a goal. And unless you were a god, it would be impossible, because you're always operating from a particular perspective and from a particular set of interests.
Why is the collective "bullshit-detector" breaking down? In the face of wholesale lying and deception, entire sectors of the American electorate seem to be ignoring or overriding their capacity for deceit detection.
Well, this is a complicated question. In the first place, what gets presented to us - particularly in American television, is kind of remote from the social situations that we were evolved to deal with: these one-on-one situations in which there's something at stake for us as individuals. So we cannot possibly mobilize the resources that we have for dealing with small social groups and bring them to bear on the sound-bites and bizarre discontinuous pieces of propaganda that we get on the television. This isn't a tribal community meeting consisting of 30 people in which we can read each other's cues and verbal and non-verbal and so on and so forth, and come to judgments.
What's going on is this: a couple of individuals and the vast interest groups behind them are attempting to deceptively present themselves in an entirely constructive, positive light, and to deceptively present the other in an entirely negative light.
Culturally speaking, there are very few resources for challenging these people. The fact is that, unlike, say, the BBC in Britain, in American commercial television, there isn't even enough sustained time to do it. These people are handled shockingly gently, considering what's at stake in a major political contest like this. I think that's chilling.
I'm pretty certain that in a more biologically realistic situation, if we were confronted with any of these people, we would be much more likely to at least unconsciously come to sound conclusions about their attempts to manipulate us.
Is there a future for trust?
Trust is always conditional. Trust is based on the confluence of interests, first of all; secondly, on one's take on the absence of deception. Deception happens when interests conflict. So, trust is as trust always has been. However, in small communities - which is where we human beings spent our time throughout pre-history - there are mechanisms, policing functions, in place to monitor people's behavior. In large conglomerations of people like we have now, in which a high degree of anonymity is possible, those mechanisms can't come into play. That removes a lot of constraints from human behavior.Published: 11/18/2004
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