The Folly of Fools

                                         

Robert Trivers,  “The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life”, Basic Books, 2011, pp. 337

Deceit and self-deception are prevalent behaviors in all of nature: Angelfish lure prey by dangling “bait” in front of their jaws; edible butterflies deter predators by adopting the coloring of poisonous species.  Possums play possum, cowbirds and cuckoos avoid the drudgery of raising offspring by laying their eggs in other birds’ nests.  Humans are not excepted from this deception phenomenon.  The author argues that self-deception evolved in the service of deceit—the better to fool others.  We do it for biological reasons, in order to help us survive and procreate (this may help explain Madoff’s behavior!). 

Our bigger brains and communication skills make us master dissemblers. As adults, we engage in “confirmation bias,” which makes us seize on facts that bolster our preconceptions and overlook contradictory data. We wittingly and unwittingly inflate the qualities of ourselves and others in our religious, political or ethnic group. We denigrate those outside our in-group as well as sexual and economic rivals.

So, though it understandable why we deceive others, Why ourselves?  Trivers proposes that believing that we’re smarter, sexier and more righteous than we really are can help us seduce and persuade others and even improve our health, via the placebo effect.  However our illusions can lead to disastrous consequences, from the dissolution of a marriage to stock-market collapses and world wars. 

Trivers is especially critical of  Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and the United States’ treatment of American Indians, blacks, the Vietnamese, Iraqis,  and Afghans.  This section is thought-provoking but not well balanced.

My Notes:

Pg. 2:  Once information arrives in our brains, it is often distorted and biased when presented to our conscious minds.  We deny the truth to ourselves.  We project onto others traits that are in fact true of ourselves—and then attack them!  We repress painful memories, create completely false ones, rationalize immoral behavior, act repeatedly to boost positive self-opinion, and show a suite of ego-defense mechanisms.  Why alter information after arrival so as to reach a conscious falsehood?  Why should natural selection have favored our marvelous organs of perception, on the one hand, only to have us systematically distort the information gathered, on the other?  In short, why practice self-deception?  Answer: We deceive ourselves the better to deceive others.  To fool others, we may be tempted to reorganize information internally even though this is unconscious.

Pg. 14:  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.  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 may be. 

Pg. 20:  Psychologists have shown that power corrupts our mental processes.  When a feeling of power is induced in people, they are less likely to take others’ viewpoint and more likely to center their thinking on themselves.  The result is a reduced ability to comprehend how others see, think, and feel.  Power, among other things, induces blindness toward others.

Pg. 54:  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 to throw a 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.

Pg. 70:  The placebo effect and the benefits of hypnosis, including self-hypnosis, are examples of self-beneficial self-deception that usually requires a third party—a person in a lab coat with a stethoscope in the first case and someone swinging watch and talking to you in a rhythmic way in the second.  The placebo effect is so consistent and strong that all medical research trials on new medicine routinely have a placebo control.  Placebo effects are highly variable across a population.  Typically roughly one-third show very strong effects, perhaps one-third moderate, and one-third none. 

Pg. 122:  The brain is a costly organ.  Although representing only 3 percent of total body weight, the brain consumes 20 percent of all resting metabolic energy.  The 20 percent energy cost is constant whether you are happy, depressed, schizophrenic, or on an LSD trip. 

Pg. 160:  We have an unconscious agent-object bias which shows up in our metaphors for the stock market.  When the market goes up we use agency terms such as “the market is climbing” but when it goes down the motion becomes an object “the market dropped today”.

Pg. 251:  Herbert Spencer stated, “The ultimate effect of shielding men form the effects of their folly is to fill the world with fools.”  (Think of old men sending young men off to war.)

Pg. 307:  A key to the development of the very solid and sophisticated science of physics is the complete absence from its subject matter of social interactions or social content of any sort.  The greater the social content of a discipline, the more slowly it will develop, because it faces, in part, greater forces of deceit and self-deception that impede progress.  Thus, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and economics have direct implications for our view of ourselves and of others, so one might expect their very structure to be easily deformed by self-deception.  The same can be said for some branches of biology, especially social theory and separately human genetics.  Many of these illusions have in common that function is interpreted at a higher level than is warranted (for example, society instead of individual). 

For roughly a century, biologists had the social world analyzed almost upside down.  They argued that natural selection favored what was good for the group or the species, when in fact it favors what is good for the individual (measured in survival and reproduction), as Darwin well knew.  More precisely, natural selection works on the genes within an individual to promote their own survival and reproduction, which is usually equivalent to what is beneficial for the individual propagating the genes.  Yet almost from the moment Darwin’s theory was published, scientists in the discipline reverted to the older view of benefit as serving a higher function (species, ecosystem, and so on)m, only now they cited Darwin as support for their belief. 

Pg. 310:  Economics in not a science even though it has developed an impressive mathematical apparatus and awards itself a Nobel Prize each year.  It fails to ground itself in underlying knowledge (in this case, biology).  This is curious because modes of economic activity must inevitably be based on some notion of what an individual organism is up to.  If only thirty years ago economists had built a theory of economic utility on a theory of biological self-interest—forget the beautiful math and pay attention to the relevant math—we might have been spared some of the extravagances of economic thought regarding, for example, built-in anti-deception mechanisms kicking in to protect us from the harmful effects of unrestrained economic egotism.

Pg. 315:  Psychoanalysis was a long-running fraud and learning theory made far-reaching and implausible claims about the ability of reinforcement to mold all behavior adaptively.  It was soon shown on logical grounds alone that reinforcement could not produce language, or even just associations of actions and their effects when the latter were delayed more than a few moments.  However, recently a school of evolutionary psychology has developed and psychology is rapidly becoming the branch of evolutionary biology it always wished to be.  Yet social psychology somewhat lags the rest of psychology, another example of the retarding effects of deceit and self-deception on disciplines with more social content.