Deception and Psychopathy | Robert Trivers | EP 270

Did I tell you about uh the fact that uh deceivers have a slightly higher pitch to their voice? Do you know anything about the physiological mechanisms? Is that a stress response or did anybody study why that is? It's stress due to fear of detection. Okay, that's believed to cause you to contract your belly when you're making a sound, and so it rises in pitch.

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Hello everyone, I'm pleased today to have with me Dr. Robert Trivers. Dr. Trivers is an evolutionary biologist who concentrates on social theory based on natural selection and on evolutionary genetics. These happen to be the backbones of all biology. His early work focused on reciprocal altruism, which we will talk about in some detail today, the evolution of sex differences in all species, the sex ratio at birth, parent-offspring conflict, kinship and sex ratio in social insects, and a theory outlining the nature of self-deception and its operation in the service of deceit, which in itself can confer, however temporarily, certain advantages.

He then devoted 15 years of his life with Austin Burt to reviewing the vast topic of selfish genetic elements in all species except bacteria and viruses. These are genes that do not benefit the individual with the genes but spread because they have a within-individual selective advantage. In 2011, he published a popular book, "Deceit and Self-Deception: Fooling Yourself the Better to Fool Others," published in the U.S. as "The Folly of Fools." It's been translated into 11 languages, including Korean, Chinese, and Taiwanese, and is widely regarded as a definitive treatment of the subject.

In 2015, he published a personal memoir, "Wildlife Adventures of an Evolutionary Biologist," translated into Spanish and Polish. A side note, Dr. Trivers also served as the undergraduate advisor to Dr. Heather Hang and Dr. Brett Weinstein, who are both well known to the audience that frequents these dialogues. Welcome, Dr. Trivers. It's very good of you to agree to talk with me today.

Thank you, sir. My pleasure. I thought we'd start with reciprocal altruism. There'll be lots of people who are listening and watching that don't know what that means, and it's a crucial idea, so I'd like you to outline, well, first define it, and then outline your thoughts about it, if you would.

Well, um, W.D. Hamilton, who I always regarded as the only greater social theorist, evolutionary social theorist than myself, had already laid out in 1964 in detail the argument for altruistic behavior. So-called altruistic is something that lowers your own reproductive success, called fitness, but I never liked the term fitness because it had connotations that could get in the way of your understanding, whereas reproductive success directly described what we're talking about—the number of surviving offspring you left.

So an altruistic act is one which lowers your production of surviving offspring and raises the production of surviving offspring of the recipient of your altruism. Now, if you're related, then the gene or genes involved may enjoy a net benefit. So indeed you're related to your children typically by a half, and yet you invest in them as a key vehicle to your reproductive success. But Hamilton extended the system laterally, so nephews and nieces might not be direct descendants of yours, but still, you could be related to them by a quarter, let's say, in which case the benefit would have to be greater than four times the cost for the behavior to be selected.

So that was the first step. Now, it occurred to me—and that was when I started becoming a biologist in 1967—I took a year as a special student at Harvard to make up for the complete lack of an undergraduate education in biology and was then accepted into graduate school. In any case, I thought it was obvious that there was a second kind of altruism in which I did something nice for you and that at a certain point in the future you did something nice back to me, so it was reciprocal. And as long as benefits were greater than costs, which one assumes they would be—otherwise you wouldn't be selected under any regime for them—then there could be a net benefit of this transfer.

The problem with reciprocal altruism was what happens with the so-called cheater. That is, the system automatically selects for someone that receives the benefit but doesn't bother to reciprocate. Well, if they don't reciprocate at all, you cut off any future altruism toward them, and so each act of failure on their part results in a source of altruism being cut off. So the more interesting phenomenon is where you cheat, that is, you give back less than you got, but you're still giving back a benefit, so they still receive a benefit—they just don't receive the benefit that they quote "ought to," or would if the system was egalitarian and fair.

And those words fair and just and so on—I felt actually emerged from reciprocal altruism precisely because they evaluated the costs inflicted versus the benefits received. So you had subtle cheaters which reciprocated to a degree and enough so that you enjoy the net benefit but not as much as you quote "deserved." So that was a dynamic of reciprocal altruism—the cheater detection of this, right? So it wasn't so difficult, but how to interact with the individual so it's to change his or her behavior—that was a more interesting problem.

So a colleague, I think a graduate student at Harvard, had happened to write a paper reviewing the emotions associated with altruistic behavior. He didn't have any particular theoretical orientation or evolutionary, but—

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He reviewed the subject, and I remember going to him. I took a class on morality, something like that, specifically in order to learn enough about human behavior related to reciprocity to flesh out my paper. But in their first class, I saw that the graduate student, who was a teaching assistant, had already written a paper doing exactly what I hoped to learn by sitting in on the class. So I went to him and asked if I could sit and read his paper, let's say, in his office and take notes, and he said, "Hell, I'll give you a copy."

