Chapter 2
What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions.
—Nietzsche1
Sally Greenwood first met Russell Oakes in 2004 at his osteopathy clinic in the village of Standish, England, a short drive from her picturesque horse farm near the beaches of Formby. Osteopaths manipulate a patient’s joints and muscle to treat injuries and ailments, which is exactly what Oakes did to relieve Greenwood’s back pain. During one of their sessions, Oakes revealed something surprising: His osteopathic techniques, which worked on humans, could easily be applied to animals. Intrigued by Oakes’s claims, Greenwood invited him to her farm to perform therapy on her horses. It was a huge success. Soon after, Oakes began working for Greenwood as her official equine “back man.”
Less than two years after they met, Greenwood learned that Oakes had received a veterinary degree and was registered with the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons. He had been fast-tracked to receive his degree, he told her, given his previous osteopathy training.2 She offered to have Oakes run his new veterinary practice out of her farm, which he happily did—establishing Formby Equine Vets in 2006. Greenwood was impressed with his skill, knowledge, and what she referred to as his “natural talent.” Soon after the clinic opened, he saved the eyesight of one of her horses and correctly diagnosed a leg issue in one of her expensive dressage horses.3
But not everyone was impressed. Seamus Miller, then an equine veterinarian with the Rufford Veterinary Group in nearby Lancashire, was confused by the speed with which Oakes obtained his credentials.4 As a full-time osteopath, how could he have attended veterinary school at the same time? “He was known to the veterinary community as an osteopath in Standish,” Miller told the Liverpool Echo. “It seemed incongruous he would suddenly have a veterinary degree.” Realistically, such degrees in the UK involve five years of intense, full-time study, which would be impossible to manage alongside a clinical practice. He also had his doubts about Oakes’s veterinary expertise after seeing him interact with horses. “We’d been exposed to the work he’d done,” he said. “It was not of a standard you’d expect.” Miller decided to run his own background check by contacting the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons, but everything seemed fine. They assured him that Oakes was a member in good standing and that his credentials checked out.5
Then, in February 2008, Miller was called out to a farm in Ainsdale to deal with an emergency of Oakes’s making. Oakes had been hired by the farm to castrate a four-year-old Welsh pony named Roo.6,7 Witnesses reported that he had fumbled with the anesthetic (taking more than twenty minutes to mix it), and had a difficult time finding a vein for the injection. When it came time for the surgery, Oakes had sliced into an artery, causing the pony to bleed uncontrollably. That was when Miller was called in to save Roo’s life (which he did). Miller reported the incident to the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons and insisted again that they investigate Oakes. This time, they did.
It turned out that Oakes was not a veterinarian at all. The degree hanging on his wall from Australia’s Murdoch University was purchased from an online company that generates fake diplomas. Afterward, local police began an investigation into his activities, and uncovered a long history of fraudulent behavior. At his osteopathy clinic, he had forged lab results to convince an elderly woman that she had heart and kidney problems, and used a fake blood test to diagnose a five-year-old boy with allergies, who he then put on a gluten-free diet. This caused him to lose so much weight that he was hospitalized.8
Oakes was arrested, but he had a difficult time understanding what all the fuss was about. He told the police that he believed that the veterinary diploma he’d received online was real.9 He insisted that everything he had done was motivated by his sincere desire to help relieve suffering in both humans and animals, and that he was innocent of any wrongdoing. In an interview with Horse & Hound magazine, one of the lead investigators on the case—Detective Constable John Bolton of the Merseyside Police CID—explained that Oakes “lied in all of the police interviews and showed absolutely no remorse. He honestly seemed to have convinced himself he was innocent.”
Russell Oakes had lied so much and so well that he even managed to fool himself. Which is, as far as the human condition goes, unsurprising. You, me, and Oakes are all skilled liars cut from the same cloth. Much like our capacity for causal inference, the human capacity for lying is one of the pillars that has shaped our success. Like all human behavior, lying has roots and analogues in the animal kingdom, but our species has taken it to absurd lengths. As we will see in this chapter, the willingness to both create and believe falsehoods helped put our species on the map. Unfortunately, it might also spell our doom.
The origins of deceit
To understand how Homo sapiens evolved the ability to lie, it’s important to understand the evolution of communication in the animal kingdom more broadly. How do biologists define communication? Here’s one: A method for transmitting a signal containing true information to another creature with the goal of altering the behavior of that creature.
Communication has been central to the biological world since life first evolved. Consider the yellow petals of a dandelion. These petals evolved to transmit accurate information to pollinating insects about the presence of nectar and pollen. Insects evolved (in tandem with the flowers) the ability to decode this information. The flower, then, is signaling to the insects that there is food, which alters the behavior of the insects (i.e., gets them to land on the flower). This communication system is beneficial to both parties involved: The insect gets food, and the flower’s pollen spreads as the insects fly from flower to flower.
