The Folly of Fools (4 page)

Nervousness:
Because of the negative consequences of being detected, including being aggressed against and also possibly guilt, people are expected to be more nervous when lying.

Control:
In response to concern over appearing nervous (or concentrating too hard) people may exert control, trying to suppress behavior, with possible detectable side effects such as overacting, overcontrol, a planned and rehearsed impression, or displacement activities. More to the point, tensing ourselves up almost inevitably increases the pitch of our voices. When asked to create a painful reaction or suppress it, for example in response to cold, children and adults are more successful suppressing than inventing—they tend to overact.

Cognitive load:
Lying can be cognitively demanding. You must suppress the truth and construct a falsehood that is plausible on its face and does not contradict anything known by the listener, nor likely to be known. You must tell it in a convincing way and you must remember the story. This usually takes time and concentration, both of which may give off secondary cues and reduce performance on simultaneous tasks.

Cognitive load often appears to be the critical variable among the three, with a minor role for control and very little for nervousness. At least, this seems to be true in real criminal investigations as well as experimental situations designed to mimic them. Absent well-rehearsed lies, people who are lying have to think too hard, and this causes several effects, some of which are opposite to those of nervousness.

Consider, for example, blinking. When nervous, we blink our eyes more often, but we blink less under increasing cognitive load (for example, while solving arithmetic problems). Recent studies of deception suggest that we blink
less
when deceiving—that is, cognitive load rules. Nervousness makes us fidget more, but cognitive load has the opposite effect. Again, contra usual expectation, people often fidget
less
in deceptive situations. And consistent with cognitive load effects, men use fewer hand gestures while deceiving and both sexes often employ longer pauses when speaking deceptively. An absurd example of the latter occurred the other day on my property in Jamaica when I questioned a young man just arriving on a motorcycle, intent (in my opinion) on either extorting money or robbing me. What was his name, I wanted to know. “Steve,” he said. “And what is your last name?” Pause. “It is not supposed to take a long time to remember your own last name.” Quick as you can say “Jones,” he said, “Jones.” So it was “Steve Jones”—not an entirely unlikely pair of names in Jamaica—but less believable on its face than his actual name, which turned out to be Omar Clarke. The point is that cognitive load gave him away at once. The most recent work shows that there is by no means always a delay prior to lying. It depends on the kind of lie. Denial is apt to be quicker than the truth, and so are well-rehearsed lies.

Efforts at controlling oneself can also reveal deception. A nice example is pitch of voice. Deceivers tend to have higher-pitched voices. This is a very general finding and is a natural consequence of stress or of any effort to suppress behavior by becoming more rigid. Tensing up the body inevitably tends to raise the pitch of voice, and this tensing will naturally increase the closer the liar comes to the keyword. For example, someone denying a sexual relationship with “Sherri” may see her voice shoot up upon mention of the key person’s name: “You think I am there with SHERri.” Well, I had been leaning toward that theory, but now I had a fresh piece of evidence.

Another effect of suppression is the production of displacement activities. As classically described in other animals, these are irrelevant activities often seen when two opposing motivations are simultaneously aroused. Since neither impulse can express itself, the blocked energy easily activates irrelevant behavior, such as a twitch. For this reason, displacement activities in primates reliably indicate stress. For example, I once tried to slip a minor lie by a female friend at a bar and saw my left arm twitch involuntarily. Since we had by then been dating for some time, her eyes shot at once to the twitching arm. A few months later, the situation happened again, only with the roles reversed. If this had been a tennis match, the referee would have said on each occasion, “Advantage, your opponent.”

Nervousness is almost universally cited as a factor associated with deception, both by those trying to detect it as well as by those trying to avoid it, yet surprisingly enough, it is one of the weaker factors in predicting deception in scientific work. This is partly because, with no ill effects of having their deception detected, many experiments do not make people nervous. But also in real-life situations (for example, criminal investigations), being suspected of lying can make you nervous regardless of whether you lie and, perhaps more important, because we are conscious of our nervousness as a factor, suppression mechanisms may be almost as well developed as the nervousness itself, especially in those experienced in lying. And as we saw earlier, the effects of cognitive load involved in lying are often opposite to those of nervousness.