And I thought, "Almighty God, that's an act of altruism that I can surely benefit from." And so he gave me a copy. I promptly dropped out of the course and actually molded the second half of my paper. The content of my paper—the different categories were just drawn straight out of his work and reorganized a bit so as to fit the logic I was pushing. I hope that's not too complicated or too much detail.

No, no, no, it's exactly right. So why concentrate specifically on reciprocal altruism? I mean obviously tied up in that is cooperation, mutual benefit, and then also you discuss the problem of cheating and cheating deception, or detecting cheating and deception. Of course, making cheating difficult to detect is a way of making cheating difficult to detect. And so you're focusing your biological inquiry on what we would intuit as moral issues—the moral issue associated with cooperation, the moral issue associated with deviation from that cooperation. Is that a reasonable way of looking at what you've been doing?

Well, what I did—when you say what I've been doing—I actually did write a paper called "Reciprocal Altruism: 30 Years Later" and tried to bring the subject up to date. But in general, I didn't do that on any of my papers. That is, I wrote the paper and that was it. I wrote a paper on parent-offspring conflict; I don't think I've ever written a second one. I wrote a paper on haplodiploid in the evolution of social insects, where I took kinship theory, Hamilton's kinship theory, and applied it rigorously to the unusual situation of ants, bees, and wasps, where males only have one set of chromosomes; they're haploid and females have two; they're diploid.

And that leads to unusual degrees of relatedness. Indeed, it's the only case in nature, other than identical twinning, where you're more related to someone other than your own offspring, namely full sisters in the haplodiploid system. You're related to them by three-quarters, but you're only related to your brothers by one-quarter, so it cancels out to give you half. And that's how people thought about it for a couple of years.

But it's obvious to me that you don't average them. If one is three-quarters and the other is a quarter, then you're selected to invest much more heavily in those that you're related to by three-quarters and much less in those that you're related to by one-quarter. How do you envision the relationship between reciprocal altruism and the structures of society and the moral structures that guide society?

I mean, I would almost be thinking off the top of my head—it's been quite some time since I've thought about it. You mentioned in your introduction that I peeled off 15 years of my life or whatever it was to master selfish genetic elements. That's selection below the level of the individual. Hamilton was conscious of it, but it was Austin Burt, my co-author, who was the first to see really deeply into the literature and start to reorganize it.

So the entire subject of genetics, evolutionary genetics, was reorganized around the concept of selfish genes and the conflict they have with others, both between closely related individuals and within individuals. So now you're asking me the relationship between reciprocal altruism and sort of society-wide phenomenon and so on, and I can't boil it down to a simple argument. Yep, in 2002, which was the selected papers of Robert Trivers—not collected because it wasn't worth everything—just a selected, but I did something unique.

Generally, for selected or collected papers, people would write a short introduction to how they happened to write the paper, and then you would get the paper, and then there would be a short introduction for your next paper and then the paper. What I added was what you're asking for, which is I would write a short introduction, then the paper, then there would be a short section on progress since then, since the paper was published. That was often fairly brief, and I can't remember what I said about reciprocal altruism. Now I would have to go get the book to check it out, but I'm afraid I can't reason for you at the level you would like in terms of reciprocal altruism and societal organization and so on.

I think it's obvious that societies are not—I mean they may be partly based on kinship, but only partly and often much more on patterns of cooperation that evolve or are generated and sustain themselves. Why would you stress cooperation as a basis for social organizations, say rather than competition or kinship for that matter?

Well, I mean it's partly just, you know, what was available at the time when I wrote on reciprocal altruism. If you want to bring it all the way back to the evolution of reciprocal altruism—which was my first paper published—

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And indeed Harvard broke their usual rule, and they allowed me. I just had a thesis that consisted of three chapters: one was reciprocal altruism, the other was parental investment, sexual selection. Then Harvard had a rule that you had to have at least one chapter that was empirical, and that meant lab work, which I had no intention whatsoever of doing. I knew nothing about labs, and I had no ability there—or fieldwork.

Well, now fieldwork is a much more congenial, especially if you're interested in social behavior, social theory. So watching baboons, which I did with Irv DeVore in Kenya and Tanzania back in '72, or going to Haiti and then Jamaica with my advisor, Ernest Williams, who was the expert on tree-climbing lizards. So in fact, I did my third chapter on the green lizard, the largest of the enolis tree-climbing lizards—there are seven species.

Well, there's really eight—in Jamaica. So I had to go back down to Jamaica at regular intervals. I would come back to Harvard and work for three months during the semester teaching and so on. Then you'd get a month between semesters, and I would fly down to Jamaica. That set up a lifelong bond between me and Jamaica, where I've lived at least 20 years of my life, married onto the island, or stole a woman off the island, as another Jamaican expression, and have four children by her.

