Post by mikegarrison on Jul 7, 2012 21:36:55 GMT -5
I've started reading this book by Robert Trivers. It's pretty interesting.
It's well-understood that all life has an evolutionary incentive to deceive anything that competes with it. But what's less well-understood is why we deceive ourselves, sometimes to the point where we cause ourselves serious harm. Trivers sets out to examine how this might be a successful evolutionary tactic.
One straightforward reason why this might be is because people are excellent lie detectors. We can pick up all sorts of signals that someone is trying to deceive us. But ... if they deceive themselves, then they aren't "lying" anymore. If they really believe their story, they no longer give off the indications that they are lying.
Besides the subject being interesting, Trivers is pretty interesting too. I've read other people talking about his work, but I've never before read anything he actually wrote.
Here's a quote from a reviewer:
It's well-understood that all life has an evolutionary incentive to deceive anything that competes with it. But what's less well-understood is why we deceive ourselves, sometimes to the point where we cause ourselves serious harm. Trivers sets out to examine how this might be a successful evolutionary tactic.
One straightforward reason why this might be is because people are excellent lie detectors. We can pick up all sorts of signals that someone is trying to deceive us. But ... if they deceive themselves, then they aren't "lying" anymore. If they really believe their story, they no longer give off the indications that they are lying.
Besides the subject being interesting, Trivers is pretty interesting too. I've read other people talking about his work, but I've never before read anything he actually wrote.
Here's a quote from a reviewer:
These concepts were popularized by others, notably Edward O. Wilson in “Sociobiology,” Dawkins in “The Selfish Gene” and Pinker in “How the Mind Works.” All have credited Trivers, whom Pinker has called “an underappreciated genius, and one of history’s greatest thinkers in the analysis of behavior and emotion.” If Trivers is not better known, that may be because he has struggled with bipolar disorder since his youth. He is also, by his own admission, an irascible anti-authoritarian, whose sharp tongue often gets him into trouble. He left Harvard in the late 1970s, eventually ending up at Rutgers. He also has a home in Jamaica.
No doubt tired of seeing others crank out well-received elaborations of his work, Trivers has finally produced a popularization of his own. His topic is deceit, with which by his own admission he has wrestled — on a personal as well as professional level — throughout his adult life. Trivers’s scope is vast, ranging from the fibs parents and children tell to manipulate one another to the “false historical narratives” political leaders foist on their citizens and the rest of the world.
But I cut Trivers slack for his denunciations of others because he is so hard on himself. Throughout the book, he recalls instances in which he lied — to girlfriends (he has apparently had many), wives (two), children (five) and colleagues. In one especially poignant passage, Trivers recalls walking down a city street with an attractive young woman, “trying to amuse her,” when he spots “an old man on the other side of her, white hair, ugly, face falling apart, walking poorly, indeed shambling.” Trivers abruptly realizes he is seeing his reflection in a store window: “Real me is seen as ugly me by self-deceived me.”
No doubt tired of seeing others crank out well-received elaborations of his work, Trivers has finally produced a popularization of his own. His topic is deceit, with which by his own admission he has wrestled — on a personal as well as professional level — throughout his adult life. Trivers’s scope is vast, ranging from the fibs parents and children tell to manipulate one another to the “false historical narratives” political leaders foist on their citizens and the rest of the world.
But I cut Trivers slack for his denunciations of others because he is so hard on himself. Throughout the book, he recalls instances in which he lied — to girlfriends (he has apparently had many), wives (two), children (five) and colleagues. In one especially poignant passage, Trivers recalls walking down a city street with an attractive young woman, “trying to amuse her,” when he spots “an old man on the other side of her, white hair, ugly, face falling apart, walking poorly, indeed shambling.” Trivers abruptly realizes he is seeing his reflection in a store window: “Real me is seen as ugly me by self-deceived me.”
