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>> Amy Draves: Good afternoon. My name is Amy Draves, and I'm here to
introduce and welcome Robert Trivers, who is joining us as part of the Microsoft
Research Visiting Speakers Series. Robert is here today to discuss his book
"The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life."
Self-deception warps our view of the world and can have terrible consequences.
So why does deception play such a prominent role in our everyday lives. The
short answer is we do it for biological reasons. The longer answer will be
illuminated shortly.
Dr. Trivers is a professor of anthropology and biological sciences at Rutgers
University and the winner of Crawford Prize in 2007 for his fundamental analysis
of social evolution conflict and cooperation. Please join me in welcoming him to
Microsoft. [applause]
>> Robert Trivers: Thank you for the introduction, and more especially the
invitation. Thanks for turning out. It's a pleasure to be here. I've written a book
on deceit and self-deception, lying to others and lying to yourself.
And people that are relatively truth-oriented, as I take you people to be, may
sometimes be a little bit naive about the underbelly of all of this, the amount of
untruth, the amount of lies and the amount of deception and the amount of
self-deception, although God knows if you read the newspaper these days we're
flooded by it from every corner of this country, Washington D.C. and then
wherever the latest debate is. So one can hardly be completely naive about it.
But in any case, deception is no problem explaining in biology. It's found at all
levels. So bacteria that will imitate parts of your body to evade the immune
system and get in. HIV which causes AIDS, of course, changes its coat proteins
at such a rate that the organism cannot mount an immune response that works
against an HIV strain that might hit it six months or a year later, and that's one
reason why you can't easily come up with a vaccine against it.
Prey hide from their predators, camouflage and so on, vice versa predators hide
from prey sometimes prey imitate noxious objects like poisonous snakes in order
to frighten an insect looking like a poisonous snake to frighten birds or lizards
that prey on them.
Likewise, within species we have a whole arm load of examples of deception.
Insects, birds, mammals, et cetera. And it's easy enough to see situations in
which you can gain a benefit. Ultimately, biologically measured in terms of
reproduction success that is, production of surviving offspring are better put
genetic success, where we include not just surviving offspring, but effects on
collateral relatives where each of these effects are devalued by the appropriate
degree of relatedness compared to personal reproduction.
So, for example, to give you an obvious example from just daily life. Let's just
take a couple and we can discuss deceptions, which if you get away with, you
can gain a benefit. So you can tell your wife Maria that you love her to death,
and she's the only one in your life and you'd never consider anybody else.
Meanwhile, you have a baby by another woman down the road, or if you're the
governor of the state, hell, you might have the baby right in the home. So as
long as they don't find out, that may give you a benefit. Once she finds out,
you're apt to pay for it. Now that marriage may have been about to end anyway,
but it sure ended with the discovery of that.
Now if you put the shoe on the other foot, a woman can easily lie to a man and
show him a baby and say this is yours. We know from birds, from the 1980s,
when we started to be able to do DNA very precisely, that a striking percentage
of the offspring in many songbirds that are being raised by a male are not
genetically his. 20 to 40 percent is a common estimate.
There's one wren where it's over 50 percent of the offspring are not the offspring
of the male who is raising them. Now from the female standpoint we know that
she can -- well, she can benefit from such an arrangement if the genes of the
male that fathers her extra pair of offspring are superior in survival value or
eventual reproduction and the genes of the male who is raising them.
We have very good evidence from several species that females are biased in
their choice for extra pair copulations towards exactly such males. But they've
got to hide it from their mate. We have evidence that when they don't hide it or
when the mate knows or suspects, he may cut down on his parental investment.
So back to the human situation and you're presented with a challenge. Not
really. There's a nice expression from Senegal which I learned when I was there
which summarizes it from the male standpoint. Better an ugly child that looks like
you than a good-looking child that looks like your neighbor. [laughter].
And so explaining deception has never been a problem. Now, sometimes people
are naive about the force of deception. And again it's truth-oriented people that
are sometimes naive. Let's take someone you may have heard of Bill Gates is
his name. And in 2004 he famously predicted that spam would be a thing of the
past by 2006.
Well, I don't know when you last checked your computer. But it's chock-a-brock
full of spam and what he can do and computer experts could do at the time is
easily see how they could erect defenses against the then popular forms of
spamming, which indeed they did. But what he didn't see was how easy it was
for the spammers to come up with tricks that overcame those defenses and
indeed generate new tricks to which they would have to invent defenses.
So often in life deception takes the lead and truth or detection of deception is
playing catch-up. Anyway, regardless of such matters as to how naive one is
about the power of deception in life, the logic is simple. You can gain -- what
about self-deception? That resembles stealing from yourself. If I take $5 out of
this pocket and put it in this pocket, where is the net gain?
If I'm deceiving myself, I'm both victimizing and victim. So where is the gain?
And it's been a classic problem in human thought ever since people started
writing down their thoughts.
In your major religions, there's various kinds of teachings against such
self-deception. Some of the eastern religions are deep and sophisticated than
western religions. But take Jesus' famous teachings on judge not but you not be
judged for the judgment you pronounce shall you be judged. Why do you see the
moat in your neighbor's eyes and fail to see the demon in your eye own. Thy
hypocrite remove the beam from the thine own eye the better to see the moat in
your neighbor's eye. So this is all about, to me, self-deception. Stop denying
your own faults and projecting and seeing them on others. Get rid of your own
first if you want to see the other person accurately. And needless to say, Jesus
ain't in favor of self-deception.
