http://realhumannature.com/
WHY WE LIE SHOULD BE TITLED WHY WE'RE SELF-DECEIVED: HOW THE CONSCIOUS MIND DISGUISES OUR UNCONSCIOUS INTENTIONS BECAUSE IT HAS MORE TO DO WITH THE WORKINGS OF OUR UNCONSCIOUS AS IT RELATES TO SOCIAL INTERACTION (INTERPERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS) THAN IT DOES WITH LYING. AS AN ASIDE, YOU'LL NEVER LOOK AT SMALL TALK AND CASUAL CONVERSATION THE SAME WAY AGAIN AFTER READING THIS BOOK!
"Save The Small Talk Girl!" - 3 O 5iiive
Oh, I Go Deeper!
Freud held that the mind is opaque, riddled with self-deception, and mostly unconscious. He placed self-deception ("defense" or "repression") at the heart of his conception of human nature and believed that the recognition of unconscious mental processes would open exciting new vistas for psychological science. Freud also held that we must consider the human mind in its broader biological context, and proposed that the study of evolutionary biology should be part of the professional education of every psychoanalyst.
(p. 112)
Haskell, a self-confessed monomaniac, immersed himself in a detailed study of group talk. He scoured the literature for references to the phenomenon, recorded T-group sessions, closely analyzed the written transcripts, and soon began to notice the same processes at work in ordinary conversations. "At this point," he wrote, "I found myself suspecting my observations - and my sanity...After all, I observed that group members were talking to me in code, as it were. This is the stuff that paranoid schizophrenia is made of." This was no idle worry. Thirty years earlier Ferenczi's colleagues, including his one-time mentor Sigmund Freud, wrongly diagnosed him as psychotic. They apparently thought that Ferenczi's idea that his patients were talking about him in coded messages sounded like it was a symptom of severe mental illness. It is important to realize that, as a psychologist, Haskell was working in a professional climate that was deeply antagonistic to the very idea of encoded, unconscious messages. Many scientific psychologists, both then and now, are chary of getting anywhere near anything that smacks of "Freudianism." These people usually do not know very much about what Freud actually wrote, but this does not prevent them from trashing or cold-shouldering anything that they think sounds Freudian. To his consternation, Haskell found that he was often tarred with this brush. (p. 180)
A trawl through Freud's writings turns up a few gold nuggets among the rubble. Consider the following comments Freud penned in 1913: "I have had good resaon for asserting that everyone possesses in his own unconscious an instrument with which he can interpret the utterances of the unconscious in other people." He also remarked that
Psycho-analysis has shown us that everyone possess in his unconscious mental activity an apparatus which enables him to interpret other people's reactions, that is, to undo the distortions which other people have imposed upon the expression of their feelings.
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Freud's remarks point to the presence of a mental module specialized for interpersonal perception, which is able to reach behind the deceptive veneer that often covers our real attitudes toward one another. I call it the Machiavellian module.
It is frustrating that Freud does not explain how he reached his conclusions. If we knew what observations were at the bottom of these claims, they might provide some information about the output of the system, the way that this module affects human behavior, and therefore give us some idea of how to go about observing it in action.
A search of the wider psychoanalytic literature shows that nobody else picked up this line of investigation until the eccentric Hungarian psychoanalyst Sandor Ferenczi delivered a paper at a conference in Wiesbaden, Germany, in 1932. The paper, which was not well received, asserted that individuals undergoing psychoanalytic treatment often "have an extremely refined feeling for the wishes, tendencies, moods, and dislikes of the analyst, even should these feelings remain totally unconscious to the analyst himself."
I do not know whether they can tell the difference by the sound of our voice, by the choice of our words, or in some other way. In any event they display a strange, almost clairvoyant knowledge of the thoughts and emotions of the analyst. In this situation it seems hardly possible to deceive the patient and if such deceit is attempted, it can only lead to bad consequences.
If true, this implies that the Machiavellian module is exquisitely sensitive to both the conscious and unconscious mental states of other people, and is relatively impervious to interpersonal deception. What about the output question? We are given a hint in an obscure remark toward the end of the paper referring to a "strange, much veiled, yet critical manner of thinking and speaking," implying that the output of the Machiavellian module is verbal.
