We are hard wired to lie. I will try to break this down in 5 steps: 1. Competing will get you the most as an individual, 2. Cooperating will get you the most as a group, 3. Only cooperating and norms enforcing groups survived, 4. Only competing individuals survived, 5. Thus we are the product of convincing ourselves of our good hearted nature while actually continuing to compete. Lying to ourselves is the optimal strategy.
Assumption 1: Natural Selection is competition. The animal kingdom sees intraspecies and interspecies competition. It takes a lot of effort to compete not only against other species but also against your own.
Assumption 2: A species as a whole would be better off cooperating with each other and using pooled resources for only interspecies competition rather than intraspecies competition.
Assumption 3: Natural selection favoured humans that were able to communicate in order to cooperate, pool resources, and focus on comparative advantage, thus levering out intraspecies competition. Thus rules and norms are created: Don’t kill, steal, cheat… To ensure those norms were followed, norm enforcement and punishment was introduced for those who tried to freeride.
Assumption 4: As an individual in a norm based society you are best off by letting others believe that you are a norm obeying citizen, while in fact competing for intraspecies’ resources, status and reproduction.
Assumption 5: The best way to trick people is to truly believing that you are a norm obeying citizen while constantly competing on an intraspecies level. Thus, evolution favoured those humans that were able to best lie to themselves.
The optimal strategy in a society is to convincingly show and tell people that you are not competing while very much competing. This will get you out of societal and legal punishment, while enjoying the benefits of your competing endeavors.
The clearest example for me is dating. The norm clearly states that you should not chat up someone else’s spouse. This is intraspecies competition and you will get societal punishment for it… UNLESS you have a good reason to convince yourself that it’s not flirting- Then you do it all the time. But it’s still trying to procreate, just this time your brain can convincingly lie to you and others that it’s only a coffee, a conversation in hard times, or catching up with an old friend. Again, the optimal strategy is to compete for the best spouse while lying about that motive to everyone, including ourselves. This will get you the best genes for kids, while avoiding societal punishment.
Its hard to detect cause part of the optimal strategy is to lie to ourselves.
Robin Hanson and Kevin Simmler call this “The Elephant in the Brain” (Great Book).
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