But what's the explanation for it? Why is it so prevalent? What's its function?
There have been pretenders to the throne. Freud was an example. And he had
some interesting concepts and thoughts about self-deception. Denial, projection.
Ego defense mechanisms. Reaction formation, so on. But he was -- he wedded
that to a thoroughly corrupt view of human development.
Anal, oral, Oedipal phases. All you women are running around wishing you had
a dick, not one to use, but one tied to yourself and meanwhile all us men are
running around fearful that our fathers are going to cut our balls off. Just utter
fantasy, utter nonsense. Stuff he made up while snorting too much cocaine, and
pretending that you can lay the foundation for science by just dreaming up
whatever you want. That's true of economics, by the way. It ain't no science. It
pretends to be. Gives itself a Nobel Prize. Has an elaborate mathematical
structure. But it fails to do one of the most elementary things of a science which
is to ground yourself in pre-existing knowledge.
We're happy to have physics sitting on math, chemistry sitting on physics. You
know, biology sitting on chemistry. And some day we hope and prey the social
so-called science is sitting on biology. Where else are they going to sit?
We came here through three billion years of natural selection and evolution. Any
functional view of life has to be based on that. So one of these days they're
going to have to hook it up. But economists don't do it. They talk -- they say we
maximize utility. So you say to an economist what's utility. And he says anything
you want to maximize. Sometimes it's money. Sometimes it's food over money.
Sometimes sex trumps both of them. So then you need preference functions that
describe when it is I prefer sex over food versus money and so on. It's hopeless
for even one individual. For you to describe my preference function. You have
to know the time of day, whole set of other variables and so forth and so on,
where I am in my life.
And what they imagine, though, is that they can have this empty concept utility
and somehow build a so-called science upwards from it. Utter nonsense. And
one of the things they do is confuse personal utility with general utility.
And they often argue that they're closely aligned. And I don't know I'm
particularly sensitive to it because if you watch the kind of nonsense that was
generated in the last 10 or 20 years, which helped bring about this near
economic collapse from which a lot of people are still suffering very acutely now
in this country, you hear all kinds of garbage being spent saying the forces of the
market will naturally constrain deception or greed or whatnot.
Nonsense. We know plenty of examples from other animals where that's not
true. All right. So let's get to the point. What's the function of self-deception?
My argument has been, or the inside thought, a thought I had a number of years
ago is that self-deception involves in the service of deceit. It's a way of making
your deception harder to detect.
So let's imagine I'm lying to you now about something you actually care about,
you're close to me. Better yet, you know something about me. Then you can
study any of the signs of conscience self-knowledge of the fact that I'm
consciously lying towards you as evidence.
For example, if we tell a lie, when we come to the keyword, we almost always
have the pitch of our voice go up. And that's virtually an inevitable consequence
of the fact that we put a strain on ourselves. And whenever you strain this part in
the diaphragm, up goes your voice.
Now, in principle you could sit there and meditate otherwise. I'm coming to the
keyword so relax, Robert, take a deep breath, stick your gut out, don't tense up,
and you might slip it through. But that's an awful lot of work.
And in fact one of the best cues to consciously mediated deception is the voice
going up. Now, I have an absurd example of that happen in my life a couple of
years. A woman was denying something I was not accusing her of, which was
having a homosexual relationship with another woman. So she said: You think
I'm there with Sherry! And her voice shoots up two octaves, not just a couple of
notes, because her voice broke on the keyword, which was -- I said to myself,
well, I did have a theory. And now I have more evidence to support the theory.
Well, what about her eye movements? I used to think that they moved
nervously. But that's not the case. And nervousness is one of the poorer
predictor's of deceit. We're all conscious of it. We think nervousness is going to
be a cue. Because partly because we may suppress signs of it but there's a
more fundamental reason, which is that under cognitive load, that if I have to
create a lie right now, it's intellectually demanding, I have to create a falsehood
that's plausible on its face that I can say in a convincing manner which does not
contradict anything you know or about to know.
And which I can remember. And that cognitive load has opposite effects on
variables associated with nervousness. For example, we blink more if we're
made nervous. But if you're asked to add a set of numbers, you blink less than
someone who is not being asked to do anything cognitive. So which trumps
which? Well, in deception, cognitive load trumps nervousness. So you blink less
when you're acting deceptively. Now, going back to the movement of our eyes.
What really happens is the following. If I'm telling you a lie that I'm making up
right now, I look away from you to an empty part of space to complete the lie,
then I look back on you. Because it's too damn hard to make it up while this
extra cognitive load of you looking at me while I'm looking at you.
And then, likewise, you can have pauses while you have to dream up these lies.
There are verbal characteristics. This has been shown with computer work.
Very nice computer work.
The word I tends to decrease dramatically, because you're distancing yourself
from the eye. Qualifiers disappear. You don't say although it was raining I
walked to the Microsoft campus. You just say I walked to the Microsoft campus.
You don't add details that cost you more to invent and are harder to remember.
And so on.
So my argument is simply if I'm unconscious of the lying, if I've rendered the
damn thing unconscious, then first of all the invention of the lie can be done
unconsciously.