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The Wiesbaden paper was Ferenczi's swan song: he died of pernicious anemia later that same year. However, in the diary that Ferenczi kept during the final year of his life; there are two brief entries with a bearing on our question. Both of these involve Ferenczi's patients reporting recollections to him. Ferenzci interpreted these recollections as unconscious portrayals of the real implications of his (Ferenczi's) own behavior...Ferenczi proposed...the memories [recollections] were evoked precisely because they were a good analogy for the real, present-day social interaction between analyst and patient. They represented a disturbing aspect of reality all too well. In one case, a patient spoke at length about a childhood teacher "who was very nice...yet always maintained a pedantic attitude." In another, a patient reported a dream about a "helpless struggle" to communicate a message to man who did not understand her. In both cases, Ferenczi interpreted the patient's remarks as a reflection of their relationship with him: his pedantic attitude in the first, and his inability to understand in the second. Perhaps without realizing exactly what he had stumbled upon, Ferenczi developed the rudiments of the idea that we unconsciously respond adaptively and perceptively to current social situations, and that we convey these perceptions to other in disguise.
Ferenczi's hypothesis raises some significant issues that repay careful consideration. Why is it that memories sometimes intrude unexpectedly into consciousness? The obvious explanation is that some environmental stimulus triggers them, in much the same way that a particular smell or piece of music has the power to transport one back to an earlier time. The kind of memory evocation that we are concerned with here is more opaque. When you hear a song on the radio that arouses memories of, say, your senior year in high school, the connection is immediately apparent. More often than not, though, memories are aroused with no obvious connection to a precipitating trigger, as I will shortly show with some examples. Ruling out the unscientific notion that these are simply random events, not caused by anything at all, it seems that the likely culprits are stimuli of which we are not aware. This explanation does not take us very far because it is much too imprecise. We need a reasonably clear idea of what kind of stimuli triggers these memories, and why they do so.
Ferenczi's examples suggest that the unconsciously discriminated meaning of an environmental stimulus is what primes at least some recollections. This invites a further question: Why is it that not all of our perceptions have the power to trigger memories in this way? If you consider the first example from Ferenczi's diary, there must have been a good deal more going on in the room than was represented by the memory of the pedantic teacher. Why is it that Ferenczi's patient did not respond unconsciously to the color of her analyst's shirt or to the vase of flowers on the table? Why is it that only certain perceptions operate as memory pumps? The answer is obvious. If you had been lying on Ferenczi's couch, wouldn't his condescending attitude have felt far more significant than the flower arrangement?
In any social encounter, we spontaneously give priority to concerns about conflicting interests, deception, and manipulation When confronted with another person whose behavior matters to us in some way, we unconsciously monitor that person's actions and expressions and then, delving deep into the memory library, select images that resonate with the meaning of the interaction. Ferenczi called these memories the "historical dressing-up" of a "wholly contemporary" situation. Although set in the near or distant past, they point to the unspoken dynamics unfolding in the emotionally charged present. By disguising our perceptions as memories, we are able to speak the unspeakable, to talk about the raw realities of social life while preserving the integrity of self-deception.
At this point, I think that it will be useful to leave the realms of theory and consider some examples that I think show the Machiavellian module in action.
My wife, Sabrina, is twenty years younger than I am. She is a woman of color and I am a Caucasian male. For many people, the sight of a middle-aged white man married to a younger black woman activates a variety of familiar stereotypes, fantasies, and suspicions. Although never mentioned in polite conversation, they find indirect and unconscious expression. One such incident occurred shortly after we had moved from England to the United States. Subrena and I attended a faculty party and were introduced to a white male colleague who, after a few minutes of small talk ("How are you enjoying Maine?"), filled an uneasy silence by suddenly informing us that his cousin had recently adopted a child from Africa. He emphasized his cousin's decision was unwise because "he's really too old for that sort of thing." Of course, it is possible that colleague's selection of precisely this conversational topic was purely coincidental, but the alternative explanation is almost too obvious.This man's story turned on the themes of age and race: Caucasian man who was too old adopted a child from Africa. It does not require an enormous leap of the imagination to conclude that it had something to do with his reaction to my wife and me. It is also obvious why he expressed these sentiments unconsciously. It would, after all, do violence to the rules of civilized social discourse to blurt out, "You are too old and too white to be married to this young black woman." We have experienced this sort of thing many times. On another occasion, after a similar introduction at a party in London, a male colleague started talking to me about the African-American jazz musician Louis Jordan. He then began to sing an obscure piece from Jordan's oeuvre. It was a song entitled "That Chick's Too Young to Fry," the lyrics of which humorously advised a man dating an underage girl to break off the relationship until she was older.