Dr. Trivers, how did you get interested in deception, and how did you get interested in self-deception and the relationship between the two? Let me step back one second, sir. You asked about competition versus cooperation. I mean, competition even applies between different cooperative enterprises. They cooperate within their entity, but they compete with other similarly structured entities so as to maximize their reproductive success.

Now competition was well known. I mean it was the basis of life—we're out there competing all the time. Cooperation was a subtler problem, which you had to figure out what the competitive natural selection advantage was. So now you just asked about deceit and self-deception. But sir, I'm afraid—blame it on 78 years of mentation, if you will. I do know that by ’76—in other words reciprocal altruism was ’71. Parental investment was ’72.

Trivers and Willard—which was an interesting theory about tending to produce sons under these conditions and then—

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Daughters under these conditions. So for example, if you look at a human hierarchy, people at the top tend to produce sons with higher frequency, but people at the bottom end tend to produce daughters at higher frequencies. Well, every child has a mother and a father, so we know that the aggregate reproductive success of females must equal the aggregate reproductive success of males.

So if high-class males are doing better, then it makes sense that lower-class women are doing better, so it's to balance out the equation, and so they get some advantage of these men, i.e., they mate with them.

Now, I wrote the forward or something like that for some book in '75 or '76, and I'm afraid to stick my brain, but I slipped in their theory of deceit and self-deception there—just two sentences in there, something about, you know, deception is obviously favored, but, you know, the best way to hide it from others is first of all to hide it from yourself, and then you don't give off any of the cues that are associated with deception. Incidentally, I have paid attention to the literature on cues, and it's very interesting to me that the most general cue for deception is a slight raise in your pitch, your voice—that seems to be all but universal.

So if you can listen carefully enough to hear when someone's voice rises a bit, they're more likely to be practicing deception. So I practiced as a clinician for a long time, and as a research psychologist, and I was very interested in how people deceived themselves and the kinds of psychopathologies that emerged. And so here's a hypothesis: let me ask you what you think of it. What I noticed often was that when people received information that contradicted one of their explicit beliefs, the information often manifested itself emotionally.

And so imagine that a husband comes home with lipstick on his collar, and the wife sees that and becomes agitated as a consequence but then refuses to think through what the implications of that might be. And so the self-deception isn't one fully thought-out proposition versus another; it's a fully thought-out set of propositions—say about marital stability—or at least partially thought out versus an emotional cue of uncertain significance that has to be unpacked with difficulty.

And avoidance of that is tantamount, at least, to some form of self-deception. How does that structure?

Well, I get lost in your argument there. Go back to your example. There's lipstick on his collar, right? And now she has a vision in her mind of, let's say, marital stability and harmony, and it's pretty fleshed out. But now all she's got that contradicts that is one piece of visual evidence and an emotion which might be anger, anxiety, and so forth. And she can hold on to her pre-existing belief with no work.

In order to transform that belief, she's going to have to do a tremendous amount of exploration and investigation, and so she can just not do that. What is her pre-existing quote belief here? I'm getting lost already.

It might be a fantasy of marital harmony.

Okay, so she has a fantasy of marital harmony—she has a piece of evidence that's inconsistent with marital harmony. Now what?

Well, there's a very large potential range of meanings of that piece of evidence, and so for her to transform that into something differentiated enough to alter her fantasy would take a tremendous amount of effort. And so she can just not do that, and that's passive self-deception, which I think is the most common self-deception. Yes, you know something's up; you know there's an elephant under the carpet, but you decide not to look.

So I'm getting confused now. You've already seen it; you've seen the lipstick. There, you've seen evidence that suggests that he's in a semi-intimate relationship with another woman, at least to the point of kissing her or being kissed by her. Now, I'm confused with what you're saying.

She's put a lot of time and effort into the theory of her marriage that she already holds. So it's the idea that that marriage is stable and loving, let's say, is a predicate for many of her memories; it's a presumption for many of her current activities, and it's the basis for her future plan. And so to investigate that means that she would have to go through all the work of modifying all those representations.

It's not like the evidence contains that modification; it's just an error message. It's hard to unpack an error message.

What's the error message?

Well, the error message would be the lipstick and then the negative emotion that goes with its visual apprehension.

What's the error?

The error is that the presumption of her fantasy that her marriage is stable and loving and, let's say, also monogamous. So that's an error you're saying, and now she's got a message that she's in error. So now what's—

Right, but that's all she has. That's the problem, right? And all she has is a message that she's in error. It doesn't contain much other information, and it's going to be extremely hard for her to reconstruct all that theorizing she's done based on the assumption—erroneous assumption—of monogamy. And so it's easiest just not to do it.

