by Ian Leslie
In 1982, Byrne and Whiten’s dangerous ideas gained impetus from a new book that captured the imagination of readers within and beyond their field. Frans de Waal’s Chimpanzee Politics is a gripping portrayal of the shifting power relationships within a captive colony of chimpanzees in a Dutch zoo, and it reads like the script of a gangster movie. Alliances are formed, broken and re-formed, individuals are manipulated, violence is selectively employed, females are fought over and seduced. De Waal framed his account as a vision of human politics in the raw, sprinkling his book with references to Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince, which famously advises that ‘since men are wretched creatures who would not keep their word’, a ruler must know ‘how to be a great liar and deceiver’.
Byrne and Whiten were fascinated by De Waal’s work, particularly by the scenes involving outright deception. For example, a chimp called Puist is chasing one of her female rivals when, outpaced, she gives up. A few minutes later, from a distance, she stretches out an open hand as if to indicate that she is ready to be friends. The younger female approaches her, though she is clearly unsure what to think, moving only hesitantly, glancing around at others and wearing a nervous grin. But Puist persists with her outstretched hand, and starts to pant softly – usually the prelude to an affectionate kiss – as the younger female gets closer. Suddenly, Puist lunges, grabs her rival, and bites her fiercely. De Waal termed this move the ‘deceptive reconciliation offer’, and anyone who has been in a playground or watched The Sopranos will recognise it.
The success of Chimpanzee Politics gave the study of primate deceit a new legitimacy, and in 1988 Byrne and Whiten finally got to publish their work, Machiavellian Intelligence (the title inspired by De Waal). Byrne and Whiten collected all of the examples of deception that they had found and organised them into a taxonomy of Teasing, Pretending, Concealing and Distracting. The book’s unsettling but powerful thesis was that our intelligence began in ‘social manipulation, deceit and cunning co-operation’. Its moment had come; Machiavellian Intelligence proved highly influential, not only in the field of evolutionary theory, but across the social sciences, from psychology to economics.
There was one more step to go, however. Although Byrne and Whiten had put together a convincing argument that there was a link between intelligence and the capacity to deceive, and had provided a wealth of anecdotes to support it, they still lacked hard evidence. The intervention of an anthropologist from Liverpool University called Robin Dunbar helped them find some.
Dunbar, also inspired by Humphrey’s theory of social intelligence, noted that although all primates have big brains related to their body size, baboons, who live in large groups, have very big brains, while vervets, who live in smaller groups, have smaller brains. He wondered if bigger brains were required to handle the complexities of larger social groups. If you belong to a group of five, you have to keep track of ten separate relationships in order to successfully navigate its social dynamics – that is, to know who is allied with who, who is worthy of your time and attention and who is not. That is difficult enough. But if you belong to a group of twenty, you have one hundred and ninety two-way relationships to keep track of: nineteen involving yourself and one hundred and seventy-one involving the rest of the group. The group has increased fourfold, but the number of relationships – and thus the intellectual burden of tracking them – has increased nearly twentyfold.
Dunbar plunged into the vast accumulation of data on primates from around the world, searching for a statistical relationship between the size of an animal’s brain and the size of the social group the animal typically lived in. He took as his proxy for brain size the volume of a species’ neo-cortex – the outer layer of the brain. This is sometimes referred to as the ‘thinking’ part of the brain, because it deals with abstraction, self-reflection and forward planning. These are the kind of skills that Humphrey had argued were necessary to cope with the confusing whirl of social life, and it was this brain region that showed such a rapid expansion amongst primates – and especially humans – two million years ago.
Dunbar found just such a correlation; one so strong, in fact, that he was able to predict with impressive accuracy the group size of a species just by knowing the typical size of its neo-cortex. He even came up with a prediction for human beings. Based on the size of our brains, he said, we should be able to cope with a social group – people we would happily meet for a drink, say – of about a hundred and fifty people. Sure enough, when he combed through the anthropological and sociological literature, he found that a hundred and fifty worked as a rough average of the size of many human social groups, from hunter-gatherer societies to modern army units and company departments.