...We have seen how unconscious social communications can pack two distinct meanings in a single utterance: a surface (explicit, overt, conscious) meaning, and a coded (implicit, covert, unconscious) meaning. Coded meanings have to be interpreted in order to be understood. This poses a problem because the very idea of interpretation has acquired an unsavory reputation among members of the scientific community.
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The examples of unconscious communication in the previous chapter, the stories of the African orphan and the chick too young to fry, are analogical. In each case, a social situation evoked a memory that analogically expressed part of the Machiavellian meaning of the immediate situation. These memories were not the kind that we draw on when we recall, say, that Napoleon died on St. Helena ("semantic" memory), and are obviously different from "procedural" memories such as remembering how to ride a bike. Unconscious communication takes the form of "episodic" memories: memories of particular happenings. Can you recall what you did right after rolling out of bed this morning? How about the plot of the most recent movie you saw? Can you recall what you did last New Year's Eve? These are all examples of episodic memories.
Episodic memories tell a tale...stories depict real or imaginary scenarios that unfold in time. They are about things that happened, are happening, or are going to happen...stories seize the mind.
First, as outputs from the Machiavellian module, unconsciously coded messages are likely only in certain social contexts. People deliver unconscious messages in circumstances where it is important for them to determine the concealed intentions of other people, situations in which manipulation, misdirection, and self-deception are likely. We should expect to hear unconscious messages in situations involving covert conflicts or interest between the speaker and some other person(s), and in which it would be disadvantageous to speak openly about these conflicts of interest.
Second, coded narratives characteristically seem irrelevant to the conversational setting or discontinuous with the conversational flow, coming from "out of the blue." Consider the example of my colleague's reaction to my wife and me. His story seemed weirdly unrelated to anything going on in the immediate environment. Sometimes a speaker will leave an otherwise coherent conversation to veer off on an analogical riff - a seemingly irrelevant or gratuitous narrative tangent. Somewhat less tangibly, unconsciously coded communications often seem to have a sense of urgency. The subjective experience is something like "I don't know why I want to tell you this but I feel strongly that I want to you right now."
A Winter's Tale
One exceptionally bitter winter morning, just before class was to begin, three undergraduate students entered the classroom and took their seats. The class was very small under the best of conditions, consisting of only seven students, but only Sara, Amy, and Michelle put in an appearance that day. I decided to wait a while before kicking off the lecture, in case there were other students en route. As the three students began to chat, the following dialogue unfolded.
Michelle: I wonder where everybody is?
Amy: I heard a horrible story on the news, but I can't remember what it was.
Michelle: There was this guy who drove up into the mountains with his three-year-old child. He went out hunting and left the kid all by himself in the truck. When he came back his son was frozen to death. He just went off to enjoy himself, and when he came back his son was dead.
Sara: That's horrible.
Amy: Wasn't Tom Allen supposed to be here today? What time is he going to come here? [This referred to congressional representative who was scheduled to visit the university that day.]
Amy [turning to Sara]: I want to do a course with Professor H. next semester. He's so cute. He gets really excited when he teaches.
Sara: You can't. He's away on sabbatical. He won't be back till next year. Once in a while I see him in the supermarket.
