Liar! Liar!
By: Laura Spinney
From: New Scientist, 14 February 1998
J. Geffen
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1.
His contemporaries saw him as Satan. His name is synonymous with corruption.
Niccolò Machiavelli wrote The Prince nearly five hundred years ago and although
pious renaissance observers abhorred the idea that ends might justify means,
Machiavelli’s political treatise remains an astute account of human nature and the
struggle for power. According to The Prince, which was inspired by the notorious
Cesare Borgia, morality is irrelevant in political affairs and skulduggery is justified in
the pursuit and maintenance of power.
2.
Today the term Macchiavellian intelligence describes the ability to outwit
another person through cunning and deceit. This is the evolutionary peak of
deception: when a survival mechanism becomes an art form. Trickery is rife in the
living world but in plants and most animals such trickery is instinctive – controlled
largely by genes with little or no intellectual input. By contrast, calculated deception
requires sophisticated mental processes. To some extent, you must be able to read the
minds of others.
3.
Many biologists think that such abilities set humans apart from the rest of the
animal world. We alone understand that our thoughts are separate and may differ from
those of others, and that our words and actions can influence another’s views.
According to this theory, the mind-reading skills necessary for Machiavellian
deception come in a flash of insight during early childhood. But recent studies on
primates and preschool children suggest that the development of mendacity is more
subtle than this and may have its roots deep in our evolutionary past.
Know Your Enemy
4.
It is two decades since a couple of psychologists from the University of
Pennsylvania coined the phrase “theory of mind” to describe the mind-reading
abilities required for social manipulation. To outwit someone, said Guy Woodruff and
David Premack, you must understand their desires, intentions and convictions. The
idea triggered an avalanche of research, particularly in psychology where researchers
were keen to reveal how theory of mind develops in children.
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Tests designed to assess a child’s mind reading abilities seemed to show that
theory of mind comes quite suddenly some time during the fifth year of life. Before
that children fail tests such as the Sally-Anne test. Here the child watches a doll,
Sally, place a marble in a basket. Sally then leaves the room and a second doll, Anne,
moves the marble to a box. Asked where Sally will look for the marble when she
returns, children under four indicate the box, because they cannot distinguish between
what they know and what Sally knows. Older children give the right answer.
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6.
The implication of such findings is that young children do not have the mindreading abilities necessary to deceive, either through their actions or words. But recent
research refutes the idea that age four is a watershed when deception begins. Lying
and cheating come naturally to us long before that, argue Vasudevi Reddy, a
psychologist at the University of Portsmouth and her colleague Paul Newton. Last
year they announced findings from a study which showed that three-year-old children
may fail the Sally-Anne test yet skilfully hoodwink other individuals.
7.
As well as testing these children in their lab, Reddy and Newton asked mothers
to scrutinise the day-to-day behaviour of their young offspring. The result was a
startling catalogue of subterfuge – not just formulaic fibs learnt by association, but
highly creative lies tailored to individual situations, such as feigning indifference to a
coveted toy so that a sibling might consider the object not worth holding onto.
8.
The misinformation that infants communicate can be as rich and varied as their
information, says Reddy. “All the infancy data … point to the idea that infants are
dealing sensitively and intelligently with other people’s mentality well before you can
say they have a concept of mind.” If young children can manipulate other people even
before the theory of mind forms, she argues, just how valuable can the theory be?
Reddy believes children don’t come to understand other people’s minds through some
breakthrough in psychological development, but instead understanding comes
gradually through a growing familiarity with the way that people interact.
9.
Support for the idea that mind-reading develops as a continuum is gathering
momentum. In 1994, Wendy Clements, an experimental psychologist at the
University of Sussex, and Joseph Perner of the Department of Psychology at the
University of Salzburg tested children aged between two and four on a more sensitive
version of the Sally-Anne test. They filmed the children and monitored the direction
of their gaze as well as their outward responses, either in words or gestures. Ninety
per cent of the children tested – including some two-year-olds – looked at the place
where “Sam the mouse” had originally hidden the object, yet fewer than half of them
indicated it explicitly. In a control test – where Sam saw the object being moved to a
new location – none of these children looked at the original hiding place.
10. Clements believes that the children knew the right answer, but were not yet
sufficiently consciously aware of their knowledge to verbalise it. She makes the
analogy with patients suffering from the neurological condition called blindsight.
They can accurately point to an object in their impaired visual field yet do not know
how they did it. In people with blindsight, the dissociation of implicit and explicit
knowledge is caused by neurological damage. In the child’s developing mind,
suggests Clements and Perner, an implicit understanding of what another person
knows comes before an explicit understanding.
11. So, according to Clements and Perner, humans develop the rudiments of an
ability to mind-read long before the fifth year. Reddy and Newton have documented
manipulative behaviour in babies as young as ten months. These babies may pretend
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to cry in an attempt to get their own way, or tease an adult by offering an object and
then withdrawing it. If this truly is the start of Machiavellian intelligence, the new
findings give animal behaviourists even more fuel to stoke a long-running and heated
debate about whether non-human primates are capable of calculated deception.