Yes, and then what's the cost of her not doing it?

Well, I would say the immediate cost is virtually nothing, and that's another advantage, but the long-term cost is that she's building a future reality based on a mispresumption. And so she may make errors, for example, about her financial security going into the future or even the presence of her partner, and that's a huge potential cost. She's going to underestimate, for example, the danger of divorce or of him leaving in order to avoid facing the pain in the—

And the—

Yes. Well, and I think this idea maps onto your hypothesis that at times the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere can be delivering contradictory messages. So if the left is linguistic and generates up detailed propositional arguments, let's say that get held with some certainty, and the right emotionally signals error, then there's a tremendous amount of work that has to be done in order to unpack that error and remake all those propositional presumptions.

It's really hard.

That's what I don't understand in your argument. I don't understand why there's a huge amount of work where she's got to unpack a whole endless series of assumptions or arguments just because it is one thing.

Alright, let's go back to the situation. We know that the guy is involved with at least one other woman and we know that he's tended to conceal it, as would be natural, so as to not result in marital conflict. Now he messes up. It seems to me, I mean, she has a simple decision that she confronts him over it and says, "Joe, what the hell is this?" or confront him whatever way she wants to.

Okay, so imagine the complexity of that confrontation. And this is the sort of thing that I saw a lot in my clinical practice. So because he lied about that, she no longer knows whether anything he's told her or anything he's done is true or real. Because she's violated this basic presupposition of trust, part of the reason she's going to have a major emotional reaction to that is that she now doesn't know whether she can trust anything about him and may have to reevaluate all her perceptions of him, even those that are part of the past.

Yeah, go ahead, so—

What?

So there's a tremendous amount of work associated with that. You know, and part of what our certainties do, as far as I can tell, is inhibit anxiety and doubt almost by definition. And so now if you've discovered that you can't trust someone because they violated a fundamental presumption, then every part of the way you look at the world that's predicated on that trust has now become unstable.

Well, now that is such a strong statement. You say everything that is associated with that violation of trust is now subject to reevaluation and so forth and so on. That's—I don't know.

You know, you're the—the foundation of your argumentation towards me, and I respect it, is that you have clinical experience dealing with people who come to you and talk to you about these kinds of things. So you know I think that's a good objection. So let me propose something in relationship to that because I think that's a crucial objection that you made.

So one of the things that I wrestled with formulating when I was thinking about self-deception was the relationship of one belief to another. So imagine that—and this is something you could object to—imagine that some beliefs are more fundamental than others and that fundamentalness is a reflection of how many other beliefs depend on that belief. It's like a definition of fundamentals, a hierarchy. And so some beliefs are trivial because almost nothing depends on them, but other beliefs are absolutely fundamental because everything that you're doing depends on their validity.

And so, well, depending on how deep the belief is. Eating dinner, come on, brother!

Well okay, but fair enough, good objection. But you know, if you deal with someone who's profoundly depressed because they've—something that was crucial to them was devastated, they will often have a tremendous amount of difficulty doing even those basic things.

That's true, brother. I grant you that people can suffer to the point where they've got a problem eating; they've got a problem digesting. I mean, the actual digestive system may be hindered or altered by the kind of mental stress or mentation that's going on. Let me give you an example of that in with depression.

Go ahead.

So this is often what—okay, this is often what happens with people who are very depressed. Let's say they have a minor argument with their son, someone they love, just a minor argument. And then they think, "Well, I acted really badly in that argument. I really hurt my son's feelings. Only a terrible person would hurt someone's feelings; I must be a terrible person. I'm a terrible person now, and I'm going to be a terrible person in the future, and there's nothing that can be done about it." And that's the sort of thinking that leads to suicide, and you can see the person going down the hierarchy of their beliefs right from the little argument, which is nothing, all the way down to something that is so basic to their self-concept that if it's challenged, they want to die.

That happens a lot in real depression, real severe depression. That happens continually; it's almost like the hallmark of the illness.

Well, that's interesting. I have been thinking about depression. You know, personally, I was presenting that conception of depression, you know, that cascade of doubt that I outlined as an illustration of what people are motivated to avoid when they practice self-deception. They don't want to start unraveling because they don't know where the unraveling will end. So they're afraid of that, and that's partly why they won't investigate.

Yes, I—off the top of my head, I would agree with that kind of argument that they don't want to pursue reality very far when it's easier to flip part of it and be unconscious, or try to become unconscious of the flip you're making.

Now in your book on self-deception, you outlined some of the social costs of self-deception, say in relationship to warfare, and talked about the way that the biases that we have to perhaps reject contradictory information can produce catastrophic consequences, say at the policy level. You said, for example, that leaders and the people that they purport to lead are often extremely overoptimistic at the beginning of a war and also have a proclivity to derogate and minimize the strength of their enemy.