But also those cues that I'm giving off, the voice, the having to move the eye,
these other kinds of cues, are unavailable to you. Or let me give you a second
example, which is consistent with what I'm talking about here. But it's a special
case. We're all into or most of us, and on average, all of us are into
self-enhancement. All right. I'm smarter than I really am. I'm more useful to you
than I really am. I'm a nicer person and trust me that's a lie than I really am.
I'm better looking than I am. If you really want to see me at my best catch me on
the dance floor. All right. So now the point is that if you believe those things, you
are apartment to be so I claim more convincing in projecting it. I'll come back to
that in a moment. But let me give you two little verbal things that we do
unconsciously that relate to shifting blame and so on.
If I do something that has positive effects on you, then I take an active voice. I
did that, I did this, and then benefits rain down on you from heaven.
But if it's negative consequences on you, then I take no active voice I'm a victim
of circumstances, these things happened, that happened and then unfortunately
you suffered cause.
And to me one of the nicest examples of this was a guy that ran into a telephone
pole in San Francisco some 20 years ago or more. And is actually recorded by
the police his description was as follows: The pole was approaching my car
when I attempted to swerve out of the way and it struck me.
So we know from physics, perfectly legitimate description, but he shifted the
attention or the responsibility to the telephone pole. Or let me give you another
example. Let's let you be a member of the out-group and you be a member of
my in-group. And it's a verbal change depending on what happens.
So let's say you do something nice for me. I say, "She's a nice and considerate
person." Let's say you do the same thing. I don't generalize, I'm specific, he
gave me a glass of water. But let's do it the other way around. Let's say you
bumped into me. Then I say, "You bumped into me." But him now I generalize.
I say he's a clumsy and inconsiderate person and we do this quite unconsciously.
Generalize or specify depending on ingroup/outgroup. Let me go back to the
self-inflation business for a second because there's been a beautiful piece of
work on it that I think will amuse you.
So if you ask high school seniors in the U.S. how many of them think they're in
the top half of their class for leadership ability, 80 percent say they are. Can't be
true.
But as you may know, you can hardly beat academics for self-deception. So fully
94 percent of professors in the United States regard themselves as being in the
top half of their profession. And I plead guilty. I can be tied down to a bed in the
backward of a Seattle General Hospital and I still think I'm doing better than half
my colleagues. And that's not just a comment on my colleagues, right?
But are we just flabbing our mouth as they would say in Jamaica, is this just what
we're saying, or do we actually, say, on looks do I actually think I'm better looking
or am I just saying it?
Now here is the work that says we actually think we're better looking or in our
inner eye sees us as better looking. Here's what they did. They would let us
imagine it's you. They would take a photo of you, ask then they morph your face
with the help of a computer to make it better looking or uglier. They do it by
taking let's say you're a woman, they take 60 women and they have a panel of
just a few judges pick out the 15 best looking. Then they take those 15 and
average their faces together. That makes it even better looking than the average
of the individual faces. And then they add increasing percentages of that face to
your face.
So at 50 percent you're half and half. Okay? Or they morph you towards
someone with cranial facial syndrome, which distorts your face and makes you
look uglier. Fine. Now here's a game they play with you then. They've taken a
picture of you, they've morphed it and let's just use the 20 percent uglier and the
20 percent better looking. Here's what they do. You're sitting in front of a
computer screen, bling go 12 faces appear matched for your age and sex. One
of which is yours. Now, your job is simply as soon as you spot it, hit that button
with your hand and then point to it. That controls for errors. Okay?
And they emphasize you know speed we want here. Speed to response. Okay.
But here's the game. In some of the runs it's real you. In some of the runs it's
20 percent better looking you. And in some of the runs it's 20 percent uglier you
so which do you see first? Well, you see better looking you first. Takes you
1.86 seconds. Okay? It takes you 5 percent longer to see the real use and
5 percent longer still to see ugly you.
So in your mind's you're 20 percent better looking. Now if they showed you the
full range of 11 faces, that is your real one and 10, 20, 30, 50. 10, 20, 30, 40, 50,
here and ask you which one you like the most, you pick out 20 percent better
looking as the one you like the most.
If they ask you which one do you think is you, and mind you you've got the real
you in front of your face, then you're roughly on average 15 percent better. In
other words, half of them taking 10 percent better, half 20. So it's on average
15 percent better.
So it's bounded, which makes obvious sense, you know. 30 percent might be
implausible. 10 percent I'm not getting enough of the gain in there. So it really
seems as if in our mind's eye we think of ourselves as better looking.
Now I don't need no damn social psychologist to tell me this, because if I'm in a
big city walking along, talking to a younger and attractive woman, not up to
nothing, you understand, just trying to make her like me enough to allow me to
remain nearby, so I'm walking along here. And I'm giving her my little shuck and
jive and so on. And sometimes I'll spot on the other side of her an old man, white
hair, face falling apart, and not even walking, kind of sham bling, you know. And
then I realize: Oh, that's me, reflected in the store windows behind her.
So self-deceive me sees the real me as ugly me. Now, they've done another
experiment that's kind of nice, which I'll briefly mention to you. Oh, sorry. No,
before I'll do it, here's a paper that came out just two months ago after my book
came out or was just about to come out. They looked at self-enhancement
across 15 human societies, including Sweden, including Japan, including the
U.S., okay? And they had a simple measure of self-enhancement. Two or three
questions they ask.
