The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life

by Robert Trivers

  For one brief shining moment, it appeared as if the name-letter effect had widespread important effects on our behavior of which we were completely unconscious. Too many Larry and Laura lawyers, too many Geoffreys publishing in the geosciences. Too many people’s last names (first four letters) match those of towns or streets or states where they live. People appeared to be making major life decisions based on trivial egoistic coincidences. Causality was strongly implied by evidence that people tend to migrate to states that match their own last names. Fortunately, perhaps, the entire edifice collapsed when a very careful reanalysis replicated all the original findings and then showed that every single one was due to hidden biases in procedure or logic. For example, forty years ago, there was a wave of enthusiasm for naming babies Geoffrey, Laura, or Larry. Hence, they are overrepresented in a variety of enterprises today besides the geosciences and law. Likewise, place of birth for the migration study was often noted as place of residence several years later (when the child was first given a social security number) and the subjects may already have migrated away. Since people have a strong tendency to return to where they were born, this alone would create a spurious correlation as, indeed, it did.

  What we do know about the costs or benefits associated with the name-letter effect are nonetheless surprising. Preference for one’s own first initials can lead to a real cost, that is, lower performance when one’s own initials are associated with signs of lower performance (though the reverse is not true). Self-love in this context gives a cost but not a benefit. In schools in the United States, Cs and Ds are low grades and As and Bs high. People with a C or a D at the beginning of either their first or last names show lower academic performance (grade-point average) than do those with As, Bs, or other letters, apparently because lower grades (Cs and Ds) are (unconsciously) less aversive to them. It is notable that self-love does not benefit those with initials of A or B—they score just like those with other initials—but self-love harms those with C or D. If your name is Charles Darwin, you will tend to do slightly less well academically than everyone around you. And these biases have ramifying effects in life. When law schools are ranked in terms of quality, students with first initials in their names of either C or D are preferentially located in inferior schools.

  For academic performance, one could argue that teachers unconsciously downgrade students with the initials C and D, but direct experiments prove that self-initiated failure works just fine. When given the choice—after trying to solve ten difficult anagrams (of which two are impossible)—people will choose to push a button associated with failure (and a lower possible prize) if it matches their own initials, but they will not show an upward bias. Once again, self-love is associated with failure but not success. Is it possible that some among us tend not to respond to such arbitrary biases and thus succeed more often while seeing life more objectively?

  How do these implicit self-biases come about? There is some evidence that early parenting style, both as remembered by individuals and, separately, by their mothers, is associated with the degree of name-letter bias and (in some cases) birth-date bias according to the following rules: warm and positive parenting produces a stronger positive self bias, while being controlling or overprotective has the opposite effect. The variables had similar effects on explicit self-esteem, as measured by asking people to rate themselves on a series of traits, such as “I feel that I have a number of good qualities” (1 to 7—completely true to completely untrue), but the implicit effect is still significant when corrected for explicit self-esteem. Recent work even suggests that daily events can affect one’s name-letter bias, but only among those with low explicit self-esteem; a greater number of negative events in the previous twenty-four hours lowers implicit self-esteem, that is, preference for one’s own name letters.

  DECEIVING DOWN AND DUMMYING UP

  As we have seen, we usually think of deception where self-image is concerned as involving inflation of self—you are bigger, brighter, better-looking than you really are. But there is a second kind of deception—deceiving down—in which the organism is selected to make itself appear smaller, stupider, and perhaps even uglier, thereby gaining an advantage. In herring gulls and various other seabirds, offspring actively diminish their apparent size and degree of aggressiveness as fledglings, to be permitted to remain near their parents, thereby consuming more parental investment. In many species of fish, frogs, and insects (see Chapter 2), males diminish apparent size, color, and aggressiveness to resemble females and steal paternity of eggs. These findings indicate that deceiving down has often been a viable strategy in other species, and thus is likely to be one in humans as well, which should lead to self-deceptive self-diminishment.

  For example, appearing less threatening may permit you to approach more closely. This is a minority strategy that probably owes some of its success to the fact that most people are doing the opposite, so our guard is not as well developed in this direction. I remember students whose approach was so low-key, so noninvasive, you would never imagine that they would end up consuming far more of your time (to less effect) than many of their more talented counterparts who were representing themselves honestly or with an upward bias. Whether they were self-deceiving downward is, of course, difficult to say.

  The most memorable version of deceiving down that I know of is referred to in African-American culture as “dummying up.” This can refer to a specific situation in which you pretend not to know anything—for example, complete failure to witness a crime at which you were present or complete ignorance of a hidden relationship. But it can also refer to a general style. You can represent yourself as being less intelligent or less conscious than you really are, often the better to minimize the work you have to do. Thus an employee may dummy up to avoid doing more difficult tasks. I have often watched Spanish-speaking people in Panama and sometimes in the United States represent themselves as understanding much less English than in fact they do, all to gain benefits from English-speaking Americans who readily believe the dummying up—another example of being victimized by one’s own prejudices.

