The Folly of Fools (16 page)

PARENTAL EFFECTS ON CHILDREN ’S DECEPTION

Even though parents may encourage white lies in their children, they often seek to penalize, suppress, and (sometimes) harshly punish deceptive behavior (especially directed toward them). Parents have the power; they need only the facts. A common parental device is to stare into the child’s face at close range and force the child to look into the parent’s eyes. I have seen parents use this successfully with their twenty-year-old children. College students consistently tell me that they think their parents read their deception better than anyone else and sometimes with near-perfect accuracy. The threat of punishment in general tends to induce deception in children to avoid it, and this is true also for punishment in response to deception itself. Punishment (especially harsh varieties) may drive the deception deeper, perhaps inducing greater self-deception to hide rising fear and pain (with unknown downstream immune effects).

Parents may also have a huge effect when they themselves indulge in deceptive behavior that the offspring are then tempted to mimic. Children may learn that it is fine to deceive; it may even be a legitimate lifestyle. This may range from lying to friends to hide misdeeds (“Oh, I’m sorry I didn’t pick you up; I had a medical emergency with one of my children”) to more serious misrepresentations. If a parent is a drug addict and tells a lot of “stories” trying to cover up the addiction, the children may tell lies to cover up the parent’s addiction and may then grow to lie to people in general. On the other hand, children are notoriously sensitive to parental contradictions and hypocrisy, especially when directed toward them. If you get caught by your child doing something you have prohibited the child from doing (throwing trash into a flower bush near your front porch), you may be in for a long afternoon of recriminations.

Psychologists have argued that a key initial stage in a child’s development is whether the child has learned to trust the world around it. This is usually navigated successfully with considerable parental care, but not always: diminished care may mean that the child can’t trust the world to provide the necessary care. In the extreme case, parents can so abuse the child’s trust that it develops no trust and lies for fear of telling the truth. It is as if the child has learned to fear reality itself, certainly its own representation of reality. If a child can’t trust its parents to act appropriately with the truth, then it may lie out of defense and distrust. This syndrome can be deep enough to endure in relations more generally. After all, parents are closely related to their children and are expected mostly to have their children’s interests at heart, so that distrust engendered by them may easily extend more broadly, to individuals with less interest at stake in them.

Parents will often act to deceive their children regarding the degree of their commitment and care. “I am doing this for your own good,” a child may hear while being beaten, or later, “I only have your best interests at heart,” while the child’s behavior is being further restricted. Really? People are expected to have their
own
best interests at heart, and these may conflict with their children’s. More extreme opportunities for parental deception of children are nicely illustrated in some single-parent households. “Where is my father?” asks the child. “He left us,” says the mother (in fact, it is the other way around). “He doesn’t want to have anything to do with you, so get over it.” Here the mother’s initial behavior inflicts a cost on the child, as does its continuation—no relationship whatsoever with one’s father, nor an image of the paternal half of oneself. Or says the mother, “He is dead” (in fact, he is in prison). Later the child learns the truth and is angry at the deception and its associated costs—again, no chance to develop a relationship with the father, through visits to prison, correspondence, and phone calls. Here is a particularly unfortunate example: One child reported that Mom said the man living in the house was her brother. They did sleep in separate rooms, yet the child is sure they have sex together. So which is it: They are not brother and sister and Mom is lying, or they are and she is committing incest? Family and sex could hardly be a more volatile psychological combination. To gain a deeper understanding of the family, we need, indeed, to include sex. Parent must be replaced by mother and father, offspring by son and daughter, and sibling by brother and sister. At the same time, the two sexes have meaning beyond families and attract deceit and self-deception specific to their roles. We turn to this topic next.

CHAPTER 5

Deceit, Self-Deception, and Sex

F
ew relationships have more potential for deceit and self-deception than those between the sexes. Two genetically unrelated individuals get together to engage in the only act that will generate a new human being—sex, an intense experience that is at best ecstatic and at worst deeply disappointing, or when forced, extremely painful and damaging. The act is often embedded in a larger relationship that will permit the two to stay together for years or even life—long enough to raise children. Opportunities for misrepresentation and outright deception are everywhere, and selection pressures are often strong. Likewise, each partner’s knowledge of the other is usually detailed and intense and (absent denial) grows with time.

Sex itself is fraught with psychological and biological meaning at every depth. Are we misrepresenting our level of interest, sexual or romantic, our deeper orientation toward the other, positive or negative, or our very sexual orientation? To analyze deceit and self-deception between the sexes, we must first describe the underlying logic for the evolution of the sexes and relations between them, including sex. Then we can link this to sex differences in deceit and self-deception regarding extra-pair sex, uncertain paternity, the female monthly cycle, female sexual interest, fantasy, betrayal, and murder.

The key to the two sexes, as it is to sex, is the offspring they may produce—the very function of life. In the evolutionary context, there are only two variables we need to pay attention to—genes and parental investment. The offspring is only made up of the two. It receives its genes from both parents (roughly equally) and the investment (that is, labor and resources to build it) from both parents or, as is usually true of other species, from the mother alone. The genes it receives from each parent arrive at the same time—fertilization—but the parental investment may have started well before fertilization and will continue long afterward, split, as in the human case, between the two sexes in a complex, changing manner. But before we get into these complexities, why sex itself? Why bother?