What is going on here? On the face of it, not much more than idle chatter intended to fill the time before class starts, but quite a different story is revealed if we treat it as an unconsciously coded conversation. Michelle, Amy, and Sara found themselves unexpectedly confronted with a significant social event: half the class was absent. This event was biologically significant because the absent students defaulted on an implicit agreement to attend each session. I am sure that all three of them would have preferred to spend an extra hour under the blankets on that icy morning, but they dragged themselves out of bed and trudged through the snow to get to class. In other words, the students who chose to come paid a cost that the absent students did not have to pay (or, to turn it around the other way, the absent students enjoyed a special benefit). There were also much more subtle forces at play, as none of the three women knew how the others assessed the situation. If one were to denounce the absent students, she might alienate her two peers, who in turn might report her attitude to the absent students, the most likely outcome of which would be social ostracism by the group.
Michelle was first to speak up. She was a person who often dominated class conversation and who cared intensely about the quality of other students' commitment to the course. In fact, she consciously mentioned the absent students at the very beginning of the conversation, but did so in a way that was entirely neutral, expressing only mild surprise. It was only after a prompt from Amy that she continued and seemingly changing the subject, recounted a sordid tale of callousness, selfishness, and the abnegation of responsibility. On the surface, this report had no clear connection with anything that was of concern to these three young women. Given the context, this should alert us to the possibility of an unconscious message. Listening to it as such, the coded meaning practically leaps out. The man in the story appears to stand for the absent students and his abandoned child stands for the three students who turned up for class. It sounds as if Michelle was accusing the absent students of selfishly ignoring their obligation to come to class. Perhaps this unconscious characterization of the situation was a way for Michelle to probe the attitudes of the other two. If so, Amy's brief reference to the congressional representative who was supposed to be there showed that they were on the same page.
Like the politician who had not yet arrived, all of the students had made a commitment to be present, although more than half of them had defaulted on it. The fact that Sara next picked up the ball and mentioned that Professor H. is away on sabbatical reinforces this interpretation. By the end of the exchange, all three students had formed a coalition by establishing that they were all concerned about the absence of the other students. Although Michelle was the only one to provide a detailed and strongly negative assessment, neither of the others dissented from it.
Rather than overtly denouncing the absent individuals, Michelle's Machiavellian module selected a story that painted a picture of the delinquent group members as selfish and neglectful of the needs of the other students. The story also included the crucial element of he wintry weather, which the three young women had to endure to get to class, and which the absent students had managed to avoid. My next point risks straining even the sympathetic reader's credulity to the limit. Notice that number three, which corresponded to the number of students present, also appeared in Michelle's narrative. We will return to, and consider in greater detail, the possibility of unconscious numerical references in chapter 8.
There is another feature of Michelle's story that is typical of unconscious communications: her reaction to the missing students seemed wildly exaggerated. It would be natural and understandable for Michelle to describe the missing students as somewhat irresponsible and self-centered, but Michelle unconsciously made them out to be cold-hearted criminals. Similarly, the students who turned up for class were young adults who were mildly inconvenienced by the situation, but they are unconsciously depicted by the heart-rending image of a cruelly neglected, helpless child. This sort of speaker-biased hyperbole is exactly what evolutionary theory would lead us to expect.
After all, it is the job of the Machiavellian module to help us pursue our interests and avoid being exploited in the treacherous game of life; it has no obligation to be "objective" in doing so. We are dealing with hot cognition rather than cool, detached reasoning. Our unconscious assessments are uncompromising and unashamedly self-interested...
The conversation between Amy, Sara, and Michelle contained a remarkably elegant interweaving of pertinent themes. The choice of imagery was precise and highly economical. It was also automatic, slipping off the tongue without conscious deliberation or effort so naturally so naturally as not to arouse even a tremor of suspicion in the conscious minds of either the speaker or the listeners. From their point of view, they were just having a chat about nothing particular. When I pointed out to them what had gone on, all three burst into surprised laughter.
Again, it is possible that this is all a coincidence? What guarantee is there that I am not just reading these meanings into the conversation? What makes this conception of unconscious communication anything more than yet another wacky, unscientific account of human behavior? Although my interpretation my sound plausible or even compelling, the fact remains that reporting a conversation between three students does not prove anything. It is very easy for an author to select an example that dramatically confirms a pet theory. Of course, I chose every vignette in this book precisely because each compellingly illustrates what I purport to be true. How could it be otherwise? There would be no point in offering them if I did not think that the phenomenon is genuine and my explanation of it largely correct. I am not trying to prove anything by these anecdotes. I am trying to get you, the reader, to entertain the idea that there might be something in this.