  I once asked Huey Newton how he dealt with dummying up directed at him, a problem he must have faced often as head of a major organization (the Black Panther Party). In reply, he imagined a situation in which a waiter always managed to avoid seeing you when you were calling him and otherwise appeared to be working while not actually doing anything. Here is how Huey would dress him down: “Oh, so you are so dumb that you happen to be looking the other way whenever I am trying to get your attention? And you are so dumb that when you know I am watching you, you decide to polish silverware that needs no polishing? And you are so dumb that you are always walking toward the pantry without ever reaching it? Well, you’re not that damn dumb!”—followed by verbal or physical assault. Perhaps the ultimate in dummying up is that alleged of chimpanzees by several African peoples living near them—that the chimps can easily understand human speech but pretend not to in order to avoid being put to work!

  FACE-ISM

  It has been argued that visual depictions of the face that show more of the face relative to the rest of the body—that is, the face appears closer to you and is higher in “face-ism”—will give the impression of higher dominance, and people do indeed rate such faces as being more dominant. The word “face,” after all, can be used to imply confrontation, as in “face-off,” “face-to-face,” “in your face,” “loss of face,” and so on. In short, the more I project my face on you, the more dominant I appear.

  Consistent with this, the faces of a discriminated-against minority in the United States, African Americans, show lower face-ism than do those of European Americans in a variety of American and European periodicals, American portrait paintings, and US stamps. The difference shows up even when relative status is controlled for. Only when the artist is an African American is there an exception—there is no ethnic difference, with all face-ism ratings being on the high side. The degree of consciousness of the art
ists about these effects is, of course, unknown, but I would guess that many of the presenters of stimuli are unconscious of the effect, as are almost all of the recipients.

  Similar findings have emerged for the two sexes in a wide range of US periodicals (such as Time and Ms.), in 3,500 media photos from eleven countries (including Kenya, Mexico, India, and France), in portraits and self-portraits dating back to the fifteenth century, and in amateur drawings of the faces of the two sexes. In all of these samples, men score higher in face-ism than do women. That is, relatively more of their face is presented in the picture—especially surprising since women have slightly larger heads for a given body size. On the other hand, women have breasts, and this may lead to a bias toward showing less head and more body. In any case, the correlation is true for every single country studied and every century from the seventeenth onward. The general face-ism effect appears to be all but universal, showing up in children’s books, Fortune 500 websites, and prime-time television, among other places. Ms. magazine (feminist) is only slightly less biased in the usual direction than the rest of US publications.

  There are some weak associations between higher face-ism and higher perceived intelligence, but no evidence that this affects the between-sex or ethnic comparisons, with one small exception. In photos from a variety of US periodicals, men shown in relatively intellectual professions had higher face-ism scores than similar women, and the effect was reversed for more physical professions.

  Even politicians’self-presentations—that is, the photos they choose to post on their websites—show the usual bias, at least in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Norway. The bias remains the same whether twice as many women per men are serving in the legislature or one-tenth as many (compare Norway and the United States). Once again, though, in the United States, African-American politicians are an exception, showing the highest face-ism index for any ethnic group. Again, this suggests awareness among them that higher face-ism equals higher perceived dominance (and perhaps intelligence). Among female politicians in the United States, the more a woman’s votes are interpreted as “pro-women,” the more she emphasizes her face in photos of herself.

  The degree to which people are conscious of face-ism is unknown, and so is its mechanism. Does a white photo selector see a black face and say “subordinate,” then search for a relatively low face-ism picture? Or does he or she find black faces somewhat aversive, and so prefer them when they are smaller? And do black people viewing the photos find black pictures attractive and therefore easily tolerated up close, or are they saying “equally dominant” or “I wish myself and people like me to appear equally dominant”?

  There is a curious result concerning George W. Bush’s head. Someone thought to analyze his face-ism index in cartoons rendered 78 days before and 134 days after the start of each of his two wars. The authors of this study predicted that, dominant leader that he was, his face-ism index would increase with the outbreak of war. In fact, it decreased in both cases. Because in every major recent US war the president has made sure to appear as if he were forced into it, after every concession and reasonable effort, the authors argued that this lowered his apparent dominance. Or perhaps cartoonists knew something the rest of us did not about how each war would turn out. More likely still, the cartoonists were unconsciously reflecting the bias toward inflating one’s own country (and leaders) prior to war, so as to impress adversaries, but not continuing once war was under way.