How much are you such and such one to seven. So it's a measure of
self-enhancement. Here's the correlation and it's quite strong. It correlates very
strongly with income inequality. The less income inequality, the less
self-inflation.
The more income inequality, the more self-inflation. Yesterday at town hall, a
Japanese American fellow asked me about this. And he said Japanese people,
you know, don't tend to go in for self-inflation. I said indeed they don't. And they
have much more equitable income distribution than the U.S.
Sweden, they're virtually -- everybody's virtually earning the same amount. Of
course, I'm exaggerating. So they're not going in for self-inflation much. The
U.S. as you know, has got an equitable distribution that's getting much on worse
if we keep it up we'll be self-inflating at 30 percent 5, ten years down the road
and it makes an obvious kind of intuitive sense that for at least money if there's
no competition for the money because everybody's earning the same amount,
why bother with self-inflation?
Now, of course there's still the matter of good looks and those kind of things. But
I think that's a very interesting recent result that shows that this thing is adjusted
to I think GINN, G-I-N-N is the economic measure of income inequality.
Now, let's see. With that overly long introduction I had, I'm not sure I have too
much time left. So let me skip this other example and go on to -- well, hell, I
could amuse you with this. All right. Let me amuse you with this for two
seconds. Then I want to go into immunology of self-deception. Because it was
something I didn't know about when I started working intensively on this book
about five years ago.
But in Georgia, they ran some amusing experiments with A-1 heterosexual men.
What's an A-1 heterosexual man? That's a man who has never had a
homosexual experience, nor a homosexual fantasy or thought or so he says.
And then they divide them into those that are relatively homophobic and not.
Homophobia is a misnomer. It's not a fear of homosexual but aggressions
toward them and the measure of how much discomfort would you feel, anger
would you feel, blah, blah, blah. It's just one of these damn questionnaires. But
you can segregate people into those that are hyperupset and those that are
relaxed. Here's the fun part. They tie a plethysmograph around the base of each
man's wood, as they call that organ in Jamaica, and it measures changes in
circumference very accurately. Then they show them dirty movies. Now six
minutes of a pornographic film.
Now, if this is male and female and we got wood size here as a function of time
and it's six minutes, it grows admirably throughout. All right. Now, the ones for
homophobic and non-homophobic are statistically indistinguishable. So we don't
have to identify them, right?
Now, if it's watching two women make love, the thing starts nice, but it, for certain
reasons, it tapers off earlier here. But once again there's no difference between
the two kinds of men. Well, I think you're probably guessing what's going on
down here. Now, we're watching two men get it on. The non-homophobic men
show a slight and statistically insignificant increase in two messages, the
homophobic men show a steady increase, starts to take off here. They get
two-thirds of the way up to watching two lesbians. Now, really, we know this is a
daily occurrence. Not a daily occurrence, a monthly occurrence in our society.
Some preacher or some politician who has taken a public stand against male
homosexuality gets outed for his secret homosexual life. Whether it's as pathetic
of looking for love in a Minneapolis airport bathroom stall, how romantic can you
get?
Or some of these other things. So this is a case of denial, projection and then
attacking what you're projecting. And you can add towards a reaction formation
when there's something inside you that you dislike you take your reaction against
it. You deny it and then the negativity is expressed outwards. But I think the
negativity is often a really kind of a form of camouflage.
Okay. Now, let me switch to talking about the immune effects of self-deception.
Because you really cannot get a deeper view of what the costs are. And you
understand throughout this is a cost benefit analysis, being out of touch with
reality has some unfortunate downstream consequences.
But for an evolutionary argument we first want to get this one on the
self-deception listed off the ground and evolving and then the more sophisticated
form of the argument is to weigh the costs and benefits and that's going to
constrain its evolution. I'm not going to talk much about the cost.
But in any case, the immune effects are examples of costs and maybe one
example of benefit. So let me give you an example of cost. If you bring people
into the lab and ask them to state -- these are adults -- the most traumatic event
in their life, usually a childhood event. The most traumatic is sexual abuse.
Physical abuse like being beaten repeatedly by the parent can be traumatic.
Divorce.
Children are usually not happy. They're going to lose one parent, et cetera, et
cetera.
So anyway they've got to name the most traumatic thing in their life they've got to
say a few things about it. Then you split it into two groups. One group writes in a
private journal three days running for 20 minutes about the trauma. The other
group write about what they did that day. They're the control group, okay?
Now here's the interesting finding. Your mood goes down if you're writing about
the trauma, because you're having to relive something that's negative.
You like to suppress it and keep it out. Okay. However, your immune system
starts improving immediately and three months later your immune system is still
elevated and by now your mood has caught up with your immune system, if you
will, and it's elevated above the control group, which is this flat lining on all these
variables.
So this is a very important result that's sharing trauma even in a private journal
has immune benefits. And those in turn affect mood in a positive way.
Now, we did not evolve writing in private journals. So this is probably reflects the
benefits of sharing it with another person. Although, you could, in principle,
share it with the Lord in prayer as some people urge you to do it. And I mean
just like nobody's reading your private journal except you, there may not be
anyone on the other end of the line while you're praying. But if you're sharing it,
it may have a beneficial effect.
