Why We Lie: The Evolutionary Roots of Deception and the Unconscious Mind (Hardcover)

by David Livingstone Smith (Author) "Mel dug furiously with her bare hands to extract the large succulent corm from the rock-hard Ethiopian ground..." (more)
Key Phrases: portia spider, social poker, mirror orchid, Stone Age, Sigmund Freud, Mae West (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
According to Smith, deception lies so deeply at the heart of our existence that we often cannot distinguish truth from lies in our everyday lives. Deception, he writes, is pervasive as we manage how others perceive us, from using cosmetics to lying on a job application; it is "more often spontaneous and unconscious than cynical and coldly analytical." In this superficial investigation of the biology and psychology of lying, Smith, a professor of philosophy and cofounder and director of the Institute for Cognitive Science and Evolutionary Psychology at the University of New England, tries to demonstrate that humans are hardwired to deceive: we do so just as frogs and lizards engage in mimicry, to insure the survival of the species. Unlike other animals, however, we have the capacity to deceive ourselves as well as others, since our mendacity is embedded not only in our evolutionary past but also in our unconscious. Smith tells us nothing that hasn't been covered by other writers in sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. Moreover, his study is really two books—one on evolutionary biology and the other on psychology and the unconscious—and the lack of transition makes it hard to tell what one really has to do with the other.
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From Booklist
The brain, especially the unconscious mind, is the ultimate challenge for scientists and philosophers. Following the lead of Antonio Damasio and Diane Ackerman, Smith focuses on a particularly baffling trait, our proclivity for deception, not only our habit of lying to others but also, and far more mysteriously, the way we deceive ourselves. To show that lying is as natural as breathing, Smith presents a lively survey of the many forms of deception practiced by plants, insects, and animals. He then turns to Homo sapiens and offers cogent and provocative analysis of the link between increasingly complex societies, the evolution of the brain, and the need for "social lies" in the interest of civility. This leads to eyebrow-raising speculation regarding the source of our habitual mendacity and psyche-protecting self-deception (the extent of which is truly astonishing), a facet of the unconscious that Smith calls "Machiavellian intelligence," and a convincing theory as to why it functions "beyond the reach of introspection." With an "aha!" moment on every page, Smith's inquiry is stimulating and unsettling. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press; 1st edition (July 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312310390
• ISBN-13: 978-0312310394
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.9 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.1 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #384,500 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Natural Born Liars, August 4, 2004

By	Loren Rosson III (New Hampshire, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

"Deceit is the Cinderella of human nature; essential to our humanity but disowned by its perpetrators at every turn. It is normal, natural, and pervasive. It is not, as popular opinion would have it, reducible to mental illness or moral failure. Human society is a network of lies and deceptions that would collapse under the weight of too much honesty." (p 2)

David Livingstone Smith has written a stunning book with four aims in view. First, he explains deception and self-deception from an evolutionary perspective, how lying to ourselves soothes the stresses of life and in the process helps us lie efficiently to others. But in order to deceive ourselves, we had to evolve an unconscious region of the brain where truth can be effectively obscured. This ties with the second aim of the book, in which Smith attempts a controversial reconnection between cognitive psychology and the kinds of questions Freud once tried (unsuccessfully) to answer. Like it or not, the unconscious is a reality which must be addressed. Freud may have left us a legacy of crackpot pseudo-science, but some of his findings can be legitimately applied in scientific investigation. Smith gets us started on doing exactly this, and hopefully some of his ideas will be pursued at more length -- and more empirically -- by the scientific community. He uses examples from modern living in describing (the third goal of the book) adaptive functions of the unconscious mind implied by self-deception, showing (even if without the level of empirical proof demanded by scientific inquiry) that we are all natural psychologists, albeit unconscious ones, carefully monitoring one another's behavior, constantly deceiving others and ourselves. This may sound like a wild idea, but it's not. For the author demonstrates (the fourth objective) that our conscious and unconscious perceptions of others are disguised in the gossip, lies, deceptions, and veiled meanings in everyday conversations.

One emerges from this book feeling almost like a paranoid schizophrenic. If indeed we tell three lies for every ten minutes of conversation; if indeed we are constantly, and often unconsciously, aiming hidden missiles at people with coded transcripts and veiled meanings; if indeed we are natural born liars with "bodies that secrete deceit"; then the conclusion presses in the opposite direction of received wisdom. Psychiatric professionals teach us that mentally ill and depressed people are self-deceived and out of touch with reality, but evolutionary biology corrects this mythology. Depressives have a better grasp on reality than then most people, because they suffer from a deficit in self-deception. Smith wryly remarks that self-knowledge isn't all that it's cracked up to be.

Smith concludes that we know far less about ourselves, and far more about others, then we are aware of knowing. While acknowledging that we can hardly be taught not to deceive ourselves -- even if we could, it would only result in unhappiness -- we can at least work to rid ourselves of surplus self-deception. But that's easier said than done. In any case, this book is one hell of an eye-opener, and a delight to read. It should be mandatory reading for gnostic-thinkers, who will hate it.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars How to Make Friends and Influence People , March 22, 2007

By	Clary Antome "www.literature-for-aliens.net" - See all my reviews

Now here's a familiar scenario: when I was growing up, my parents, teachers and other such authority figures every now and then found it fit to scold me for lying -- and made it sound like a character flaw, a fearful sin. Of course, they were absolutely right and managed to pass on a very valuable lesson: if you want to survive in this world, you've got to cheat in a way that makes you sound/appear totally honest!

