Unpleasant but unavoidable: more you start knowing somebody and understanding him/her more,more you want to run away. Far away. And it is so sad when you know precisely that you do not have any other choice but running.

A Highly Evolved Propensity for Deceit

NY Times
by Natalie Angier
December 23

When considering the behavior of putative scam operators like Bernard “Ponzi scheme” Madoff or Rod “Potty Mouth” Blagojevich, feel free to express a sense of outrage, indignation, disgust, despair, amusement, schadenfreude. But surprise? Don’t make me laugh.

Sure, Mr. Madoff may have bilked his clients of $50 billion, and Governor Blagojevich, of Illinois, stands accused of seeking personal gain through the illicit sale of public property — a United States Senate seat. Yet while the scale of their maneuvers may have been exceptional, their apparent willingness to lie, cheat, bluff and deceive most emphatically was not.

Deceitful behavior has a long and storied history in the evolution of social life, and the more sophisticated the animal, it seems, the more commonplace the con games, the more cunning their contours.

In a comparative survey of primate behavior, Richard Byrne and Nadia Corp of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland found a direct relationship between sneakiness and brain size. The larger the average volume of a primate species’ neocortex — the newest, “highest” region of the brain — the greater the chance that the monkey or ape would pull a stunt like this one described in The New Scientist: a young baboon being chased by an enraged mother intent on punishment suddenly stopped in midpursuit, stood up and began scanning the horizon intently, an act that conveniently distracted the entire baboon troop into preparing for nonexistent intruders.

Much evidence suggests that we humans, with our densely corrugated neocortex, lie to one another chronically and with aplomb. Investigating what they called “lying in day-to-day life,” Bella DePaulo, now a visiting professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and her colleagues asked 77 college students and 70 people from the community to keep anonymous diaries for a week and to note the hows and whys of every lie they told.

Tallying the results, the researchers found that the college students told an average of two lies a day, community members one a day, and that most of the lies fell into the minor fib category. “I told him I missed him and thought about him every day when I really don’t think about him at all,” wrote one participant. “Said I sent the check this morning,” wrote another.

In a follow-up study, the researchers asked participants to describe the worst lies they’d ever told, and then out came confessions of adultery, of defrauding an employer, of lying on a witness stand to protect an employer. When asked how they felt about their lies, many described being haunted with guilt, but others confessed that once they realized they’d gotten away with a whopper, why, they did it again, and again.

In truth, it’s all too easy to lie. In more than 100 studies, researchers have asked participants questions like, Is the person on the videotape lying or telling the truth? Subjects guess correctly about 54 percent of the time, which is barely better than they’d do by flipping a coin. Our lie blindness suggests to some researchers a human desire to be deceived, a preference for the stylishly accoutred fable over the naked truth.

“There’s a counterintuitive motivation not to detect lies, or we would have become much better at it,” said Angela Crossman, an assistant professor of psychology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “But you may not really want to know that the dinner you just cooked stinks, or even that your spouse is cheating on you.”

The natural world is rife with humbug and fish tales, of things not being what they seem. Harmless viceroy butterflies mimic toxic monarch butterflies, parent birds draw predators away from the nest by feigning a broken wing, angler fish lure prey with appendages that wiggle like worms.

Biologists distinguish between such cases of innate or automatic deception, however, and so-called tactical deception, the use of a normal behavior in a novel situation, with the express purpose of misleading an observer. Tactical deception requires considerable behavioral suppleness, which is why it’s most often observed in the brainiest animals.

Great apes, for example, make great fakers. Frans B. M. de Waal, a professor at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center and Emory University, said chimpanzees or orangutans in captivity sometimes tried to lure human strangers over to their enclosure by holding out a piece of straw while putting on their friendliest face.

“People think, Oh, he likes me, and they approach,” Dr. de Waal said. “And before you know it, the ape has grabbed their ankle and is closing in for the bite. It’s a very dangerous situation.”

Apes wouldn’t try this on their own kind. “They know each other too well to get away with it,” Dr. de Waal said. “Holding out a straw with a sweet face is such a cheap trick, only a naïve human would fall for it.”

Apes do try to deceive one another. Chimpanzees grin when they’re nervous, and when rival adult males approach each other, they sometimes take a moment to turn away and close their grins with their hands. Similarly, should a young male be courting a female and spot the alpha male nearby, the subordinate chimpanzee will instantly try to cloak his amorous intentions by dropping his hands over his erection.

Rhesus monkeys are also artful dodgers. “There’s a long set of studies showing that the monkeys are very good at stealing from us,” said Laurie R. Santos, an associate professor of psychology at Yale University.

Reporting recently in Animal Behavior, Dr. Santos and her colleagues also showed that, after watching food being placed in two different boxes, one with merrily jingling bells on the lid and the other with bells from which the clappers had been removed, rhesus monkeys preferentially stole from the box with the silenced bells. “We’ve been hard-pressed to come up with an explanation that’s not mentalistic,” Dr. Santos said. “The monkeys have to make a generalization — I can hear these things, so they, the humans, can, too.”

One safe generalization seems to be that humans are real suckers. After dolphin trainers at the Institute for Marine Mammals Studies in Mississippi had taught the dolphins to clean the pools of trash by rewarding the mammals with a fish for every haul they brought in, one female dolphin figured out how to hide trash under a rock at the bottom of the pool and bring it up to the trainers one small piece at a time.

