Deceit and self-deception

Abstract

Deception is a universal feature of life, at all levels and in all relationships both within species and between species, inside individuals and outside, with strong effects on both deceiver and deceived. Being detected often results in a sharp reversal of fortune for the deceiver thereby intensifying selection to deceive successfully. In encounters between human strangers, nervousness, signs of control and of cognitive load can all serve as cues of deception but cognitive load appears to be the most important. Self-deception is defined as hiding true information from the conscious mind in the unconscious, and is illustrated by classical experimental work. Selection to deceive can favor self-deception, the better to hide the deception and separately to reduce its cognitive costs. Four examples are described. There is a general tendency toward self-inflation in humans, the better to give off a positive image. Conscious thought suppression, studied via fMRI, shows that one area of the brain has been coopted to suppress memory formation elsewhere in the brain. When people reach age 60, they fail to attend to negative social reality, and this old-age positivity may give immune benefits. Across primates there is a strong positive association between relative size of the neocortex and frequency of deceptive acts in nature. If the relationship holds within species, we may expect relatively intelligent humans to be prone to self-deception. There is such a thing as imposed self-deception, in which we act out the system of self-deception of another. Likewise, there is parasitized self-deception in which our system of self-deception makes us more vulnerable to deception by others. Con artists are given as an example. One could model the evolution of deceit and self-deception as a multiplayer game, which can then be analyzed mathematically, modeled via computer simulations or tested experimentally. One promising possibility is a variant of the Ultimatum Game, in which deception and detection of deception are permitted and given quantitative values.