12. Back in 1979, Premack and Woodruff published results from a study which they
claimed showed that chimps have a theory of mind. When the two psychologists
forced an animal to compete with a human for a concealed reward, the chimp would
try to dupe the person by indicating the wrong hiding place and ignore its rival’s
misleading cues. But in another trial where both of them had to cooperate for the
reward, the chimp did not try to deceive the human and assumed that its companion
would also be truthful. Could such an artificial situation really reveal mind reading
abilities in chimps? Most primatologists remained unconvinced.
13. A decade later, Andrew Whiten and Richard Byrne, evolutionary psychologists
at the University of St Andrews, took a different approach to answering the question
of whether primates possess Machiavellian intelligence. They had seen what they
believed to be calculated deception in their studies of apes and monkeys, and
conversations with other researchers convinced them that such practices were
widespread. Most of the evidence was anecdotal, but by painstakingly compiling a
record of examples, Whiten and Byrne believed they could persuade other biologists
that humans are not the only animals able to bamboozle one another.
Cheeky Monkeys
14. The result was a catalogue of observations (“A thinking primate’s guide to
deception”, New Scientist, 3 December 1987, p 54) which by 1990 had grown to 253
entries. The database includes numerous examples of female infidelity, both in
monkeys and apes. Females would hide from the view of the dominant male and
suppress their copulation calls as they mated with subordinate males, so as to reduce
the chances of violent reprisal. Another example was the vervet monkey which,
finding itself cornered following a chase by angry members of its troop, looked to the
horizon and emitted an alarm call to signal the arrival of a predator. Distracted, his
aggressors climbed the trees to search for the nonexistent danger and the chase was
called off.
15. Despite the quantity and quality of the anecdotes, Whiten and Byrne agree with
other biologists that these alone do not prove the existence of Machiavellian
intelligence in primates. But as far as the great apes are concerned, they believe the
data point to a “real theory of mind understanding”, but that claim is not, they say,
justified for other primates. Instead of skilfully manipulating their fellows using an
ability to mind-read, they might merely be re-enacting tricks which trial and error had
showed to work under particular circumstances. The vervet monkey, for example,
might know that shrieking would distract its aggressors, but not understand how. If in
the past the monkey really had spotted a predator while being chased it could have
learned to associate the warning call with its own escape.
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16. Is it possible to distinguish between intentional deception and tactics learnt by
trial and error? Today, attempts to crack this problem often rely on the sort of test
developed to assess theory of mind in young children. The latest research will be
discussed at a symposium held by the International Primatological Society in
Madagascar this August.
17. At the meeting Joseph Call from the University of Liverpool will describe a
study done with Michael Tomasello of Emory University, Atlanta, to compare the
mind-reading abilities of chimps, orang-utans and four and five-year-old children.
Using a non-verbal version of the Sally-Anne test, the researchers found that children
performed as predicted: only four-year-olds failed. No ape passed the test. Call
concludes that only humans are capable of distinguishing between what they know
and what others know. But he concedes that, like the young children in Reddy and
Newton’s study, chimps and orang-utans might possess the rudiments of mind-reading
without having enough understanding to pass the Sally-Anne test.
18. How can the naturalistic evidence of Whiten and Byrne be reconciled with the
failure in mind reading tests of even our closest relatives? Mark Hauser of Harvard
University believes he has the answer. He attributes the anomaly to flaws in the
method. It is unfair, he argues, to test for a theory of mind in nonhumans with a task
designed specifically for humans. With his colleague Laurie Santos, Hauser has tested
cotton-top tamarins using a special version of the Sally-Anne test.
19. An actor sees an object being hidden, then a screen is raised to obscure his
vision while the location of the object is changed. When the screen is lowered, the
actor looks either in the original hiding place, as he would be expected to, or in the
new location. Hauser and Santos filmed the response of monkeys so that they could
assess the length of time animals spent looking at the actor. Psychologists routinely
use this measurement when testing preverbal children, and assume that a longer stare
indicates that the child’s expectation has been violated. Hauser and Santos found that
monkeys looked longer when the actor searched in the new location. They believe this
shows that tamarins understand that the actor cannot have knowledge of an event he
hasn’t seen.
Distant Relatives
20. Hauser’s results have surprised other researchers, not least because tamarins
split from the hominid line an estimated 40 to 50 million years ago. If such deceptive
powers have been honed through evolution then in theory tamarins should have
poorer mind-reading abilities than chimps, which branched off only 5 to 6 million
years ago. Hauser has yet to test chimps. Another puzzle is why tamarins might need
an implicit understanding of another’s mental processes. Whiten points out that the
dissociation of implicit and explicit understanding makes sense in young children
because it is only a stage on the way to a full-blown theory of mind. “It’s strange to
see something this complex in an animal if it isn’t being used more explicitly – to
intentionally deceive, for example,” he says. “That’s not the way natural selection
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works. Natural selection operates to refine and modify things because of their
practical consequences.”
