The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life (22 page)

The next time you’re catching up with old friends, listen carefully to how they speak about themselves. They’re not too transparently pretentious, I’d bet, as that would backfire (just think how much we despise braggarts and name-droppers, given the obviousness of their manipulative intentions)—yet they’re probably not too humble either. If you tune your ear just right, you’ll notice just how inventive people can be at sliding into the conversation details that place themselves in a positive light. If you’ve ever itched to tell someone how you mastered tae kwon do in the sixth grade, sacrificed your own happiness to care for your dying uncle, scored 143 on the Stanford-Binet intelligence test, or have a brilliant daughter who was just accepted into Wellesley College, rest assured you’re not alone.

If they’re believable, lies can go a long way, at least in terms of serving our reproductive interests. What is especially remarkable is that human beings are the only species for which the individual’s actual possession of evolutionarily relevant traits (such as intelligence, talents, selfishness, sexual proclivities, diseases, and so on) has become overshadowed in selective importance by the ability to
intentionally
manipulate others’ beliefs about these traits. In today’s world, for example, it doesn’t matter if you’ve got a skin disease, a mental disorder, or one leg that’s shorter than the other—all that really matters to your reproductive interests is whether you can lead others to believe that you don’t have these problems, by using your theory of mind to plant false beliefs in their head (perhaps, in these cases, with the help of makeup, psychotropic medication, or a prosthetic device). This is what keeps PR companies so busy today.

But while not all information is reliable and we constantly run the risk of being deceived by others, in general the more information we have about other people, the better placed we are to make adaptive decisions around them. Gossip allows us to avoid much of the costly trial-and-error learning that other primates face. This is why we’re social vultures hovering over the sensational aspects of each other’s lives, and why, as our evolved psychology manifests itself today, star-driven tabloids are such a lucrative business and campaign seasons have us busily collecting dirt on politicians. It’s important to know if those in a position of leadership, who are poised to have considerable say about our future welfare, have a history of corruption or dubious dealings. And because, evolutionarily speaking, there’s an obvious imbalance between the costs of disbelieving and the costs of believing strategic social information, even false accusations can be especially damaging to one’s reputation. All else being equal, a woman who shrugged off her fiancé’s ex-wife’s claims that the man, years earlier, had physically abused their infant daughter would be at a disadvantage over one who dumped this fiancé for another man. This is why the “where there’s smoke, there’s fire” line of reasoning is so intuitive to most people, whereas the “innocent until proven guilty” counterpoint comes only with organized judicial effort.

In one clever archival study in a 2003 issue of
Evolution and Human Behavior
, University of Guelph psychologists Hank Davis and Lyndsay McLeod sampled a random selection of news stories from eight different cultures over the past three hundred years. What they discovered was that the “essence” of sensational news—what made something particularly alluring to a human readership—was its relevance to reproductive success in the ancestral past.
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Most of these high-profile stories dealt with things such as altruism, reputation, cheaters, violence, sex, and the treatment of offspring. In other words, what whets our appetites in the social domain today are probably the same general topics of conversation that the first humans were gabbing about 150,000 years ago in sub-Saharan Africa.
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Again, with all due caveats, you wouldn’t knowingly marry someone who had a history of abusing children or philandering up a storm, just as you wouldn’t hire someone who stole from his previous employer or who was supposedly a slacker. In today’s high-tech world, you certainly wouldn’t buy something from an eBay seller who had generated negative feedback.

What separates you from other animals is that you don’t have to be the victim yourself. Other people have already done that for you. Ultimately, the human tendency to plant, track, and manipulate social information by way of language enabled group sizes to become larger and larger, bettering the chances of survival for individual members (and hence their genes). “At some point in our [preverbal] evolutionary history,” writes Robin Dunbar, “prehuman groups began to push against the ceiling on group size. The only way they could have broken through this ceiling so as to live in groups larger than about 80 individuals was to find an alternative mechanism for bonding [other than manual grooming] in which the available social time was used more efficiently.”
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Among other benefits, a larger group offered its members increased protection against external threats—whether other humans or tooth-and-claw predators. So when there was a bad apple in the bunch, or someone who weakened the group’s defenses in some way by compromising its cohesion, strength, and size, this person invited intolerance. And language rooted out these problem figures marvelously. In groups as diverse as British undergraduate students and Zinacantán Indians in Mexico, content analyses of “free-range” conversations (essentially, data gathered by the researchers’ eavesdropping) show that about 80 percent of all naturally occurring linguistic discourse involves social topics.
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The particular rules may differ from society to society, of course, fluctuating with the prevailing social and environmental pressures. But in general, morality is a matter of putting the group’s needs ahead of one’s own selfish interests. So when we hear about someone who has done the opposite, especially when it comes at another person’s obvious expense, this individual becomes marred by our social judgment and grist for the gossip mills. As Florida State University psychologist Roy Baumeister says, “Gossip serves as a policing device that cultures employ as a low-cost method of regulating members’ behaviors, especially those that reflect pursuits of selfish interests that come at a cost to the broader community.”
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Consider, for example, a scene in Robert Louis Stevenson’s
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
(1886), in which the narrator watches in horror as, in a fit of rage, the heinous Mr. Hyde tramples a young girl whose path has accidentally collided with his own at a street corner:

Clever readers realize that Mr. Hyde is just as much a part of our own double human nature as is the kindhearted Dr. Jekyll. And Stevenson certainly wasn’t alone in holding this opinion of the constant tension between the intrinsic good and evil in each of us.
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In fact, the age-old question of our double human nature is a recurring theme in literature. In Swedish author Pär Lagerkvist’s somewhat lesser-known novel
The Dwarf
(1944), a story written from the psychological vantage point of a man standing only twenty-six inches high in Renaissance Italy, the protagonist shrewdly observes,

Here, then, in the acknowledgment of our animalistic “dark sides,” is the rub. Language was indeed adaptive, just as Dunbar and other evolutionary psychologists say it was. But it was a double-edged sword; every bit as much as it solved some problems, it introduced a serious adaptive predicament for our ancestors. Not only were we talking about other people; other people were talking about us. And, given those ever-present, feel-good, ancient drives we inherited as part of our old social brains, that was a
major
problem. Even a single, impulsive, uninhibited selfish misstep would have led directly to social problems once word got out; and given our extreme dependence on others, these social problems would have translated into real, calculable genetic losses. “Words are wolves,” said the French writer Jean Genet.
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That language posed a special adaptive problem for early humans is reflected by evolutionary changes to other areas of the brain, particularly the regions responsible for executive functioning and inhibitory control. In a chatty human society, behavioral self-regulation would have been especially important. Florida Atlantic University psychologists Kayla Causey and David Bjorklund point out that

The inhibition of our selfish, or explosive, streaks is no less critical today than it was in the past. If you’re known as a cheat, a child abuser, a thief, or even a slacker, some of the better-case scenarios are that you’ll end up alone, poor, or in a federal penitentiary where, despite even the best efforts with your same-sex cell mate, the forecast for your further genetic replication is grim. In some places still, your community might simply decide that you’re not worth all the hullabaloo anyway and simply do away with you in some creative way, cheaply ridding itself of a potential liability to the group.

But although the adaptive problems posed by this chronic tension between the old and new components of our social brains are clearly apparent still today, just imagine how powerful they would have been for our ancestors. Only ten thousand years ago, we were still living in close-knit societies about the size of a large lecture hall in a state university. What today might be seen as an embarrassing faux pas back then could have been the end of the line for you. At least, it could have been the end of the line for your reproductive success, because an irreversibly spoiled reputation in such a small group could have meant a surefire death for your genes.

Imagine the very worst thing you’ve ever done—the most vile, scandalous, and vulgar. Now imagine all the details of this incident tattooed on your forehead. This scenario is much like what our ancestors would have encountered if their impulsive, hedonistic, and self-centered drives weren’t kept in check by their more recently evolved prudent inhibitions. And this was especially the case, of course, in risky situations—that is, while being watched by potential carriers. Eyes meant carriers, and carriers, of course, meant gossip. If their previously adaptive, ancient drives overpowered them, our ancestors couldn’t simply move to a brand-new town where nobody knew them. Rather, in their case it was “wherever you go, there you are.” Because early humans were completely dependent on those with whom they shared a few hundred square kilometers, cutting off all connections wasn’t a viable option. And effectively hiding one’s identity behind a mantle of anonymity wasn’t very doable either, because one couldn’t exactly be just a nameless face. There was no such thing as the Internet then; the closest our ancestors had to anonymity was the cover of night.
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So in the ancestral past, being good, being moral, by short-circuiting our evolved selfish desires, was even more a matter of life and death than it is today. Like Nathaniel Hawthorne’s character Hester Prynne trapped in cloistered, seventeenth-century Puritan Boston, early humans found themselves living in a scarlet-letter savanna.
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Fortunately, today most of us are skilled at behaviorally smothering our ancient drives and subscribing to moral rules, which are nothing but the logistical details by which group members can coexist without tearing each other to bits. After all, we’re the direct genetic descendants of those who effectively heeded the advice of their new social brains. And, to be clear, it’s not
always
the end of the world if we’re seen doing something frowned on by society or if others somehow learn of our bad deeds. In fact, depending on the circumstances and the severity of one’s immoral lapse, any given screwup could have a negligible effect on one’s genetic fitness, even if it succumbs to loose lips. There are also preemptive damage control tactics to keep the information from being received by the wrong pair of ears or serving to ward off or lessen punishment, such as apologies, confession, restitution, crying, or blackmail.
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In extreme cases, murdering a carrier could also be effective, adaptively speaking. In Dostoyevsky’s
The Brothers Karamazov
(1880), the priest character, Father Zossima, tells of a middle-aged man attempting to clear his conscience of murdering a young woman after she had refused his marriage offer. The woman’s innocent serf had been falsely arrested for her murder, subsequently fell sick in prison, and died shortly thereafter. Plagued by guilt, the real murderer, who “was in a prominent position, respected by all, rich and had a reputation for benevolence,”
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confesses to the priest but soon comes to regret this and considers killing Father Zossima. “The thought was unendurable that you were alive knowing everything,” says the man to the monk, who had now become a dangerous carrier. “Let me tell you, you were never nearer death.”
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