Now, if you look at adults, we know that trauma is associated especially when
it's -- well, we know that trauma is associated with health problems in adulthood,
but it's especially true of sexual trauma, which, of course, is especially common
for girls not boys as in Penn State. It goes both ways but it's more common with
girls.
And it turns out that sexual trauma is the least shared trauma of any trauma in
childhood. More than half of women did not tell a soul. Not even their own
mother. It's shameful. They feel guilty. They think maybe they brought it on.
And furthermore there may be a situation like it's from their stepfather. So telling
mom can create problems.
Situations where mom denies it, because she's in denial and wants to protect the
marriage. The child may not want to harm the marriage and so on. Whatever
the reasons are, we're pretty confident from various lines of evidence that the
reason why sexual trauma has such negative effects on the immune system -- I
mean you can measure the immune parameters. And likewise they just have a
lot of sickness. They catch colds and have these other kinds of chronic
conditions.
Results from the lack of sharing of the trauma more than the trauma per se.
Okay. Yes, did you want to say something?
>>: What's the connection between the self-deception and the immune
suppression? How does it affect that?
>> Robert Trivers: Well, dear, if I could answer that I'd have a major paper in
press in Nature and Science. I tried repeatedly to work it out. And the
information just ain't there.
First I started thinking about the brain. See, the immune system's an extremely
expensive system. And in nature roughly 30 percent of mortality or variation of
reproductive successes are due to parasites. It's a major selective effect.
What's more important than predators?
So in any case, we produce every two weeks three grapefruit sized set of tissues
in our immune system. The life span of a white blood cell is two weeks. That's
not the half life. That's the full life. And so we gotta replenish our white blood
cells even absent an infection every two weeks. We've got to produce a new set
of them.
Okay. So it's an extremely expensive system in both proteins and energy. And
we can draw down on it for other purposes. So I tried to work out the logical on
those lines.
It's better for me to just tell you, I ain't got it solved and it's going to take a while
for it to be solved. It almost certainly requires that we understand which
chemicals are common to both, are important both in brain function and in
immune function.
We know, for example -- well, let me just end by saying that, okay? The book -a big scientist on my knees, you know I have a couple of examples where we
chemicals that work in both situations. But that's not an answer to your question.
Your direct question cannot be answered at present. Not by me.
Let me mention -- well, let me mention one analogy that I do mention in the book.
We've known since the 1980s that the reason why females and so many species
of animals like brightly colored males is because bright coloration is hard to
achieve if you're sick or have suffered parasite load.
So by choosing the brightest colored male bird or whatnot, you are most likely to
get a male who has got parasite-resistant genes which are then valuable for your
offspring.
So why this relationship between color and signs of sickness? It was just one of
those arbitrary things until in the 1990s they showed that carotinoids, the reds,
yellows and oranges, are major chemicals in our immune system.
And if you're sick, a bird's beak, if it's bright red, will turn pale because the body
is sucking the carotenoids out of the beak and putting them into the immune
system to fight the infection.
I know you are sitting there looking at me when are you going to get to my point.
I'm not going to get to it and so let me stand over here and not deal with that
pressure anymore.
So let me give you, if you guys can stand it, let me give you one other example
on the immune side. And then I think I'll tell you something about cheating in
science that might amuse you.
All right. Let's return to homosexuality now. But on the other hand let's talk
about males that are primarily, and I mean 98 percent or completely homosexual.
Now, we know there's this phenomenon of being in the closet.
So you can be in the closet where only two heterosexual friends know about this
side of yourself. You can be part way out of the closet where five know and your
parents or one parent and you can be out there where people at work know and
your friends but others know. And then whoopy deedo, you can be over here
where everybody knows you're gay, even if they don't know you because you're
flaunting it. Now which one do you think is better for your health? Is it
suppressing your identity and living a double life and living a lie and having to
practice some self-deception, which the former which I'll skip for a moment as
part of it, or is it being out there, out of the closet? What's your guess, who says
it's more healthy to be in the closet, show of good hands. Who thinks it's better
to be out of the closet?
Well, I'm sorry to say you're all right. More fun when the audience goes the
wrong way. But they don't go wrong on this one. Now, the data are
unambiguous. And it's easiest to present by talking those that are halfway in the
closet or halfway out, but in fact if you graph it, it works by each category. In
other words, it's a correlation that's quite robust.
But if you're HIV negative, you suffer from cancer more often and bronchitis on
opposite ends of danger to you if you're in the closet. If you're HIV positive, you
transit into AIDS quicker and die 20 percent sooner if you're in the closet
compared to out of the closet.
Now homosexual men have been very intensively studied precisely because of
their connection to HIV, and the first couple of studies I looked at they corrected
for everything they could think of, ethnicity, socioeconomic class blah, blah, blah.
But they were not correcting for unsafe sex. Now, why is that relevant? Let's say
I've got HIV, a strain in here. And then some man kindly donates a second strain
to me. Now the two strains are in competition in me. And that will tend to
increase their replication, which is going to tend to bring on AIDS quicker.
So you want to control for that. So my notion, I'm not even going to ask you for
the show of hands. We're probably on the same wavelength on this, is that
you're more likely to have unprotected sex if you're in the closet. So I say if
you're out of the closet you've got three condoms on you and one in the boot in
case there's an orgy, right?
