The Science Behind The Invention of Lying: Hollywood Fact vs. Fiction

• Digital Hollywood
• anthropology
• evolution
• Hollywood Sci-Fi vs. Reality

What if humans had never evolved the ability to lie? That's the premise posed by The Invention of Lying, the new movie from Ricky Gervais, the creator and star of Extras and the original BBC version of The Office.

In Lying's alternate reality, people are ultra-literal, and incapable of even comprehending the concept of deception (they don't even have a word for "truth"). Casinos prominently post their unfavorable odds, blockbuster movies are actually just "readers" narrating well-known stories from history (because without lies, fiction doesn't exist), and dating is made simpler by prospective mates' up-front pronouncements or their perceived genetic compatibility.

But the differences between the movie's world and our own seem to be limited to the cultural. Physically, the movie's characters appear to be identical to those that populate our world—a parallel that would likely be impossible, considering the role deception played in our evolution, according to John Hawks, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin."Deception is old," Hawks says. "It goes at least as far back as the common human–monkey ancestors, and experiments have shown that monkeys and apes deceive each other."

Without deception, humans would likely be physically different—if there would be humans at all. This stems from a concept that anthropologists call "honest signals." In a world where a person or animal is capable of both truth and deception, extra attention is given to signals that portray a message that is difficult to fake. As an example, Hawks cites male peacocks, which have large feathers that are believed to attract females by drawing attention to the fact that, despite their presence in a dirty and predator-filled world, the male is savvy and strong enough to maintain bountiful plumage. In other words, good-looking feathers are difficult to fake (there are no peacock wig shops), and are therefore an "honest signal."

"If there wasn't lying, we could save the expense of some of these signals," Hawks says.

In humans, he theorizes this would take the form of a reduced difference in the physical appearance of men and women, as there would be less evolutionary pressure for both men and women to develop typical "masculine" or "feminine" traits that signal to prospective mates that they come from healthy genetic stock. Without deception, they could just come out and say their health and strength, and prospective mates would believe them.

Hawks also believes that conversation in a deception-free world would be far more to the point, without any handshaking or small talk.

"We spend a lot of time and attention on rituals that are designed to get people to trust us, and I expect we wouldn't have any of that," Hawks says. "Every encounter would be like running into somebody you already knew on the street."

But there's one thing the movie did get right: In a deception-free world, a person with the ability to lie would have an enormous advantage. In the movie, Mark Bellison (played by Gervais) stumbles upon the first lie—or, as they call it in the film, "saying something that wasn't"—and almost immediately uses his newfound power to accumulate wealth and power.

(Spoiler alert!) At the end of the movie, Bellison's son is shown to have inherited the ability to lie. Given enough generations, this hereditary ability would likely prove so advantageous that it could spread until the world bears a greater resemblance to our own, where everybody is able to lie.

"If everybody told the truth all the time, the population would be vulnerable to a new version that was able to lie," Hawks says.

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