So there are certain muscles in our face and body relating to emotion which are controlled by the autonomic nervous system and not under our direct control. For example, when we perform a genuine smile, muscles around our eyes contract wheras a fake smile only involves the lips. Thus, you can tell when someone is genuinely smiling or not. The same applies to blushing when you’re embarrased and the face reddening when you get angry and a whole bunch of involuantary visual cues.
My question is, why does this occur? Wouldn’t being able to directly control which emotions your face presents hold a huge evolutionary advantage? If someone evolved the ability to fake a genuine smile, wouldn’t it allow them to become better liars and make them more successful in passing on thier genes?
I’m not convinced that we can’t consciously control our facial muscles. I’ve successfully masked various emotions; wouldn’t that be impossible if the muscles were out of my control?
And I have to wonder whether being a better liar would be a significant enough factor with regard to siring children to effect evolution much, in the amount of time that we’ve been intellectually erudite enough to be lying at all. Not only is evolution rather slow, but I’d think that if you were that successful at lying your way into women’s beds, somebody would get pissed and hunt you down before you changed the species much (which would dampen the overall effect, I’d think).
IANA Evolutionary Biologist, but wouldn’t it also be a huge evolutionary advantage to be able to tell when someone is lying to you? The evolutionary pressure would work both ways, here, since both the liar and the one being lied to are human.
I question the assumption that this hasn’t already happened.
Successful CEO’s, lawyers, doctors, politicians, actors, etc. are all people who have to, at some point or another, conceal their emotions to become successful in their field. Even working behind the counter at the video rental, you can’t let your customers know what you really think of them. In fact I think a case could be made that the more socially and economically rewarded careers are those which involve more concealment of emotion. And, of course, socially and economically successful men are more likely to have their choice of good fertile women (and, outside of “nature” to afford IVF in the event of infertility).
Thousands of women have children by men who never loved them and refuse to support them, but they once pretended they did. I personally have one child by a man who was a consummate liar (pun unintended, but noticed on preview. I’ll keep it), and whom everyone agreed would make a fantastic politician, televangelist or movie star. Since humans currently don’t literally need two parents to successfully bring their offspring to reproductive age (though it’s still a hell of a lot easier!), there’s not a reproductive advantage to being honest, and lots of men aren’t.
I like to believe they’re in the minority, and on good days I do.
Evolutionary psychologists argue that there are sometimes good reasons to be perceived to be out of control. A famous example from game theory involves two people driving towards each other in a game of Chicken. Suppose one of the drivers makes a show of removing his steering wheel and throwing it out the window. That driver has just lost control and yet, paradoxically, has increased his chances of winning the game.
Some argue that a similar logic creates a selective advantage for losing control in the natural world. If two individuals are fighting, and one seems to be so overwhelmed by rage that he will accept great injury or even death to harm the other, the second individual might just decide that it’s not worth the trouble.
This is an argument for why it might be to an organism’s advantage to appear out of control. But the easiest way for our genes to make us appear out of control may have been just to make us actually out of control. And so you have a selective advantage for losing control, especially of the kinds of social emotions that could change what others predict our actions will be. I’ve emphasized threatening displays, but similar arguments could be made with respect to displays intended to increases how much others trust us or like us.
Spotting liars is actually fairly simple. People who are trained to spot the clues manage to spot liars with about 80% accuracy. That’s vastly higher than the average person. Not only that but the skill can be taught in just a few weeks. Yet the ability never evolved. Why not?
This is the flip side of the apparent paradox that Mr. McAllister just expounded on. As he pointe dout humans are fairly compliated animals and our success depends not just on physical success but on our ability to bluff, feint and double bluff. However it also depends in large degree on self-image and status. While succesful people have a better self-image the converse is also true: people with a good self image will be successful. Call it positive htinking or whatever you like, but humans who feel good about themselves do better.
People who are good at spotting liars can’t just turn the ability off when it’s inncovenient. They not only see people that want to harm them, they also see when people are lying out of politneness or flattery or simple to meake them feel better. Can you imagine how low your self esteem would be everyone you knew was always brutally honest? But for a human that could spot lies that is exactly they world they would inhabit.
So it appears that human shave never developed an ability to spot lies because it is a double edged sword. It improves our abaiility to avaoid being misled, but it also destroys our self esteem. So the skill has evolved to a certain point thatis right at the limit of what we can bear psychlogically… and even then most of us ignore it when we want to believe lies.
Which brings us back to the OP. People need to be able to trust the people around them. We don’t mind so much if our friend and partners lie about the little stuff, but we hate it if we find out we been lied to about the big stuff. Can you imagine living with someone who who you could never read, ever? Someone who could send any message they liked any time they liked? You could never trust them about anything, ever. While such people may have some advantages they would also be completely untrustworthy. That is a massive detriment for social animals like humans. Now imagine an entire tribe of such people. Cohesiveness would be nearly impossible simply because trust wouldn’t exist.