Now if you're in the closet, you go out with your heterosexual friends, couple of
married couples, someone else. You have no intention to have sex, but after
four drinks and it's midnight, your car turns left instead of right and you end up
there with no condom.
So lo and behold they had two studies that corrected for unprotected sex. Goes
in just the direction I'm saying. It is significantly associated with being in the
closet. But when you correct for that factor, the major correlation is virtually is in
fact it's as robust as before.
So this is not being caused -- this correlation with HIV positive men is not being
caused by the connection to unsafe sex.
I'll mention two things real quickly. There's a chapter on self-deception airplane
crashes. Some people say I flew from Chicago to Boston and I love that chapter.
Other people say I felt more comfortable waiting until I was on the ground to read
that chapter.
But I analyzed the crash of Air Florida Flight 90 years ago that took off from
National DC airport and ended up in the Potomac River in terms of deceit and
self-deception between the pilot and co-pilot. That was before Google and so on.
We'd just have a folder. Every time there was a plane crash, in went the story.
And I was consulted by the U.S. Army for some manual on cockpit
conversations.
In any case I kept up with the subject. Now, here's a striking single fact. And
again on its face it's counterintuitive. Pilots fly the plane 50 percent of the time.
And co-pilots fly it 50 percent of the time. Of course, when the co-pilot's flying
the, pilot is still in charge. When Jesse Sullenberger runs into a set of geese
there in New York City because the co-pilot was flying, Jesse says my plane and
co-pilot says your plane. Then he lands it on the Hudson River. But in any case
the point is this 80 percent of accidents occur while the pilot is flying. How does
that make sense? Ain't he the more experienced one, ain't he putatively the
better pilot, etc, etc., ain't he the pilot and the other guy the co-pilot? So why
should it be more likely that you're going to die if the pilot's flying the airplane.
And careful work suggests that the major problem with the pilot flying is a
dominance relationship in the cockpit in which the co-pilot may be inhibited from
speaking up.
And this was especially true of Korean Airlines for a period of time. And Korea, I
understand the Korean language has some hierarchical terms. And in the
cockpit, there's pilot's on or whatever and you're sort of are obsequious around
him. And the relationship is symbolized by the fact that a Korean pilot once
backhanded a co-pilot for making a modest suggestion to improve things.
They literally had Korean Airlines planes flying straight into a mountain in
Indonesia with the co-pilot saying pilot-san I think perhaps a slight adjustment
now might be appropriate. Bam. You know?
So and incidentally, aye-yi-yi, incidentally -- now what the hell was the
incidentally on that?
Oh, incidentally, the worst configuration, which confirms this logic, is when the
co-pilot and pilot are flying for the first time together. Because if you're the pilot
and I'm the co-pilot, but we have flown together a number of times, we may be
friends by now.
And I may be able to say to you, Phil, I think blah, blah, blah. But if it's the first
time we're flying, you're more likely to get that hierarchical structure that inhibits
me from speaking up. So it's as if the pilot were flying you've only got one in the
cockpit, if there's a sufficiently strong dominance hierarchy. There's a whole
chapter on it including space disasters thrown in for good measure.
One last thing, this is a paper that just came across my desk. And I was just
trying to get some of the details straight in my head. Willingness to share
research data is related to the strength of the evidence and the quality of
reporting of statistical results.
PLOS-1 just came out. November 2011. All right. It turns out the American
Psychological Association publishes like 50 journals. And if you get a paper
accepted, you sign a contract that states that you were willing to share the
original data with anybody writing. So do they? No, the first study showed that
75 percent don't share the data.
You know, they just, scientists just write a bunch of authors and say we like your
data. Now, 25 percent never answer. Another 30 percent say they are, and as
they pointed out six years later they still haven't gotten it.
Six say they can't share it because either the data are lost or it's too hard for
them to manipulate in a form to share it. Now they go ahead and show that this
tendency to share is related to statistical slovenliness let's call it. Series of minor
errors you can make.
You can round off .058 down to .05, which is where you want it. .058 is
technically not publishable. It's not a scientifically valid fact. So they showed that
the more the data were close to .05, the last likely they are to share it. Then they
did these statistics themselves these authors for papers that provided sufficient
information, degrees of freedom, what the variance was and so on.
And they find that failure to share is positively associated with numbers of
statistical errors. Okay. So science, if you can call psychology of science yet,
but as you know newborn sciences at least got this problem.
I'm sure other more mature sciences have it as well. So anyway -- sorry.
>>: That's okay. Questions. So the first one is if we don't actually have the data
then how do we know what the errors were?
>> Robert Trivers: They publish it.
>>: But they publish their statistical results. They don't push their raw data. I
thought the whole point was they don't share their raw data.
>> Robert Trivers: No, they don't share their raw data but in some of the papers,
I don't know statistics, I mean I know it's utility. And I know it conceptually. But if
you put a gun to my head I could not do a T test. However, they look at papers
that have sufficient details so that they themselves can run the test.
And they will find out that people make the various kinds of errors. They'll make
it a one-tailed test when it should be two. Or it already is a one-tailed test but
they divide by two in order to make it a one-tailed test. Those kind of mistakes.
They're fairly -- or they're rounding mistakes I just mentioned.