The point about cognitive load (and pitch of voice) is that there is no escape. If suppressing your nervousness increases pitch of voice, then trying to suppress that effect may only increase pitch further. If it is cognitively expensive to lie, there is no obvious way to reduce the expense, other than to increase unconscious control. Mechanisms of denial and repression may serve to reduce immediate expense, but with ramifying costs later on.

Separately, it is worth pointing out that cognitive load has important effects across a broad range of psychological processes, according to the rule that the greater the cognitive load, the more likely the unconscious processes will be revealed. For example, under cognitive load, people will more often blurt out something they are trying to suppress and will more often express biased opinions they are otherwise hiding. In short, cognitive load does more than slow down your responses—in a whole host of ways, it tends to reveal unconscious processes. These predominate when conscious degree of control is minimized because of cognitive load.

Verbal details of lies can also be revealing. Excellent work, aided by computer analysis, has demonstrated several common verbal features of lies. We cut down on the use of “I” and “me” and increase other pronouns, as if disowning our lie. We cut down on qualifiers, such as “although.” This streamlines the lie, lowering both our immediate cognitive load and later need to remember. A truth teller might say, “Although it was raining, I still walked to the office”; a liar would say, “I walked to the office.” Negative terms are more common, perhaps because of guilt or because lies more frequently involve denial and negation.

It is difficult to measure the frequency with which lies are detected in everyday life. Interviews of people in the United States show that they believe their lies are detected 20 percent of the time and that another 20 percent may be detected. Of course, the 60 percent of lies they feel are successful may contain some detections where the detector hides his or her knowledge of the deception.

SELF-DECEPTION IS OLDER THAN LANGUAGE

How biologically deep is the subject we are discussing? Many people imagine that self-deception is, almost by definition, a human phenomenon, the “self” suggesting the presence of language. But there is no reason to suppose that self-deception is not far deeper in evolutionary history, as it does not require words. Consider self-confidence, a personal variable that others can measure. It can be inflated to deceive them, with self-deception making the act more plausible. This feature probably extends far back in our animal past.

In nature, two animals square off in a physical conflict. Each is assessing its opponent’s self-confidence along with its own—variables expected to predict the outcome some of the time. Biased information flow within the individual can facilitate false self-confidence. Those who believe their self-enhancement are probably more likely to get their opponent to back down than those who know they are only posing. Thus, nonverbal self-deception can be selected in aggressive and competitive situations, the better to fool antagonists. Much the same could be said for male/female courtship. A male’s false self-confidence may give him a boost some of the time. A biased mental representation can be produced, by assumption, without language. Note, of course, that self-deception tends to work only with plausible limits to self-inflation.

The above is meant to demonstrate that in at least two widespread contexts—aggressive conflict and courtship—selection for deception may easily favor self-deception even when no language is involved. There are undoubtedly many other such contexts, for example, parent/offspring. On top of that, as we shall see, very clever recent work demonstrates in monkeys forms of self-deception that are well-known in humans: a consistency bias, for example, as well as implicit in-group favoritism, both being shown by the same kinds of experiments that reveal them in humans. As we shall see, men are more prone to overconfidence than are women, just as expected, and in rational situations such as stock trading, where fooling others is rarely involved, men do correspondingly worse.

Self-confidence is an internal variable and thus especially prone to deception. I can inflate my apparent size by muscling up, but this is fairly obvious to observers, and increasing my apparent symmetry, another important variable, is very difficult to achieve. But pretending to be more confident than I am is more easily achieved and more strongly selects for self-deception, especially when self-confidence may be as important as apparent size in predicting aggressive outcomes. Thus, I believe that overconfidence is one of the oldest and most dangerous forms of self-deception—both in our personal lives and in global decisions, such as going to war.

