Human mechanisms for deception, truth, and hypocrisy
R. D. Alexander (1975, p. 96) states that "human society is a network of lies and deception, persisting only because systems of conventions about permissible kinds and extents of lying have arisen". Lazarus (1979, p. 47) notes that there is a "collective illusion that our society is free, moral, and just." Can these statements be taken from the realm of philosophy, speculation, and private opinion and be substantiated by psychological research.
The problem already starts with definitions. In order to maintain our self-image as unselfish and honest, we seem to have special definitions that help obfuscate the true state of affairs. Of course, we are honest. We just omitted some fact, but we did not lie! We would feel very uneasy about a definition of truth that disallows this type of behavior.
This is a very uncomfortable definition. So uncomfortable, that the logical mind immediately finds faults with it.
Some people retort that the truth is often hard or impossible to define. And, that the whole truth can never be said. There is too much information in this world, we cannot tell uncle Joe that he has five fingers on his right hand, five on the left and nails on all fingers, and that there is a brownish spot on the left upper corner of the outside wall.
I agree that these arguments are important, but do claim that they are part of the larger pattern of denial and avoidance. There is a fundamental difference between omission of the trivial and unimportant truths cited above, and omission of facts like he has bad breath, we are sexually attracted to his wife, we are hoping we will die so we can inherit his apartment, or that we took the bigger piece of the pie for ourselves than the one we gave to him.
How are these two groups of omission different? One measure could be the estimated cost of honesty to the sender or the benefit of the honest message to the receiver. As a first estimate of this message, self report or estimation by third parties suffice: "How costly do you think would it be to tell uncle Joe that he has bad breath?" Or, "how costly do you think it is to tell your husband that you actually had ten sexual partners before him?" This may be compared to the estimate of how much benefit the target of the deception would gain from the information. As an additional measure, people could be asked to discern the amount of intentionality in different types of omissions, and the amount of saliency of different types of observations. `All these measures would show a clear difference between the omission of the fact that uncle Joe possesses toes and the omission of the fact that he has a huge belly.
In topics related to relationships, all these questions should be in a 2x2 ANOVA fashion, sex of rater versus sex of the rated person.
Additional questions would be: How frequently did you ever engage in such (deceptive) behavior?
How frequently did you chose to tell the truth in this type of situation?
What is your truth (e.g. how many sexual partners did you have before?). It might be necessary to define sexual partner (actual intercourse or any sexual activity), or better even ask to answer the question for various interpretations.
How strongly did you distort the truth? What did you tell your partner (i.e. how many partners did you say you had)?
How morally repugnant a lie do you think this is if you did it? if a partner did it? if a same sex friend did it? if an opposite sex friend did it?
As an alternative to the self reports we could tell a vignette. Take, for example a young woman/man who had 15 sexual partners in her/his life. Then ask questions:
Partly, this questionnaire is intended as a survey to establish the absolute frequency of certain behaviors. (A more representative sample than a psychology subject-pool would be useful.) The prediction is that most of these behaviors are extremely frequent. Knox et a. (1993) found that 92% of the respondents in their sample of college students had engaged in some kind of deception. They asked students to write down any lies they had told to an existing or past partner. Their question was open ended and did not explicitly ask for every single behavior. I would expect higher numbers in the all individual categories if subjects were explicitly reminded of
It is likely that actors lie most frequently in areas where the cost of honesty is very high, the cost of lying to the target are low, and where the target does not care very much about knowing the truth. A high chance of being detected and a strong negative reaction to detection would reduce the chance of lying. For example, the chance that the target finds out the true number of prior sex partners is relatively slim, but the punishment for telling the truth is also not major. In comparison, the chance of finding out about a present affair is much greater, but, in compensation, the price for telling the truth is greater, too.
There may be sex differences in rating. For example, women will probably rate lies about commitment more repugnant than men. Tooke and Camire (1991) studied sex differences in the use of lies. As expected, in intersexual communication each sex uses dishonesty to enhance those features that are most desired by the opposite sex. Males, for example, lie about commitment, honesty and resources.
The evolutionary arms race between influence strategies and counterstrategies was so important that the theorists like Byrne and Whiten (1988) suggest that it is actually responsible for the evolution of primate and human intelligence. I suggest that a lot of human behavior, like influence strategies and courtship behavior can be explained in these terms.
Arms races are extremely frequent in evolution. They occur between species, like the cheetah and the gazelle driving each other to ever increasing speed records. Arms races between males of the same species lead to increased fighting abilities.
Stealth, mimicry, and deception are also important features that are helpful, or even indispensable for survival and success. Impalatable and poisonous animals often provide a niche for imitators who free-ride on the respect predators confer on *** the original poisonous species. A three-way arms race occurs between the predator who tries to distinguish between the impostor and the original, the original impalatable animal who gains from truly advertising its impalatibility and being clearly discernible, and the impostor who can only survive by being indiscernible.
Evolution produced deceptive mechanisms frequently. Mitchell (1986) lists four levels of deception.
Level one is permanent appearance, for example a butterfly whose tail looks like a head, so it can escape when a bird attacks its tail thinking it is its head, or animals that look like wasps or other impalatable species (in humans level one might occur in the form of fat on woman's hip to look like a bigger space for babies or the low male voice).
Level two is coordinated action. Examples are fireflies who mimic the mating flashes of the female of another firefly species in order to prey on the males. It also includes bird's injury feigning in order to distract predators from their nest. (An example for this in humans could it be infatuation, male that truly believes every week that he will forever love the woman he met this week.)
Level three involves learning, like in a dog who feigns injury because he has been petted more when he had a broken leg. Deceit may depend on the deceived organism's learning, too: a blue jay learns to avoid a palatable butterfly after experiencing the nausea of eating the similar looking distasteful one.
Level 4 involves planning: a chimp who misleads about the location of food, by looking the wrong way or purposefully walking past it, or a human who lies on purpose. Conscious planning of deception requires a "theory of mind", an understanding of what goes on in other individual's minds. In animals it is hard to show that an action involves conscious understanding and planning. Does a chimp walk past a food source because she understands that this will make the higher ranking animal think that there is no food around? Or does she walk by because he has a simple "hard wired" (level 2) or learned (level 3) program that, without any deep understanding, says: "walk by a food source if you are near a higher ranking animal who has not seen the food?"
There are two theories about why primates evolved such a high intelligence.
Complex feeding patterns, like processing nuts and. finding fruits in
the forest and knowing which fruit is ripe at which place and what time
requires higher intelligence than just eating grass and leaves. As support,
frugivorous monkeys have relatively larger brains than leave eaters (citation,
***). While this might have given brain development an extra boost, it
is not convincing that this is the main reason fro primate brain size.
Small brained animals like birds and bees find complex food sources that
are distributed in time and spaceFootnote1.
Squirrels have pretty good location memory for what they buried.
Therefore, the second theory is much more convincing.
The complexities of social manipulation require large amounts of brain power. There are many group living animals, but their social hierarchy is quite simple and interactions among individuals are limited. Only primates have complex social manipulations and intrigues. They can play off one individual against another and have #2 and #3 in strength hierarchy conspire and plot successfully against #1, or retaliate against relatives and allies of attacker (DeWaal, 1987, ***.
Byrne (1993) claims that "relative neocortical volume explains 60% of the variance in usage of tactical deception." While this contention is hard to believe, due to measuring difficulties, there is a lot of literature supporting the intelligence-for-social-manipulation theory (Byrne & Whiten, 1988, 1992; Whiten & Byrne, 1988; Byrne, 1994).
In humans, too, expensive signals are more credible and a lot of the wastefulness in human society derives from that. I suspect that high status clothing is, on purpose, highly impractical. It needs dry cleaning and easily gets dirty. It is hard to walk or bicycle in it. It signals "I do not need to walk nor do dirty work".
In human interaction, words are cheap. Compare, for example, the persuasive effect of:
The above examples amply demonstrate that deceit as an influence strategy is neither new nor a human invention. Rather, the animal precedent is quite clear: "One of the most important things to realize about systems of animal communication is that they are not systems for the dissemination of the truth" (Trivers, 1985, p. 395). This is the result of a vast amount of research on animal communication. Cronk (1991) suggests to "follow the example of animal behavior studies in seeing communication more as a means to manipulate others than as a means to inform them".
People don't seem to like to follow this example. Most people probably do not see others, their friends, and much less themselves as mere manipulatorsFootnote2. I am unaware of any data on this subject of self image, but a literature search would probably reveal it. This data would be very relevant for discussing the "conspiracy theory" postulated below.
I suggest that people not only tend to have a wrong image about themselves and humans in general, but they actively resist information contrary to these beliefs.
