Eco-Nalogies: On Lying
It took six years for my dog to discover how to lie to me. When she gets a burr stuck under her paw, I always lift her up to remove it before continuing our walk. But recently I’ve been catching her fake an injury whenever I’m leading her opposite from where she wants to go; she limps, peers up at me through those big puppy dog eyes, then scampers away quite unobstructedly as soon as I cave to her demands. It’s a cute thing, her lying, but if I continue to go along with her not-so-sneaky charade, I daresay she might start doing it even more often.
Lying, like most culturally-agreed upon forms of ‘sin,’ is so pernicious precisely because it benefits the liar in the short term, despite its eventual damage to him (and his society) in the long. It might be formulated that lying is akin to stealing Adderall from its medically-subscribed user, and taking it for recreation. Sure, the thief might enjoy a brief high from their ill-begotten prize, but the effect upon its owner—and thereby society—is a net loss. The recipient of theft can never apply his goods as efficiently as he from whom it was stolen.
Consider two architecture firms contending for a job. The firm that gives the lower bid (all else being equal) will likely get the job, but if it is unable to perform this job as efficiently as it has claimed, then the homeowner suffers for its incompetence, the field of architecture suffers by way of reputation, and even the deceitful firm suffers eventually once its falsehoods have caught up to it via word of mouth and poor reviews. Unless, of course, the other firms begin lying to keep up with it, in which case the entire field steadily loses its credibility, and even those honest holdouts are awarded a sneaking skepticism that they did not especially earn.
Studies have found that intelligent children lie more often and earlier in life, even as they show that societies more engendered to lying are quicker to fail. What these seemingly paradoxical findings suggest is that lying is a sort of prisoner’s dilemma, whereby one person lying might be able to get away with it, but a whole society of liars will crumble. If this supposition is correct, then natural selection would have imbued us with tools to identify and root out lying in others, and even to dissuade against promoting falsehoods within ourselves.
Fortunately, this is indeed the case. Charles Darwin himself described blushing as “the most peculiar and most human of all expressions.” Other animals might redden or change color due to external changes, but only humans are capable of blushing in accordance with a purely emotional stimulus. When we blush, we are putting on the opposite of a poker face; we are truly wearing our hearts on our sleeves (rather, cheeks), making ourselves weaker and more prone in order to protect the tribe from ourselves. Here we glimpse a clear example of natural selection favoring the population over the conniving individual, even promoting a sort of higher order morality in the process. As Marcus Aurelius duly noted, “What is not good for the bee-hive cannot be good for the bees.”
In a way, the blush is the opposite of the lie; accordingly, the individual loss of ability to hide one’s emotions is lesser than the collective benefit of having these emotions open to analysis in the public square. In the prisoner’s dilemma created by the lie, blushing is the jailer keeping our testimony from remaining anonymous. (Snitches don’t get stitches until someone sees them blush.)
Growing up at summer camp, I participated in a social experiment quite similar to this dilemma. The whole division—maybe forty to fifty teens—would gather in a room and cover our eyes. If we counted to ten and nobody raised his or her hand, then each of us would receive an ice cream sandwich. (Or, as we called them, a ‘chipwich.’) If just one person raised his hand, then he or she would receive a chipwich—in secret, of course; our own Witness Protection Program—everyday for the rest of the session. But if two or more people raised their hands, then nobody would receive a thing. In all the times I played this game, not a single one of us got a chipwich, but we all received our just desserts.
With our eyes closed, some of us would shout for everybody else to just keep their damn hands down, for the love of God (and chipwiches!), and a communal groan would sweep over us each time we learned of our collective failure. Keep in mind, this was a cluster of inordinately close friends, not exactly a group of strangers. But with our heads lowered, there was no one around to keep us honest (excluding our counselors, of course), and our lesser demons won out every time.
Ayn Rand wrote of a moral system based on “rational self-interest” (in no way supported/denied by this essay), but what this phenomena of blushing presents to us could be labeled a form of “evolutionary self-negation.” A game of poker might be inadvisable with open hands, but when it isn’t randomly-picked cards being wagered over, but our actual competence and good intentions (or lack thereof), then exposing our true cards lures more players to the table.
Paradoxically, blushing is both a great equalizer and a great in-equalizer. For even as it restrains us more faithfully to truth, so too does it restrict us to the hands we are dealt. And to the player who keeps pulling pocket Jacks, the inability to effectively bluff helps far more than it hinders him. Ultimately, blushing is a reminder that the cards we hold actually matter.
Studies have shown that humans are significantly better at detecting falsehoods when able to look a liar in the face. But there are yet more ways to discern when someone is attempting to ‘pull one over’ on you, even when he or she is doing everything right to conceal it.