And here is a book that can teach you everything you need to know about the origins, mechanisms and usefulness of lying to ourselves and each other. Far from being a morally dubious trait in some "bad" people, it turns out that this is one of our most vital survival strategies.

Smith makes some very important contributions to the understanding of our minds from an evolutionary point of view. He convincingly portrays social life as a highly competitive system, and our cooperation with others as a form of allegiance against competitors/enemies. But because it is so difficult and draining to make reliable friends and influence the right people (as you might have noticed after any cocktail party or family gathering), our brains have evolved mechanisms to do most of the job unconsciously, while we merrily engage in (mostly elevating) self-deception and apparently boring small-talk.

In fact, recovering some of Freud's most enlightening hypotheses, Smith (along with many other evolutionists quoted in his book) argues that our conscious mind is not at all responsible for making decisions: "only results become conscious". We're like the user-friendly computer screen, as opposed to the hard disk, where all the real important information gets processed. Which means that what's going on even in our yapping heads is not really under our "control" -- at best we are informed of the final verdict (though we actually tend to be given false information by our unconscious!).
This split between conscious and unconscious, Smith argues, actually helps us blissfully cheat and manipulate each other without noticing it (thus avoiding unnecessary and possibly violent conflict) -- except when we, all too often, betray ourselves. The book is full of witty and convincing examples of situations in which the gap between our real but unconscious opinions/intentions and our fake but morally/socially acceptable actions becomes visible.

With all this social poker taking place on a daily basis, it becomes clear that society itself is mainly sustained by lies and deception, from religion through the judicial system to elections -- like a collective hallucination. (Which would really explain why politicians, celebrities, the media, schools, etc can come up with the greatest imaginable nonsense without anyone feeling particularly insulted -- it's just normal, after all.)

Thus, Smith's book may lead to two basic conclusions:
1) Either you are totally honest with yourself (if this were possible at all) and must therefore bluntly and unashamedly lie to others;
2) Or, far more likely, you mostly deceive yourself about your true opinions/intentions, in order to keep the conviction that you can be totally honest with others (just like mum and dad and all the other grown-ups taught us).

In any case, reading Why We Lie might give you some valuable hints about how to go on participating in this farce called life -- and enjoy the brief moments of enlightenment that may follow, once we understand that we are swimming in a sea of fables... starting with our own minds.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Are there hidden truths within this book? , October 17, 2005

By	Dr. Lee D. Carlson (Baltimore, Maryland USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

The best thing about this book is that the author realizes that his assertions are very difficult to substantiate scientifically. However he believes that they should at least be put down in print, in order that they might motivate more thorough scientific investigation. There are many places in the book that are very interesting, but there are also places where the author's assertions seem difficult to accept, even from an intuitive and philosophical point of view. It is a welcome addition to the literature though, since it touches on a topic that has not traditionally been the subject of much research (although this is changing, especially in the field of neuroscience). The author's background is in psychoanalysis, and he is aware of the extreme skepticism about this field in contemporary psychology. He asks the reader though to consider what he has to say, and gives fairly provocative food for thought in this regard.

Interestingly, many readers will perhaps find that the author's theses are self-evident, namely the assertion that a truthful life, i.e. a life where a particular individual has chosen to not engage in deception, would be very burdensome both for the individual and those around him. Of course, the author's view of deception is much broader than mere verbal expression. Any kind of manipulation, whether intended or not, (and subconscious motivations play an even greater role) constitutes a lie in the opinion of the author. For example, if a middle-age man dyes his gray hair black in order to appear younger at a job interview, this would be lying according to the author. Even more radical is the assertion that one can be lying without even intending to. The author's central thesis is that the elaborate mechanism of the unconscious has evolved in order that the individual does not have knowledge of his deception. Awareness of deception will result in a dead give away to those around you, since they will be able to spot the deception using their superb lie detection abilities (which have also evolved).

Indeed, the author takes lying to be the normal state for all humans, with truth telling actually anomalous and forming a definite statistical outlier. "Our minds and bodies secrete deceit", he says. This is an acceptable statement to make as a working hypothesis, for again, the author wants to instigate research that will justify it. But of course, the reader will wonder why the author himself has been excused from the evolutionary pressures that force humans into a global minimum of deception. This book, and the content within it, is supposed to be an honest assessment of the author's intentions to finding, well, the "truth". He is curious (evidently) about whether his beliefs will be verified by scientific research and the meticulous data collection that this entails. Does he expect those who carry out this research to be honest, or does he expect them to lie? If there is a propensity to lie, i.e. if humans are all "natural-born liars," then how can he expect researchers to go through the motions of collecting data and reporting it truthfully?

Several questions arise when reading this book, the answers of which would be fascinating and very important. For example, what are the energy costs associated with lying as compared with truth-telling? Why is lying the more optimal strategy in this regard? Why is truth telling considered naive and ineffective in social interactions, especially in interactions between representatives of different nations? Is there any evidence, even anecdotal, to suggest that a life of truth telling is not as enjoyable as one devoted to lying? Could it not be just as plausible to believe that humans are instead "natural-born truth tellers?" Research in neuroscience has shown what areas in the brain are activated when lies are told. Is this activation healthy or detrimental to the individual? What if further research indicates that lying actually damages the brain, resulting in emotional and intellectual disintegration, i.e. in a cynical mal-adapted individual? Given the enormous amounts of energy that has been expended by humans throughout history in pursuing the objects of their curiosity, i.e. technological inventions and scientific research, it would seem plausible to believe that further research in neuroscience will indicate that truth telling results in a healthy brain and enhances the general well-being of the individual.