Almost all communication in the animal kingdom works by transmitting useful, accurate information. The strawberry poison frog is a bright red color: a visual signal to other animals that they contain lethal toxins. Now, the frog doesn’t intend to convey this information; it was simply born this way and has no idea what its redness means. Frog predators, like snakes, are born with an instinctual knowledge that a red-colored frog is unpalatable. It’s not something they need to learn through trial and error. When they see a red frog, they stay away. Being brightly colored (like a red poison frog), having high-contrast stripes (like a skunk), or dazzling blue dots (like the blue-ringed octopus) is called aposematic signaling: in Greek, apo means away from and sema means sign. As a human, you are also born with an instinctual fear of aposematic signals relevant to our evolutionary history. Humans are wired to be wary of, for example, triangular shapes, like the zigzag pattern on a rattlesnake’s skin.10 This ancient fear might be the root cause of aichmophobia, “a morbid fear of sharp or pointed objects (such as scissors or a needle),”11 which extends not just to obviously dangerous things like snakes, knives, and needles. For those who have a terrible case of aichmophobia, even the pointy corner of a dining room table elicits the same kind of fear response as seeing a rattlesnake.
However, not all animal communication is trustworthy. The animal kingdom is filled with species that evolved morphological characteristics that also transmit dubious information. Which leads us to define another term.
Deception: a method for transmitting a signal containing false information to another creature with the goal of altering the behavior of that other creature.
In biology, a classic example of a deceptive signal is one species pretending to look like an object or another animal. It’s a phenomenon called mimicry. Stick bugs are the classic example. They are insects whose bodies look exactly like twigs or tree branches. Then there are butterfly fish, which have a big black spot on their flanks (called an eyespot, or ocellus), which creates a visual illusion that their body is the head of a predator. Batesian mimicry is a form of mimicry where a harmless animal evolved to mimic the aposematic signaling of a dangerous animal. Wasp beetles, for example, have black-and-yellow stripes that make them resemble deadly yellowjackets, but are harmless. Drone flies (which do not sting) have stripy coloration that makes them look exactly like a honeybee. The Sanguine poison frog is red like the strawberry poison frog, but it is not poisonous. Batesian mimicry is a cheap (from an evolutionary perspective) defense mechanism to deter potential predators. It doesn’t take too many mutations or changes to a drone fly’s genetics and morphology to evolve stripes when compared to the many mutations needed to generate an actual venomous stinger. Being a stinging animal is a fantastic defense mechanism, but producing venom takes a lot of energy and cellular resources. By pretending to be a stinging animal without actually wasting energy on maintaining a stinger/venom, drone flies have found a kind of loophole in the communicative signaling system; an evolutionary shortcut that hijacks what is usually a truthful signal (where there are stripes, there is a stinger) for deception (there are stripes but no stinger).
It’s important to understand that the word deception does not carry any negative connotations in biology when describing animal communication. We think of deception as something that bad people do for nefarious purposes. But deception in the animal kingdom just means a communicative signal that provides inaccurate information. In most cases, the communicative signal itself is baked into the animal’s morphology (like a frog’s skin color), leaving the animal completely unaware of the inaccuracy of the information it’s conveying. For nonhuman animals, deceptive signals (like mimicry) occur without the intention to deceive, or with any knowledge that the signal itself is deceptive.
Contrast this with the behavior of Russell Oakes. He had conscious control of his deceptive communication, and fully intended to fool Sally Greenwood by misrepresenting who and what he was. He both knew that he was lying, and that Greenwood would believe his lies. To achieve this feat, humans have evolved several cognitive traits that make us skilled deceivers. But our ability to intentionally deceive others has, as always, roots and analogues in the animal kingdom, as we will see in the next section.
Intention is everything
The animal communication we’ve analyzed thus far can be described as passive or unintentional: It’s just a physical property of the animal (like a baboon’s giant canine teeth or a bull moose’s antlers) that evolved to send a particular message. However, animals can also actively, intentionally communicate. Take a house cat. When a cat wants to convey that she is unhappy, she will swish her tail, and often thump it on the ground. Tail thumping is a signal that cats evolved to convey important information about their emotional states to other cats. It is honest: The behavior accurately correlates with the cat’s negative emotional state.
However, a question arises: Is the cat’s tail-thumping intentional? If an animal decides to generate a communicative signal with the goal of achieving something, then we can describe it as intentional. What animals are trying to achieve through intentional communication is to change the behavior of another animal. And because they have this goal in mind, they will monitor the situation to see if their communicative signals are having the desired effect. For example, when my cat Oscar thumps his tail as I pet him, it’s because he wants me to stop petting him. A tail thump is just one of many signals cats have in their behavioral repertoire that indicates that they’re unhappy. If I fail to understand what Oscar intends, he will graduate to another communicative signal that is a bit clearer. Like biting my hand. Again, he makes the choice (intends) to bite me with the goal of getting me to stop petting him (i.e., changing my behavior). Oscar will cycle through all the communicative signals he has in his repertoire that correlate with his negative emotional state (e.g., tail thumping, biting, yowling, scratching) until his intended goal is achieved.
