Born Liars why we can't live without deceit by Ian Leslie

A book investigating why we are programmed to deceive, most of all to deceive ourselves.  Touches on topics from several other books I have read, explaining that what we perceive as reality is actually constructed by our minds some time after the event (so as to best fit with our mental view of the world).

Interesting chapters on child development and at what point they are able to deceive and detect deception.

Looks at how the evolutionary explosion in teh size of our brain can be traced back to having to manage living in larger social groups with an 'arms race' of deception and detection.


Based on the size of our brains, he said, we should be able to cope with a social group – people we would happily meet for a drink, say – of about a hundred and fifty people. Sure enough, when he combed through the anthropological and sociological literature, he found that a hundred and fifty worked as a rough average of the size of many human social groups, from hunter-gatherer societies to modern army units and company departments.Read more at location 215 •
Two-year-olds start to sense that their parents have feelings, and that they can affect those feelings by what they do. They then proceed to test this fascinating insight to destruction.Read more at location 368 •
Great liars tend to be great readers of human behaviour. Think of Iago, a ‘people person’ if ever there was one, subtly drawing out Othello’s rage, or reflect that Bill Clinton is famous for being both a convincing liar and a politician of exceptional empathy.Read more at location 438 •
What’s clear is that, faced with a group of people and asked to identify the liar, you’d be better off picking the most charismatic and fluent person in the room rather than, as we’re inclined to, the shifty-looking mumbler in the corner. Lying requires high cognitive, emotional and social abilities. The best liars tend to be charming, empathetic, and capable of thinking several moves aheadRead more at location 927 •
When you are talking to someone, there are at least two things more prominent in your mind than in theirs – your thoughts, and their face. As a result you tend to judge others on what you see, and ourselves by what you feel.Read more at location 1111 •
This description of memory tallies with the experimental evidence of Elizabeth Loftus, and with the findings of modern neuroscience. Remembering is an act of creative reconstruction rather than simple replaying. Every time a memory is recalled it is re-formed, and in the process it becomes mingled with the stories of others and shaped by our own anxieties, desires and imaginings. As the neurologist Antonio Damasio puts it, the brain carries ‘no hard copies’.Read more at location 1731 •
that our feeling of free will is nothing but a trick of perspective – a deception practised by the brain. A conscious ‘decision’ is merely a story we tell ourselves to explain what has happened to us, or what our bodies have already executed. This is a deeply contentious position, although many neuroscientists agree with him. There is certainly a huge amount of experimental evidence that our unconscious brain guides and determines many of the everyday decisions we think of as conscious ones.Read more at location 1869 •
Anthony Greenwald compressed this even further when he coined the word beneffectance to describe the normal human tendency to interpret reality so as to present ourselves as both beneficial and effective. Whenever either of these propositions are thrown into question, we are good at inventing stories that resolve the inconsistency between our actions and our self-image. Most of the time we’re not aware of doing so.Read more at location 2283 •

scientist Harold McGee has pointed out that the pungent smell of certain cheeses, like Vieux Boulogne, is the smell of decay – something we are hard-wired to find disgusting (and thus to avoid for our own good). That some people, in certain countries – especially France, of course – find such smells appetising is testament to the extent that our senses are in thrall to the beliefs we inherit from the culture in which we live.Read more at location 3071 •
Other studies have shown that green pills are better at reducing anxiety, and white pills are best for soothing ulcers. Patients who take four sugar pills a day clear their gastric ulcers faster than those who take two sugar pills a day. Large pills work better than medium-sized pills, and very small pills work best of all. Placebos that patients believe to be expensive work better than those they think cost less. Fake surgery involving impressivelooking, excitingly-named machines works extremely well indeed.Read more at location 3211 •
The anthropologist Robin Fox put it to me like this: ‘The brain’s business is not to give us an accurate or objective view of the world, but to give us a useful view – one we can act on.’ Its primary job is to help the packet of tissue, bone and muscle in which it’s encased to survive and thrive; reporting reality is an important but secondary consideration. So is telling the truth to others.Read more at location 3570 •