The Red Queen_ Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature - Matt Ridley [165]
Indeed novelists themselves saw this first. In George Eliot’s Felix Holt, the Radical, she gives a concise summary of the Alexander-Humphrey theory:
Fancy what a game of chess would be if all the chessmen had passions and intellects, more or less small and cunning; if you were not only uncertain about your adversary’s men, but a little uncertain also about your own … You would be especially likely to be beaten, if you depended arrogantly on your mathematical imagination, and regarded your passionate pieces with contempt. Yet this imaginary chess is easy compared with a game a man has to play against his fellow-men with other fellow-men for instruments.
The Alexander–Humphrey theory, which is widely known as the Machiavellian hypothesis,41 sounds rather obvious, but it could never have been proposed in the 1960s before the ‘selfish’ revolution in the study of behaviour, or by anybody steeped in the ways of social science, for it requires a cynical view of animal communication. Until the mid 1970s zoologists thought of communication in terms of information transfer: it was in the interests of both the communicator and the recipient that the message be clear, honest and informative. But, as Lord Macaulay put it, ‘The object of oratory alone is not truth, but persuasion.’42 In 1978, Richard Dawkins and John Krebs pointed out that animals use communication principally to manipulate each other, rather than transfer information. A bird sings long and eloquently to persuade a female to mate with him, or a rival to keep clear of his territory. If he were merely passing on information, he need not make the song so elaborate. Animals’ communication, said Dawkins and Krebs, is more like human advertising than like airline timetables. Even the most mutually beneficial communication, like that between a mother and a baby, is pure manipulation, as every mother who has been woken in the night by a desperate sounding infant that merely wants company knows. Once scientists had begun thinking in this way, they looked at animal social life in an entirely new light.43
One of the most striking pieces of evidence for deception’s role in communication comes from experiments that Leda Cosmides did when at Stanford University and that Gerd Gigerenzer and his colleagues did at Salzburg University. There is a simple logical puzzle called the Wason test, which people are bafflingly bad at. It consists of four cards placed on the table. Each card has a letter on one side and a number on the other. At present the cards read as follows: D; F; 3; 7. Your task is to turn over only those cards that you need to in order to prove the following rule to be true or false: if a card has a D on one side, then it has a 3 on the other.
When presented with this test, less than one-quarter of Stanford students got it right: an average performance. (The right answer, by the way, is D and 7.) But it has been known for years that people are much better at the Wason test if it is presented differently. For example, the problem can be set as follows: ‘You are a bouncer in a Boston bar and you will lose your job unless you enforce the following law: if a person is drinking beer then he must be over twenty years old.’ The cards now read: drinking beer; drinking Coke; twenty-five years old; sixteen years old. Now three-quarters of students get the right answer by turning over the cards marked drinking beer and sixteen years old. But the problem is logically identical to the first one. Perhaps the more familiar context of the Boston bar is what helps people do better. But other equally familiar examples elicit poor performance. The secret of why some Wason tests are easier than others has proved to be one of psychology’s enduring enigmas.
What Cosmides