Oscar’s tail-thumping signal is honest in that it is an accurate representation of his emotional state. But sometimes, animals produce intentional communicative signals that are not honest, where it looks as if they are intending to deceive with false information about themselves, their emotional states, or their thoughts. Consider chickens.
In On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche wrote that “the unhappy man… is like a hen around which a line has been drawn. He cannot get out of this drawn circle.”12 This cheerless summary of the human condition referred to a behavior in chickens where, if you flip one upside down and draw a line in the dirt in front of them (or a circle around them), they will lie completely still. Why? It has nothing to do with drawing a line. It’s because you’ve flipped the chicken upside down and pinned it to the ground. Scientists call this phenomenon tonic immobility, or a form of playing dead.13 When threatened, possums also play dead, flopping over with their tongue hanging out. It’s a widespread behavior seen in snakes, spiders, insects, fish, birds, and frogs. It’s effective because most predators will avoid eating a dead (and possibly rotten) animal. By feigning death, a chicken is providing false information about its state of decomposition. It is a form of behavioral deception that the chicken uses to manipulate a potential attacker, stopping the attacker from eating it.
A similar behavior is found in many species of ground nesting birds. Piping plovers, which build their nests in sand dunes, engage in something called a broken wing display. When a perceived predator approaches a plover’s nest, the mother will take flight and squawk, hoping to draw it toward her and away from the nest. Then she does something remarkable: She flies down to the ground and begins walking awkwardly while dragging her wings behind her. It looks like she has a broken wing. Most predators are quite keen to chase after the “injured” bird, which makes for an easy meal. But it’s all a con. Once the threat is far enough away from her nest, she drops the act and flies away to safety.
The broken wing display evolved in plovers to be a deceptive act and is quite the clever ruse. And because she is monitoring the behavior to see if her deception is working, it is an example of intentional deception. But there are even cleverer deceivers out there. A few species engage in a behavior called tactical deception, which is the closest thing to human-style lying that you’ll find in the animal kingdom. Tactical deception can be defined as “when an individual is able to use an ‘honest’ act from their normal repertoire in a different context to mislead familiar individuals.”14 The definition comes from the evolutionary psychologists Richard W. Byrne and Andrew Whiten, who introduced the idea in a series of articles describing the deceptive behavior of baboons and other primates. The idea being that an animal takes advantage of a communicative signal that it uses to convey true information most of the time to confuse another animal. True information being a key difference, however. The plover’s broken wing display or chicken death-feigning are deceptive by design, which means they don’t fit the definition of tactical deception. It’s only tactical if the animal has made the decision to use an honest signal deceptively, forcing the receiver to misinterpret what’s going on.
Researchers have found examples of tactical deception in primates, dogs, and birds, but my favorite example comes from mourning cuttlefish, which is a species of cephalopods. This class of tentacled mollusks includes octopuses and squid, and are gaining a reputation for having a lot more going on cognitively than you might expect for the close cousins of snails and slugs. Mourning cuttlefish resemble squids and lead surprisingly complex social lives. Living off the east coast of Australia, they congregate in large social groups, which is a sight to behold: Pigment-filled skin cells called chromatophores, which function a bit like e-ink in an e-reader, turn each of their bodies into elaborate visual displays. These intricate patterns and shapes are used for both camouflage and communication. Throughout the course of the day, male cuttlefish typically display a distinctive stripy pattern, whereas females display a blotchy spotted pattern.
When it comes to their mating habits, male cuttlefish do not tolerate smaller subordinates of the same sex in the vicinity when they are wooing females. Scientists have observed smaller males engaging in a rare and crafty form of tactical deception to outsmart the dominant males and increase their chances of mating with females without raising suspicion.
When a smaller male is caught wooing a female that a dominant male has his sights on, he will place himself between them. Then he’ll do something miraculous. On the side facing the rival male, his coloration changes to resemble the blotchy pattern of a female. On the side facing the female, he keeps his normal coloration pattern intact. The larger male will be fooled into thinking that he is looking at two females, and the smaller one gets to continue courting as planned.15 What makes this tactical deception (and not regular deception) is that the signal itself—the blotchy pattern—is normally an honest signal indicating female-ness. What’s even sneakier is that they will only engage in this behavior when in the presence of one male. If there are more males around, they won’t bother since different viewing angles will reveal what they’re up to. This ability to parse when to use this tactic—if there’s one male versus many—is itself remarkable. They’re actively monitoring their surroundings and altering their deceptive behavior based on the circumstances. Tactical, intentional deception along these lines is exceedingly rare in the animal kingdom—much rarer than the other forms of deception we’ve seen in animals. Likely the only chance you might have to encounter tactical deception in animals in your everyday life is when interacting with a dog. Researchers found that dogs will deceive their handlers by enthusiastically leading them to a less desirable food reward if that handler has a reputation for stealing food.16 They will actively fake out people to increase their chances of getting the food that they really want for themselves.
