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 chess-men 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 con-tempt: Yet this imaginary chess is easy compared with a game a man has to play against his fellowmen with other fellowmen for instruments:
The Alexander-Humphrey theory, which is widely known as the Machiavellian hypothesis," sounds rather obvious, but it could never have been proposed in the 1960s before the "selfish " revolution in the study of behavior 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,'Z "The object of oratory alone is not truth but persuasion: " In 1978, Richard Dawkins and John Krebs pointed out that animals use communication prin-
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cipally to manipulate one another rather than to 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: Animal 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 who merely wants company knows: Once scientists had begun thinking in this way, they looked at animal social life in an entirely new light."
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: get 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 the students get the right answer: Turn 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.
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Cosmides and Gigerenzer have solved the enigma. 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 beer-drinking 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 for 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 alclass="underline" 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 fair-ness of social bargains and the sincerity of social offers: It is a mistrustful Machiavellian world:"
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 the baboon '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's 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 humans, 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.°
Robert Trivers has argued that to deceive others well, an
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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."
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: 1ndeed, 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:"
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 people are cleverer than chimpanzees, which is no great surprise, but it starkly poses the question why? If Figan had had a bigger brain, he might have seen what was coming: So the evolutionary pressure that Nick Humphrey identified—to get better and better at solving social puzzles, reading minds, and THE INTELLECTUAL CHESS GAME