Decoding Love - Andrew Trees [27]
What makes deception an even bigger problem is that it turns out that, while seemingly all of us are reasonably adept at lying, we are terrible at telling when other people are lying to us. According to research, people can only distinguish truth from lies 54 percent of the time, which is not much better than random guessing. We’re even worse at picking out lies, which we only manage to achieve 47 percent of the time. Sometimes even the person who is lying isn’t aware that he or she is doing so, which makes detecting the lie nearly impossible.
Men are so quick to lie in order to have sex that evolutionary psychologist Glenn Geher advises women that if they can’t judge a man’s intention with at least 90 percent accuracy, they are better off being skeptical all the time. Women should also be more careful prior to entering a relationship. Once they are in a relationship, studies show that they tend to shut off their skepticism and become more vulnerable to deception. If you want to take a more active approach, you can try to train yourself to become better at figuring out when someone is lying, in which case you could turn to Paul Ekman, an expert on facial expressions. He has devoted a substantial part of his professional life to figuring out how to “read” deception in the face of other people and has found that our faces are constantly leaking information about what we are feeling. For example, if your boss makes an annoying request, you might cover up your feeling with a polite smile and a nod of assent, but there was likely a split second (less than a fifth of a second to be more precise) when your face sent a very different message, albeit too fleeting for your boss or even you to notice. Ekman calls these brief moments microexpressions, and with training, you can become better at noticing these facial “leaks.”
Deception, genetic warfare, measures, and countermeasures—we are a long way from the romantic story line. Although evolutionary psychology offers a great deal of insight into human mating and dating, it is not a pretty picture. Luckily, that is not the end of the story.
2 ½
The Dating Animal, Part II
How Dating Is What Makes Us Human or Darwin Reconsidered
BEFORE WE BECOME TOO DISHEARTENED ABOUT THE level of deception between men and women, we need to consider the role of deception in the development of the human mind. The old saying is that to err is human, but a more accurate statement might be to lie is human because it appears that social manipulation is at the core of how we became who we are. According to one study, people lie in about 25 percent of their regular daily interactions, which means that even the simplest of human exchanges often involve deception. Take, for example, the smile. Ekman is probably the leading expert in the world at decoding what our faces are actually expressing. What he has found about our smiles is nothing to smile at. He has uncovered nineteen different kinds of smile. How many of those are genuine expressions of pleasure or happiness? One! That’s right. We have nineteen different ways to smile, and only one of them is a truly sincere expression of how we feel.
THE MACHIAVELLIAN MIND
Distressing though this is, our social skills (a much nicer expression than deception) are quite possibly the key to understanding how the human brain evolved. One of the leading theories for why human beings developed large brains is called the social brain hypothesis, also known rather chillingly as the Machiavellian intelligence theory. The idea is that the size of our social groups has played the essential role in pushing humans to develop larger brains. Many primates, such as chimpanzees, live in reasonably large troops, usually between twenty to fifty