All the animal communicative strategies I’ve mentioned in this section—intentional communication, intentional deception, and tactical deception—form the building blocks upon which the human capacity for lying is built. Lying, however, is a different beast altogether. It requires a cognitive skill-set that even the most tactical of deceivers—like cuttlefish—might be missing. One of the key ingredients that sets the human capacity for lying apart from the deceptive behavior of other animals is language.
The difference between human language and animal communication is my favorite subject. I am going to fight the urge to write hundreds of pages about this and instead see if I can distill the explanation into a single, simple sentence. Here goes: Animal communication involves signals that convey information about a small set of subjects, whereas human language can convey information about any subject at all. This pithy explanation avoids a protracted discussion about the structural or functional differences between language and animal communication, and the question of how language evolved from earlier forms of hominid communication. The bottom line is this: There is something different about the human mind that allows for a capacity for limitless subject-discussion.
Nonhuman animal communication is typically limited to letting the world know about an animal’s emotional state (like angry), their physical state (like what species they are), their identity (like which dolphin they are, based on their unique whistle), their territory (like dogs marking theirs by peeing on trees), and sometimes—but not often—the presence of external objects of interest in their environment (like prairie dog alarm calls that can convey the location, size, color, and even species of approaching predators). Through the medium of language, on the other hand, humans can literally discuss—and lie about—any subject at all. Humans have minds full of dead facts (as we explored in Chapter 1), and thus have a limitless array of subject matter that we can channel into words.
There have been many attempts over the past half a century to teach animals to use symbolic communication systems. The goal is to test the limits of their cognitive capacity for both passive language comprehension and their ability to actively express their thoughts via language. But despite decades of trying, no animal has ever been able to learn symbol systems that enable them to communicate about anything more than the most basic of topics. Even our most prolific language-learning animals—like Koko the gorilla, Kanzi the bonobo, or Akeakamai the dolphin—ended up with a tiny set of subjects about which they could share their thoughts. Either because they are incapable or uninterested, animals simply don’t use symbol systems to generate words and sentences in a boundless, expressive manner like humans do.
This capacity for limitless expression via the medium of language is one key ingredient that allows humans to corner the market on lying. But, as we will see in the next section, there is one even more fundamental skill that, when used in conjunction with language, makes our species the most skilled deceivers on this planet.
Mind manipulators
To understand why humans are such skilled liars, we first need a clear definition of what lying even is.
Lying: a method for intentionally transmitting false information to another creature with the express purpose of making that creature believe something that is not true to manipulate its behavior.
When humans lie, we do so with the intention of altering not just the behavior of the intended receiver, but their beliefs as well. This is a key distinction—and one that makes us unique. Manipulating someone’s beliefs requires us to know (or at least guess) that other humans/animals have beliefs in the first place, to have minds filled with thoughts, feelings, desires, intentions, etc. Humans do this with ease, which is why we sometimes default to treating inanimate objects—which we know do not have minds—as if they do have minds. Gary Ross Dahl used this weird bit of human psychology to make millions back in the 1970s. Dahl was the inventor of the Pet Rock—a small stone resting on some straw inside a cardboard box with airholes. By simply calling it a “pet,” people began semi-ironically treating the rock as if it were a living entity with feelings, desires, and needs. This kind of behavior is both very weird, and very human.
Humans are constantly making predictions as to why other creatures are doing what they’re doing, or what they might do in the future based on our guesses as to what’s going through their heads. It’s intimately connected to our why specialist, causal inferential nature. For example, I might ask “Why is my cat meowing right now?” The answer? Because he wants me to open the front door. My ability to guess what it is that my cat wants is called having a theory of mind (or sometimes mind-reading or mental state attribution). We can generate a theory or a model of what we expect is going on inside the minds of other creatures.17 It allows us to ask why living things do what they do and derive an answer based on our best guess as to the goals, desires, and beliefs running through their heads.
Manipulating beliefs via theory of mind gives you much more control when trying to alter the behavior of other creatures. Imagine you are being chased by a hyena. If you used theory of mind to guess that the hyena is chasing you because she feels hungry, you might try throwing your ham sandwich at her. She might then eat that instead of you. Most animals wouldn’t think of this because they are not thinking about the hyena’s motivations. They’d simply run and hide.