And you link—so when you did your work on self-deception, did you draw any ethical conclusions from it? Did—I mean, and as an evolutionary biologist, you see it as a strategy, in a sense, but it's a strategy that has a lot of costs. Initially, I was very much down on both deception and self-deception. I was very much biased towards the truth and honesty. Then I think when I saw the degree to which deception was advantageous—you mentioned in the book having lots of examples from other animals of deceptive behavior and even morphology.

And then self-deception, I was against, you know, doubly, if you will. Because you're deceiving yourself, so you're both the victim and the victimizer, as I imagined it. Then I came to kind of relax about both of them. I saw situations in which deception is something I would practice—consciously, you know—but again, it might have to be a fairly serious situation in which you would have to construct a serious lie to get out of it.

And I know there have been situations in my life, not too too long ago, where I've spent a lot of time constructing a deception that gives off the minimal amount of cues so that hard—it’s hard to detect, if you will—when I walked my clients through situations where they had to construct deceptions to avoid, let's say, some serious consequence or maybe to gain some serious advantage, which often backfired in the long run, one of the things that seemed useful to do was to trace back into their story the events that led to the necessity of the deception.

You know, there's a Canadian songwriter who wrote a line that struck me in this regard: he said, "There is no decent place to stand in a massacre." And my response would be, well, you should unpack the actions that led you to be there to begin with, right? Because sometimes there's no good way out of something, but there might have been a good way of not having it arise in the first place.

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There's no decent place to stand in a massacre. Does that include the victims?

Well, that's a good question, isn't it? You know, if you've been a victim—let's say you've been a victim, a genuine victim. I saw this in my clinical practice a lot. As well, despite the genuineness of your victimization, it still might be useful asking yourself if you did anything that you could change that increased the probability of that victimization.

Increase the probability that it did happen?

Yes, that you were victimized. You know, you might say, for example, you might want to address your vulnerabilities. You know, so here, let me give you an example. Okay, imagine that I had clients like this: they were women who had been in sequential abusive relationships.

Yes, okay.

So they were victims and often of extremely violent and sometimes psychopathic men. Yes. But what I would help them do, because I couldn't deal with the psychopathic men—they weren't there—was to unpack elements of their actions and assumptions that might have increased the probability that they would enter into those relationships.

I can remember cases, though not in much detail now, where I notice a particular woman who seemed to go from abusive relationship to abusive relationship. So she would sometimes flee an abusive relationship literally by changing the city she lived in. This is in the U.S. But then what was so striking to me was I would visit her or see her—she was not intimate, a friend of mine, but a close friend, if you will, or potentially close friends—and I would see, by God, she's gone and found somebody else that's abusive in this new situation.

So she's drawn to them in some way, or at least she's not averse to them. You know, she doesn't have her guard up and she may indeed be attracted to some element of them that is associated with them being abusive. I'm sure given your clinical practice, you must have examples of this kind of stuff.

Here's something to think about in that regard. Oftentimes, women who find themselves in those situations aren't sophisticated enough for one reason or another to distinguish between power, aggression, and competence. And so when they see someone acting aggressively, they infer competence.

So part of unpacking that would be to help them distinguish between those two, to know that there is a distinction between the raw expression of power and competence.

Well, there's another—I had no idea that that confusion was involved in the behavioral problem we're talking about, but certainly Jesus Christ, is the difference between confidence and abuse.

Okay, well let me— I was speaking with an evolutionary psychologist, David Buss, yes, just yesterday. And David Buss has looked at the relationship between dark triad behavior. So that's narcissism, Machiavellianism, and aggression—I might have the third one wrong, but that's basically it.

Now, younger women, younger inexperienced women are much more likely to be attracted to dark triad guys. And that's partly, as far as I can tell, because they haven't had the experience to distinguish between narcissism, let's say, and success, and the confidence that comes with success.

And that's an example of that inability to distinguish between aggression and competence.

Now, the aggression might be necessary to deal with free riders and cheaters.

So you're saying are you that some of these aggressive men might be attractive to women precisely because they would be hard on the malevolent types you're talking about?

Yes, exactly, exactly. That the capacity for male aggression is necessary—and it's part of what makes men attractive to women. You can see that in their fantasies.

So the most common forms of pornographic fiction that women read feature surgeons, pirates, vampires, billionaires, and unfortunately I can't remember the other one, but they're men who have—you could say power, but that's not it.

I don't believe that. I believe it's something like competence and the ability to use aggression when necessary. And then the narcissistic men, they're parasitizing that in some sense; they're mimicking that, and that's why they're attractive to inexperienced women.

Plausible?

Sure!

