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and Gigerenzer have done is solve the enigma. It is simply this: if the law to be enforced is not a social contract, the problem is difficult – however simple its logic; but if it is a social contract, like the drinking-beer example, then it is easy. In one of Gigerenzer’s experiments, people were good at enforcing the rule, ‘If you take a pension then you must have worked here ten years’, by wanting to know what was on the back of the cards – ‘worked here eight years’ and ‘got a pension’ – so long as they were told they were the employer. But if told they were an employee and still set the same rule, they turned over the cards – ‘worked here twelve years’ and ‘did not get a pension’ – as if looking for cheating employers even though the logic clearly implies that cheating employers are not infringing the rule.

Through a long series of experiments Cosmides and Gigerenzer proved that people are simply not treating the puzzles as pieces of logic at all. They are treating them as social contracts and looking for cheats. The human mind may not be much suited to logic at all, they conclude, but is well suited to judging the fairness of social bargains and the sincerity of social offers. It is a mistrustful Machiavellian world.44

Richard Byrne and Andrew Whiten of the University of St Andrews studied baboons in East Africa and witnessed an incident in which Paul, a young baboon, saw an adult female, Mel, find a large root. He looked around and then gave a sharp cry. The call summoned Paul’s mother, who ‘assumed’ that Mel had just stolen the food from her young or threatened him in some way, and chased Mel away. Paul ate the root. This piece of social manipulation by the young baboon required some intelligence: a knowledge that its call would bring its mother, a guess at what the mother would ‘assume’ had happened, and a prediction that it would lead to Paul getting the food. It was also using intelligence to deceive. Byrne and Whiten went on to suggest that the habit of calculated deception is common in mankind, occasional in chimpanzees, rare in baboons and virtually unknown in other animals. Deceiving and detecting deception would then be the primary reason for intelligence. They suggest that the great apes acquired a unique ability to imagine alternative possible worlds as a means to deception.45

Robert Trivers has argued that to deceive others well, an animal must deceive itself, and that self-deception’s hallmark is a biased system of transfer from the conscious to the unconscious mind. Deception is therefore the reason for the invention of the subconscious.46

Yet Byrne’s and Whiten’s account of the baboon incident goes right to the heart of what is wrong with the Machiavellian theory. It applies to every social species. For example, if you read any stories of life in a chimpanzee troop, the ‘plot’ has a painful predictability about it to human ears. In Jane Goodall’s account of the career of the successful male, Goblin, we watch Goblin’s precocious and confident rise in the hierarchy, as he challenges and defeats first each of the females in the troop and then, one by one, the males: Humphrey, Jomeo, Sherry, Satan and Evered.

Only Figan [the alpha male] was exempt. Indeed, it was his relationship with Figan that enabled him to challenge these older and more experienced males: he almost never did so unless Figan was nearby.

To the human reader what comes next is startlingly obvious.

For some time we had been expecting Goblin to turn on Figan. Indeed, I am still puzzled as to why Figan, so socially adroit in all other ways, had not been able to predict the inevitable outcome of his sponsorship of Goblin.47

The plot has a few twists, but we are not surprised; Figan is soon toppled. Machiavelli at least warned his Prince to watch his back. Brutus and Cassius took great care to conceal their plot from Julius Caesar; they could never have pulled off the assassination if their open ambition had been so obvious. Not even the most power-blinded human dictator is taken by surprise as Figan was. Of course that only proves that