If At First You Don’t Succeed

Then lie, lie, and lie again until you do

Image credit: TimesTech

As my kind indulgent regular readers will by now know very well, we humans evolved under conditions of scarcity and therefore conserving calories was the optimal strategy for making it through to another day. As thinking can consume up to 30% of the body’s blood glucose, and as that glucose was far more often needed to power muscles in the search for food or in flight from potential predators, we naturally evolved to do as little thinking as possible.

Unfortunately for us now, our modern world in no way resembles our evolutionary environment. And so we are highly maladapted and struggle to cope with the novel challenges presented by what we call civilization. As evolution is all about competition for resources, and as the most earnest competition occurs within the group, it’s not surprising that some of us discover we can gain significant advantage by exploiting the cognitive predispositions nature has given us.

The Ricky Gervais movie The Invention of Lying provides a comic take on this real-life superpower. But we don’t need fictional accounts to see just how powerful a weapon lying can be, provided that the lies in question are easy to understand. The human brain is evolved to shun complexity and crave simplicity. As reality is invariably complex, this means that nearly…