The following beliefs are attractive and pervasive, in spite of proof to the contrary
There are mechanisms ( a "conspiracy"Footnote3) that prevent us from showing, and seeing the truth about our selfishness, manipulativeness, untruthfulness, injustice, etc. These effects are strongest regarding our own behaviors, but, to a lesser degree, we do support other people's beliefs about themselvesFootnote4.
Hypocrisy is an essential element in these mechanisms. Hypocrisy should be selected for in certain areas. These areas have to do with terms like honesty, altruism.
Terms like altruism and honesty are special, because the most successful impression management strategy would be to display as much as possible of these qualities (to gain allies and partners), while actually possessing as little as possible of the same qualities (to avoid incurring huge fitness costs).
In other words, we want to look as good as possible, but get away as cheaply as possible. I suggest that our thinking and even our use of language is "twisted" in order to accommodate this hypocrisy effectively. The intelligence performing this should be a special purpose intelligence, because a general purpose intelligence that would actually see the whole truth would be detrimental. The logic about the advantage of self deception applies here: the person who honestly believes in his honesty and altruism is a usually lot more convincing than the person that, in a Machiavellian way, clearly sees his own manipulative ways. Righteous indignation is difficult when one knows one is wrong. In the case of detection, planned manipulation is much more harshly condemned and punished than mistaken beliefs and thinking.
Intelligence is certainly useful for survival and for reproductive fitness. It has its price, though. In addition to its large metabolic cost, intelligence has, as its unintended by-product, some serious reproductive costs.
Because our evolved mechanisms promote inclusive fitness only indirectly, an intelligent woman who understands about fertility and ovulation could abstain from sex during fertile periods, to avoid the pain of child birth. A gene for this type of intelligence would immediately be selected against. Or, alternatively, counter mechanisms would evolve. This could be, as I speculate, a specific mental mechanism that blocks out certain insights or understanding. For example, a man's self knowledge that his infatuation is often short lived. Or a physiological adaptation, as Burley (1979, p 844) speculates about concealed ovulation: "The hypothesis is that natural selection concealed hominid ovulation to counter a human or pre-human conscious tendency among females to avoid conception through abstinence from intercourse near ovulation." "Only when egocentric motives are at odds with biological interest should natural selection act to undermine human behavior."
The same way as understanding of pregnancy and ovulation could lead women to override mechanisms to ensure conception, understanding of one's social reality could lead to decreased fitness. Someone who can see the irrationality of religion and of social norms will probably be exterminated in a witch hunt. Seeing the truth is also detrimental in human alliances, especially in love and marital relationships. If a woman sees the truth about her relationship, and says it she will be met with denial. This denial is probably honest because the partner is completely unaware of his manipulation tactics: Research (citations ***) shows that her marital partner picked her as a compromise, because she was the best person he could get, in consideration of his own mate "market value", and that heFootnote5 uses all kind of manipulation to retain her and to make her conform to his own rules of fidelity and investment.
Is this argument compelling? What are the alternatives?
Cosmides and Tooby (1994, p. 70) extended the notion of "grammar" from the realms of linguistics to social contracts. They state: "to realize that it [a Universal Grammar] exists one must realize that there are alternative grammars." And "alternative grammars- and hence Universal Grammar- were difficult to discover because circuits designed to generate only a small subset of all grammatical inferences in the child also do so in the linguist." And, I would add, so do they in the social scientist that researches topics like altruism and love. Cosmides and Tooby extend the meaning of the term universal grammar to rule systems that produce valid semantics concerning social contracts or other systems of meaning and behavior.
I suggest that the semantics of terms like altruism, love and freedom, truth and honesty are restricted by a "Universal Grammar" in the sense postulated by Cosmides and Tooby. For example, the following perfectly logical thoughts would rarely be created by a Universal Grammar:
If one is not aware of these sentences, which constitute the extreme range of altruism, honesty and love, one cannot see that humans possess these qualities only in greatly limited form.
The model of the human as a "naive scientist", a rational decision maker prevailed in Social Psychology for several years after cognitive psychologists had proved it wrong by demonstrating a myriad of biases (Kahnemann, Slovic & Tversky, 1982). The notion that we are basically rational beings still predominates intuitive and popular thinking, in spite of proof to the contrary (Taylor, 1989, Taylor and Brown, 1988, Nisbett and Ross, 1980)Footnote7.