WHY SEX?

Why sexual reproduction? Why not go the simple, efficient route and have females produce offspring without any male genetic contribution? Females typically do all the work; why not get all the genetic benefits? In other words, why males? There are, in fact, many all-female species, but they tend to be clustered in small animals (very small insects, mites, protozoa, and so on), with some notable exceptions, such as are found in some lizards and fish. And among those with larger body sizes, asexual species do not persist long over evolutionary time, they go extinct. Why these two facts?

The advantages of sex must come from the benefits of producing genetically variable offspring. Two human parents can—through the magic of everyday recombination—produce billions of genetically different offspring, while an asexual female is stuck with her own genome and the few mutations she can give each offspring. And why is it important to produce genetic variability? Logic and evidence strongly suggest that there are two important forces. By continually breaking up gene combinations, recombination permits genes to be evaluated in many different genetic combinations, instead of always being tethered to the same set of genes. This increases the rate at which beneficial genes can evolve. The major pressure for this, in turn, often comes from one’s parasites, which are numerous and costly, and rapidly evolve new means of attacking you. Parasites favor in their hosts both the production of genetically variable offspring and offspring with high internal genetic diversity (heterozygosity). This underlying genetic imperative of sex has important implications for mate choice and other aspects of sex, as we shall see.

TWO SEXES—TWO COEVOLVING SPECIES

Sex has been the dominant form of reproduction in most species for hundreds of millions of years. Two partly competitive morphs, males and females (defined by whether they produce sperm cells or egg cells), are caught in a stable frequency-dependent equilibrium over huge stretches of time in which the relative increase in the numbers of one sex makes the opposite sex more valuable, thus increasing its numbers, so that many species have evolved to produce the sexes in roughly equal numbers.

The two sexes, in turn, are described by their relative parental investment. Females produce expensive eggs so that the number of eggs is strictly limited by their cost. Males produce sperm so inexpensive that 100 million typically do not weigh even a gram, and a man at rest can generate that number in less than an hour. When additional investment is added, it is usually added on the female side, so that in general female parental investment exceeds that of the male. This is true even in our own species, where male parental investment is often substantial.

For many millions of generations, male deception must primarily have concerned male genetic quality, since males offered nothing but their genes. It is generally believed that female choice has repeatedly favored signs of male quality that are reliable and hard to fake—size, symmetry, bright coloration, and complex song, to name but a few. Mating with such males usually produces genetically superior offspring. Sometimes high-quality males are temporarily in short supply and females may have been selected to advertise fertility to attract one quickly.

Of course, almost every trait is capable of being advertised or hidden. I once thought bodily symmetry was so often a marker of genetic quality (in plants, insects, birds, mammals, and so on) not only because it was a good measure but also because it was impossible to mimic. But the bluegill sunfish soon taught me otherwise. Males are brightly colored on both sides of their body and typically swim back and forth displaying both sides. But some asymmetrical males always swim showing only one side, the more colorful one. There are probably few females so dull they do not notice they are watching a “single-sider,” but they still do not know how asymmetrical he is—merely that he has something to hide. Such males do not do as well as two-siders but might do even worse if they revealed both their sides.

In everyday life, the importance of this first occurred to me when I was chatting with a young student who had a remarkably attractive face, and it seemed that whenever she wanted to impress herself fully on me, she turned so that both sides were shown equally and then gave a dazzling smile. The effect was very strong. So the rest of us, unconsciously and sometimes consciously, must be altering the frequency with which the two sides are displayed, with a bias to the more attractive side and to hiding asymmetry.

I would have thought by now that scientific work would have shown a series of general differences in the sexes regarding deceit and self-deception. I would expect females to be better at seeing through males than vice versa, on grounds of social expertise and amount of time devoted to social interactions, and I would expect males to be more self-deceived than females—more opportunities for benefit through self-inflation and overconfidence. I believe that women often make a deeper study of deception in their relationships than do men—self-deception, of course, is always another matter. I will never forget the sense of vulnerability I felt when I first realized my wife of eighteen months had been catching me in a series of lies without telling me. She was building up a library of my behavior for future use. I almost felt betrayed. Being simple-minded, the first time you lie to me, I am apt to point it out to you (unless there is a dominance problem).

Whether any of my speculations here are true, I have no idea, because there is no real scientific research on this subject. There is no evidence of women’s systematic ability to spot deception better or to propagate it more deftly. Nor is there a clear bias in self-deception when comparing the two sexes—except perhaps for overconfidence, where there surely appears to be a male bias.

DECEPTION AND SELF-DECEPTION AT COURTSHIP

To explore deception and self-deception between the sexes at first contact, it is helpful to know that in humans, female choice usually focuses primarily on a male’s status, resources, and willingness to invest as well as signs of genetic quality (especially when she is ovulating). The latter may be revealed by physical attractiveness (for example, facial symmetry and facial masculinity). So we expect males to misrepresent their standing on these attributes upward. They appear to have more to give than they actually do, they are more likely to give it than in fact they will, and their genes are better than they really are (this last one perhaps is the hardest to fake).