Humans are one of only a small handful of animals (if not the only animal) on this planet that has theory of mind. Scientists have spent forty years designing experiments to sniff out evidence that nonhuman animals understand something about the beliefs and motivations of others.18 As I am writing this, the best evidence we have that a nonhuman animal has theory of mind comes from the false belief test. This test determines if an animal knows if another animal/person has a belief about how the world is that is factually incorrect. The best evidence for this capacity comes from our fellow great apes. In one famous experiment, a handful of apes (chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans) were tested to see if they understood whether a human researcher could be fooled into believing something that was untrue. The apes watched through a window as a dramatic scene unfolded, specifically designed to capture their attention.19 Behind the window, they could see two giant hay bales, and an experimenter dressed in a gorilla suit. A human actor then entered through a door and was confronted by the “gorilla” (a fight scene that is very compelling to watch if you’re a great ape). The gorilla then hid behind one of the hay bales as the human actor watched. The human then went back inside to grab a big stick to whack the gorilla. But while he was gone, the gorilla crawled out of the hay bale and ran away. This set up a scenario where the human did not see that the gorilla had left, and now has a false belief that the gorilla was behind the hay bale. If the apes watching this scene had theory of mind, they would be expecting the human to look for the gorilla in the wrong location: behind the hay bale where the human had last seen the gorilla. Using an eye-tracking device, researchers measured to see where the apes behind the window were looking as the human came back out the door carrying the stick. Most of the apes’ gaze was directed at the hay bale where the gorilla used to be (and not the direction where the gorilla had fled), presumably because they knew that the human—who had a false belief as to the location of the gorilla—would go there to look. This is strong evidence the great apes had theory of mind; that they were making educated guesses as to what the human carrying the gorilla-whacking stick believed to be true about the situation.
The ability to understand that others can have false beliefs and that this dictates their behavior is rare in the animal kingdom, perhaps restricted to the great apes and maybe some corvids (e.g., ravens, crows, scrub jays). Understanding that others can hold false beliefs is the key ingredient that explains how humans became such prolific liars. The fact that most animals seem to lack this skill—with perhaps the handful of exceptions above—suggests that humans really are unique when it comes to both predicting and manipulating the minds of others. Most animals make predictions as to what other animals will do not via theory of mind, but through visual cues. For example, when you see a dog bare its teeth, you can predict that it might bite. It’s a simple learned association between the teeth-baring communicative signal and the behavior that is most likely to follow (i.e., biting). You don’t need to guess that the dog is angry, or that the dog wants to bite you, or that the dog believes that you are a threat. This is called behavior reading (as opposed to mind reading). All the cases of deception that we have thus far encountered for nonhuman animals can be understood as an attempt to manipulate the behavior, but not the mind, of the intended target. Try observing the animals in your life and ask yourself if they are interacting with you because they are making guesses as to what you are thinking/believing/feeling, or if they are simply reacting to your outward behavior. It can be difficult to know the difference, which is precisely why, after four decades of experimentation, scientists are still not sure if theory of mind exists in nonhuman animals.
When you observe human behavior, on the other hand, there is no doubt that humans are using theory of mind as part and parcel of their communicative signaling, which explains why we behave the way we do. Spend a few minutes watching a silent Charlie Chaplin film and you’ll see mountains of evidence of theory of mind (and lying) unlike anything observed in nonhuman animals. Chaplin pointing off in the distance to distract a rival so he can steal his bread, for example. A seemingly simple act of deception, but only possible if Chaplin knows that he can get his rival to believe that there is something worth looking at instead of the bread he holds. Charlie Chaplin films are built on moment after moment of theory of mind in action, and we, the audience, enjoy them because we can guess what’s going through his mind: what he wants, what he believes, and why he’s doing what he’s doing. And all this without speaking a word.
Include words, however, and the human capacity for lying goes off the charts. It’s when theory of mind works in concert with language that expert liars like Russell Oakes finally begin to take shape. Language is the perfect vehicle for deception. In fact, some evolutionary biologists think that language might even have evolved specially to help us deceive.20 Regardless of how and why it got here, language and theory of mind are used by our species to incessantly deceive one another. As we will see in the next section, our capacity and propensity to lie is fundamental to the human condition. But so, too, is our species’ propensity to assume others are telling us the truth. It’s this bizarre mismatch that creates enormous societal problems for our species. Problems that, as we will see, could lead to the extinction of our species.
Duped
Leo Koretz was a Chicago attorney with a knack for making huge profits on real estate investment deals.21 As of 1917, Koretz was managing the Bayano River Syndicate: a trust that owned five million acres in the Panama jungle that was exporting huge amounts of mahogany and millions of barrels of oil annually. Koretz had investors clamoring to buy stock in Bayano, where annual returns were around 60 percent.
