The Folly of Fools (10 page)

If you then discover that the proposer lied, you should have a moral (or, at least, moralistic) motive to reject the offer, and the other way around for the truth—all compared to uncertainty, or not paying to find out. Note that from a purely economic point of view, there is no benefit in finding out the truth, since it costs money and may lead to an (otherwise) unnecessary loss of whatever is offered. The question can then be posed: How much would a responder be prepared to pay to reduce the uncertainty and go for a possibly inconvenient truth? Note that the game can be played in real life with varying degrees of anonymity and also multiple times, as in the iterated prisoner’s dilemma. As ability to discriminate develops, the other person will benefit more from your honesty (quickly seen as such) and suffer less from deception (spotted and discarded).

When we add self-deception, the game quickly becomes very complicated. One can imagine actors who are:

• Stone-cold honest (cost: information given away, naive regarding deception by others).

• Consciously dishonest to a high degree but with low self-deception (cost: higher cognitive cost and higher cost when detected).

• Dishonest with high self-deception (more superficially convincing at lower immediate cognitive cost but suffering later defects and acting more often in the service of others).

And so on.

A DEEPER THEORY OF DECEPTION

Those talented at the mathematics of simple games or studying them via computer simulation might find it rewarding to define a set of people along the lines just mentioned, and then assign variable quantitative effects to explore their combined evolutionary trajectory. Perhaps results will be trivial and trajectories will depend completely on the relative quantitative effects assigned to each strategy, but it is much more likely that deeper connections will emerge, seen only when the coevolutionary struggle is formulated explicitly. The general point is, of course, that there are multiple actors in this game, kept in some kind of frequency-dependent equilibrium that itself may change over time. We choose to play different roles in different situations, presumably according to the expected payoffs. Of course it is better to begin with very simple games and only add complexity as we learn more about the underlying dynamics.

It stands to reason that if our theory of self-deception rests on a theory of deception, advances in the latter will be especially valuable. I have known this for thirty years but have not been able to think of anything myself that is original regarding the deeper logic of deception, nor have I seen much progress elsewhere. Yes, signals in male/female courtship interactions may evolve toward costlier ones that are more difficult to fake (for example, antler size, physical strength, and bodily symmetry), but there is always room for deception, and many systems do not obey this simple rule regarding cost.

CHAPTER 3

Neurophysiology and Levels of Imposed Self-Deception

A
lthough study of the neurophysiology of deceit and self-deception is just beginning, there are already some interesting findings. Evidence suggests a greatly diminished role for the conscious mind in guiding human behavior. Contrary to our imagination, the conscious mind seems to lag behind the unconscious in both action and perception—it is much more observer of action than initiator. The precise details of the neurobiology of active thought suppression suggest that one part of the brain has been co-opted in evolution to suppress another part, a very interesting development if true. At the same time, evidence from social psychology makes it clear that trying to suppress thoughts sometimes produces a rebound effect, in which the thought recurs more often than before. Other work shows that suppressing neural activity in an area of the brain related to lying appears to improve lying, as if the less conscious the more successful.

There is something called induced self-deception, in which the self-deceived person acts not for the benefit of self but for someone who is inducing the self-deception. This can be parent, partner, kin group, society, or whatever, and it is an extremely important factor in human life. You are still practicing self-deception but not for your own benefit. Among other things, it means that we need to be on guard to avoid this fate—not defensive via self-deception but via greater consciousness.

Finally, we have treated self-deception as part of an offensive strategy, but is this really true? Consider the opposite—and conventional—view, that self-deception serves a purely defensive function, for example, protecting our degree of happiness in the face of reality. An extreme form is the notion that we would not get out of bed in the morning if we knew how bad things were—we levitate ourselves out via self-deception. This makes no coherent sense as a general truth, but in practicing self-deception, we may sometimes genuinely fool ourselves for personal benefit (absent any effect on others). Placebo effects and hypnosis provide unusual examples, in that they show direct health benefits from self-deception, although this typically requires a third party, either hypnotist or doctor-model. And people can almost certainly induce positive immune effects with the help of personal self-deception, as we shall see in Chapter 6.

THE NEUROPHYSIOLOGY OF CONSCIOUS KNOWLEDGE

Because we live inside our conscious minds, it is often easy to imagine that decisions arise in consciousness and are carried out by orders emanating from that system. We decide, “Hell, let’s throw this ball,” and we then initiate the signals to throw the ball, shortly after which the ball is thrown. But detailed study of the neurophysiology of action shows otherwise. More than twenty years ago, it was first shown that an impulse to act begins in the brain region involved in motor preparation about six-tenths of a second before consciousness of the intention, after which there is a further delay of as much as half a second before the action is taken. In other words, when we form the conscious intention to throw the ball, areas of the brain involved in throwing have already been activated more than half a second earlier.