Men tend to value a car more if it is introduced in the presence of an attractive woman, and we all tend to vote for the taller and more attractive political candidate (Cialdini, 1993, p.140), and are fonder of people and things presented to us while eating (Razran, 1938, 1940; cited in Cialdini, 1993, p. 158). In these and similar cases, the targets of influence, full of honest conviction, vehemently deny having been influenced by such irrelevant factors.
In spite of numerous findings to the contrary, the myth of human rationality and consciousness continues to pervade our thinking and our literature. It was difficult for authors like Ury (1993) to overcome these ideas: "Because what I learned at Harvard Law School is that all that counts in life are the facts- who's right and who's wrong. It's taken me twenty-five years to learn that just as important as the facts, if not more important, are people's perception of those facts" (p. 18). He concludes that "humans are reaction machines" (p. 8). Pushing will make them more resistant. Indirect actions are needed. "It requires you to do the opposite of what you naturally feel like doing in difficult situations" (p. 10).
Making the target of social influence falsely believe we are not trying to push him satisfies intuitive as well as formal definitions (see Mitchell, 1986) of deception. Only on rare occasions do authors dare to call manipulative influencing strategies deception: "Many ploys depend on your not knowing what is being done to you. . . . If you don't realize that he is using his partner as a "bad guy", you may agree innocently to the changes" (Ury, 1993, p. 42). But, generally, the myth of human sincerity prevails.
"The more common everyday self-presenter who wants others to perceive, validate, and be influenced by his selfless integrity, even though he might vigorously deny such motivation and, indeed, be unaware of it" (Jones and Pittman, 1982, p. 246). "A tantalizing conspiracy of cognitive avoidance is common to the actor and his target. the actor does not wish to see himself as ingratiating; the target wants also to believe that the ingratiator is sincere" (p. 236).
I believe that self presentational concerns and preoccupation with saving other people's face prevent us from seeing the pervasiveness of deception. Furthermore, our egocentrism provides us with the wrong model of human behavior. Intuitively, we seem to think that human biology and social dispositions made us apt to be rational scholars in a just and free society.
Competition can lead to quite paradox qualities
or in Axelrod's competition: if each competitor advertises his strategy, everything changes!!! doves win and are ESS, because cooperators win out; or in Maynard Smith example cooperators win
If we believe our own lies it is much more difficult to be caught, because we are not making conscious efforts to lie. Furthermore, moral codes and laws punish the conscious lie much more stringently than the "honest" error.
Gur and Sackheim (1979) defined self deception as the motivated unawareness of one of two conflicting cognitions. They required that (i) the individual holds two contradictory beliefs (p and not-p) (ii) these beliefs are held simultaneously (iii) the individual is not aware of holding one of the beliefs (for example p) and (iv) the mental operation that determines which mental content is and which is not subject to awareness is motivated.
They managed to prove the existence of self deception even according to these stringent requirements. It surprises me that knowledge of the repressed truth (not p) remains stored somewhere in the brain. Jokes who induce laughter by alluding to taboos seem to tap into these secret memories. Maybe there is a fitness advantage to having access to the truth. Maybe the truth is required in some emergency situations.
Paulhus (1986) introduces a less restricted definition of self-deception in a more general sense. He termed it auto-illusion: an honest belief in a false characterization of the self, due to cognitive or informational biases. This term is probably more useful, as self-deception in the most stringent sense has been shown in only two studies (Gur & Sackheim, 1979; Sackheim, 1983, cited in Paulhus, 1986).
Paulhus (1986) shows the relationship between self deception and various other constructs: "The SDQ [Self Deception Questionnaire] is highly negatively correlated with standard measures of psychopathology, including Beck's Depression Inventory and the Manifest Anxiety Scale." This counterintuitive result supports the evolutionary hypothesis, that high self deception is natural. I propose that people low on self deception are at such a disadvantage in social life that this increases their anxiety levels. Alternatively, low self deception may be a part of psychopathological personality patterns.
Factor analyses show that social desirability scales diverge into two factors, into self-deception or "autistic bias" and impression management or "propagandistic bias" (Paulhus, 1986).
