The Folly of Fools (15 page)

PARENTAL MANIPULATION AND IMPRINTING

Parents are selected to manipulate their offspring to serve parental interests, and offspring are selected to resist such manipulation. A key variable is the offspring’s degree of altruistic and selfish tendencies, insofar as these affect other relatives. Parents will tend to encourage an equality ethic among their offspring, because the parents are equally related to all, but each offspring is more related to self than to siblings, so that a more personally biased ethic would seem more appropriate.

Of course, each parent is expected to represent its own interests and not those of both parents, so there will be maternal manipulation and paternal manipulation, and in turn possible conflict between the two representations in the offspring. What is more to the point is that maternally active genes in the offspring are expected to be receptive to maternal manipulation and vice versa for paternal genes. Thus, parental manipulation should coevolve with imprinted genes in progeny, each reinforcing the other. This strengthens the case for a “maternal voice” and a “paternal voice,” each based on effects from the same-sex parent as reinforced by imprinted genes.

I must say this interaction first occurred to me when I was trying to poison the minds of my three daughters against their mother’s people. Not against their mother, God forbid—I was not crazy—only against her relatives. As their faces lit up with, so far as I could tell, full agreement, I felt good, another case of successful parental manipulation in the guise of teaching. Then as they walked away, it hit me: I had been looking only at the paternal genes in them, vibrating in unison with my paternally biased argument. As soon as they were on their own, they would take a more balanced view of the matter, and what was worse, as soon as they were with their mother, the whole matter would be reversed.

Incidentally, as people age, their important categories of relatives change from those with important genetic asymmetries (parents, half-siblings, and cousins) to those without asymmetries (children and grandchildren)—in short, from relatives over whom genomic conflict is expected to occur to those in whom it is not. So perhaps we become less internally conflicted as we age because our relatedness structure to the outside world becomes more symmetrical.

THE EFFECT OF MARITAL CONFLICT ON GENETIC CONFLICT

The above line of thinking leads to a very important question: What is the genetic effect of marital strife on the psyche of the child who is both witness and actor in the drama? By logic, one would expect the child’s paternal genome to accept or acquiesce in the paternal viewpoint, while the maternal genome would be biased to embrace the maternal position. With increasing strife, one can easily imagine that the two genetic sides in the child—maternal and paternal—are hyped by the escalating conflict toward excessive production of their products (proteins, small-interfering RNAs, or anti-sense RNAs, all capable of regulating other genes). Thus with greater marital strife, the intensity of the child’s internal conflict may increase at the genetic level and the biochemical, as well as at the psychological. If so, this must be an important factor in intensifying the child’s internal suffering.

A striking feature of children, noted in anecdotes, is how often they respond to the news of an impending half-sibling—let us say, Dad’s child by his new wife—with intense hostility. Rather than gladdening their hearts at the arrival of a half-sibling, children seem instead to see the less related sibling as a threat to investment in themselves (and in their full siblings). Again, one would expect maternal genes to take the lead in such reactions, because they have
no
interest in Dad’s new progeny. Thus, the genetic conflict induced by this new situation may be more intense than the direct psychological one.

IMPRINTING AND SELF-DECEPTION

The relevance of genomic imprinting to deceit and self-deception is several-fold, of which the most important is the internal fragmentation and conflict it generates. In important parts of our family lives, we are two separable people (not one) with partly divergent aims, theories of reality, and degrees of deceit and self-deception—two people who are also tempted to deceive each other. We call these two people our maternal and our paternal selves.

What difference is expected between the two sides in degree of consciousness? This depends, of course, on which personality we are most inclined to hide from others. Let us say the maternal side is more selfish in its orientation (fewer relatives to interact with). It will wish the more to hide itself from the outside world, as well as its other genetic half (the paternal). Thus, the conscious mind will show paternally oriented behavior and be unaware of its maternal biases, while the maternal side will have full opportunity to study (and exploit) the paternal, much as happens in dual personalities, where the unconscious one knows the conscious one but not vice versa. These are merely the first speculations. Inevitably, the subject of the two halves of our minds—their interactions and their differing effects on deceit and self-deception—will grow to become a major subarea regarding family.

Here is an interesting possibility. Can one half of you feel guiltier than the other? Yes. Can half of you feel ashamed and the other not? I believe so. If guilt concerns harm to other, then by logic, harm to a relative is worse than harm to a stranger, so your paternal side could feel guilty for a hurt to a paternal relative, while your maternal side scarcely notices. If shame deals with damage to the self, especially in public, then when the public includes relatives related, say, through Mom, you may feel strong shame through your maternal genes and much less or none at all through your paternal. Guilt and shame are feelings that are both produced by us and
induced
in us. Someone may try to make us feel guilty when there is no good reason to do so, and someone may also attempt to shame us. Their own relatedness asymmetries may affect their tendency to induce these feelings in us. The induction may split each of us in two, which can produce both internal conflict and confusion.

DECEPTION IN CHILDREN

At what ages do humans become capable of deception? We talk of the innocence of children, but dissembling and lying show up at very early ages—both in everyday observations and in scientific studies. Children show a wide array of deception by ages two and three, and the earliest clear signs appear at about six months. Fake crying and pretend laughing are among the earliest. Fake crying can be discerned because infants often stop to see whether anyone is listening before resuming. This shows that they are capable of moderating the deception according to the victim’s behavior. By eight months, infants are capable of concealing forbidden activities and distracting parental attention. By age two, a child can bluff a threat of punishment, for example, by saying, “I don’t care,” about a proposed punishment when he or she clearly cares. In one study, two-thirds of children age two and a half practiced deception at least once in a two-hour period. Motives for children’s lies seem broadly similar to those of adults. Lies to protect the feelings of others—so-called white lies—appear only by age five.