  SPAM AGAINST ANTI-SPAM

  There is an analogy between the coevolutionary struggle in nature and struggles in human life over deception in which (over a period of months or years) each move by a deceiver is matched by a countermove from the deceived and vice versa. The advantage lies with the deceiver, who usually has the first move. This is true even of situations in which the very best minds are enlisted in fighting the deception. Consider the ubiquitous invasive “species” of spam, unwanted computer messages. They offer a variety of services to induce a transfer of funds, however small, directly or from third parties. In some cases, companies will send out spam to lure the unsuspecting viewer to their websites, whose visits garner them more pay from the advertising company employing them. When spam first became a problem, computer software engineers leaped in on the side of prevention and protection, devising means of spotting incoming spam and blocking it. This led Bill Gates, in a burst of enthusiasm in 2004, to proclaim that the problem of junk e-mail “will be solved by 2006.” Gates saw that defenses could easily be erected against the set of spamming devices then in use, but he could not imagine that these defenses could quickly be bypassed at little cost and that newer forms of spamming would easily be invented. By 2006, the amount of spam was higher than ever, having doubled in the previous year alone. Spam, of course, is a human invention for human purposes, with the computer and the Internet serving as the tools of replication.

  After an initially successful counterattack by the anti-spam forces that resulted in a decrease in spam, the protective measures introduced could all be circumvented so that by the end of 2006, roughly nine out of every ten e-mail messages were junk. The initial attack against spam blended three filtering strategies. Software scanned each incoming message and looked at where the message was from, what words it contained, and which website it was connected to. The first was bypassed in spectacular fashion by devising programs that infected other computers with viruses that sent out the spam instead. In late 2006, an estimated quarter-million computers were unknowingly conscripted to send out spam every day. This achieved two aims at once: no sender’s address that could be screened, and no additional cost to send.

  The second screening device searched statistically for word usages suggestive of spam, but this maneuver was overcome by embedding the words in pictures whose extra expense was offset by the first device, the use of pirated computers. Efforts to spot and analyze images were, in turn, offset by “speckling” the images with polka dots and background bouquets of color that interfered with the computer scanners. To block detection of multiple copies of the same message, programs were written that automatically changed a few pixels in each picture. It was as if an individual could change successive fingerprints by minute amounts to evade detection, reminiscent of the ability of octopuses (see Chapter 2) to rapidly spin out a random series of cryptic patterns, again to avoid targeting. The HIV virus uses the same trick, mutating its coat proteins at a high rate to prevent the immune system from concentrating on it. As for the problem of linked sites, some scams do not require any. Spam can hype so-called penny stocks (inexpensive stocks in obscure companies) that may give a quick 5 percent profit in a matter of days, when enough people invest to raise the value, after which the spammer sells his or her interest in the stock and it collapses.

  The point is that each move is matched by a countermove and a new move is always possible, so deceiver leads and deceived responds with costs potentially mounting by the year on both sides with no net gain. Intellectual powers among programmers increasingly will be required on both sides. One inevitable cost in this context is the destruction of true information by spam detectors that are too stringent, thus excluding some true information. This, as we saw in Chapter 2, is a universal problem in animal discrimination. Greater powers of discrimination will inevitably increase so-called false negatives—rejecting something as false that is in fact true. So as we act to exclude more spam, we inevitably delete more true messages. And now there is something more dangerous, called malware—special infiltrating codes that download proprietary information and ship it to one’s enemies. As with newly appearing natural parasites (such as living viruses), malware is increasing at a more rapid rate than defenses against it.

  HUMOR, LAUGHTER, AND SELF-DECEPTION

  One striking discovery is that humor and laughter appear to be positively associated with immune benefits. Humor in turn can be seen as anti-self-deception. Humor is often directed at drawing attention to the contradictions that deceit and self-deception m
ay be hiding. These are seen as humorous. Reversals of fortune associated with showing off—usually entrained by self-deception—are often comical to onlookers. A staple of silent films is the man strutting down the street, dressed to the nines, showing off, with head held high—so that he does not see the banana peel underneath him, producing an almost perfect visual metaphor for self-deception. The organism is directing its behavior toward others, with an upward gaze that causes him to pay no attention to the surface on which he is actually walking. Result: cartwheel and complete loss of bodily control, of the strut, of the head held high, and of the well-presented clothes—the whole show destroyed by a single contradiction.

  Those who are low in self-deception (as judged by a classic paper-and-pencil test) appreciate humor more (as measured by actual facial movements in response to comedic material) than do those high in self-deception. At the same time, those with greater implicit biases toward black people or toward traditional sex roles laugh more in response to racially and sexually charged humor than do those with less implicit biases. Is it possible that the greater internal contradiction in them is released by appropriate humor on the subject, resulting in greater laughter? Laughter is an ancient mammalian trait, found in rats as well as chimpanzees. Tickling a rat will produce laughter-like sounds, and the rats will seek out the pleasure of being tickled. Chimpanzees will pant-laugh when being chased, an action that signals that the chase is not aggressive or aversive.