A 60 percent return on any investment is absolutely staggering, and many investors both now and back in the 1920s would be skeptical of a fund manager promising this kind of return. Especially since Koretz was operating at a time when Charles Ponzi had just become a household name. Ponzi had swindled investors out of millions of dollars with promises of similarly high returns. The Ponzi scheme is an elegantly simple con: Investors are paid returns on their investments using money that comes in from new investors. It requires a constant stream of new investors or else there’s no money to pay the interest that the existing investors are expecting. But unlike Ponzi, who had a reputation for soliciting as many investments from as many people as he could to keep his scheme going, Koretz was known for turning people away. He famously handed back the checks of would-be investors who didn’t meet his standards.
The few investors given the opportunity often put in huge sums of money and made a significant profit. They jokingly referred to Koretz as “Our Ponzi,” an inside joke trafficking on the absurdity that Koretz could possibly be a swindler. Unlike Ponzi’s victims, Koretz’s clients were investing in something tangible, like pipelines and oil tankers in Panama. They had seen the blueprints of the pipelines and the contracts to buy the oil tankers. Koretz was, in their minds, the real deal.
Eager to see their assets in person, a group of Bayano investors boarded a steamship to Panama in November 1923. They were keen to escape the cold Chicago winter, and even more keen to see the Panamanian oil fields that had become the source of their newfound wealth. After spending a few days in Panama City in search of the Bayano River Syndicate offices, the investors became suspicious: Nobody they spoke with had ever heard of Bayano or of Leo Koretz. They eventually found a fellow Chicagoan—C. L. Peck—who was with another investment firm that owned land in the area. The investors showed Peck a map that Koretz had provided them of the land Bayano supposedly owned in Panama. “Gentlemen,” Peck said, “I am of the opinion that you have been duped.” Peck’s company owned most of that land. The game was up.
It turned out that the Bayano River Syndicate held no investment properties of any kind. Koretz had lied about everything. Koretz had simply run a Ponzi scheme. But he’d been even better at it than Ponzi himself, having duped his investors out of $30 million to Ponzi’s $20 million. Despite all the red flags that his investors had noticed and even joked about, they were still fooled. How can this possibly be?
“We are hardwired to be duped,” argues Timothy R. Levine in his book Duped: Truth-Default Theory and the Social Science of Lying and Deception. Levine is the distinguished professor and chair of communication studies at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and has spent his career studying human lying, with his research being funded by the FBI and the NSA. Levine’s work argues that, despite our obvious capacity and propensity to lie, the default setting for our species is to accept the things we hear as being true, something Levine calls truth-default theory (TDT). “TDT proposes that the content of incoming communication is usually uncritically accepted as true, and most of the time this is a good thing for us,” he argues. “The tendency to believe others is an adaptive product of human evolution that enables efficient communication and social coordination.”22
As a species, humans are both wired for credulity and for telling lies. It’s that combination of traits—this bizarre mismatch between the human ability to lie and spot lies—that makes us a danger to ourselves.
Natural-born liars
Humans are unlike other animals when it comes to our capacity for deception. Because we are why specialists, we have minds overflowing with ideas—dead facts—about how the world works, which gives us an infinite number of subjects about which we could lie. We are also in possession of a communication medium—language—that allows us to transform these dead facts into words that slither into the minds of other people with ease. What’s more, we have the capacity to understand that other people have minds in the first place; minds that hold beliefs about how the world is (i.e., what’s true), and thus minds that can be fooled into believing false information. As Levine points out, we’re also particularly bad at spotting false information. This sets up a scenario where, as we will see in this section, being a lying bullshit artist in a world filled with gullible victims can be a path to success, as it was for Russell Oakes.
The accepted wisdom is that humans tell, on average, between one and two verbal lies a day.23 That, however, is an estimated average across the entire population. Six out of ten people claim not to lie at all (which is probably a lie), with most lies being told by a small subset of pathological liars who tell—on average—ten lies a day.24 We tell fewer lies as we get older, which might have less to do with our maturing sense of morality, and more to do with the cognitive decline that makes it harder to pull off the mental gymnastics needed to keep track of the nonsense we’re spouting.25 We need to think harder and maintain concentration to produce lies, which is why you often see the TV trope of an onscreen detective asking rapid-fire questions of suspects until they inadvertently blurt out the truth because they can’t think fast enough.26 It’s the same reason for the phrase in vino veritas (in wine, there is truth): It’s the idea that drinking alcohol works a bit like a truth serum, where people are more likely to reveal their true feelings (and stop lying) when their higher-order thinking has been compromised.
