This is a transcription of a speech Robert Trivers gave in Pop!Tech 2005. I've written down the speech quite directly, only removing some of the "right nows", "nows" and so on. I couldn't quite decipher some of the words in the speech, but I believe that I still got the main gist of it. So the information given by this transcription is hopefully accurate enough. As usual, I'd love to get feedback on this transcription; any errors, omissions, misunderstandings or such: send them tojajvirta@gmail.com.So, here's what Trivers said:
"I want to lecture today on deceit, self-deception and the war. Lying to each other, lying to ourselves in this dreadful U.S. sponsored and organized bloodletting that is going on in our name —I speak as a U.S. citizen— at this very moment in Iraq.
I want to argue that deception is a deep feature of nature, in relations between members of different species and within species. That under certain condition deception and selection to spot deception generates self-deception to better to hide deception from others and to better to perform our deception reasonably efficiently, that is, with modest cognitive cost.
I want to argue that warfare is especially conducive to human self-deception. Easy to practice and with very dangerous consequences. And then because any discussion of self-deception eventually has to come back to self, I want to deal briefly with this latest war going on right now.
Remember, if I've got a theory of self-deception that is good at explaining yours, it doesn't mean that I can explain mine. I haven't even got to first base there yet.
Let's begin with the assertion that deception is a very deep feature of nature. Wherever you look, and that includes viruses, bacteria, protozoa, many of the parasites that inflict us, you will find deception as part of their arsenal. They've got to convince us that they are part of self and not other so as not for example to trigger our immune system response or our other devices for dealing with invaders. So they may have proteins on their surface that mimick very particular parts of our self in order to slip in undetected.
If you look at plants, you will find species that have evolved to manipulate insects to do unpaid work for them. If you look at insects themselves, they've evolved a bewildering array of tricks to fool their predators: including mimicking harmless objects, including mimicking distasteful objects, including mimicking the predator of their predator, including mimicking their predator, that is, actually making their predator think that their prey is a member of their own species and leading to a territorial display instead of predator gobbling up the prey. They even have evolved repeatedly mimicking the predator's droppings, or shit. This is so common that it has a technical term: shit mimicks.
Shit mimicks range in size from this, down to something two or three orders of magnitude smaller. There are tiny, tiny, tiny little mites that roll up into a little ball and mimick the shit of a slightly larger creature that eats them. Not only gaining by looking like something they're not, but also looking like something that you're not necessarily sure you want to put into a test.
From the study of these instances of deception there are a few general principles that have emerged, but not many. Deception, by its nature, keeps hidden from us. Just as there is one truth, there are hundreds of thousands of falsehoods that you can imagine that are almost true but not in fact exactly true.
Some of the principles that have emerged are very obvious. For example, there is a frequency dependent principle, that has been demonstrated with some very nice data from the field. That is if a deceiver is rare, it'll do better. But when it becomes more common, it runs into experiential and genetic problems. The host (or the victim) may have seen it before or it might have evolved a response to it. Therefore the deceiver gets caught in a frequency dependent equilibrium in which it can neither go to fixation and drive the truth out, but nor can it be driven out. It is caught in an intermediate frequency and it may vary around it. It therefore continues to generate adaptations on the part of others to see through it and then evolves clever deceptions to overcome those adaptations.
A second thing we've realized over the years is that one adaptation is intellectual powers. For many years our only evidence that animals could count came from deceptive situations in which they've been selected to count. So you have these brood parasites, birds that are laying eggs in another nest, and get their young taken care of that way. Their egg looked different, so they evolved an egg that looked like the host egg. Now the nest had five instead of four eggs and the host evolved the ability to tell five from four and to get rid off a nest that had too many eggs, because all their young would be destroyed by the host and so on.
So if you want to step back and be an intelligent designer and imagine why you might have designed a universe and stuck a lot of deception in there, at least you can argue that it tends to evolve intellectual powers in others. Perhaps that's a good reason for deception. (There are other tricks we can talk about, but I want to keep moving.)
Deception within species was not first recognized. It took a few years and it took detailed studies within species to really nail it down. But now we have a wide range of examples. Take for example misrepresentation of sex: you'd think that it would be fairly easy to detect. There's a male and there's a female. They're different and I have been selected to tell the difference. There are, however, a surprising number of species where sexual misrepresentation is a way towards a reproductive success by males. Transvestite males, if you will, in fish, in frogs, in insects, where you mimick a female, to fool a male into thinking you are female, and when a real female arrives, you're right there to take part in the fun.