There must be some way to explain the thematic contents of seemingly idle talk. At the very least, my hypothesis has the advantage of being rooted in evolutionary biology and is consistent with much of what science tells us about the architecture of the human mind. It also offers an integrative framework that casts new light on other investigators' results (more about this in chapter 7 and 8). These consideration fall far short of entailing its truth, but they bolster the case for taking it seriously. I will argue in the chapters to come that unconscious communicative phenomena are lawful and systematic, and can be tested using reasonably conventional methods, as well as less formal ones in everyday life. All of this will become clearer as we proceed. For now, let us return to the main topic of the present chapter.
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We need a principled biological explanation detailing why such interactions occur so frequently. More specifically, we need an account of why, at any given time, conversational partners select a particular, apparently trivial or irrelevant, topic to discuss. These questions may sound bizarre and it can be tempting to dismiss them, but it is not satisfactory to brush them off with responses such as "because it came to mind" or "because the speaker chose it." Why did the story come to mind? Why did the speaker chose it? In other words, what caused the speaker to unconsciously select just this story, and no other, at precisely this moment, in exactly this context?
The coded communication hypothesis gives us a possible explanation for at least some and perhaps many cases of seemingly inconsequential gossiping. We select particular stories at particular moments and in particular contexts because they portray the interpersonal dance unfolding right there and then on the interactional stage. Such stories encode information to shield our conscious minds from the complex Machiavellian dynamics humming away just beneath the surface of our encounters with others.
But Why Is It Unconscious?
Sitting on a bus crawling through heavy traffic in central London one muggy summer day, my wide and I found ourselves seated behind a young mother holding a fretful baby. The infant was hot, and the jerky movements of the bus and the still, stale air exacerbated her mood. The mother was perceptably irritated by the sluggish progress of the crowded bus: she was at wit's end and seemed unable to calm her infant. Predictably, the more stressed and irritable she became the more vehemently the baby cried. The outcome was an angry mother and a distressed baby. We struggled unsuccessfully to "tune out" this little drama and carried on with a lighthearted conversation about various friends and relations, but we could barely hear ourselves think, much less talk. Subrena suddenly found herself launching into a vehement critique of her friend's style of child care. "I'm sorry, David," she said, "but I would never let Jane look after my child!" She went on to describe Janet's lack of patience with her daughter, how she would become enraged and inappropriately punish the girl in the mistaken belief that such "strictness" was good for her. At this point, the mother changed seats, moving farther away from us, and became calmer and more attentive. The baby stopped crying. It was at this point that Subrena abruptly ended her diatribe about Janet's dysfunctional mothering techniques.
Subrena's message seemed so transparent that I assumed that she had intended it quite consciously. When an opportunity arose, I asked, and she reacted with astonishment. She had been completely unaware of any connection between her story about Janet and the drama that had unfolded on the bus a few moments before. An obvious question to ask is why did Subrena do this unconsciously? Why did she deceive herself about the meaning and motivation of her story? Would it not have been more advantageous for her to respond consciously?
Just think of what would have happened if Subrena had directly accused the woman of handling the baby ineptly. The young mother would probably have taken offense and the conflict between mother and baby would have almost certainly escalated into something both more volatile and more costly. In concealing the meaning of her story from herself, Subrena did not have to struggle with issues about overstepping social boundaries. Furthermore, she could sincerely deny that she was trying to manipulate the young mother, who would not feel that another woman was challenging her maternal prowess. By communicating her message unconsciously, Subrena flew under the radar of both the mother's consciousness and, perhaps more importantly, her own. We will never know whether or not the woman on the bus consciously took my wife's remark as a hint, but based on similar experiences, I very much doubt it. Unless the sequence of events was purely coincidental, the delivery of an unconscious message seemed to be a remarkably effective way of securing the desired outcome.
