said on each occasion, “Advantage, your opponent.”
Nervousness is almost universally cited as a factor associated with deception, both by those trying to detect it as well as by those trying to avoid it, yet surprisingly enough, it is one of the weaker factors in predicting deception in scientific work. This is partly because, with no ill effects of having their deception detected, many experiments do not make people nervous. But also in real-life situations (for example, criminal investigations), being suspected of lying can make you nervous regardless of whether you lie and, perhaps more important, because we are conscious of our nervousness as a factor, suppression mechanisms may be almost as well developed as the nervousness itself, especially in those experienced in lying. And as we saw earlier, the effects of cognitive load involved in lying are often opposite to those of nervousness.
The point about cognitive load (and pitch of voice) is that there is no escape. If suppressing your nervousness increases pitch of voice, then trying to suppress that effect may only increase pitch further. If it is cognitively expensive to lie, there is no obvious way to reduce the expense, other than to increase unconscious control. Mechanisms of denial and repression may serve to reduce immediate expense, but with ramifying costs later on.
Separately, it is worth pointing out that cognitive load has important effects across a broad range of psychological processes, according to the rule that the greater the cognitive load, the more likely the unconscious processes will be revealed. For example, under cognitive load, people will more often blurt out something they are trying to suppress and will more often express biased opinions they are otherwise hiding. In short, cognitive load does more than slow down your responses—in a whole host of ways, it tends to reveal unconscious processes. These predominate when conscious degree of control is minimized because of cognitive load.
Verbal details of lies can also be revealing. Excellent work, aided by computer analysis, has demonstrated several common verbal features of lies. We cut down on the use of “I” and “me” and increase other pronouns, as if disowning our lie. We cut down on qualifiers, such as “although.” This streamlines the lie, lowering both our immediate cognitive load and later need to remember. A truth teller might say, “Although it was raining, I still walked to the office”; a liar would say, “I walked to the office.” Negative terms are more common, perhaps because of guilt or because lies more frequently involve denial and negation.
It is difficult to measure the frequency with which lies are detected in everyday life. Interviews of people in the United States show that they believe their lies are detected 20 percent of the time and that another 20 percent may be detected. Of course, the 60 percent of lies they feel are successful may contain some detections where the detector hides his or her knowledge of the deception.
SELF-DECEPTION IS OLDER THAN LANGUAGE
How biologically deep is the subject we are discussing? Many people imagine that self-deception is, almost by definition, a human phenomenon, the “self” suggesting the presence of language. But there is no reason to suppose that self-deception is not far deeper in evolutionary history, as it does not require words. Consider self-confidence, a personal variable that others can measure. It can be inflated to deceive them, with self-deception making the act more plausible. This feature probably extends far back in our animal past.
In nature, two animals square off in a physical conflict. Each is assessing its opponent’s self-confidence along with its own—variables expected to predict the outcome some of the time. Biased information flow within the individual can facilitate false self-confidence. Those who believe their self-enhancement are probably more likely to get their opponent to back down than those who know they are only posing. Thus, nonverbal self-deception can be selected in aggressive and competitive situations, the better to fool antagonists. Much the same could be said for male/female courtship. A male’s false self-confidence may give him a boost some of the time. A biased mental representation can be produced, by assumption, without language. Note, of course, that self-deception tends to work only with plausible limits to self-inflation.
The above is meant to demonstrate that in at least two widespread contexts—aggressive conflict and courtship—selection for deception may easily favor self-deception even when no language is involved. There are undoubtedly many other such contexts, for example, parent/offspring. On top of that, as we shall see, very clever recent work demonstrates in