We’re desperate to believe that what our loved ones say is true. And now we find otherwise. Oh, Flipper, et tu?

Milgram test validated: People 'still willing to torture'

BBC
December 19

Decades after a notorious experiment, scientists have found test subjects are still willing to inflict pain on others - if told to by an authority figure.

US researchers repeated the famous "Milgram test", with volunteers told to deliver electrical shocks to another volunteer - played by an actor. Even after faked screams of pain, 70% were prepared to increase the voltage, the American Psychologist study found. Both may help explain why apparently ordinary people can commit atrocities.

Yale University professor Stanley Milgram's work, published in 1963, recruited volunteers to help carry out a medical experiment, with none aware that they were actually the subject of the test. A "scientist" instructed them to deliver a shock every time the actor answered a question wrongly. When the pretend 150-volt shock was delivered, the actor could be heard screaming in pain, and yet, when asked to, more than eight out of ten volunteers were prepared to give further shocks, even when the "voltage" was gradually increased threefold.

Some volunteers even carried on giving 450-volt shocks even when there was no further response from the actor, suggesting he was either unconscious or dead.

Similar format

Dr Jerry Burger, of Santa Clara University, used a similar format, although he did not allow the volunteers to carry on beyond 150 volts after they had shown their willingness to do so, suggesting that the distress caused to the original volunteers had been too great.

Again, however, the vast majority of the 29 men and 41 women taking part were willing to push the button knowing it would cause pain to another human. Even when another actor entered the room and questioned what was happening, most were still prepared to continue. He told Reuters: "What we found is validation of the same argument - if you put people in certain situations, they will act in surprising and maybe often even disturbing ways. He said that it was not that there was "something wrong" with the volunteers, but that when placed under pressure, people will often do "unsettling" things.

Even though it was difficult to translate laboratory work to the real world, he said, it might partly explain why, in times of conflict, people could take part in genocide.

Complex task

Dr Abigail San, a chartered clinical psychologist, has recently replicated the experiment for a soon-to-be-aired BBC documentary - all the way up to the 450-volt mark, again finding a similar outcome to Professor Milgram. "It's not that these people are simply not good people any more - there is a massive social influence going on." She said that the volunteers were being asked to carry out a complex task in aid of scientific research, and became entirely focused on it, with "little room" left for considering the plight of the person receiving the shock. "They tend to identify massively with the 'experimenter', and become very engaged and distracted by the research.

"There's no opportunity for them to say 'What's my moral stand on this?'"

See also:

Milgram's original study

Living on-line

Internet is a wonderful thing. Really. I can pay my bills on-line, order food, buy on ebay, reading whatever I want to, writing on a blog for whoever will find me, learning, find new friends and dates too. You stay in the front of a computer connected to Internet and the world is yours. The knowledge you can acquire is amazing. The condition is to have medium Internet skills, a good knowledge of English, and your on-life is waiting for you.

One of the dangers of a life exclusively, or mostly, set on-line is the lack of basic human interaction. Why, you could ask, because you could make your "relationships" made on-line became at a certain respect a reality, through a video-call, for example, when you can effectively see who you are talking to. It's in a way similar to what's happening when seeing a movie, with the difference than you could now be an actor yourself. And, also, not less important, you can close the window if you want to.

You can spend hours and hours messaging on-line people, perhaps telling the same creepy story 100 times to 100 different people. You can call it an intense social life. You can find people with who to share different thoughts and interests, even at different corners of the world, with a low certainty to ever meet them in person. It could be rewarding, again, and you are free to call them "friends". Or to fall in love on-line after seeing one's picture, as the teens who are gathering pictures of favorites actors and hang them near their beds.

Sorry, but real-life relationships are more different. (fortunately) You call friends those you can rely on, that could be any time "on-line" (to be read available, ready) to help you, with whom to share a cup of coffee talking or not, but simply offering you a strong human presence. A conferece call it's very different of a real party or of a friends gathering. A virtual tour of a city - through pictures or short movies - could be the same for every place. You still don't know nothing about the smell of the streets or the sound of the voices.

In Japan, they created recently robots with a human appearance, able to answer with a human voice basic human requests. I'm not sure their system is not down when asked "How are you?", but I can bet they don't make any difference between the people who are addressing them. And they don't need to, because...they are robots.

From my own experience, I can say that the on-line environment, dating sites included, is full of people with a high degree of stupidity and aggressiveness and intolerance, with serious, hard to cure psychological troubles. I'm happy I never had the occasion to meet them in person. I'm already worried they are so many on planet Earth.

Of course, nothing is perfect, and in completely accidental circumstances, once in a century, you can find as well outstanding brainy people.

But still, everything is just an opportunity we still have to tackle with very basic human knowledge skills. Human brains projected extremely sophisticated tools, we are used to work with as they are appendix of our bodies. And without them, we could feel disabled. Every time you feel technically addict, try to close your eyes - a suggestion - and imagine a survival test in a simple world, without mobile phones, Internet, different machines. Are you still able, for example, to find a street only with a simple map? Or to talk with your neighbors? Or to write a letter to your real friends telling in a couple of sentences - not only disparate messaging-like words - how do you really feel (maybe happy, maybe sorry)? If yes, you are still alive.