Why We Lie: The evolutionary roots of deception and the unconscious mind by David Livingstone Smith, St Martin’s Press, $24.95, ISBN 0312310390 Reviewed by Sean Spence
IN the arms race that is evolution, deceptive genes conveyed reproductive success upon their hosts, proposes philosopher David Livingstone Smith. From the acrobatics of the portia spider to the cheating chimp, deception and subterfuge are ubiquitous. Through “blind”, unconscious processes, those genes have persisted that fooled the enemy through false signalling.
It does not end there, however, for unconscious deception pervades human speech, particularly gossip. And, when we think we’re being sincere, we may be kidding ourselves. What the author argues is that it is self-deception, the lie we do not see, that serves best to deceive our enemies. The best way to tell a lie is to believe it yourself.
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Livingstone Smith combines an evolutionary psychological account of Machiavellian intelligence – that social cognition going on behind our foreheads, allowing us to anticipate what others are thinking and intending – with a post-Freudian account of the unconscious – that dark, mythic shadow that hides us from ourselves. He emerges with a highly speculative theory of self-deception; one buoyed up more by anecdote and citations from book chapters than by scientific, peer-reviewed papers. To the author, all social speech is ripe for decoding, rich in symbolism, particularly analogy. To the psychoanalyst this would resemble transference: the words we use convey a latent message, expressing our beliefs about our interlocutor. We cannot say we dislike his haircut so we say the lawn needs trimming.
Yet, the author’s use of the word “deception” in this context may not satisfy all his critics. For, by expanding the concept to encompass all those activities that give rise to misinformation, even those of which the perpetrator is unaware (the chameleon changing hue, the plant that fools the fly) something is lost. Livingstone Smith fails to address precisely that aspect of deception that gives the book its title: the consciously motivated, spoken lie. What mechanisms are at play in the mind of the knowing deceiver? You will not find them here.
This is a shame, as there is a fascinating tale to be told of how knowing deception arises in those primates closest to man. Of how we learn to lie as children, yet come to value truth. And of how we bear responsibility when we confess to what we’ve done.