And then there's false alarm calls. You know how alarm calls have evolved to warn other creatures there's a predator. But you can also give an alarm call when you see another bird about to grab a tasty item of food. It's frightened, you fly and grab the item of food. In the species where it has been studied, you can see the co-evolution going on, because with a real warning call everybody dashes for the bushes; with a false warning call, only a half of the individuals are fooled. False warning calls have been used to scare away extra pair of copulations by your mate: you frighten both of them in opposite directions. It's been used to separate youngs that are fighting, etc.
One last example within species: ravens. They show a consciousness or appear to show a consciousness of deception; being spotted deceiving and so on in their food caching. So you have one raven that wants to go hide food, but is very conscious that another raven maybe watching. The other raven gets behind something so as not to be seen. If the first raven spots it, it stops caching. If the raven doesn't spot anyone, it still comes back a minute or two after caching in case there was someone waiting there to rush in and get the food.
In a complex co-evolving world between deceivers and those trying to spot deception, you can argue that there are advantages to self-deception. Hiding the truth from yourself to hide more it deeply from others.
We start with a non-linguistic example that could have happened and I believe that must have been going before we started using language. If you are in a tight evaluation; let us say to an opponent in a fight or a female evaluating a male giving a display, then one of the variables you are interested in is the individual's self estimation. Are they confident? Do they think they are a good fighter? Do they think they're really handsome?
And that is subject to internal manipulation in order to give a greater degree of self confidence than is deserved by any objective fact. Or to use a linguistic example: right now if I am lying to you about something you actually care about, you might pay attention to my eye movement; you might pay attention to the quality of my voice; you might pay attention to my sweaty palms if you can get a chance to shake my hands. Any evidence of conscious knowledge of ongoing deception: get rid off that and I've at least gotten rid off that avenue for detecting deception.
Of course the language greatly accelerated our ability to make true statements about space and time, but it greatly accelerated our ability to make false statements. Belief systems are so important in our own species, that the ability to produce apparently consistent belief systems, that are allegedly in everyone's interest, when they're really biased towards your own, has had to been a major selective force for some time.
There is, fortunately, in psychology, a growing body of work, of increasing quality that demonstrates features of how our mind systematically does bias reality in our favor. I am just going to mention two or three very briefly to you.
There is an entire subdiscipline of social psychology that deals with ego inflation. You ask high school students if they are in the above half of leadership abilities and 80% of them say that they are, indeed, in top half in leadership abilities. You can't do better than academics. You ask academics and 94% of us say that we are in the top half of the profession. I plead guilty right now. I have to be tied down on a back ward of a mental hospital for six months for it to occur to me that I am doing less well than the average of my colleagues.
In maintaining this illusion, we have various linguistic devices to which we are mostly or entirely unconscious. We will unconsciously switch from active to passive voice depending on whether the outcome was positive or negative for others. So if it was positive: "I did this and I did that and the benefits rained down on you." If it was negative: "this thing was happening, I was trying to make adjustments, when you all suffered from some unfortunate cause."
There was a quote of a man used by Anthony Greenwald who did excellent work on this years ago to illustrate this point. A guy in San Francisco ran into a telephone pole with his car and his explanation was: "the pole was approaching my car. When I attempted to swirl out of the way, it struck me." Perfectly legimitate in terms of physics, but shifted the focus there.
What about in-group and out-group? A very nice linguistic trick they pointed out in a psychology study. Let's say a member of your in-group does something nice. You give a general comment: "he's a generous person." Let's say an out-group person does something nice. You define the nice event precisely: "he showed me how to get to Chicago." It's vice versa for the negative one. If it's an in-group member that does something negative, you specify it: "she stepped on my toe." If an out-group member did something negative, you give the general argument: "she's rude."
We are not conscious of these things. Our mind is busy setup organizing the world in this kind of biased way for us.
Another example: memory is biased. It is easily manipulated by others and here some psychologists have done very important work that the judicial system is very slowly responding to and mostly resisting. In interviewing people about crimes or other kinds of events that interest police, you can insert into their memory the very event you want get back from them, say, two weeks later or a month later.
We also find in studies that there is no association with between how confident people are of their memory and the accuracy of their memory. Yet in judicial system it really impresses you if someone is confident of their memory that "so-and-so was on that block at that time". In other words, it's as if we reward the perfection of people's system of self-deception by giving them a greater credibility.