Encouraged by Dunbar’s findings, Richard Byrne, now working with a young researcher called Nadia Corp, set out to see if he could prove a link between deception and brain size. Byrne and Corp studied a catalogue of observations of deceptive behaviours in wild primates that had been greatly expanded since the publication of Byrne and Whiten’s groundbreaking hypothesis. They found that the frequency of deception in a species is directly proportional to the size of the neo-cortex. Bush babies and lemurs, which have a relatively small neo-cortex, were among the least sneaky. The most deceptive primates, including the great apes, also had the largest neo-cortex. The original theory held up: the better the liar, the bigger the brain.
Byrne didn’t attempt to measure the capacity for deception of the animal that has the largest neo-cortex of all: homo sapiens. But then, he didn’t need to. There’s no doubt about which species takes the prize for deceit.
* * *
In the middle of the nineteenth century, P.T. Barnum’s American Museum in New York housed an exotic collection of human and animal oddities, including the original bearded lady, a great white whale, and a pair of very argumentative Siamese twins. Naturally, the exhibition was hugely popular. But success brought difficulties. Barnum realised he had a problem with what modern retailers term ‘traffic flow’: the exhibition was getting congested because people were lingering too long in front of the attractions. Barnum’s solution was to use a deliberately obscure term for exit, posting signs that read ‘To The Egress’. Excited at the prospect of witnessing yet another bizarre beast, customers would follow the signs and find themselves in the street outside.
The generally accepted definition of a lie is a false statement made with the intention to deceive. If I tell you that Paris is the capital of Belgium, you’ll know it’s not true, but you won’t accuse me of lying. You’ll just assume I’m mistaken, or that I’m making a joke. Telling somebody something false isn’t a lie if the person doing the telling believes it to be true. But if you know that I know Paris is not the capital of Belgium, and you know that it’s in my interest to persuade you otherwise (maybe I’m trying to make you lose at Trivial Pursuit) then you’ll know I’m lying.
As Barnum’s example shows, you can lie by telling the truth. You can also lie to somebody without deceiving them. In Jean-Paul Sartre’s short story The Wall, set during the Spanish Civil War, Pablo Ibbieta, a prisoner sentenced to be executed by the Fascists, is interrogated by his guards as to the whereabouts of his comrade Ramon Gris. Mistakenly believing Gris to be hiding with his cousins, he plays for time by telling them that Gris is hiding in the cemetery. He then has a night to ponder his impending execution once the guards discover he has deceived them. Yet when dawn breaks he discovers to his horror that Gris had moved to the very location he reported to the guards. Gris is arrested at the cemetery and Ibbieta is released. Ibbieta lied to his interrogators with the intention of deceiving them but told them the truth.
Lies are slippery things, and endlessly various. There are the little lies we tell to simplify a complicated story or to protect our own privacy, and lies we tell to get out of unwelcome social situations (‘Thursday? I have a bassoon lesson that night’). Then there are the more serious lies: the ones we tell to cover up misdemeanours or to g
et what we want – lies about illicit affairs or workplace manoeuvrings. There are lies of commission (I tell you I’m a policeman) and lies of omission (you tell me about your scorching love life without mentioning that your partner in sexual acrobatics is my wife). There are lies told to win admiration (the abnormally large fish you caught and threw back; a soldier’s exaggerated account of his valour), and lies told to shield oneself or another person from physical or emotional harm.
There are also lies told for the sheer fun of it: we have all come across people who embroider their stories with a fictional filigree simply because they’re more interesting that way. ‘I’m the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It’s awful,’ says Holden Caulfield, the fourteen-year-old hero of Catcher In The Rye. ‘If I’m on my way to the store to buy a magazine, even, and somebody asks me where I’m going, I’m liable to say I’m going to the opera. It’s terrible.’