When I see the political arguments that take place now—the accusation that the male hierarchy is, let's say, oppressive patriarchy, an exploitative structure—what I see in that is partially this inability to distinguish between power and competence. And also to understand when aggressive action is necessary and desirable, and that seems related to the free rider problem.

Yes, I hear you. No objections to that.

[Laughter]

None, so far.

Alright, so let me go back to the idea of belief dependencies. So you know we all say that some things are more important to us than others; we hold them more dear. So the integrity of those core beliefs, I think, is related to directly to the inhibition of negative emotion, inhibition of what?

Of negative emotion—anxiety particularly, and doubt. So the beliefs that are more important to us are beliefs that other beliefs depend on. And when they're threatened, it's very emotionally destabilizing and very hard on us from a physical perspective as well, because when our core beliefs are disrupted, we don't know what to do.

And therefore we have to prepare to do everything—that's the emergency response, right? That's fight or flight, I suppose. But it's very physiologically costly. And so I think sometimes people engage in self-deception so that they don't have to undermine their core beliefs and disregulate themselves like that.

That seems plausible to me, sir. The unfortunate problem seems to be that the long-term consequences of that are often not good. You know, you ignore a profound danger at your peril. It saves you from the psychophysiological exhaustion in the present, but if the problem is really there, things unravel really badly in the future.

Yes, so we could say that self-deception has its advantages, even as an adaptive strategy. And I think the idea that it can serve deception as a handmaiden, say, is a powerful idea. But it doesn't look like it's an optimal strategy. And one of the things I wanted to ask you is, is there justification in evolutionary biology for—you know, you said strategies compete, right?

And so does that mean that there's an optimal strategy that we approximate, that we have an intuition of?

Even—God, I would tend to doubt that there's an optimal one. First of all, if there were an optimal strategy, why isn't everybody adopting it?

Well, you may answer me by saying, "Well, it's adaptive but not in all situations." Fine, but if it's always adaptive in these situations, you would expect them to get matched up together or fairly quickly over time, wouldn't you?

That's a good objection. I mean, it's a tough one, right? I mean, you've also talked about runaway sexual selection. Okay, so this is an answer to the problem you just posed.

Possibly. I mean one thing that does seem to have been selected for that operates across a very wide range of contexts, at least in human beings, is something like general intelligence. You know, and the cortical expansion that produced that and that's been selected by women.

So I would say as a domain general, there's a domain general ability that might have been selected that worked in most situations, and that was more intelligence, at least with humans. That doesn't address the ethical issue exactly. And you said it was mostly being selected by women—female choice.

Well, they're choosier. Yes, and they're socially brighter, and they're also—they are also less likely to agree that a low-intelligent sexual partner would be acceptable, according to David Buss, the evolutionary psychologist I was speaking with just yesterday.

So they are—women do appear to be exerting more selection pressure on general cognitive ability, but I also wonder if there's not an ethical equivalent to that, that something like—well, the capacity for reciprocal altruism.

So what's your—what are you then saying that females are a positive selective force for reciprocal altruism? I'm—I'm on—

Well, yeah, well that's not as strong an argument as the one for, let's say, intelligence. It's harder to define the central element of reciprocal altruism than the central element of intelligence.

It's harder technically, but you know that there is an idea in evolutionary biology, sort of implicit, that women select men who are higher—as high as they can manage—in the status hierarchy, and that hierarchy is constructed as a consequence of the exercise of power.

And I think that's wrong and dangerous, that idea. I don't think those hierarchies—the male hierarchies that influence female selection—are based on power. I think they're based on something more like competence, and I think it's associated with this capacity for reciprocal altruism because you want them—if you're a woman, you want a man who's productive but also generous.

Certainly I don't have anything to say against what you just said. I don't know what David Buss was arguing.

Well, so I would say something similar. I mean, your book on deception and self-deception is very interesting because you point out in many, many ways how deception can confer at least a temporary advantage, but often a more permanent advantage.

And so it makes making the case that let's say something like honesty is selected for much more difficult. But I also wonder if there's a utility in differentiating between deception and mimicry in animals.

No, terminologically—but I don't understand why mimicry is not an example of deception. Let's say we're talking about moths or butterflies and predators, birds. So you will have some butterflies that are perfectly tasty to birds, but there are a couple that are not—that have a poison that they ingest when they're caterpillars, which they retain in adulthood.

So that they're distasteful and poisonous, so then they attract, so to speak, mimics, because now if you're related species, so you're similar in appearance already, but you don't happen to have the poison, then you evolved to resemble that species more and more in order to gain the benefit that they have from having the poison.