Neurophysiology is starting to produce interesting results. In one nice study of memory supression done in a lab, they had people to try to surpress certain arbitrary symbols versus trying to remember others. What they showed was that a particular area of the prefrontal cortex was activated in surpressing and it acted on hippocampus, where the memory is stored, and the more this area was activated, the more it was true a month later that the individual couldn't recall the event any more. One thing that is interesting about this is that this area of brain is involved in getting prepared for motor responses and also overcoming cognitive obstacles. It rang true to me —I don't know about you— because there are some memories in me that come up from down below, where I got my initial responses, like this: "get back down there." Out of sight, out of mind.
Let me give you two examples that relate to the war I am about to get to. Let's consider selective forgetfulness. How many U.S. citizens here —leave aside those with the good fortune to come from other countries— how many of us remember the following facts regarding Iraq? It's relevant to the hypothesis that we have any capacity to act in the interest of those people.
In 1976, Saddam was our boy. The CIA supported him in that year (or a year or two later), in a little initial move to depose whoever was in the power at the moment.
In 1982, a truly tragic and immoral decision to support Saddam and Iraq in their attack on Iran, just because Iran had 50 of our people, all of whom were returned, if not in great health, but at least alive. We supplied coordinates to the Iraqis to allow them to locate Iranian troops. They used some of the same chemicals, which we also helped supply to them, which is one reason we have such an advanced sense of what Iraq might or might not know about chemistry and biological warfare.
In 1991, we kick Iraq out of the Kuwait and we end the famous slaughter of the innocents where we bombed all these low-level people on their way out of Kuwait. They were already back in Iraq at the time.
Then the 1990s, the era of Clinton and feel-goodism: when he lied, nobody died. Well, half a million Iraqis died in the 1990s, and that's just counting children.
So that's the history of a country that is going to turn around and come up with the pretense that it's either going to be natural or even possible for us to organize for the benefit of those people.
Let me turn to general discussion of war and self-deception. After that, I want to zero in on two features of this misguided adventure.
First of all, there is a background to human warfare in our primate ancestry as revealed by the behavior of chimpanzees. They practice raids on neighboring groups. It's a male-male activity: you try to isolate a single male or two, rush in there with great numerical superiority, tear them to pieces and if possible inherit the territory with the females. Otherwise at least decimate the group, so that they're not a danger to you.
As Richard Wrangham has pointed out (who studied this in some detail), they use rational methods of figuring things out. Is that person isolated? Are we stronger than them? It's a small scale activity and there is immediate feedback. If you make a mistake and it is a trap, you may pay with your own life.
Battles by contrast —warfare as we know it—; large number of people going at each other, is a very recent invention. Call it ten, be generous and imagine fifteen thousand years ago. It's a very rapidly changing behavior. For example, we easily forget that the World War I was the last major war in which troops fought to protect civilians. Twenty million people died in those trenches, but people in Paris weren't being burned down, people in Berlin and London were safe. By the time World War II came around, and certainly now, civilians are attacked to protect the troops.
What are the features of modern warfare that make it so conducive to self-deception? Besides its recency, so there is no evolved machinery for thinking very well about it.
Your ignorance is high: it's another group, another country, another culture. Your overlapping self-interest is low: you're not related to them, you don't have much in common with them. And you get little negative feedback from them as you do within a group. You can practice your self-deception at home and your wife is going to tell you about it. You can practice your self-deception in other interactions and you're going to get some feedback.
But here that kind of feedback is distant, overlap in self-interest is small, ignorance is great. Furthermore, you have a moral quandary, especially when you're the attacker, because there is a presumption that the moral right lands with those that are being attacked. Possession is nine tenths of law. It's their country, it's their world, it's their setup, and you're in there. So you often have to invent something to overcome the basic moral problem you've got.
There is no necessary feedback on the reproductive success of the actors —absent famous cases like Custer and generals out there, that screw up and die. Is the inclusive fitness of the people that organized this latest adventure going to be affected at all by the feedback? 200000 Iraqis could die, 20000 Americans, 60000 wounded, or whatever the final tally is going to be. That doesn't necessarily mean that the planner would suffer any kind of evolutionary feedback of the negative sort that would keep this in check.
It is perhaps no surprise, therefore, that there is a whole subarea of military studies called military incompetence. It's studied as a separate a little area. In World War I, almost every country went off to war in a gleeful: "this is gonna be over within six weeks." And there was racism that helped support that. In other words: "the French are so stupid they don't know which end to point the gun", "the Russians don't know this and that", just this basic kind of degradation of the enemy.
It has been said, that truth is the first casuality of war. But truth died long before this particular war. It didn't have to have the war to break out for the truth to be dead.