21. But Hauser argues that the “looking” response does not necessarily indicate
implicit knowledge. It could equally be a different way of expressing explicit
knowledge – the tamarin version of human speech. As for the large evolutionary gap
separating tamarins from us, it is not impossible, he says, that we evolved the capacity
to mind-read independently of each other.
22. Hauser goes even further. “There is a good chance that when we get more
sophisticated with our techniques and procedures, we’re going to find that at least
some primate species, and potentially some nonprimate species, will have the
rudiments of a theory of mind.” Either way, he is convinced that the mental gap
between nonhuman primates and humans is smaller than scientists used to think. The
ruthless politician or entrepreneur may be at the top of the evolutionary tree of
deception, but according to Hauser, Whiten, Byrne and others, apes and monkeys are
surely to be found swinging in the branches below.
23. If the world of primates really is teaming with liars and cheats, it is likely that
the ability to outwit another may be more than simply a useful tool. This is what
Whiten argues in a book soon to be published. Deception, he says, has played a
crucial role in evolution. When early hominids left their forest habitat to colonise the
plains, 4 to 5 million years ago, they were physically ill-adapted to compete with the
highly specialised carnivores already there. What they did have were the rudiments of
Machiavellian intelligence. So instead of honing their bodies to slug it out with their
rivals, they sharpened their minds to outwit the rest. Our ancestors survived, argues
Whiten, only by carving out a unique “cognitive niche”.
24. If Whiten is correct, then the same evolutionary forces that created complex
social organisation, giving early hominids power over other species, also shaped the
Machiavellian mind that was responsible for the ruthless corruption of the Borgia
family.
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Answer in your own words.
1.
2.
3.
What was the title of the book written by Machiavelli?
Answer : ____________________________________________________________
Complete the sentence below.
Machiavelli probably believed that his book presents the morals to be drawn
from the life and achievements of ________________________________________
Answer the question below in English.
What was the main moral to be drawn from Machiavelli’s book?
Answer : ____________________________________________________________
Answer the question below in Hebrew.
4.
In what sense is Machiavelli’s work consistent with the title of this article?
Answer : ____________________________________________________________
5.
6.
Answer the question below in English.
In what way does the trickery one sees in nature – paragraph 2 – differ from
calculated deception?
Answer : ____________________________________________________________
Answer the question below in English.
What novel suggestion – paragraph 3 – have recent researches among primates
and infants come up with?
Answer : ____________________________________________________________
Answer the question below in Hebrew.
7.
The existence of what qualities did Guy Woodruff and David Premack
presuppose for the successful performance of an act of deception?
Answer : ____________________________________________________________
Liar! Liar / 7
8.
Answer the question below in English.
a) What thesis is challenged by psychologists Vasudevi Reddy and Paul
Newton? b) Name those who have lately supported Newton’s claims
(paragraphs 6-10).
Answer:
a)
b)
9.
10.
11.
Answer the question below in English.
Sum up the two theories concerning the appearance of mind-reading ability;
which of the two is currently gaining more prominence?
Answer : ____________________________________________________________
Answer the question below in English.
To what conclusions – paragraph 11 – may the thesis, that humans develop the
ability to mind-read in early infancy, eventually lead?
Answer : ____________________________________________________________
Answer the question below in English.
What would the sexual practices of some of the females, both monkeys and
apes, suggest? (Generalize)
Answer : ____________________________________________________________
12.
Answer the question below in English.
In what sense, according to Joseph Call – paragraph 17 – are humans unique?
Answer : ____________________________________________________________
13.
Answer the question below in English.
Who are our closest relatives – paragraph 18?
Answer : ____________________________________________________________
Liar! Liar / 8
14.
Answer the question below in English.
What claims were Hauser and Santos – paragraph 19 – trying to refute?
Answer : ____________________________________________________________
Answer the question below in Hebrew.
15. Why did Hauser’s findings – paragraph 20 – appear unconvincing?
Answer : ____________________________________________________________
Answer the question below in Hebrew.
16. What was the revolutionary essence – paragraphs 18-22 – of Hauser’s claims?
(Generalize, do not specify)
Answer : ____________________________________________________________
17.
18.
Answer the question below in English.
To what does Hauser – paragraphs 18-22 – attribute human failure to discern the
capabilities of some primate species to mind read?
Answer : ____________________________________________________________
Answer the question below in English.
How does Whiten – paragraph 23 – account for Man’s success?
Answer : ____________________________________________________________
Answer the question below in Hebrew.
19. What is the main idea in this article?
Answer : ____________________________________________________________