The main causal mechanism, I believe, that maintains these false perceptions about ourselves is the fact that the deception is always two-fold. We deceive and then we deceive about the fact that we deceive. This kind of deception has been described by the psychoanalyst Alice Miller (***) as an important reason for the creation and continuous maintenance or traumas and neuroses. An example is beating a child and telling her that it is for her own good and that nobody is mistreating her. Or "how do you dare to accuse father of molesting you?!" Bateson (***) called this a "double bind" and suggested that this type of behavior in the family makes children candidates for schizophrenia. I cite these authors not to support the notion that this behavior is necessarily disease-causing. Rather, my point is that this is a method for cementing any belief in the brain.
In the case of the cultural understanding of impression management, selfishness and altruism, this seems to be normal and adaptive: When we ingratiate it is essential that we seem not to ingratiate; when we brag its effect is severely diminished if it looks like bragging. I believe that this deception about being deceptive is an extremely important point, and helps to obfuscate and to muddle many relevant issues. For example, a professor pretends and believes he is a scientist in search of the truth. In reality, if the truth interferes with his publication record and his popularity, he will probably favor enhancement of his popularity over the truth.
It is interesting, and I believe not a coincidence, that it is very frequent that deception is not called by its true name.
It is so hard to get a grasp on human deception and manipulation, because it is so extremely complex. Extrapolating from the theory that primate intelligence evolved for the purpose of social manipulation, I venture that the complexity of human influence is limited only by the computing power of the brain. If influencing, impression management and deception were controlled by special purpose mechanisms, as I surmise, this processing power would be even higher than if it were controlled only by special purpose mechanisms. The literature about theory of mind modules (Leslie, ***, etc.) suggests this is the case. The complexity of the issue will be further demonstrated by the following counter-intuitive examples of hard-wired competition and cooperation.
Predator and prey, or enemy soldiers can have common interests. Axelrod (***) describes how in World War I cooperation between enemy soldiers did evolve fairly frequently. Solders that encountered each other for months, dug into the same trenches, stood to gain from mock shootouts that would not harm anyone. Among animals, the prey might benefit from communicating the honest message: "I saw you and I am able to escape, so you would save us both unnecessary effort if you chased someone else" [citation??].
These signals only work when they are unfalsifiable. This can be done by the prey animal synchronizing its movement with the movement of the predator (citation ***???). This cannot be falsified by prey that did not see the predator. Alternatively, and more frequently, signals have to be expensive in order to be unfalsifiable. Stotting is an example of this. [elaborate, cite Zahavi handicap, peacock etc.]
The opposite of cooperation among enemies is competition among close relatives, even among mother and embryo. The interests of parent and offspring sometimes do diverge. Offspring has the interest to exaggerate its need of food or help to extract more resources from the parents (David Haig, Harvard, Quarterly review of Biology, 1994 ***).
As a final example for highly complex deception ploys I want to cite an example from the ample espionage literature (citations, ***). In World War II, the allies actually passed the correct date and time of the invasion of Europe in the Normandy to a known double agent, who promptly informed the Germans. The ploy worked, because this spy was already totally discredited, thus passing on the intended deceptive message that the invasion will not take place at the location and time he indicated (citation, ***).
Unfortunately, this beautiful state of cooperation does not work in evolution.
The amount of attitude change due to persuasion is higher when the communicator has high credibility, is knowledgeable and trustworthy, i.e. is perceived as honest and sincere. (citation ***)
[This could be a potentially interesting thesis project !!!??]
Do young children lie automatically and lie frequently as an "exercise", the same way as rough and tumble play is a training for future fighting?
See also the literature about theory of mind.
We have difficulties to find satisfactory theories about culture. I suggest this is because culture is based on unconscious enforcement of unspoken norms. Culture is based on violent sanctions that enforce often arbitrary behavior (see Robert Boyd (***) about punishing non-cooperators and punishing the non-punishers).
Culture is not understood, because the underlying dishonesty, deception and self deception are denied and not understood. Some elements of culture are:
Literature about social norms can be found in Sociology Garfinkel (***, Heritage, ***) did "breaching" experiments. He had students violate social norms and observe reactions to this. Examples are:
How can people believe in unproved, nonexistent things, like the god that happens to be popular in the country they were born and that contradicts all other religions? People are not seeking the truth!! The same methods that researchers on overconfidence use to establish statistical base line values can easily prove that at least 70% of humanity believes in the wrong religion. Because almost all religions are mutually exclusive and claim that the others cannot be right, at the most one can be right. If the one with the most believers is right, then the rest of humanity believes in a wrong religion.