Temper tantrums, violent instances of rage with the child threatening even self-harm, are well known in humans, but also in chimpanzees and even pelicans. Pelican chicks will work themselves into a frenzy, swirling around violently and, in the process, chasing away their siblings, before falling prostrate at their parent’s feet, in effect demanding immediate investment, which indeed they often receive. Instead of banging their head on the ground, as a child or a young chimp might do, the pelican attacks
its
most critical part and bites its own wing.

Offspring deception can be extremely subtle, as the following two anecdotes suggest. A woman with a close, loving relationship to her happy five-month-old daughter picks her daughter up at day care. The girl is playing happily with a staff member, but when she spots her mother there is a flash of joy, followed at once by collapse and tears. The mother’s interpretation? The daughter is genuinely happy to see her but then immediately hides the happiness to express her suffering at not being cared for continuously by her mother, in other words, to induce guilt in Mom. In another anecdote, the same girl, now more than two years of age, uses “need” when she wants something (“I
need
. . . ”), as if to stress how critical the matter is, but when she does
not
want something, she no longer speaks of need but says more gently that she does not “want” it, both asserting that she too has wants and now speaking more slowly, almost plaintively, “But, Mom, I don’t
want
that.” She is manipulating her mother toward greater investment in the first case, and in the second, trying to get her mother to sympathize with her as someone with her own wants.

In fact, deception in children starts even before birth. In the last trimester of pregnancy, there is a striking change in the control of the mother’s major blood variables—pulse rate, blood-sugar level, and distribution of her blood. Normally these are under the control of maternal hormones, produced at very low levels. In the third trimester, control shifts to the offspring, who either produces the same chemicals or their very close mimics, but does so at one hundred to one thousand times higher concentrations. Why this shift in control to the offspring and to a grossly inefficient signaling system, at that?

Control has shifted to the fetus, to its own advantage. It acts to increase maternal blood-sugar levels and pulse rate above what the mother favors, because this will increase nutrient transfer to itself via the placenta. For the same reason, it also acts to deprive the mother’s legs and arms of blood and to concentrate the blood near itself. If one assumes a coevolutionary struggle in which increases of fetal hormones are matched by increasing maternal insensitivity to them, one can easily see how hormone levels could grow over evolutionary time to many times greater than when mother alone controls her own blood. As an expert in this field put it, when there is no disagreement, a whisper will do; shouting suggests conflict.

As children mature, they become increasingly intelligent and increasingly deceptive. This is not an accident. The very maturing capacity that gives them greater general intelligence also gives them greater ability to suppress behavior and create novel behavior. There is also clear evidence that natural variation in intelligence, corrected for age, is positively correlated with deception. A child is left in a room and told not to look in a box. By the time the experimenter returns, most children have peeked. Now they are asked whether they peeked. Most say no, and the brighter the children are on simple cognitive tests, the more likely they are to lie. Even health of the child at birth (as measured by a weighted sum of multiple factors) is positively correlated with lying. Because we experience deception aimed toward ourselves as negative does not imply that as deceivers we experience it as negative, at least when undetected.

Although the critical evidence is lacking for adult humans, smarter ones, as we saw in monkeys and apes (Chapter 2), are expected to practice
more
deception, not less, and more skillfully. By theory, they are also expected to be
more
self-deceived than the less gifted. This creates special dangers—high intellectual ability combined with high self-deception—for example, a malevolent person who is good at being malevolent. It is easy for the intellectually gifted to argue otherwise, that their special talents will save them from the failings lesser mortals are prone to, but by evidence and logic, we expect the opposite. Until shown otherwise, we should assume that the intellectually gifted are often especially prone to deceit and self-deception, including in many of the academic disciplines they produce (see Chapters 10 and 13). Those who take pride in their alleged intellectual gifts or of their particular group might well contemplate whether they are also more regular liars and self-deceivers. They are expected to be better at it.

When children are told to tell white lies (for example, that they like a gift when they do not), they direct all their smiling toward the intended victim (the gift giver). When receiving a gift they actually like, they share their smiles more broadly. Like adults, children tend to suppress true facial expressions more often than they invent novel ones, and they are better at it—when inventing faces, people of all ages tend to exaggerate, while suppression is achieved more exactly.

It is interesting that more dominant five-year-old children of both sexes are better at fooling observers in laboratory experiments, but in the same experiments, dominance confers no advantage in detecting deception by others. Among adults, the same is true for men, but women’s deceptive behavior is unaffected by dominance (as is their ability to spot it). As we saw in the first chapter, when people are given a “power prime,” they see the emotional expressions of others
less
accurately, so if anything, we expect them to be more vulnerable to deception.

It is noteworthy that parents play “pretend” with their children at very early ages, that children play pretend with one another and with themselves, and that most of children’s literature is fantasy. Consider how common (and popular) games are that involve deception—hide-and-seek, card tricks, magic, liar’s dice, and so on. Hence, there seems to exist some drive to incorporate pretense into life at very early stages. It certainly stimulates imagination and learning and also prepares the child for living in a world where practicing and spotting deception are important. I have certainly never seen any signs of natural guilt in children when practicing deception. Quite the contrary, regarding their parents at least, children seem to regard deception as their first line of defense, as well they might. Their parents are bigger, stronger, more experienced, and in control of most of the resources at issue.