NATALIE ANGIER
ESSAY


Deceitful behavior has a long and storied history in the evolution of social life, and the more sophisticated the animal, it seems, the more commonplace and cunning the con games.

In a comparative survey of primate behavior, Richard Byrne and Nadia Corp of the University of St.Andrews in Scotland found a direct relationship between deception and brain size.

The larger the average volume of a primate species’ neocortex - the newest, “highest” region of the brain - the greater the chance the animal would pull a stunt like this one described in The New Scientist: a young baboon being chased by an enraged mother intent on punishment suddenly stopped in midpursuit, stood up and began scanning the horizon intently, an act that conveniently distracted the entire baboon troop into preparing for nonexistent intruders.

Much evidence suggests that we humans, with our densely corrugated neocortex, lie to one another chronically and with ease. Investigating what they called“lying in day-to-day life,”Bella DePaulo, now a visiting professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and her colleagues asked 77 college students and 70 people from the community to keep anonymous diaries for a week and to note the circumstances and context of every lie they told.

They found that the students told an average of two lies a day, community members one a day, and that most of the lies fell into the minor fib category.“I told him I missed him and thought about him every day when I really don’t think about him at all,”wrote one participant.“Said I sent the check this morning,”wrote another.

In a follow-up study, the researchers asked participants to describe the worst lies they’d ever told. Out came confessions of adultery, of defrauding an employer, of lying on a witness stand. When asked how they felt about their lies, many described being haunted with guilt, but others confessed that once they realized they’d gotten away with lying, they did it again and again.

In truth, it’s all too easy to lie. In more than 100 studies, researchers have asked participants questions like, Is the person on the videotape lying or telling the truth- Subjects guess correctly about 54 percent of the time. Our lie blindness suggests to some researchers a human desire to be deceived.

“There’s a counterintuitive motivation not to detect lies, or we would have become much better at it,”said Angela Crossman, an assistant professor of psychology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.“But you may not really want to know that the dinner you just cooked stinks, or even that your spouse is cheating on you.”

The natural world is rife with things that are not what they seem. Harmless viceroy butterflies mimic toxic monarch butterflies, angler fish lure prey with appendages that wiggle like worms.

Biologists distinguish between such cases of innate or automatic deception, however, and so-called tactical deception, the use of a normal behavior in a novel situation, with the express purpose of misleading an observer. Tactical deception requires considerable behavioral suppleness, which is why it’s most often observed in the brainiest animals.

Great apes, for example, make great fakers. Frans B.M. de Waal, a professor at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center and Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, said chimpanzees or orangutans in captivity sometimes tried to lure human strangers to their enclosure by holding out a piece of straw while putting on their friendliest face.“People think,‘Oh, he likes me,’and they approach,”Dr.de Waal said.“And before you know it, the ape has grabbed their ankle and is closing in for the bite.”

But apes wouldn’t try the straw ruse on their own kind.“They know each other too well to get away with it,”Dr.de Waal said.“Holding out a straw with a sweet face is such a cheap trick, only a naive human would fall for it.”