Much more recent work, from 2008, gives a more dramatic picture of preconscious neural activity. The original work involved a neural area, the supplementary motor area involved in late motor planning. An important distinction is whether preparatory neural activity is related to a particular decision (throw the ball) or just activation in general (do something). A novel experiment settled the matter. While seeing a series of letters flash in front of him or her, each a half-second apart, an individual is asked to hit one of two buttons (with left or right index finger) whenever he or she feels like it and to remember which letter was seen when the conscious choice was made. After this, the subject had to choose which of four letters was the one he or she saw when consciously deciding to press the button. This served roughly to demarcate when conscious knowledge of the decision is made, since each letter is visible for only half a second and conscious knowledge of intention occurs about one second before the action itself.

What about prior unconscious intention? Computer software can search through fMRI images (showing blood flow associated with neural activity) taken in various parts of the brain during intervals prior to action. Most strikingly, a full seven seconds before consciousness of impending action, activity occurs in the lateral and medial prefrontal cortex, quite some distance from the supplementary motor area and the motor neurons themselves. Given the slowness of the fMRI response, it is estimated that fully ten seconds before consciousness of intent, the neural signals begin that will later give rise to the consciousness and then the behavior itself. This work also helps explain earlier findings that people develop anticipatory skin conductance responses to risky decisions well before they consciously realize that such decisions are risky.

One point is well worth emphasizing. From the time a person becomes conscious of the intent to do something (throw a ball), he or she has about a second to abort the action, and this can occur up to one hundred milliseconds before action (one-tenth of a second). These effects can themselves operate below consciousness—that is, subliminal effects operating at two hundred milliseconds before action can affect the chance of action. In that sense, the proof of a long chain of unconscious neural activity before conscious intention is formed (after which there is about a one-second delay before action) does not obviate the concept of free will, at least in the sense of being able to abort bad ideas and also being able to learn, both consciously and unconsciously, from past experience.

On the flip side, it is now clear that consciousness requires some time for perception to occur. Put another way, a neural signal travels from the toe to the brain in about twenty milliseconds but takes twenty-five times as long, a full five hundred milliseconds (half a second) to register in consciousness. Once again, consciousness lags reality and by a large amount, plenty of time for unconscious biases to affect what enters consciousness.

In short, the best evidence shows that our unconscious mind is ahead of our conscious mind in preparing for decisions, that consciousness occurs relatively late in the process (after about ten seconds), and that there is ample time for the decision to be aborted after consciousness (one second). In addition, incoming information requires about half a second to enter consciousness, so that the conscious mind seems more like a post-hoc evaluator and commentator upon—including rationalizing—our behavior, rather than the initiator of the behavior. Chris Rock, the comedian, says that when you meet him for the first time (conscious mind and all), you are not really meeting him—you are only meeting his representative.

THE NEUROPHYSIOLOGY OF THOUGHT SUPPRESSION

One particular kind of self-deception—consciously mediated efforts at suppressing true information from consciousness—has been studied by neurophysiologists in a most revealing way. The resulting data are striking in our context: different sections of the brain appear to have been co-opted in evolution to suppress the activity of other sections to create self-deceptive thinking.

Consider the active conscious suppression of memory. In real life, we actively attempt to suppress our thoughts:
I won’t think about this today
;
please, God, keep this woman from my mind
, and so on. In the laboratory, individuals are instructed to forget an arbitrary set of symbols they have just learned. The effect of such efforts is highly variable, measured as the degree of memory achieved a month later when attempting to recall the symbols. This variation turns out to be associated with variation in the underlying neurophysiology. The more highly the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) is activated during directed forgetting, the more it suppresses ongoing activity in the hippocampus (where memories are typically stored) and the less is remembered a month later. The DLPFC is otherwise often involved in overcoming cognitive obstacles and in planning and regulating motor activity, including suppressing unwanted responses. One is tempted to imagine that this area of the brain was co-opted for the new function of suppressing memories because it was often involved in affecting other brain areas, in particular, suppressing behavior. There is a physical component to this—I know it well. When I experience an unwanted thought and act to suppress it, I often experience an involuntary twitch in one or both of my arms, as if trying to push something down and out of sight.

THE IRONY OF TRYING TO SUPPRESS ONE’S THOUGHTS

The neurophysiological work employed meaningless strings of letters or numbers during short periods of memorization followed by short periods of attempted forgetting, results measured a month later. But another factor operates if we try to suppress something meaningful. One might easily suppose that a conscious decision to suppress a thought (don’t think of a white bear) could easily be achieved, each recurrence of the thought suppressed more deeply so that soon enough the thought itself fails to recur. But this is not what happens. The mind seems to resist suppression, and under some conditions we do precisely what we are trying to suppress. For example, we may blurt out the very truth we are trying to hide from others, as if involuntarily or contra-voluntarily. The suppressed thought often comes back to consciousness, sometimes at the rate of once per minute, and often for days. As with the neurophysiology of thought suppression, some people are better at thought suppression and some try harder. But few people are completely successful.

Two processes are thought to work simultaneously. On the one hand, there is an effort to consciously suppress the undesired thought, initially and whenever it reappears. On the other hand, an unconscious process to search for the prohibited word, as if looking for errors, that is, thoughts that need additional suppression. This process is itself subject to errors, especially when we are under cognitive load. When one is distracted or overburdened mentally, the unconscious search for the thought is not combined with suppression of it, so that the suppressed thought may burst forth
more
often than expected.