For example: I have a close friend who was once invited to a big celebrity party in the Hollywood Hills, and at which he apparently met and befriended Chat Kroeger, lead vocalist and guitarist of the band Nickelback. Now, when someone claims to have befriended a celebrity, they are often lying or at least exaggerating—And yet, who in their right mind would willingly invent a false story about meeting fucking Nickelback? If he’d claimed to have befriended Mick Jagger or Paul McCartney, then yeah, I probably wouldn’t have believed him. But the sheer preposterousness of choosing Chad Kroeger as your celebrity-of-choice is so fundamentally ridiculous that I’d bet my life on my friend having told me the truth, red cheeks be damned!
We might analyze science itself through a similar prism. When a researcher’s findings line up perfectly with his predispositions (scientists should not technically ‘intend’ to find anything at all, but alas we are only human), one should view that finding with a healthy dose of cynicism. Not to suggest that he cannot be right (he likely still is), but that finding will still never be as reliable as one that he was not hoping to find. Not because the science is unreliable, but because the scientist is.
A perfect example of this behavior comes from analyzing a 2018 study by Armin Falk and Johannes Hermle, in which they attempted to find a link between women’s autonomy and cultural differences between genders. Naturally, they hoped to find that the more freedom a woman is given in life, the less her actions will diverge from what we might consider a more ‘manly’ pursuit, thus showing that culture, rather than nature, is the foremost root of our gendered differences. And yet, their study found the exact opposite: That the freer a society’s women, the less those women’s career paths will mirror that of men. Now, I will not waste time discussing whether or not this finding is a ‘good’ thing; ‘is’ does not equal ‘ought,’ and it is always better to swallow a bitter truth than to accept a comforting lie. The point of the matter is that, in our knowledge that Falk and Hermle ended up proving the exact opposite of their initial hypothesis, we can rest assured that their work is uncorrupted by their own personal worldview; not that the science is necessarily any more true/false than otherwise, but that the potential influence of an ideologically-biased scientist can effectively be ruled out. Like meeting Nickleback at a party, nobody is going to make that shit up.
When I was an advisor at summer camp, I was faced with the exact opposite quandary: My junior counselors and I had been leading a two-day ‘Color War’ extravaganza for the entire camp, with the campers divided into teams that represented each of the four Hogwarts Houses. When the event was drawing to a close, we counted up the points and realized that Team Gryffindor was bound to win, which put us in quite the pickle: Either we tell the truth, and everyone will believe the festival was rigged, or we lie so that they might believe us. (We told the harsh truth, and even the Gryffindors felt that they’d won unfairly.)
But this Color War was not an isolated event; such a festival happened three times each summer, once per session, and the assumption of its being rigged went back to my own childhood. How was I supposed to convince people that we actually kept score, especially when the winning team was so clearly the obvious storybook ending? If I was in the campers’ shoes, I doubt if I should have believed in the results either.
Like the boy who cried wolf, our camp society had been functioning on lies for so long that even the truth—albeit a suspicious one—was caught up with it; the baby was thrown out with the bathwater. I was in the tricky position of a scientist who confirms his own ideologically-based hypothesis; even having done everything right, hardly anyone was inclined to believe it.
Our society and its relationship to the media has become like this camp; even when a journalist does tell the truth, a huge portion of society will refuse to accept it, feeling resentful at having been lied to by others like him for so long. Just as it only took two teenagers raising their hands to deprive everyone of chipwiches, it only takes a handful of faulty reports for the entire field to be thrown to the doghouse. And after so many provably egregious lies we’ve been spoonfed over the years, it’s hard to blame one another for this cynical, reactionary response.
And so here we are: Believing news not by its merits, but by how well it molds to our pre-existing conception of reality. All of us are guilty in this descent into what some have termed a ‘post-truth’ world; we did not protest enough when the convenient lies arose—falsehoods we desperately wanted to be true—and now cannot be believed even when conveniently honest. Perhaps if more of our communication was still done face-to-face, where we could identify signs of mischief in the faces of our peers (and be exposed to such scrutiny ourselves), we would not be in this mess. But our technology has not yet found its ability to blush, and what had been destructive to the beehive has destabilized the bees.
Mark Twain once wrote that “If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.” Unfortunately, we now live in a world that remembers everything, and the only ways to elicit genuine belief in others is by confirming their preexisting worldviews, or by hanging out with Nickelback—All convenient truths are deemed too suspicious. Until there emerges some new form of subconscious lie-detection—a computer’s blush—that de-fangs and humanizes this Age of the Internet, I fear that this destabilization will only worsen. Nobody gets a chipwich, and even the Gryffindors hang their heads.