living creatures are expected to be organized accordingly, that is, to attempt to maximize personal RS. Because the replicating units are actually genes, this also means that our genes are expected to promote their own propagation.
When applied to social behavior, natural selection predicts a mixture of conflicting emotions and behavior. Contrary to widespread beliefs of the time (and even sometimes now), parent/offspring relations are not expected to be free of conflict, not even in the womb. At the same time, reciprocal relations are easily exploited by cheaters, that is, non-reciprocators, so that a sense of fairness may naturally evolve to regulate such relations in a protective manner. Finally, a coherent and unbiased theory for the evolution of sex differences can be built on the concept of relative parental investment—how much time and effort each parent puts into creating the offspring—as well as an understanding of selection acting on their relative numbers (the sex ratio). This work gives us a deeper view of the meaning of being a male or a female.
The general system of logic worked perfectly well for most subjects I encountered, but one problem stood out. At the heart of our mental lives, there seemed to be a striking contradiction—we seek out information and then act to destroy it. On the one hand, our sense organs have evolved to give us a marvelously detailed and accurate view of the outside world—we see the world in color and 3-D, in motion, texture, nonrandomness, embedded patterns, and a great variety of other features. Likewise for hearing and smell. Together our sensory systems are organized to give us a detailed and accurate view of reality, exactly as we would expect if truth about the outside world helps us to navigate it more effectively. But once this information arrives in our brains, it is often distorted and biased to our conscious minds. We deny the truth to ourselves. We project onto others traits that are in fact true of ourselves—and then attack them! We repress painful memories, create completely false ones, rationalize immoral behavior, act repeatedly to boost positive self-opinion, and show a suite of ego-defense mechanisms. Why?
Surely these biases are expected to have negative effects on our biological welfare. Why degrade and destroy the truth? Why alter information after arrival so as to reach a conscious falsehood? Why should natural selection have favored our marvelous organs of perception, on the one hand, only to have us systematically distort the information gathered, on the other? In short, why practice self-deception?
During a brainstorm on parent-offspring conflict in 1972, it occurred to me that deception of others might provide exactly the force to drive deception of self. The key moment occurred when I realized that parent-offspring conflict extended beyond how much parental investment is delivered to the behavior of the offspring itself. Once I saw conflict over the offspring’s personality, it was easy to imagine parental deceit and self-deception molding offspring identity for parental benefit. Likewise, one could imagine parents not just practicing self-deception but also imposing it—that is, inducing it in the offspring—to the offspring’s detriment but to parental advantage. After all, the parent is in the position of advantage—larger, stronger, in control of the resources at issue, and more practiced in the arts of self-deception.
Applied more broadly, the general argument is that we deceive ourselves the better to deceive others. To fool others, we may be tempted to reorganize information internally in all sorts of improbable ways and to do so largely unconsciously. From the simple premise that the primary function of self-deception is offensive—measured as the ability to fool others—we can build up a theory and science of self-deception.
In our own species, deceit and self-deception are two sides of the same coin. If by deception we mean only consciously propagated deception—outright lies—then we miss the much larger category of unconscious deception, including active self-deception. On the other hand, if we look at self-deception and fail to see its roots in deceiving others, we miss its major function. We may be tempted to rationalize self-deception as being defensive in purpose when actually it is usually offensive. Here we will treat deceit and self-deception as a unitary subject, each feeding into the other.
THE EVOLUTION OF SELF-DECEPTION
In this book we take an evolutionary approach to the topic. What is the biological advantage to the practitioner of self-deception, where advantage is measured as positive effects on survival and reproduction? How does self-deception help us survive and reproduce—or, slightly more accurately, how does it help our