Once a child is old enough to speak (and as theory of mind makes an appearance), the lies start coming—usually between the ages of two to four.27 If you ask a child not to peek inside a box after telling them that there’s a fun toy inside and then leave the room, nearly any child, regardless of where they’re from, will not only look inside the box, but lie about having done so afterward.28 As countless studies reveal, toddler fibbing is a human universal. Once puberty begins, the lies keep coming. One US study found that 82 percent of teenagers had lied to their parents about friends, alcohol/drugs, parties, money, dating, or sex within the last year.29 Once a teenager leaves the nest, lying behavior starts getting directed toward romantic partners, with 92 percent of college students admitting to lying to the person they are sleeping with about their sexual history.30 Lying is common because lying works—since most people default to believing lies, telling lies is a super effective way to get ahead in this world.
An even better way to get ahead is to take lying to the next level: bullshitting. The term bullshitting is a legitimate scientific term. It was popularized by the philosopher Harry Frankfurt in his 2005 book, On Bullshit, and is used in the scientific literature today to describe communication intended to impress others without concern for evidence or truth.31 It is not the same thing as lying, which involves knowingly creating false information with the intention of manipulating others’ behavior. A bullshitter, on the other hand, does not know and does not care whether what they’re saying is accurate. They are more concerned with what Stephen Colbert called truthiness: the quality of seeming or being felt to be true, even if not necessarily true.32
Bullshitting seems like a negative behavior that would gum up the works of the human social world and sow chaos and confusion. But there is evidence to suggest that bullshitting might be a skill that has been selected for by evolution. A capacity to produce bullshit might be a signal to others that the bullshitter is in fact an intelligent individual. A recent study in the journal Evolutionary Psychology found that participants who were the most skilled at making up plausible (but fake) explanations of concepts they didn’t understand (a bit like the game Balderdash) also scored highest on tests of cognitive ability. So being a better bullshitter is in fact correlated with being smarter. The authors concluded that “the ability to produce satisfying bullshit may serve to assist individuals in navigating social systems, both as an energetically efficient strategy for impressing others and as an honest signal of one’s intelligence.”33 In other words, the bullshitter has an extra advantage over a non-bullshitter: They don’t waste time worrying about the truth; they can focus all of their energy on being believed instead of being accurate.
The psychologist Klaus Templer wanted to know why it is that toxic, dishonest people (that is, bullshitters) seem to be better at navigating the corporate and political landscape than honest, good-hearted people. One would think that bullshitters would be punished or ostracized by society. But that’s the opposite of what seems to happen. Templer asked 110 employees at several large companies how they would rate themselves in terms of their political skills, such as the ability to network with and influence others.34 The same was asked of these employees’ bosses. Templer also gave the employees a personality test to measure their levels of honesty and humility. Perhaps unsurprisingly, those employees who had lower levels of honesty and humility (i.e., those more likely to be shameless liars and bullshit artists) also rated themselves as politically skilled. Others agreed with them. The bosses rated their less honest employees as the most politically skilled. But, importantly, also rated them as more competent than their honest and humble workmates. This creates a scenario where the biggest bullshitters among us are likely to be viewed as the most competent, and thus more likely to receive promotions or be elected to positions of power. Sure, we might not like them, and they might be objectively terrible people, but we respect their political and social acumen. “It’s also worth remembering that sometimes these difficult personality types can be useful,” Templer wrote in the Harvard Business Review.35 “Good managers figure out how to deploy these kinds of people while limiting the damage they do to other employees.”
Lies, liars, and bullshit, it seems, can be good for business. But also good for the nation. What major superpower doesn’t have a political arm dedicated to generating and spreading propaganda? The Internet Research Agency (Агентство интернет-исследований) is a company in Russia that has been sowing disinformation online since 2013.36 It employs more than a thousand people to create fake online content on social media to bolster the interests of Russian businesses and the Russian government. Their preferred method is what political scientists Nancy L. Rosenblum and Russell Muirhead call the firehose of falsehood—repeating conflicting information as often as possible through as many different social media accounts as possible to create an impression of discord.37 The Agency was indicted by the US government for their interference in the 2016 United States presidential election by, according to the indictment, “spread[ing] distrust towards the candidates and the political system in general.”38 Which, if the storming of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, is any indication, seems to have worked pretty well. Scientists had previously seen how effective the Agency had been at sowing distrust in the US health-care system with a sustained campaign to inflame the anti-vaccination debate that began in 2013.39 That, too, seems to have worked. A Gallup poll from 2020 found that just 84 percent of Americans feel that it’s important to vaccinate their children; a drop from 94 percent back in 2001.40
This firehose of falsehood is classic bullshit in action. It is unlikely that the hackers working at the Internet Research Agency are intimately familiar with the ins and outs of vaccine science, or the exact details of the US electoral system. But they don’t need to be. Their goal is to spread bullshit online—information meant to confuse the American public. They have no real interest in what is true or accurate, but are instead intent on sowing discord within the United States, and thus making the Russian state look more competent and attractive in comparison.