So the predator makes the assumption that you've got the poison because you look exactly like the species that has the poison, and then they've done work—but I, you know, it's long ago disappeared from my memory. They've done work on a relative frequency of the two kinds, and there are situations in which the mimic can be, you know, five or ten times as frequent as the model as they're called, and they're gaining a benefit, and they’re inflicting a marginal cost on the model.

There are other situations in which, as they rise in number, they mimic—they inflict a cost on the model, because now birds snap the model of course; they spit it out, but that doesn't help the model—that just means the—well, the bird doesn't swallow the poison.

You could make a similar case for narcissists. Imagine that the model is someone competent and confident and maybe assertive because of that and productive and generous, but the mimic just mimics the confidence and assertiveness and then there is a cost inflicted on the model because if there are enough narcissistic mimics, then the existence of the model starts to become doubtful.

You're absolutely right, and there's a rich literature on that, and I used to study it very carefully because I was interested in the interaction between deception and detection of deception. And of course, you toss in self-deception to bypass the initial problem. Did I tell you about the fact that deceivers have a slightly higher pitch to their voice?

Yes, you mentioned. You mentioned that. That's very interesting. Do you know anything about the physiological mechanisms? Is that a stress response or did anybody study why that is? It's stress due to fear of detection.

Okay, that's believed to cause you to contract your belly when you're making a sound, and so it rises in pitch. As a side note, an interesting story from your book: you talked about one species of butterfly that could lay five different kinds of eggs to mimic five different kinds of poisonous butterfly species.

Right, so let's talk about mimicry for a minute and deception because they're so tightly interwoven. Human beings are very imitative, and so someone growing up can choose to mimic a particular model, let's say, and that model might be someone competent or it might be someone narcissistic.

And so you could mimic competence and become competent, or you could mimic narcissism and become narcissistic. And that's partly why I think maybe there's a useful distinction to be made between mimicry and deception.

I mean, not in the cases you raised with the butterflies, but in the human case because there are psychological mechanisms involved. The problem becomes a lot thornier. What's the definition of a narcissist?

You can define it by personality. So narcissists tend to be extroverted, a lot of positive emotion, and disagreeable. So very little empathy and more likely to be aggressive. So—and that is a masculine pattern to some degree, because men are more extroverted than women, especially in assertiveness, and they're less agreeable than women.

It's the extremes, though. When you get the extremes, there you have something like temperamental narcissism. And then if they're low in conscientiousness, that's even worse because then, well, they're neither productive nor dutiful nor honest—none of those—and maybe that's psychopathy. Maybe it's not clear.

And then you could think about it socially. Is that a narcissist is someone who assumes his or her status is higher than those around them would claim?

There's a very important literature on psychopaths because I found it was transformative when I read these papers; they were written by Canadian mathematicians. And there was a psychopathic scale that someone had invented—Robert Hare, I believe, invented the scale.

Well, psychopaths—there are violent psychopaths, and they are, of course, of a considerable danger, but they are outnumbered by non-violent psychopaths. And their definition, I think, has to do with lack of empathy, lack of feeling for others. A non-violent psychopath, according to this Canadian literature, they studied—was it the propagation of exploitative psychopathic behavior in populations where there was no punishment for free riders?

The reason is because I was thinking that, oh, Crook—was that the name that people know? You were mentioning someone else in Canada, right?

Yeah, Hare developed the scale, but he didn't do the work you're speaking of.

Okay, Crook. So let me hit the document now. I believe the paper you're referring to is “Nepotistic Patterns of Violent Psychopathy: Evidence for Adaptation”—whether Crook et al. also did the held at a one to three percent frequency in a population.

The notion was that the psychopath is held in a frequency-dependent equilibrium. In other words, it doesn't go down to zero because when there's only one percent that's a psychopath, they're positively selected compared to the general population. However, when they reach three percent frequency, they're already bumping up against the upper boundary, so they're selected.

You could also imagine that when their frequency declines in a given population that people are much less alert to the possibility of psychopathy. And so then the deceptions that they engage in are less likely to be detected, and they spring back into existence.

Well, yes, but remember that that's automatically true about these psychopaths because they're held between a one to three percent frequency, which is low—as I mentioned in that just a little paragraph there—in other words, when you're a psychopath, you're always appearing.

But the percentage is only one to three percent, whereas the population itself is only experiencing a psychopath once every several generations. So selection is bound to be weaker on the detect detectors of psychopaths.

Although the fact that it doesn't rise above a three percent frequency does suggest that at that frequency, there's too damn many of them, and so people start paying attention.

The fact that you just laid out too, that even when psychopaths are relatively successful in a population, they don't exceed three percent also indicates that that psychopathic exploitation, which might be regarded as the purest expression of arbitrary selfish power, is actually not a very good strategy.

Well, I'd rather be part of the 97% that wasn't a psychopath. I just found the whole argument of Crook very powerful because these psychopaths sure acted as if they'd been under selection because they favored their relatives.

