The Folly of Fools (9 page)

For years, I have been well aware of the importance of information limitation. I have not used it with customs officials, but if a police officer is searching the trunk of my car, I simply turn my back. The officer may think I have something to hide, but he or she will learn nothing from me about where it is, if indeed there is something. Of course, when being watched for other purposes, we may also busy ourselves with semi-random behavior to hide the truth.

Once, when trying to get readmitted to Harvard after a medical leave, I had to take the famous “What do you see in this inkblot?” (Rorschach) test. I had learned that results were graded based on whether you saw a picture or told a story, whether it was in color, whether the story was coherent, and so on, but I had forgotten what the “appropriate” answers were supposed to look like to signify “normal,” so I simply randomized my responses, figuring absence of a pattern was my best hope. Sometimes they got a story, sometimes a snapshot, sometimes in color, and so on. At least I did not appear to be rigid or compulsive. I was readmitted.

It may, indeed, be that a certain degree of randomness is built into the very core of our behavior. Not only will others not detect a pattern, but neither shall we—thus preventing us from inadvertently revealing ourselves.

DECEPTION MAY INDUCE ANGER

How do animals react when they detect deception directed at them? Studies from a range of species—wasps, birds, and monkeys—suggest they often get angry and seek immediate retribution. At least this seems to be true of several species in which individuals have what appear to be arbitrary symbols that confer status—so-called badges—such as greater melanin (darker color) on the chest feathers of sparrows or the mouth-parts (clypeus) of wasps. In each case, the signals are on the part of the body most visible in a face-to-face encounter, and each is positively associated with body size and dominance. How is the association maintained between the arbitrary badge of status and the status itself? In wasps, for example, less than 1 percent of the body’s melanin is found on the clypeus. Why do cheaters not invade the system and produce higher-status badges than their size warrants? Precisely because they are immediately attacked and are usually unable to defend themselves. Those whose clypeuses are painted to look more dominant do not become more dominant but are attacked six times as often by truly dominant individuals, while wasps painted to look less dominant are attacked twice as often as nonpainted controls. And it is interesting that subordinate wasps attack those painted to look dominant more often than they attack those who look dominant to begin with. A key perceptual factor is incongruity between appearance and behavior—when individuals are painted darker and made more aggressive via hormone treatment, they gain in dominance, but when made more aggressive without the change in appearance, the wasps fail to establish stable dominance relations, presumably because others are continually tempted to challenge them.

When a sparrow’s chest is painted blacker to enhance the apparent badge size and, thus, status of the sparrow, the effect on status is usually the opposite. The altered bird is attacked more frequently than before, especially by those with the same apparent badge size or larger. The result is a drop in status—or ostracism from the group—for the individual with the deceptive badge. By contrast, those who, in effect, deceive downward—that is, who are bleached to appear less dark than they really are—often become hyperaggressive, whirling around and attacking their near neighbors who now act disrespectfully by standing too close to them based on their new (diminished) badge.

That deception might induce anger and attack was suggested to me very forcefully in my own life some thirty years ago. I was taking a walk, carrying my one-year-old son in my arms, when I spotted a squirrel in a tree. The problem was that my son did not see the squirrel, so I whistled as melodically as I could to draw the squirrel closer to us and, sure enough, the squirrel crept forward, but my son still could not see it. So I decided to reverse my relationship with the squirrel and mimic an attack. I suddenly lunged at it. I expected it to scamper away from me. I would have ruined a budding friendship but allowed my son to see the squirrel as it rushed away from us. Instead, the squirrel ran straight at us, chitter-ing in apparent rage, teeth fully exposed, jumping to the branch closest to me and my son
. Now
my son saw the squirrel, and I had the fright of my life, quickly running several steps away.

For my folly, the squirrel could have killed my son with a leap to my shoulders and two expert bites to his neck. Had I begun the relationship hostile, I believe the squirrel never would have become so angry. It was the betrayal implied by beginning friendly, only then to attack (deception), that triggered the enormous anger. There is nothing quite like the humility you feel as you sneak your son back into your home, not telling your wife, of course, that in a little pseudo-scientific work on the side, you had managed to enrage a squirrel to the point of putting her child at risk. I had no plans to try that stunt again anytime soon.

The importance of aggression following knowledge of deception is that it may greatly increase the costs of deceptive behavior and the benefits of remaining undetected. Fear of aggression can itself become a secondary signal suggesting deception, and its suppression an advantage for self-deception. Of course, aggression is not the only social cost of detected deception. A woman may terminate a relationship upon learning of a lie, usually a crueler punishment than her giving you a good beating, assuming she is capable. Detected deception may lead to social shame—bad reputation, loss of credibility and status, so that there will always be pressure on the deceiver to hide the deception, not only to make it successful but to avoid the larger consequences of detection.

ANIMALS MAY BE CONSCIOUS OF DECEPTION

Naturally one must be careful in imputing particular kinds of consciousness to other species, but some situations strongly suggest that animals are conscious of ongoing deception in some detail. Ravens, for example, have evolved a set of elaborate behaviors surrounding their tendency to cache (that is, bury and hide) food for future consumption, which can be enjoyed by another bird who happens to view the caching. Accordingly, ravens who are about to hide food seem very sensitive to just this possibility. They distance themselves from others and often cache behind a structure that obstructs others’view. They regularly interrupt caching to look around. At any evidence they are being observed, they will usually retrieve the cached food and wait to rebury somewhere else, preferably while not under observation. If they do cache food, they will often return within a minute or two. The watchers, in turn, stay at a safe distance, often hiding behind a tree or other object. They stop looking if the other stops caching and wait a minute or more after the bird has left before going for the cache. Hand-reared ravens, in turn, can follow the human gaze by repositioning themselves to see around an obstacle. This suggests the possibility that ravens can project the sight of another individual into the distance. Likewise, when jays are caching in others’ presence, they maximize their distance from others and cache in the shade and in a confusing pattern, moving caches frequently. Experimental work shows that they remember who has watched them cache in the past and when being observed by such individuals are more likely to re-cache than when they are being watched by a newcomer—another example of intelligence evolving in the context of deception.

