Saturday, December 17, 2011
Deceit and Self-deception
Robert Trivers
Allen Lane,
€28.50;ebook €15.30
I TELL the truth. You lie like a rug. Your family specialises in falsehood and you have lied since you were a toddler. Even as a babe in arms, you were given to the odd untruth.
The latter part of that proposition, says Robert Trivers, is true. The first is not. Trivers would say that I lie all the time, too.
"We are thoroughgoing liars, even to ourselves," he says. "Our most prized possession — language — not only strengthens our ability to lie but greatly extends its range. We can lie about events distant in space and time, the details and meaning of the behaviour of others, our innermost thoughts and desires, and so on. But why, why, self-deception? Why do we possess marvellous sense organs to detect information only to distort it after arrival?"
In the ‘70s, Trivers, an internationally-published evolutionary theorist, became intrigued by the role played by deception in everyday life. He was fascinated by the human capacity to project onto others traits which are true of ourselves — and then attack precisely those traits. He began to wonder about the biological advantage derived by the practitioner of self-deception. Could it, he speculated, help our genes to survive and reproduce?
It helped viruses and bacteria to gain entry to their human hosts. HIV changes its coat so often as to make defence against it extremely difficult. Trivers says that just as a lie can be halfway around the world before the truth catches up, so deception, in various animal and plant species, takes the lead, while the capacity to identify and defend against it is always playing catch-up.
In terms of deception among humans, Trivers says that most con artists could not succeed were it not for the willingness of their victims to deceive themselves in a way that serves not their own interests, but that of the con artist.
The example Trivers cites is of the classic form of pick-pocketing, which involves the thief approaching the victim, flinging his arms around them, and greeting them as if the two were old friends.
The enforced, startling intimacy of the embrace, which permits the slithering hand to enter a pocket and remove a wallet, could not work if the victim instantly rejected both the physical contact and the moral pressure to behave as if the two were friends, when, in reality, no such friendship has ever existed.
Instead, Trivers says, if the victim is sufficiently deferential, they may instantly create a false memory of the person embracing them, which then permits continuation of the warm embrace and facilitates the consequent theft.
Another form of self-deception is the placebo effect, where patients in clinical trials of a new pharmaceutical are divided into groups, only one of which receives the new tablet, while the second or control group gets a sugar-filled capsule. Neither the patients nor their medical practitioners know which is getting the useful capsule and which the useless one. Yet trial after trial turns up the same result: that a sizeable number of the patients taking a preparation which could not be of any objective benefit to them, nevertheless experience an amelioration of their symptoms.
Indeed, as Trivers says, in the 1960s, studies in the US revealed that the placebo effect applies even to surgery.
At the time, angina pain was treated surgically by a minor chest operation in which two arteries near the heart were fused to increase blood flow. The surgery was markedly successful.
"Pain was reduced, patients were happy, and so were the surgeons," Trivers says. "Then, some scientists did a nice study. They subjected a series of people to the same operation, opening the chest and cutting near the arteries, but they did not join any together. Everyone was sewn up the same way and nobody knew who had received which ‘operation’ when later effects were evaluated. The beneficial effects were identical to those of the original operation. In other words, the entire effect seemed to be that of a placebo. The joining of the two arteries had nothing to do with any beneficial effect."
Unique? Not so. Rare? Not so either. Trivers says that surgery is particularly prone to the placebo effect, possibly because the great cost and the massing of abstruse expertise persuades the subconscious that a positive end result is a near-certainty, and the body obediently produces the ‘consequences’ thereby justifying the operation. Medical self-deception would seem to be productive, life-enhancing and — in the case of the sugar pill versus the prescription drug — cheap.
One of the possible explanations of some self-deception is that it is a defence mechanism: the psyche’s immune system, severely depressed people protecting their mental health by a series of interwoven self-deceptions.
That theory would not explain the form of self-deception manifested in many space and aviation disasters, to which Trivers devotes a lengthy section of the book which, were it not so terrifying, would amount to comedy, as in the case of the Russian passenger jet pilot who planted his 16-year-old son in the pilot’s seat and allowed him to actually fly the plane, until the son’s actions caused the catastrophic loss of the plane and of the 75 souls on board.
Trivers accounts of deceit in diverse aspects of human and animal interaction — a phenomenon he describes as universal — manage to be informative and thought-provoking. If at the end the non-specialist reader is somewhat confused as to the central thesis, that confusion does not impinge upon the enjoyment and enlightenment delivered by the book.
What dented this reader’s pleasure in the book was the author’s regular although mercifully infrequent insertion within the text of stories involving himself and a variety of women, each of which is distasteful and the sum of which is tawdry.
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