On the other hand, language certainly greatly expanded the opportunities for deceit and self-deception in our own lineage. If one great virtue of language is its ability to make true statements about events distant in space and time, then surely one of its social drawbacks is its ability to make false statements about events distant in space and time. These are so much less easily contradicted than statements about the immediate world. Once you have language, you have an explicit theory of self and of social relationships ready to communicate to others. Numbers of new true assertions are matched by an even greater number of false ones.

A very disturbing feature of overconfidence is that it often appears to be poorly associated with knowledge—that is, the more ignorant the individual, the more confident he or she maybe. This is true of the public when asked questions of general knowledge. Sometimes this phenomenon varies with age and status, so that senior physicians, for example, are both more likely to be wrong and more confident they are right, a potentially lethal combination, especially among surgeons. Another case with tragic consequences concerns eyewitness testimony—witnesses who are more mistaken in eyewitness identification and more confident that they are right, and this in turn has a positive effect on jurors. It may be that a rational approach to the world is nuanced and gray, capable of accommodating contradictions, all of which leads to hesitancy and a lack of certainty, as is indeed true. An easy shortcut is to combine ignorance with straight-out endorsement of ignorance—no signs of rational inquiry but, more important, no signs of self-doubt or contradiction.

NINE CATEGORIES OF SELF-DECEPTION

We begin with simple cases of self-inflation and derogation of others. We consider the effects of in-group feelings, a sense of power, and the illusion of control. Then we imagine false social theories, false internal narratives, and unconscious modules as additional sources of self-deception.

Self-Inflation Is the Rule in Life

Animal self-inflation routinely occurs in aggressive situations (size, confidence, color) as well as in courtship (same variables). Self-inflation is also the dominant style in human psychological life, adaptive self-diminution appearing in both animals and humans as an occasional strategy (see Chapter 8). Much of this self-inflation is performed in the service of what one psychologist aptly called “beneffectance”—appearing to be both beneficial and effective to others. Subtle linguistic features may easily be involved. When describing a positive group effect, we adopt an active voice, but when the effect is negative, we unconsciously shift to a passive voice: this happened and then that happened and then costs rained down on all of us. Perhaps a classic in the genre was the man in San Francisco in 1977 who ran his car into a pole and claimed afterward, as recorded by the police: “The telephone pole was approaching. I was attempting to swerve out of the way, when it struck my front end.” Perfectly legitimate, but it shifts the blame to the telephone pole. And self-bias extends in every direction. If you question BMW owners on why they own that brand of car, they will tell you it had nothing to do with trying to influence others but will see others as owning one for exactly that reason.

Self-inflation results in people routinely putting themselves in the top half of positive distributions and the lower half of negative ones. Of US high school students, 80 percent place themselves in the top half of students in leadership ability. This is not possible. But for self-deception, you can hardly beat academics. In one survey, 94 percent placed themselves in the top half of their profession. I plead guilty. I could be tied down to a bed in a back ward of some hospital and still believe I am outperforming half my colleagues—and this is not just a comment on my colleagues.

When we say we are in the top 70 percent of people for good looks, this may be only our mouths talking. What about our deeper view? A recent methodology gives a striking result. With the help of a computer, individual photos were morphed either 20 percent toward attractive faces (the average of fifteen faces regarded as attractive out of a sample of sixty) or 20 percent toward unattractive ones (people with cranial-facial syndrome, which produces a twisted face). Among other effects, when a person tries to quickly locate his or her real face, the 20 percent positive face, or the 20 percent negative one, each embedded in a background of eleven faces of other people, he or she is quickest to spot the positive face (1.86 seconds), 5 percent slower for the real face (2.08 seconds), and another 5 percent slower for the ugly one (2.16 seconds). The beauty is that there has not been the usual verbal filter—what do you think of yourself?—only a measure of speed of perception. When people are shown a full array of photos of themselves, from 50 percent more attractive to 50 percent less attractive, they choose the 20 percent better-looking photo as the one they like the most and think they most resemble. This is an important, general result: self-deception is bounded—30 percent better looking is implausible, while 10 percent better fails to gain the full advantage.