Customer Reviews

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

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"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.

Every once in a while a new book appears which lifts the veil off one's eyes. This is just such a book. Smith addresses one the most important issues of our time. Why do we tell lies? Further, why are we so good at telling them? The author tells us that "the evolutionary roots of deception and the unconscious mind"(the subheading of the book) accounts for our ease with lying.

The book addresses some of the fundamental aspects of lying - that we are indeed natural born liars, that not only is lying found throughout nature, but that organisms that lie well are successful. In addition, Smith describes the role of unconscious cognition. His use of the term "social poker" illustrates what takes place in communication.

Smith goes where no `self-respecting' psychologists these days are willing to go, by discussing `Freudian' ideas. This was refreshing amidst the climate of overwhelming objection to Freud's ideas in psychology. Smith's knowledge of the various areas addressed in the book is profound. His ability to express Darwinian concepts in a clear and reasoned manner is superb.

Indeed this book is a `must read' for the scholar, the student, or even the general reader who is interested in human nature. I highly recommend it, and believe that those who read it will find it fascinating and compelling.

The first reviewer said it right: "Every once in a while a new book appears which lifts the veil off one's eyes." This book amazes me.

Why did our brains evolve a split between our conscious mind and subconscious mind? David Livingstone Smith has a hypothesis that makes sense in an astonishing way. Our brains evolved to maximize our survival potential in prehistoric ages. By far the most important survival factor to primitive humans were their relationships to other humans. Most of our brain power evolved for the purpose of getting along in (primitive) society. Man's capacity for deception evolved in response to reciprocal altruism. Reciprocal altruism improved the life of primitive man, so long as the relationships were reciprocal. However, some individuals would cheat. They would find a way to accept the benefits of reciprocal altruism without reciprocating. Anyone who could cheat successfully had a better chance of passing on their genes. In order to cheat successfully, cheaters had to excel at deception. The genes for deceptive ability spread through the gene pool because that survived the best. With widespread deception and cheating, the ability to detect deception also became an important survival factor. Evolution of the human brain became an arms race between the ability to deceive and the ability to detect deception. As deception became more advanced and subtle, so did the detection of it. Neither side, deception nor detection, could keep the upper hand in the arms race. At some point, deception could no longer be conducted effectively enough by conscious lying. When we lie consciously, we give ourselves away by telltale signs and nervousness. The next step in the arms race was self-deception - to split the mind into a conscious and unconscious. The conscious mind could remain innocent of deception, leaving the unconscious mind free to excel at it. This separation of the mind into a conscious and unconscious, though necessary for successful deception, came at a high cost. The conscious part of our minds became deliberately dumbed down. With the conscious mind being dumbed down, the detection of deception also had to move underground, to be handled by the same "Machiavellian module" that engaged in deception. This unconscious portion of the brain is an expert psychologist, highly capable at reading other people's motivations and at manipulating them. Its high intelligence is unavailable to the conscious mind, except what it selectively allows through. This explanation of a deliberately dumbed down conscious mind accompanied by an intelligent self-deceptive subconscious makes sense. Before reading this book I couldn't see why people (including myself) are like that, but it fits. It is observationally true.

Another important revelation in this book is the survival role of gossip and idle chit chat. As mentioned, detecting cheaters in primitive society had high survival value. Gossip served the vital role of communicating reputation information. However, gossip was dangerous and could be used for mis-information as easily as for sharing reputation information. Gossip could cause the gossiper to be ostracized by friends of the subject, which was fatal in primitive society. To counter this danger, the Machiavellian module developed the ability to communicate in hidden code. Instead of gossiping directly about someone, the Machiavellian module brings up topics of conversation that seem unrelated, but which contain hidden messages. On the surface, it appears to be idle chit chat about nothing. Below the surface, people's Machiavellian modules understand the hidden messages, and have a coded conversation with each other, the meaning of which remains hidden even from their conscious minds. I used to wonder why people waste time in idle chit chat about nothing. After reading this book, my way of listening to people will be forever changed.

This book goes on my most highly recommended list of "must read" books.

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.

David Livingstone Smith presents Why We Lie as a beginning step in the direction of an evolutionary psychology of deception. "Nature is awash with deceit," he claims. He produces many fascinating examples of deceit in nature (jumping spiders, for example) as a survival strategy and points out that "although we claim to value truth above all else, we are also at least dimly aware that there is something antisocial about too much honesty."

Smith gives an evolutionary account that in a nut shell goes as follows. As our evolutionary ancestors began to gather in larger and larger groups, the increasing complexity of group dynamics led to an "arms race between deception and detection [that had] huge implications for the evolution of human intelligence." The advent of language upset the balance between deception and detection and gave a huge advantage to the liar. "Most of us are embarrassingly inept at spotting liars." The problem is that we tend to privilege speech over raw observation, and thereby miss the clues that give the liar away. "Once our ancestors learned to gossip, they could form secret alliances, deceive each other far more effectively about where they stood in relation to other community members, and stab each other in the back."

Under Smith's account "the power to deceive is our main weapon in the struggle for social survival." Self-deception was an adaptation that enabled us to better deceive others. The result for us today? Not so good. "Self-deception has been a wonderful gift, but it is now destroying us. Our taste for it resembles our craving for sugar and animal fat." Further, "the most dangerous forms of self-deception are the collective ones. Patriotism, moral crusades, and religious fervor across nations like plagues, slicing the world into good and evil, defender and aggressor, right and wrong."

Smith's book is, as he admits, thin on evidence and light on research. Even so, it is a quick, easy read with enough interesting insights to nudge the reader a little closer to that ever elusive goal of self-knowledge. After all, shouldn't you know whether, at the most fundamental level, you are a self-deciever? It's worth thinking about.