In the presence of other squirrels, gray squirrels cache farther apart, build false caches, and build with their backs turned to the other squirrels; no such responses are shown to crows who may be watching. Turning one’s back often shows up in other mammals, as well. A chimpanzee male displaying an erection to a female may turn his back when a more dominant male arrives, until his erection has subsided. Children as young as sixteen months will turn their backs to conceal the object in hand or what they are doing. I personally find it very hard in the presence of a woman with whom I am close to receive a phone call from another woman with whom I may have, or only wish to have, a relationship, without turning my back to pursue the conversation. This occurs even though there is nothing visual to hide and the act of turning gives me away. Perhaps this is a case of reducing cognitive dissonance—and cognitive load—by not having to watch one woman watch you while you pretend not to talk to another woman.

In ravens, the pilferers avoid searching for known caches when in the presence of those who cache but will go immediately to the caches in the presence of a noncaching bird (that is unlikely to defend). In addition, they actively search away from the cache in the presence of the cacher, as if hiding their intentions. In one experiment, when ravens were introduced into an area where food was hidden, a subordinate male quickly developed the ability to find food, which the most dominant quickly learned to parasitize. This in turn led the subordinate to first search in areas where no food was present, to lure the dominant away, at which point the subordinate moved quickly to the food itself.

Mantis shrimps are hard-shelled and their claws dangerous for seven weeks out of eight. On the eighth week, they are molting, and their body and claws are soft; they are unable to attack others and are vulnerable to attack by them. When encountered at this time, they greatly increase their rate of claw threats, sometimes combined with insincere lunges at the opponent. About half the time, this scares off their opponent. The other half, the soft-shelled shrimp runs for its life. The week before a mantis shrimp becomes soft-shelled, it increases its rate of claw threats but also increases the rate at which these threats are followed by actual attack, as if signaling that threats will be backed up by aggressive action just before the time when they will not.

In fiddler crabs, the male typically has a large claw used to fight and threaten other males and to court females. Should he lose this claw, he regenerates one very similar in appearance but less effective than the original. The size of the first claw does indeed correlate (independent of body size) with claw strength as well as ability to resist being pulled from one’s burrow, but the size of the replacement claw does not, and males can’t distinguish between the two kinds of claws in an opponent.

In primates, hiding information from others may take very active forms. For example, in both chimpanzees and gorillas, individuals will cover their faces in an apparent attempt to hide a facial expression. Gorillas in zoos have been seen to cover “play faces” (facial expressions meant to invite play) with one or both hands, and these covered faces are less likely to elicit play than uncovered play faces. Of course, a play face hidden in this fashion is hardly undetectable and may easily become a secondary signal. Chimpanzees will hide objects behind their backs that they are about to throw. They will also throw an object to one side of a tree to frighten another chimp into moving to the opposite side, where his opponent awaits him.

DECEPTION AS AN EVOLUTIONARY GAME

An important part of understanding deception is to understand it mathematically as an evolutionary game, with multiple players pursuing multiple strategies with various degrees of conscious and unconscious deception (in a fine-grained mixture). Contrast this with the problem of cooperation. Cooperation has been well modeled as a simple prisoner’s dilemma. Cooperation by both parties benefits each, while defections hurt both, but each is better off if he defects while the other cooperates. Cheating is favored in single encounters, but cooperation may emerge much of the time, if players are permitted to respond to their partner’s previous moves. This theoretical space is well explored.

The simplest application of game theory to deception would be to treat it as a classical prisoner’s dilemma. Two individuals can tell each other the truth (both cooperate), lie (both defect), or one of each. But this cannot work. One problem is that a critical new variable becomes important—who believes whom? If you lie and I believe you, I suffer. If you lie and I disbelieve you, you are likely to suffer. By contrast, in the prisoner’s dilemma, each individual knows after each reciprocal play how the other played (cooperate or defect), and a simple reciprocal rule can operate under the humblest of conditions—cooperate initially, then do what your partner did on the previous move (tit for tat). But with deception, there is no obvious reciprocal logic. If you lie to me, this does not mean my best strategy is to lie back to you—it usually means that my best strategy is to distance myself from you or punish you.

The most creative suggestion I have heard to mathematically model deception is to adapt the ultimatum game (UG) to this problem. In the UG, a person proposes a split of, say, $100 (provided by the experimenter) —$80 to self, $20 to the responder. The responder, in turn, can accept the split, in which case the money is split accordingly, or the responder can reject the offer, in which case neither party gets any money. Often the game is played as a one-shot anonymous encounter. That is, individuals play only once with people they do not know and with whom they will not interact in the future. In this situation, the game measures an individual’s sense of injustice—at what level of offer are you sufficiently offended to turn it down even though you thereby lose money? In many cultures, the 80/20 split is the break-even point at which one-half of the population turns down the offer as too unfair.

Now imagine a modified UG in which there are two possible pots (say, $100 and $400) and both players know this. One pot is then randomly assigned to the proposer. Imagine the proposer offers you $40, which could represent 40 percent of a $100 pot (in which case you should accept) or 10 percent of a $400 pot (most people would reject). The proposer is permitted to lie and tell you that the pot is the smaller of the two when in fact it is the larger. You can trust the proposer or not, but the key is that you are permitted to pay to find out the truth from a (disinterested) third party. This measures the value you place in reducing your uncertainty regarding the proposer’s honesty.