In this book I often use the words ‘deception’ and ‘lie’ interchangeably, but there is a distinction. Jerry Andrus, the great and eccentric American magician, made it a point of principle throughout his career never to lie, despite the fact that his act depended, as with all conjurors, on deception. But Andrus constructed his tricks so that he always spoke the truth, even as he was deceiving with his hands. He would say, ‘It may appear as though I’m putting the card in the centre of the deck’ rather than ‘I am putting the card in the centre of the deck,’ before producing said card from the top. This made his tricks more difficult to perform because he was alerting his audience to the possibility of deception, but that was the challenge Andrus set himself. Deception can involve any attempt to mislead: it could be a tone of voice, a smile, a faked signature or a white flag. A lie involves words – a specifically verbal form of deceit.
Indeed, the human knack for dissembling, born of the demands of Palaeolithic social life, was supercharged by the invention of language. Estimates of when this happened vary wildly, from fifty thousand to half a million years ago, but what’s certain is that it was a giant leap forward for deceit, because it detached communication from deed. When I don’t have to point to food to make you think there’s food there – when I can just tell you and let you discover the truth later – then the possibilities for deception become infinitely more diverse and elaborate.1
Reading tales of primate deceit inspires two feelings at once: discomfort, because of the suggestion that such behaviour is bred in our bones, and admiration at the guile, creativity and intelligence on display. Something like those two antithetical responses runs through the history of our attitudes to lying. We are simultaneously appalled with ourselves for being able to make up things that aren’t true, and impressed by our capacity for inventiveness; uneasy about our ease with falsity, yet certain that lies of some kind are necessary.
‘Lying is indeed an accursed vice,’ wrote the sixteenth-century philosopher Michel de Montaigne. ‘If we realised the horror and gravity of lying we would see that it is more worthy of the stake than other crimes.’ Theologians from Augustine onwards have condemned lying as a heinous sin. Immanuel Kant pronounced that there was no such thing as a white lie; that lying could never be justified under any circumstance.
Other thinkers have argued it is absurd to propose that we can, or should, live without deceit. ‘There is only one world,’ said Nietzsche, ‘and that world is false, cruel, contradictory, misleading, senseless . . . We need lies to vanquish this reality, this “truth”, we need lies in order to live.’ Oscar Wilde, in his more playful style, suggested that lying is a welcome escape route from the insufferable dullness of real life, cautioning only that it should be done with flair; he lamented ‘the decay of Lying as an art, a science, and a social pleasure’. Kant and Montaigne might have agreed with Achilles, the hero of the Iliad, who says, ‘For I hate him like the gates of death who thinks one thing and says another.’ Yet in the Odyssey Homer contrasts Achilles with a hero who is a ‘master deceiver among mortals’; a man who skilfully and proudly wields deceit in battle and in love. In the end, it’s Odysseus who comes across as the more attractive – more human – hero.
There’s no settling the debate over lying. It’s been part of the buzz and thrum of human conversation ever since we started talking, and it contains just about everything: our ideas about what kind of creatures we are, what it means to be a good person, and what on earth all those other people are saying about us. What’s certain is that our ability to deceive is innate, and false speech comes naturally to our lips. ‘The human capacity to lie,’ says the literary critic and humanist philosopher George Steiner, is ‘indispensable to the equilibrium of human consciousness and the development of man in society.’ Like it or not, we are all born liars.
First Lies
How our children learn to lie (and why we should be impressed when they do)
The real history of consciousness starts with one’s first lie.
Joseph Brodsky
Charlotte’s four-year-old son Tom has a rather casual way with the truth. Tom has no compunction whatsoever in blaming his one-year-old sister Ella for anything that goes wrong, even if that means lying through his baby teeth. If Charlotte is in the kitchen and hears a crash in the living room, she knows that when she walks in she’ll find an upended lamp on the floor and Tom, pointing to Ella, inviting his mother to share his exasperation with his sister. Ella will be on the other side of the room, oblivious to the fuss, but Tom will be adamant that she knocked over the lamp while looking for her favourite doll. If it weren’t that Ella can’t crawl fast enough to get away from the scene of a crime so quickly, Charlotte might be tempted to believe him. ‘He’s so convincing,’ she tells me. ‘He’s a scarily good liar.’