>>: They can only do this kind of analysis to find the mistakes. I see, look at the
papers themselves in the calculations that are actually ->> Robert Trivers: Right. They're saying even on that basis where we don't
even know the data we can see there are errors being made systematically
which tend to be in their direction and tend to be most common when you're right
around .05. The break-even point. If you're way down there at .001 you don't
need the lie.
>>: If you're going to lie, lie big.
>> Robert Trivers: Pardon me?
>>: If you're going to lie in a psychology paper lie big.
>> Robert Trivers: That's right. Lie big and lie often. Anyway, I'm a little bit
sensitive to it because I published -- I didn't publish it. I was one of seven
authors on a lead article in a cover story in Nature back in 2005.
And we were using my Jamaican students measured for degree of bodily
symmetry three different times followed for 15 years and blah, blah, blah. But we
used motion capture camera work to capture dance.
And so that's how you get published in nature. You have a new methodology
and then some striking results. You're in the door. So if we just took videos -- so
we were trying to correlate dancing ability with how symmetrical you are.
Symmetry is good for traits in which on average people are symmetrical. You're
healthier, better looking, stronger, run faster, etc., whole series of positive
correlates in ourselves and other species. We were curious about dancing. And
Jamaica is a society where people dance easy and often, so on and so forth.
And if we took videos of people dancing, there would be a problem, because
since you're better looking, if you're symmetrical, we might see a good-looking
guy like you and actually you can't dance very well. But we up you a little bit
because of the looks, right?
So using motion capture cameras, beautiful, because we then created a whole
bunch of -- they were more than stick figures a little bit more than, more
humanoid than a stick figure but basically a stick figure that was identical across
all dances. So when we brought that back down and had the people evaluated
for dancing ability, they're only looking at the phenotype of the dance.
So we showed a number of striking results. The entire thing like Germans would
say is [inaudible]. Complete nonsense. My post-doc sat there and invented the
whole goddamned thing right down to changing, when I discovered he'd done
this it was like a knife in my heart.
He actually changed the FA values. I mean, our whole project is based -- FA is
fluctuating asymmetry our whole project is based on we're measuring the degree
of asymmetry. We had proven that the paper was a fraud to one in ten million.
But when we submitted to Nature in an attempt to retract it. Nature asked for all
the original data, plus the original animations. And going through the tables one
night of his dataset and mine, you had to go about 22 dances down before they
were chosen or subjects before they were chosen for the dance. I realized
goddamned, he's got a wrong FA value.
And so out of the 80 FA values, he falsified 65. Out of all of the non-dances,
which was way more than 80, maybe 230, there was only one that was wrong.
We think he falsified it and then forgot to change it back when he didn't use it.
So that alone is less than one in a billion. So you multiply the two together and
we're up in the gazillions. Now, Rutgers has been -- see NSF supported it. If
NSF supports work or NIH and fraud is alleged, it kicks the problem back to the
institution that received the money and says: You do an investigation.
And the institutions take as long as they possibly can. I'm very cynical about
institutions regarding fraud. They all wished the problem went away. And NSF,
by the way, holds a cudgel over Rutgers' head and says: We can stop all
NSF-supported money to Rutgers, or we can stop all to the anthropology
department or we can keep Dr. Trivers and Cronk from every getting NSF money
so they have reprisals that force Rutgers to do the job. Well almost. It's over two
years now since they started their investigation.
They still haven't revealed a thing. But I discovered they had hired a statistician
who proved something very nice. The fraudster change. Hell, you don't want to
hear all the goddamned details with fraud. But anyway since I'm into the
sentence I'll be done with it.
Let's say your ears are one millimeter difference in -- okay, that's the degree of
asymmetry between your ears. Now let's say mine are two millimeters apart but
my head's twice as big so we always divide -- so that's the same degree of
asymmetry. So you divide the asymmetry by the trait size. So that was the key
fact that he changed. But then he didn't bother to program his computer so that it
automatically changed the values on either side. So as to be consistent.
So his data also internally completely inconsistent. You understand what I'm
saying? In other words, if you divide the FA values in his files by the trait size,
you don't get the falsified values.
If he was a little bit -- now I don't know what the probability is. I think it's less
than the number of atoms in the universe, the inverse of that.
And who knows when Rutgers will finally fess up to it. Anyway, let me just end,
pretend to summarize this just by saying: This is a topic that goes from our inner
most relations, intimate relations with other people, husband and wife, children,
parents, even conversations we have with ourselves. And it goes all the way up
to societal disasters, misguided, stupid and disastrous wars often have a real
component of self-deception. Alas the people planning and running the war
rarely suffer the consequences these days.
You know, 100,000 Iraqis may die, four million displaced, terrorism way, way up
since this mad response to 9/11. But the people that designed it are doing just
fine as far as you can tell. That's a little unfortunate feature of self-deception at
the mega level. Other people will suffer the cost or may suffer the cost or may
suffer the cost but not the perpetrators.
Then the garbage you hear about economics these days, I mean, it's just
incredible. I don't know the field but I know more than the nonsense they're
talking. Or take something that amuses the hell out of me. If you suggested that
the wealthy should pay a little bit more in taxes so as to get a fair distribution or
more fair distribution, class warfare, class warfare, bullshit class warfare is when
peasants with their pitchforks come into the king's area. That's class warfare.
