Human Deception Operates In Clear Contrast

The urge to procreate, which underpins the mechanism of evolution as a whole, can also be used by one species against another. When the duped suitor arrives, she eats him. Frogs, too, communicate false signals to one another. Male green frogs use their croaks to announce their size. Sometimes, though, small frogs will lower their croaks, imitating the signals of a bigger male. This can serve to ward off the challenges of competitors. Bolas spiders do not spin webs. Instead, they are fishermen who use a synthetic form of moth pheromone as bait. This bait is contained on a sticky glob at the end of a single line of silk. Often, they achieve this by synthesizing the chemicals that the exploited species uses to identify members of its own group. The staphylinid beetle, for example, can make ants believe that it is a larva of their own colony, and the ants will feed it and care for it even as it repays their hospitality by eating the colony’s real ant larvae. The variety and frequency of deception in nature demonstrates that it offers its practitioners an advantage in the great game of survival and procreation.

See Yourself

Clearly, it does not take a large brain to execute some fairly cunning acts of deception. Yet as we consider the question of whether the deception that humans practice has evolutionary roots, it is important to keep in mind that animals of the intelligence of a bug don’t employ deception the way we do. In this, humans differ even from animals that can, in a limited way, alter their deceptive behavior based on the response of their targets. Piping plovers have evolved a very cunning way of protecting their nests. When predators threaten their chicks, plovers will fake a broken wing and scurry in the opposite direction, hoping to draw the attention of the hostile animal away with the promise of an easy meal. If they see that they have lost the predator’s attention, they will squawk more loudly and flap their broken wing more elaborately. Human deception operates in clear contrast to this. Our deception is flexible, it is creative, and we can employ it in almost any context or environment. The action is fast as players reveal themselves as double agents, scores climb as high as Q to 12, and equipment from eye masks to volleyballs to croquet wickets enter the fray and are then declared irrelevant. Calvinball is spontaneous, borderless, and requires wit more than athleticism. The possibilities for strategy are limited, at best. Most games end in a tie.

Welcome To The Good Times

As we’ve discussed, the deception most creatures on earth enact is instinctive. Given a particular stimulus, they respond in a particular deceptive way too. When a plover with chicks senses the approach of a predator, it is wired to run away while feigning a broken wing. The variety in nature means that these contests are played out much more elaborately than four crossed lines on a piece of paper allows for. When humans lie, we’re playing Calvinball. We are not bounded by particular stimuli or particular behavior. We can invent and fashion our lies to suit the situation or in response to whomever we are playing against. The forms of deceit humans are capable of are as limitless as the human imagination. It’s important to keep in mind, when evaluating the cunning of a portia spider, the intelligence of the creatures it is fooling. The spiders the portia hunts aren’t capable of insight into their attackers or of devising new solutions to the problem of predation. When humans attempt to lie to other humans, on the other hand, they are trying to fool the smartest animals on earth. Human deception demands the flexibility and creativity of a game of Calvinball because humans are, relatively speaking, so difficult to fool.

Lighten Up

The key distinction biologists make between the deception practiced by humans and that seen in much of the animal kingdom is that the former involves what’s called mind reading. This is not the application of psychic powers, though that would surely be a useful tactic in deceit. Rather, reading minds means applying our understanding of what other people think, believe, or expect. The awareness of the minds of others and how they operate is a crucial asset in our ability to manipulate one another. We can assess what we know other people think, as well as how they think, in order to fool them. Mind reading is the fundamental element in the huge diversity of human deceptive behavior. We address our knowledge of what others think when we give a sensitive friend a false compliment, when we deceive our boss about our workload, and when we invent an excuse to avoid an unappealing social invitation. Let’s say Eve asks her husband, Adam, whether he cleaned the gutters yet. Yes, I cleaned them this morning before you got up. He knows that Eve is going out later in the afternoon, and this will give him a chance to actually clean the gutters, thereby covering up his lie. Again, it is a simple, seemingly uncomplicated lie, the kind of lie even a child could tell. Yet even such a basic example of human deceit involves complexity on the mental level. Adam has to assess, first, what Eve knows. He can’t trick her if she’s been outside and seen the clogged gutters. Second, he has to make an assessment as to what Eve will believe. His addition of the I cleaned them this morning has to be plausible, and must contribute to the overall plausibility of the deceit. Finally, he has to make a judgment about what Eve will do. For the lie to succeed, he needs to know that she won’t immediately check the gutters, and that later in the day she will go out and give him a chance to really do the work. Hence, even a lie like Yes, I cleaned them this morning demands accurate assessments of the target’s knowledge, judgment, and intentions.