Should Charlotte be worried about Tom’s lying? Browse the voluminous literature on child-rearing, and you might conclude that she should. Authors of how-to guides to parenting call for vigilance on the matter. Here’s a typical extract from one of the many internet guides to raising
children:
Before we consider why children lie, it is essential to recognise that lying may be an early indicator of a more severe problem. Compulsive lying has often been indicated in the early stages of children suffering from social behaviour disorders, primarily that of Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder and Conduct Disorder.
The author is careful to distinguish between ordinary, harmless lying, and compulsive lying, where a child lies ‘frequently and for no apparent reason’. On this basis, Charlotte might be concerned: after all, Tom lies frequently, sometimes without obvious motive. But when I ask her if she’s considered seeing a child counsellor about Tom’s trouble with the truth, she laughs. ‘He’s no worse than I am,’ she says.
Charlotte’s relaxed attitude to Tom’s deceit is shared by the author of this passage:
A little later (2 years and 7.5 months old) I met him coming out of the dining room with his eyes unnaturally bright, and an odd unnatural or affected manner, so that I went into the room to see who was there, and found that he had been taking pounded sugar, which he had been told not to do. As he had never been in any way punished, his odd manner certainly was not due to fear, and I suppose it was pleasurable excitement struggling with conscience. A fortnight afterwards, I met him coming out of the same room, and he was eyeing his pinafore which he had carefully rolled up; and again his manner was so odd that I determined to see what was within his pinafore, notwithstanding that he said there was nothing and repeatedly commanded me to ‘go away’, and I found it stained with pickle-juice; so that here was carefully planned deceit. As this child was educated solely by working on his good feelings, he soon became as truthful, open, and tender, as anyone could desire.
This is from a short essay Charles Darwin published in 1877 entitled A Biographical Sketch of an Infant. Darwin, nearly seventy when he wrote it, had read an account of a child’s mental development by the French naturalist Hippolyte Taine and was inspired to dig out
the notes he had kept about the early years of his first child, William Erasmus, or ‘Doddy’. Enraptured by the experience of fatherhood, Darwin was as intensely curious about his children as he was about the rest of the natural world. He was, of course, a great noticer, and the essay is alive with tenderly observed detail, such as Doddy’s ‘unnaturally bright eyes’ as he scampers out of the pantry, high on sugar. Although Darwin attends to the first signs of a ‘moral sense’ in his child, he doesn’t judge his young son in moral terms; he gives no indication that Doddy’s ‘carefully planned deceit’ perturbed or angered him.
Darwin’s essay was largely neglected by those in the field of what became known as ‘developmental psychology’, the study of children’s mental development, which didn’t really get going until well into the twentieth century. Even then, until the end of the that century little attention was paid to the question of when and why children lie. When it was discussed, it was usually as a disorder – a sign of delinquency. In our everyday lives we still think in similar terms, and few parents are comfortable with the notion that their child is a liar. But if you notice your three-year-old telling lies, you needn’t be unduly concerned. In fact, it may be that parents should celebrate a child’s first lie, just as they celebrate their child’s first words.
Learning to Lie
We exert our powers of deception virtually from birth: even babies seem to engage in pre-verbal forms of fakery. During her research with the parents of very young children, Vasudevi Reddy of the University of Portsmouth found examples of baby behaviour that fit the taxonomy of deception in non-human primates put together by Byrne and Whiten: Teasing, Pretending, Concealing and Distracting. A baby girl repeatedly puts her hands out as if to join her welcoming mother but then backs away, laughing. A nine-month-old appears to fake laughter as a way of signalling that he wants to join in with others who are laughing. An eleven-month-old baby, being made to eat, watches her mother carefully, and as soon as her back is turned throws the toast away. The simplest acts of deception, says Reddy, ‘seem to happen more or less simultaneously with the earliest attempts to communicate anything at all’.