The evolutionary biologist Carl T. Bergstrom and the information scientist Jevin West teach a course at the University of Washington titled Calling Bullshit, which they turned into a book of the same name. Although the course and book are lighthearted to some extent, with a goal to “provide your crystals-and-homeopathy aunt or casually racist uncle with an accessible and persuasive explanation of why a claim is bullshit,”41 they do not mince words about the serious threat that the proliferation of bullshit in the internet age poses to human civilization. They write that “adequate bullshit detection is essential for the survival of liberal democracy. Democracy has always relied on a critically thinking electorate, but never has this been more important than in the current age of fake news and international interference in the electoral process via propaganda dissemination over social media.”42
The country of Finland has been concerned with this bullshit problem for almost a decade. After being bombarded with bogus news stories coming out of Russia, the country rejiggered its education system in 2014 to help teach students how to recognize lies in the media. “The goal is active, responsible citizens and voters,” Kari Kivinen told The Guardian.43 Kivinen is the head of the French Finnish school of Helsinki, and the former secretary-general of the European School system. “Thinking critically, factchecking, interpreting and evaluating all the information you receive, wherever it appears, is crucial. We’ve made it a core part of what we teach, across all subjects.”
And it’s working. The Media Literacy Index 2019—which measures how susceptible a country is to fake news—put Finland at the top by a wide margin.44 The lesson here being that if a person—or a country—wants to get better at spotting bullshit, it takes a concerted and prolonged effort to overcome our default for believing everything we hear. But at least it’s possible—even in a world where we are drowning in bullshit.45
Is our lying ability a liability or a boon?
Many animals can deceive, like piping plovers or death-feigning chickens. And some animals might engage in tactical deception, like cuttlefish trying to mate surreptitiously. But the deceptive ability of even our closest primate relatives is simply incomparable to our own lying and bullshitting abilities, which are due to our unique abilities for language, theory of mind, and why specialism.
How should we feel about this? To some extent, our capacity for dishonesty requires a convergence of forces that reveals an exceptional mind at work. Being a bullshitter is uniquely ours, and we have seen that being a good liar—or a prolific bullshitter—is correlated with social (and financial) success within our species.
But, in terms of the bigger picture, the human capacity for lying—and bullshitting in particular—has a dark side that might outweigh the good. The spread of dubious, confusing, or false information through the act of state-sponsored lies and bullshit has killed millions of people. From the anti-Jewish Nazi propaganda that proliferated in Nietzsche’s time to Russia’s Internet Research Agency currently spreading anti-vaxxer messages, lives are lost when bullshit spreads.
We long for a world in which bullshit is minimized, and our societies and decision makers operate from the same base reality about what is real and what is not. Finland has done a bang-up job of educating its children to both desire and create such a world. Carl Sagan wrote eloquently of his techniques for spotting and eliminating bullshit in the chapter “The Fine Art of Baloney Detection” from his 1995 book, The Demon-Haunted World. Social psychologist John Petrocelli recently published an entire book (The Life-Changing Science of Detecting Bullshit) on identifying—and counteracting—modern bullshit. The tools for spotting and eliminating bullshit are right there for the taking and have been for quite some time. The current problem is that most people don’t seem all that interested in picking up these tools.
The reason for this is simple: Humans have been designed by evolution to be liars. Liars that are, strangely enough, susceptible to lies. This is a problem unique to our species. We are not an exceptional species because we can deceive; as we’ve seen, other species—from insects to cuttlefish—produce communicative signals that contain false information. And a few of them even intend to deceive others. But our species has weaved the intention to deceive—to lie by manipulating the beliefs of others—into the very fabric of our brand of social cognition. At best, we can educate our children to be sensitive to the proliferation of false information, and to want to reduce the harm it causes. But we cannot remove the human capacity to both produce and believe lies any more than we can remove our capacity for walking upright. It is who we are.
To imagine a world where humans have eliminated bullshit and toxic lying is to enter the world of science fiction. As long as our species has theory of mind, language, and a capacity for why specialism, we are going to be a species that lies and bullshits and castrates ponies under false pretenses. These are the unavoidable consequences of our cognitive gifts. We can minimize the damage through an appeal to scientific thinking, but even those of us immersed in science will remain human, and thus bullshit-prone.
Animals inhabit a world where deception exists only as a small subset of their communication systems. A balance has been struck where honesty is the norm. And when animals do lie, the consequences are more cute than catastrophic, like cuttlefish trysts, hypnotized chickens, or limping plovers. Humans, on the other hand, are wired to both dupe and be duped. This toxic combination is currently sending us down a very dark path. Countries like Finland are actively engaged in a nationwide course correction. Animals, on the other hand, don’t need a course correction; natural selection has already generated communicative systems that minimize the presence of bullshit. It’s us humans that need to generate new solutions to the self-destructive problems we are creating for ourselves through our capacity for lying coupled with our hardwired propensity to believe. The question is: Can we save us from ourselves before the firehose of falsehoods washes our species from this planet?