Freudian defense mechanisms are very similar to the mechanisms described: purposeful mechanisms to deny the truth!
Honesty is consistently among the traits that are most valued in a mate (citations ****). In Ellis' thesis (1995 ***), dishonesty and deception show up as most indicative of low investment in a relationship. On the other hand, deception is rampant in marriage and dating relationships. Knox et al. (1993) report that 92% of their college student sample reported having lied to a romantic partner.
partners cannot accept to hear the truth. A truthful man would be at a distinct disadvantage. A truthful woman, too. [e.g. talking about one's truthful desires, wishes, opinion about partner].
How would a man sink in a woman's rating if he told the truth?
Compare:
We might study couples, but there would be ethical problems if we ask in questionnaires about the lies one told to his partner. The partner might be prompted to ask what one has answered, prompting a major fight or even divorce. Of course, this would prove my point that deception is rampant and an important feature in relationships.
What do people really mean by honesty in a partner? That he tells the truth about one's flabby belly? Or that he tells the truth about his desire for his partner's sister? Or that he should have a degree of faithfulness unseen in the male race?
Ask people to fill out questionnaires for a hypothetical dating service. Then ask to fill out honestly. Then have people of the other sex rate both questionnaires.
Expected Result: the honest answers will greatly diminish the person's chance to be considered. This is probably too trivial a result?
Then show the same set of questionnaires with the following modifications:
Question: will the honest person's questionnaire have a chance to compete with the dishonest one under these circumstances??
Does the woman discount correctly???? That is does she translate the man's answers into something that is close to the true state of affairs? This is hard to test because in real life this depends on personal interaction cues!
I predict that people have very strong gut reactions to findings about selfishness and manipulation and dishonesty in humans. I suggest that even HBESFootnote8 members who theoretically embrace these theories will get resistant and irritated when trying to apply them to their personal lives. I would like to send a questionnaire via e-mail to all HBES members, asking not their intellectual but their gut reaction to findings certain findings. I would provide for them to e-mail the answers back anonymously.
Some of the topics I would like to ask about:
Do you pick the friends that best serve your interests and give you the most benefit?
Do you believe your friends picked you this way?
Do you pick your partner as a compromise: the best you can get?
Did your partner pick you as a compromise, the best he can get?
Then ask them if they would prefer a hypothetical wonderful partner (Richard Gere, Schwarzenegger, . . .) or an 18 year old rich beauty queen, athletic, top student, and deeply in love with him.
Do you think your partner would prefer such a person to you?
Afterward I could confront people with the results of their answers and compare it to the some answers about their self image they gave in the beginning.
Does body size influence your vote for presidency?
Do you treat physically attractive people better than people of average or below average attractiveness?
People show a surprising amount of tolerance for domination by their sexual partner. this reminds me of langur monkeys where the female consorts with the murderer of her children.
For example, if anyone other than our romantic partner made demands as to where we could point our eyeballs to we would probably answer that we were born in free country. There seems to be the following adaptations
Probably, uncovering this behavior was not adaptive because nothing can be done about it and no better, non-dominating partner can be found.
I suggest to compare the tolerance of this type of behavior by sexual partners vs. similar behavior by other people:
What is the difference between those two? Is it only cultural?? Is it an adaptation?
The (sudden and unexpected) End
It is important to note that birds and bees, unlike primates, can fly. The cheap locomotion and wide overview allow for easier location of fruit, even without intelligence and memory.
In humans, reputation is an important element that makes seemingly altruistic behavior pay off (Franks, Passions within reason, ***).
I am still looking for an attractive name, alternatives to Conspiracy theory are Blindness theory, Purposeful Ignorance, self deception, Truth Avoidance theory, Hypocrisy theory, Hypocrisy hypothesis.
We do call our business and romantic partners altruists and not selfish, even though they clearly condition their "altruism", in a tit-for-tat fashion to our good behavior.
The choice of gender is accidental. The identical argument can be made for women manipulating men.
It is interesting that, at least in this society, privacy, secrecy and discreetness are so highly valued. Privacy enhances our capacity to deceive and diecreases the chance of detection.
Even if these findings were proven wrong, according to Gigerenzer (***) and Tooby and Cosmides (*** intuitive statisticians) part of my argument still remains valid: people resist these ideas. Of course, my argument would be weakened if people intuitively resisted incorrect findings. But, at any rate, my argument will remain valid in reference to social biases about self image, hypocrisy etc.
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