Mother Nature has seen to it that the conscious mind is relatively blind to the nuances of social behavior. It is easy to understand why this turned out the way that it did. If human beings had the knack of consciously making penetrating inferences about each other's motives and strategies, our insights would come at a high price. Self-deception would become much more difficult, and this would rob us of its vital benefits. To understand why, consider a physiological analogy. It is impossible for a person to damage his or her eyes in such a way as to make them unable to see only certain kinds of objects. There is no such thing as porcupine-blindness or the selective inability to see teacups. If one is blind, one loses a whole dimension of experience. The same principle applies to the social "blindness" of the conscious mind, which provides us with relatively impoverished portrayals both of our own actions and motives and those of others. All social inferences flow from a common set of assumptions, an informal folk-psychological theory of human nature. If the theory is biased, it will deliver faulty appraisals of everyone: not only of oneself, but also of other people. Commonsense assumptions include gems of sagacity such as the notion that self-deception is abnormal, that good people do not lie, that so-called normal people are not motivated by self-interest, and that politicians aspire to serve the public. Such homilies cannot serve as a basis for sound social reasoning, but they are terrific gimmicks for Machiavellian manipulation. The knife of self-deception cuts two ways: you can maintain a highly distorted conception of yourself side by side with a true estimate others.
Take a walk with me through a dystopian world where conscious minds routinely deliver astute insights into the wellsprings of human behavior. In this imaginary but logically possible world, the people whom you encounter each day can read your motives as easily and accurately as they read the newspaper. Take a moment to ponder seriously what life would be like if we were all psychologically naked to one another's gaze. Social life would quickly unravel. Furthermore, given the deceptive character of human nature, this setup would be extremely unstable. Individuals who, through some genetic quirk, were able to conceal successfully their feelings and motives from others would have a competitive advantage, and the inexorable tide of reproductive success would eventually disperse the "deception gene" through the entire population. This, of course, would be the opening salvo in an evolutionary arms race. As the aptitude for deceit swept through the population, it would favor the evolution of more efficient methods of detection, initiating an arms race that would spiral through evolutionary time until it reached the dead end of a conscious mind encrusted with self-deception. Sustained conscious insight is not an option for the human animal. Because it hinders rather than contributes to our reproductive success, natural selection has "disfavored conscious knowledge of motivation as a social strategy." For our species, all roads lead to self-deception...and thus to unconscious communication.
http://www.thelavinagency.com/news/why-do-humans-lie-david-livingstone-smith-explains
Everything that we have learned so far suggests that the unconscious mind-reading circuits of anyone placed in the role of patient in the standard psychoanalytic setting will likely sizzle with activity. Like a brilliant detective, the patient's Machiavellian module will make the most of every small clue to determine exactly what the therapist is up to. Ferenczi was so astonished by his patient's mind-reading skills that he toyed with the idea that they possessed paranormal powers.
People tell their psychotherapists many stories, stories about childhood, friends, and lovers, family, adventures and misadventures, triumphs and defeats. Langs proposed that these stories carry unconscious messages couched in an indirect, figurative idiom. They covertly express patients' unconscious interpretations of their therapists, and more often than not, portray the therapists as social predators.
According to Langs, therapists' handling of the "ground rules" of treatment, the partially implicit and partially explicit norms governing the way that therapists manage the clinical settings, are the main triggers for encoded narratives. He suggests that psychotherapy patients unconsciously have an ideal concept of how the therapist should behave, against which they judge the therapist's actual behavior. When it falls short of, or contradictions, the ideal, patients encode their unconscious perceptions of this by telling negatively toned stories that spell out what has gone wrong.
http://us.macmillan.com/excerpt?isbn=9780312310400
If it is true that we are all natural-born liars, it follows that the scientific investigation of human nature runs against the grain of human nature itself. It is triply paradoxical that although we are the only animal that has evolved a mind with the remarkable power to scientifically analyze its own nature, this same mind has been configured by the forces of natural selection to oppose and dismiss the outcome of this investigation.48
https://rampages.us/neptunelane/2015/10/12/natural-born-liars/