These demonstrations throughout the country are trying to bring in a little bit of
class consciousness. I like the guy in New York that had a sign saying hungry,
eat a banker. But that's not much class warfare. That's a little class comment.
In any case this is a topic that ranges up and down, and we can all contribute to
it. Any discipline we're working in has material on it if you're an expert in
Shakespearian plays you can find deceit and deception in plays. And even if
we're not in an academic discipline we all practice it and we're all victimized by it
so we can study it around us and in principle make valuable observations.
The man that works on my property in Jamaica, I'm explaining to him this voice
going up and he said to me, "Well, does that mean if you confront a person and
accuse of them of a lie, that their voice will tend to go up?" And I said I'll bet you
it's true I wish you would have said it to me nine months ago because it would be
a speculation in my book.
Okay. Thank you for your attention.
[applause]
Yes.
>>: Can you speak to the role self-deception plays in people actively choosing to
do something they know is wrong?
>> Robert Trivers: Can you give me an example, because the way you're putting
it, it's like -- it's almost as if you're excluding self-deception. They actively do it
even though they know it's wrong. So where is the what's the example? Where
is the self-deception there?
>>: That they couldn't possibly harm anyone. Even if it does, it doesn't matter.
>> Robert Trivers: Okay, yes there's a whole ->>: Like bankers deciding to roll together derivatives and sell them and so on.
>> Robert Trivers: Yes. Well, there is a literature and it's robust. It doesn't
mean I can pull out the nice example or two that I trust is in the first chapter of my
book.
But it's well known that people definitely want to keep up an image of being moral
or more or less moral among in a group of species where we care about things
like that.
So there's all kinds of mental operations that go on, biased remembering, biased
reporting, bias this and that allow you to do what is obviously immoral or
inappropriate action and still keep a facade up.
But if you want a specific example of such a maneuver, I'd have to think about it.
You can -- they ran the following strange experiment. They've got someone
pretending to be handicapped or crippled. And they've got someone else who is
pretending to be normal on a bus or something. And they're each watching,
what, a TV screen. Something like this. I don't know whether it's a bus or a
room or something.
That you walk in and you've got a choice of which two seats to sit next to. Now, if
they're watching the same program, you sit next to the crippled person as if
demonstrating you ain't got no bias, but if you can be given a reason to express
your bias, such as the fact they're watching different programs, you now decide
that this program is more interesting.
But your real reason, I mean the correlation is not with the program. They're
reversing those, it's simply with are the two people watching the same programs
or different programs.
So there's lines of research like that where if you give people an option to make it
look, to rationalize it, they go for it. Okay? Yes?
>>: Do you distinguish between self-deception where you know in some glimmer
it's true like you're in the closet and versus self-deception where you have no
idea, like I lived a thousand years ago and I believe the earth is flat because the
latter doesn't seem to be explained by your theory of self-deception.
>> Robert Trivers: Wait a second. I felt about writing until you said that. What's
your statement now? First of all, let me just make a general statement. Of
course the more sophisticated account of this doesn't just talk about conscious
and unconscious, because we know there's a graded series of steps between
complete unconsciousness, I don't know what the "F" you're talking about, and
semi-consciousness or, well, there's no such thing as complete consciousness.
To be conscious of some things you have to be unconscious of other things, you
know?
The question is whether you're doing that in a biased and self-serving way. But
what were you saying about flat earth didn't seem to fit into my theory or
something like that.
>>: If I'm a true flat earther, and it doesn't seem that believing in a flat earth helps
me to deceive others in any other way these are just the facts I have and I
believe it. It doesn't help me.
>> Robert Trivers: Well, I don't know. For a brief period of time I debated a
young earth creationist. Meaning these people are really loony tunes. They
calculate backwards from the bible and the whole world was invented 6,000
years ago. Bee got, be got, multiple by 30 and they've got 6,000 years. So I
can't even remember the guy's name again. But I was getting a thousand
dollars. And there were biologists saying you're giving him predominance I'll
debate the devil for a thousand dollars. Back then a thousand dollars meant a
lot.
But in that case the guy's promoting himself as someone with an important
intellectual contribution that runs counter to received wisdom. And so he was
definitely pumping himself up. He had money coming in. He filmed the damn
thing. And then I agreed to just get $2 per copy he sells. I'm an economic nitwit
and he got $8. Only he didn't pay my money after a while. Then I had to harass
him about that. He also went to jail because he also fought the IRS, and the IRS
is a worse entity to fight than me. And end up on the losing end of the stick.
There's an example where he's talking [inaudible] but where he's promoting
himself.
As you know, there's this notion that they're passing around now that us
scientists are so pathetic that for grant money we're willing to deny -- we're willing
to create a fiction about global warming and that humans have something to do
with it to just get grants. We all know people are willing to fudge around to get
grants. But we also know, as scientists, that if you can prove that global warming
is nonsense, you really rise in status, right? We have our eyes out for major
contradictions in what is generally accepted, because that's high payoff if you
prove that. If you just prove that this, yet another iteration of this argument is true
in that situation it's relatively minor. But anyway...
>> Amy Draves: One more question?
>> Robert Trivers: Not even one. Okay.
>> Amy Draves: Thank you very much.
>> Robert Trivers: Thank you.
[applause]