Yeah, I didn't know that about psychopaths. I didn't know that, see, because psychologists, when they're talking about psychopaths, they tend to generally assume that there's zero social relatedness governing their behavior.

The fact that they favor kin is extremely interesting; I wasn't aware of that.

Yes, indeed. And classically, you know, psychopath is like a—as a negative trait—where you and I aren't psychopaths; we have the positive trait—it's just like any other thing where there's a negative trait held at a low frequency or it's at a low frequency, but basically, it's being forced down to zero.

But what this literature said was for these psychopaths, it's not being forced down to zero. If it gets down to one, it's being bounced back up. It probably oscillates between five and—and a half or something like that. But when it gets infrequent enough, it's definitely beneficial to enough to stay in the population, you know?

Well, it could well be that effectiveness at low frequency—the effectiveness is dependent on the low frequency. So you might wonder what happens to societies where the psychopath incidence exceeds, say, five percent. Like, do you suppose those societies get exceptionally punitive? What do you suppose happens to knock down the psychopath percentage?

That's a good question, my friend, and I don't have any answer off the top of my head. So this paper that you cited—one of the conclusions is that in light of Wakefield's 1992 definition of mental disorder, evidence that psychopathy retains nepotistic design features is at odds with psychopathy being a mental disorder, given that a diagnosis of mental disorder tends to be positively associated with the victimization of genealogical kin.

It's not the case with Crook's work.

Absolutely not. And you see figure after figure with different relatedness categories and showing that the psychopaths are treating them better.

Oh, right. It's how much they score on the psychopathic scale. So the higher they score on the psychopathic scale, the more they are biased towards relatives.

Yeah, that's really something. That's really remarkable; I didn't know that, and that's a huge finding, and I can see why it showed up on your radar.

Yes, and it's also a very interesting definition of mental disorder—that you can tell if someone suffers from a mental disorder because they victimized genealogical kin.

Yes, and that's not the only criteria, obviously, but it's an interesting criteria for a definition.

Yes, and it's not true of psychopaths. They don't victimize.

Do you suppose that the exacerbation of nepotism is actually part of a psychopathic strategy? Do you think you could go that far?

Well, I'm—this paper has made me wonder about the relationship between nepotism as a phenomenon and psychopathy per se. So do you suppose that if psychopaths are more likely to be nepotistic, is the reverse true? Are radical nepotists more likely to be psychopathic?

I radical—nevertheless, I like that—that I don't know.

What do you think the best evolutionary theories have to say about the persistence of homosexuality, especially among men?

One of the most interesting subjects has to do with the repression of homosexual tendencies, and it applies especially to Jamaica because Jamaica is violently against homosexuals; they're murdered, and they have to hide and so on.

But anyway, what was I going to say about homosexuality?

Evolutionary theory.

Yeah. So there was an excellent paper published in Georgia, the State of Georgia, in the U.S. You documented that in your book; I know the study, I believe it's—they gave them a homophobia scale and then measured their penile erection, erectile response to homosexual pornography and found that those who were most homophobic, according to the scale, showed a significant increase in erectile function during exposure to the homosexual pornography—quite distinct from those who were less homophobic.

Yes, and what they did was—they showed them six six-minute films, and the first was on a man and a woman making love, and then they graphed the penile growth in the homophobic and the non-homophobic, and they were statistically identical.

Then they showed them a six-minute movie of two women making love, and it started taking off like a man and a woman, but for a certain reason, it sort of leveled off again—there was no difference between the two categories of men.

Now the third one was the interesting one—that's where they showed him six minutes of two men getting it on. And the non-homophobic men showed a small and statistically insignificant increase in penis size, so in other words, they didn't respond at all statistically, whereas the homophobic men started and then they climbed, and then they kept climbing, and they got two-thirds of the way up to the level at which they responded to two women, and yet they denied any homosexual tendencies.

These were all men that rated themselves as never having had a homosexual experience, never had a homosexual fantasy, and never even had a homosexual thought—or so they said. So that was a fascinating result that H.E. Adams, I believe, has suggested: homophobia associated with homosexual arousal.

Probably it is.

Are you aware of that paper?

Only since—I think I've heard of the paper before, but I reacquainted myself with it when I was reading through your book today.

Right. Don't know if it's been replicated, but perhaps—I don't know.

I don't know that—no, I well don't know of it being replicated, but you know, again, I'm the stage in life where I'm not keeping up with new work.

Well, I really enjoyed talking to you, and I really benefited from your work, scientifically and practically, and I appreciate very much the fact that you talked to me today.

Alright, Jordan. If there's nothing else, it was a pleasure talking to you, and God bless you and keep you.

Thank you very much, sir. Very nice talking with you.