The evidence is scarcely now worth recounting. We know that the arguments given in favor were completely bogus. The behavior ahead of time was inconsistent with the hypothesis being advanced: if you really cared about weapons of mass destruction, you'd talk about North Korea, Iran and Libya before you even got to Iraq. All assertions that were made with great confidence, turned out to be false. the detailed historical record contradicts this notion, that is, we now know that within a day of 9/11 sites were set on Iraq. We know that by 15th of September, Iraq was a major thing that was being discussed. And we know that within about six weeks, the order was given to prepare the invasion of Iraq.
Now, what was the consequences of this cabal planning, this quick war on completely bogus grounds? There's one very interesting thing psychologists have shown that I think is relevant here. I think we can all relate to it and it is this: when you're planning to do something, whether it's "get married to Suzy" or "accept that job at Rutgers" or whatever the hell, you are more rational in your thought patterns. You weigh the pros and the cons. You are in fact in a slightly down state. You're not euphoric or happy. You may even be a little bit depressed.
But once you sign aboard, once you decide it's Suzy, or for better or worse it's Rutgers, it's like you are oriented with your every cell in that direction and pulling in the same direction. Your mood goes up. You don't want to hear about the negative side at all. And you start to display some of these tricks of over-optimism and over-confidence that are not evident during the planning stage.
But there was no planning stage here! It was like a predator who saw a chance. It wanted to jump on this country; it wanted seize immediate military, political, and economic advantage. After that, everything had to support the decision to make that move. Since they were lying to everyone else about it, including most of the rest of the U.S. government, they were not open to sharing information broadly, as was done during WWII, where they started planning what to do in Berlin about three years before the arrival. They had detailed plans and so on.
Actually there were detailed plans for Iraq too. There was 16 volumes produced by a working group of USAID state department, the army and CIA, but that was kept from the planners of this war. So that there was communication in neither direction and they refused to allow the head of that planning group to be involved in the coalition provisional authority in April of 2003.
So, ironically, they did some planning, but made sure they paid no attention to it. And anybody who said anything about the downsides to it, "this is going to be costly financially, you really need 300 000 troops, not 50 000 as Rumsfeld originally said". They were all deemed anti-war and therefore to be excluded from the presses.
Self-deception gives you two great gifts: on the one hand, it leaves you into a disaster. Then, once it has you there, it makes sure you don't have the tools to deal with what you've done to yourself. NASA, by the way, was a dramatic example of that. They paid no attention to foam. They did the usual bullshit stuff about safety. Then they got the people up there, and they had a foam problem, but they did not want to take a look and see whether they had a real foam problem or not.
In any case, it seemed obvious within about two months of the arrival of U.S. troops in Iraq that this thing was going to hell in a hand-basket, 20 billion of infrastructure destroyed during the so called looting. Crime heading up and out of sight. Now we have situation where we've used three times as much depleted uranium as we used in 1991 war, where we really faced 500 000 people for a period of time.
We have gone to the usual level one goes to in these kinds of wars: we level cities now. In the case of Fallujah —I don't know how many people are conscious of this— but I've read repeated accounts that we did not permit men from the ages of 18 to 45 to leave the city before we levelled it, precisely because we wanted to level them right along with the city. And we're going ahead now and levelling cities throughout Iraq.
The people I listen to on the future of this, and whose opinions I respect most, are the retired three, four, and five star generals and admirals, who have come out against this thing almost as a unit from the beginning. There was a beautiful article —in Rolling Stone of all places— year and a half ago, where they interviewed several of these people. One of them said something that stuck in my ear. He said that we can win the insurgency in Iraq. It'll just take us ten years and we will have to kill ten percent of the population.
Mercifully enough for all of us, I guess, my time has run out.
Let me just say the following: the good news is that we really do have it in our a capacity now to put together a scientific theory of deceit and self-deception. We've had pretenders to that throne for an awful long time. If you're only thinking about recent western tradition, there's Marx, he had a theory of self-deception. At last, when he applied it to himself, it fell apart. Freud had a theory and science: nothing, a shambles.
But I think we really do have the opportunity to put together a broad theory based, of course, ultimately on some evolutionary logic, evolutionary genetics, psychology, neurophysiology and from other fields, autobiographies and historical work and so on. That's the good news. The bad news is that the forces of deceit and self-deception, especially at national and international level, are very powerful. I fear that we'll spend our lives always describing in retrospect what deceit and self-deception just did to us and not getting to the point where we can try to prevent some of the bullshit ahead of time.
Thank you."
Transcript by Jarno Virtanen. Email: jajvirta@gmail.com.