This could be a lie, but I found this book to be fairly interesting, yet poorly written. The author sometimes writes his opinions as if they are blunt facts. I enjoyed the bits of information on animal behaviour, but again poorly written. There is a lot here to make a more interesting read out of. I really felt sometimes as if I was reading a high school student's extended essay. He did his research, he had some interesting things to think about, he put it together and got a B+ (for a high school student).

This book really has potential. I'd say pull it from the shelves, rewrite it, then resell it. More money for the author and publishers, more fun for more readers.

Regardless, it's a book to be taken with a grain of salt. Enjoy the stories, disregard the opinions.

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.

The book contains many references to texts and some brilliant insights in evolutionary psychology revealed by Trivers, Hamilton, Alexander, Humphrey, Darwin. The author describes many evolutionary insights in a concise, interesting way (including the reason for the development of deception and self deception, unconsciousness, and split of the brain). Because of this, the book deserves 5 stars.

But the author also introduces the term Machiavellian module claiming its unconscious existence in a person, and prescribing this module intelligence and cognition. At the same time, he also try to diminish the importance of consciousness, even questioning if there is such thing as a conscious cognition and intelligence, narrowing the importance of consciousness to merely an observing role. From that point on, the book gets a little frustrating and it seems that the author unnecessarily tries hard to explain everything by this Machiavellian module. But actually he cannot introduce or explain anything new into the existing evolutionary psychology insights, but only complicate things.
Because of this, I give the book one star.

There is no such thing as Machiavellian module (unconscious cognition and intelligence as described by the author) and a weak observing consciousness, but quite the contrary - there is the term already known in evolutionary psychology - Machiavellian intelligence (active, conscious part of the brain developed in men because of immense human social relationships) which answers to questions "how" and the unconscious containing motivations and emotions (although powerful it does not contain neither cognition nor intelligence) which directs the goals of people and answer to questions "why". The author also tries, by numerous examples of unconscious discoveries, to justify the existence of a highly cognitive, intelligent unconscious, but - it seems that he confuse unconscious intelligence with unconscious memory.

This book described exactly what its title claims. It methodically analyzes how we tend to operate on two levels with a clear and direct writing style. There is a whole unconscious level of communication that is more honest but less admitted in most of our interactions. Smith explains how this has supported our survival over time. Personally, I'm more interested in becoming more conscious of those processes, but the book only peripherally addresses increasing our awareness.

Solid scientific writing all the way through. For someone who knows nothing about evolutionary psychology the material covered would have to be mind-blowing indeed. On the other hand, to people who already have a grasp on evolutionary psychology a-lot of the material is just review ... but it is well written, very interesting examples from biology.

Pretty bold, Smith uses all the Freud he can, the good the bad and the ugly of Freud. No need to dismiss him as "bad" or "wrong." Smith argues that conversation often expresses meaning hidden to consciousness. Hard to prove scientifically, yet almost certainly true. Smith is a little too defensive about his hypothesis, I think. It shouldn't be as revolutionary as it is, if it is.

The experiment about homophobia, demonstrating homophobic men aroused by gay pornography but not normal heterosexual men is amazing. As is the demonstration that bodily movements begin to be planned before conscious decision making. The research attempting to estimate the proportion of lies in everyday conversation. Dozens of books must report these experiments, of course, as they should be - they are mind blowing - science at its best!

Smith argues that self-deception is an evolutionary adaptation, it would not be beneficial for a person to know what their unconscious knows. Certainly there is a-lot of truth in this idea. In my experience, I have found most people have beliefs about other people which are almost unchangeable ... to change Joes opinion about Jason can be as or more difficult from changing Joe from a Christian into a muslim.

Unfortunately, the book does not tackle research in cross-cultural psychology. In Chinese culture, for example, people have a self-concept more in accord with their actual abilities than in American culture. Since work like this is often brushed off as ignoring or ignorant of cultural factors an inclusion of research done in cross-cultural psychology, I think, would have been a very good idea.

Smith seems to take favor with the idea ... sorry I do not know the correct words, that consciousness is something of an epiphenomenon or at least of much less significance than it is usually believed to be. I don't find much favor with this idea when I think about it. Decision making is an important part of any life, decision making is an essential part of chess and all sports ... and what is decision making if not for consciousness? Seems to me that when someone attempts to explain away the importance of consciousness they end up spelling out a-lot of works without too much meaning. However, as well, delibrate decision making places a much more important part in the lifes of some than in others.

Smith's audience is, of course, mainly scientists and people who are quite fond of science, so I understand that he is a little uncomfortable defending the value of poetry and literature for scientific inquiry. Honestly speaking I am sure there are dozens and dozens of dime a dozen sharp scientific minds who, though succeed in understanding the value of science, with a wave of the hand dismiss the value of literature (or poetry) because "someone just made it up in their head." These same people, who usually do not enjoy or do not understand serious films still find themselves watching popular movies and popular television shows and enjoying them. Certainly, if someone has no experience with serious literature or serious poetry, it is about as hard to grasp as an academic paper on biology or chemistry. For readers like those, I cross my fingers and laugh imagining how the literary sentences in Smith's book went above their head.

Serious literature, in case you aren't aware is full of the phenomenon that Smith discusses - namely meaning in words and phrases that is seldom or rarely percieved by conscious perception. Most great novels and poems are full of this stuff, and if the material isn't processed by an active unconscious the work won't be understood correctly. Examples of books that do this? I can think of no ltierary work more compelling than D.H. Lawrence's Apocalypse. Wuthering Heights and Ulysses - two more. You read my mind - cellar door. Anyway, this is a really interesting book that is worth the time to read through.