So we never evolved the ability to conceal our lies either. We always let others in using subtle cues precisely so that they know we can’t lie to them, or at least not regularly and not on big issues. That makes us far more useful and worthy of the trust of our fellow humans. And since human survival depend on our society as much as on our individual accomplishements that’s a massive evolutionary advanatge. Any tribe that did happen to spawn a lot of natural liars would have collapsed as soon times got tough because no-one could trust anyone else.
Why can’t we evolve to have high self esteem despite knowing who is lying to us?
This sounds a lot like group selection. Is that what you’re proposing? It seems to me that someone who developed the ability to completely control their emotional signals could become a massive free rider in society.
Because the success of the human species depends primarily on our ability to co-operate, not just on our personal success. A person who had no need for the approval of others would have no desire to please others and ultimately no drive to co-operate or form social bonds. I imagine such an individual would be very close to a severe autistic in behaviour. A group of such indivdiuals would have the same survival chances as a whelk in a super nova.
Or in short, we need to be able to feel pain when we displease our pack members and we need to feel pleasure when we please them. These are the carrot and stick tha make humans social animals.
Yes an no. Certainly a group of people who could lie to one another with impunity could never form a functional society. But a single individual who could lie with impunity would also have a hard time surviving regardless of the group she inhabits. If nobody can trust you then you have a short term advanatge that becomes a masisve liability as soon as everyone relaises they can’t trust you.
In the modern world where such an individual can move forever into new societies as soon as they are “discovered” the ability seems to have some charm. However until 10, 000 years ago any individual’s entire society consisted of less than 1000 other people. Everyone else on Earth wanted to kill either you or rape you or both. As such anybody who alienated those 1000 members of his own clan would be dead in short order.
And the 10, 000 years where the ability might have proved useful is way to short for such an ability to evolve.
While I agree with your response to the topic in this thread, the second statement here is false. There’s almost no evidence of inter-tribal warfare before agriculture. Tribal cohesion was needed for the basics: gathering food, raising kids, taking care of the sick and injured. An individual who was booted from the tribe would probably die of starvation, injury, or disease, but not from being killed by some other tribe.
:eek:Can we please have some evidence to support this claim?
One thing that almost all anthropolgists agree on is that relative rates of inter-group violence were far higher in hunter-gatherer than agricultural societies. I have never heard of a hunter-gatherer society that was not in a state of conflict with its neighbours, and where anyone crossing tribal boundaries was not subject to immediate execution.
For comprehensive reviews I strongly suggets reading Gat 1999. “The pattern of fighting in simple, small-scale, prestate societies.” Journal of Anthropological Research or Haas 1990. “The anthropology of war.” Cambridge University Press. Neither will leave you in any doubt that warfare was a norm for hunter-gatherer groups and that anyone wandering outside their tribal territory could expect a swift death at the hands of thei neigbours.
I really will be interested in seeing your evidence that there was no inter-tribal warfare before agriculture given the abundance of evidence to the contrary collected by Gat and Hass amongst many others. Even Ferguson, who is probably the biggest critic of Gat and Haas, doesn’t dispute the evidence they collected. Rather he suggests that their numerous documented accounts of hunter gatherer warfare are all individually special cases that somehow don’t apply to the world at large. He goes on to say that in those instances where no evidence was collected before a HG group became extinct we should assume that they were never at conflict with neighbours. An extremely weak argument and even that is not one that suports your claim that there is any paucity of evidence of HG warfare.
But you are the only person I have ever seen suggest that there is any shortage of hunter gatherer warfare. Perhaps you might start by naming even one hunter gatherer group that we cna say wasn’t perpetually in a state of conflict with its neighbours and that didn’t kill straying neigbours on sight.
You sure about that? This well-written article states that this appears to be an innate skill, not a learned one. I found this part particularly interesting:
Of course, the findings are in dispute, like with anything new or unusual. But, I found it compelling, myself.
QED I’m just about to leave and haven’t had time to read your article, though I will.
At this stage it doesn’t look like we are in dispute. Your are saying that some people can innately spot lies 80% of the time without training. I’m saying that anyone can achieve the same results with sufficent training. Nothing contradictory in those remarks. Some people can run 10km in an hour without any training but anyone can run 10km in an hour with sufficient training. Same deal.
The interesting point is that even though such skills can be learned or even (as your article implies) possibly be inherited, it isn’t a normal innate human trait. That is very strong evidence that there is advantageous in not to be able to spot lies. The best reason I’ve seen for this is that believing lies is vital for our self esteem.
If that is true, we should expect that those who can detect lies better than average (whether innately or through training) have a greater tendency towards low self-esteem. Is there evidence of that?
I agree that is what we would predict. I don’t know of any evidence to that effect.
However because self-esteem depends on so many other factors you would presumably need a large sample of lie spotters to get anything meaningful. For example a person’s self-esteem also hinges on physical attractivenes, income, social position and health to name just a few things. You would need some way to control for those and many other factors to be able to say with any certainty that lie spotters have lower self esteem.
At least one of the researchers in my link doesn’t think so. He says:
Their hope is that with enough study, they can eventually figure out how the best of the best spot liars with such a high success rate, but for now it appears that this skill is not well understood:
