genes survive and reproduce? Put differently, how does natural selection favor mechanisms of self-deception? We shall see that we have a large set of such mechanisms and that they may have important costs. Where is the benefit? How do such mechanisms increase individual reproductive and genetic success?
Although the biological approach defines “advantage” in terms of survival and reproduction, the psychological approach often defines “advantage” as feeling better, or being happier. Self-deception occurs because we all want to feel good, and self-deception can help us do so. There is some truth to this, as we shall see, but not much. The main biological objection is this: Even if being happier is associated with higher survival and reproduction, as expected, why should we use such a dubious—and potentially costly—mechanism as self-deception to regulate our happiness? Lying to ourselves has costs. We are basing conscious activity on falsehoods, and in many situations this can turn around and bite us, as we shall see many, many times in this book. Whether during airplane crashes, the planning of stupid offensive wars, personal romantic disasters, family disputes, whatever, we shall see time and again that self-deception brings with it the expected costs of being alienated from reality, although, alas, there is a tendency for other people to suffer disproportionately the costs of our self-deception, while the benefits, such as they are, go to ourselves. So how does self-deception pay for itself biologically? How does it actually improve survival and reproduction?
The central claim of this book is that self-deception evolves in the service of deception—the better to fool others. Sometimes it also benefits deception by saving on cognitive load during the act, and at times it also provides an easy defense against accusations of deception (namely, I was unconscious of my actions). In the first case, the self-deceived fails to give off the cues that go with consciously mediated deception, thus escaping detection. In the second, the actual process of deception is rendered cognitively less expensive by keeping part of the truth in the unconscious. That is, the brain can act more efficiently when it is unaware of the ongoing contradiction. And in the third case, the deception, when detected, is more easily defended against—that is, rationalized—to others as being unconsciously propagated. In some cases, self-deception may give a direct personal advantage by at least temporarily elevating the organism into a more productive state, but most of the time such elevation occurs without self-deception.
In short, this book will attempt to describe a science of self-deception that is actually built on preexisting science—in this case, biology. The book will showcase what seem to be some of the most important features of the subject. The field is in its infancy, and surely many mistakes will be made here, but if the underlying logic is sound, and is linked by evidence and logic to the rest of biology, then corrections should come very quickly and we may rapidly grow a mature science that this book seeks only to outline.
The dynamics of deception and its detection have been studied in a broad range of other species (see Chapter 2), with the advantage that we can see things in others that we can’t easily see in ourselves. This enterprise also greatly extends our range of evidence and leads to a few general principles of some considerable value. Deceiver and deceived are trapped in a coevolutionary struggle that continually improves adaptations on both sides. One such adaptation is intelligence itself. The evidence is clear and overwhelming that both the detection of deception and often its propagation have been major forces favoring the evolution of intelligence. It is perhaps ironic that dishonesty has often been the file against which intellectual tools for truth have been sharpened.
Regarding underlying mechanisms, some interesting work in neurophysiology shows that the conscious mind is more of an observer after the fact, while behavior itself is usually unconsciously initiated (see Chapter 3). Knocking out activity in deception-related areas of the brain improves the quality of deception, while suppression of memory can be achieved consciously by inhibiting brain activity in relevant areas. The classic experiment demonstrating human self-deception shows that we often unconsciously recognize our own voices while consciously failing to do so, and this tendency can be manipulated. An important concept is that of imposed self-deception, in which we act out self-deceptions others have imposed on us. The possibility that self-deception evolves as a purely defensive device to make us feel better is addressed and rejected, with some latitude for