Given this ceaseless battle on both
the human and genetic level, relationships are rampant breeding grounds for
deception. Part of the problem is that modern society provides far more
opportunities to lie. In our ancestral environment, social groups were smaller,
and those who lied would gain a reputation for dishonesty. But in today’s
environment, especially in cities or other highly populated areas, there is a
much smaller chance of being caught. Internet dating has only increased the
problem. Not surprisingly, men and women in relationships lie to each other all
the time. In a 1990 study of college students, researchers found that 85 percent
of the participants had lied to a partner about a past relationship or an
indiscretion. Another study revealed that dating couples lied to each other in
about one-third of their interactions. The numbers do improve for married
couples, who lied in only 10 percent of their conversations, although the survey
found that married couples saved their biggest lies for their partners. Your
spouse is probably telling the truth about whether or not she likes your new tie
but is possibly lying about whether or not she slept with the mailman. While men
are more dishonest than women, they are at least more honest about their
dishonesty, giving more accurate estimates of how much they lie than women do.
And those are just the lies that we openly acknowledge. The most successful lies
are those that we do not even know we are telling, and studies have shown that
we are quite good at lying to ourselves about many things having to do with
mating, such as how committed we think we are to someone when we are trying to
get him or her into bed.
The deception occurs along predictable
lines. Given a culture that frowns on female promiscuity—a man’s greatest fear
in any relationship revolves around questions of fidelity and paternity—women
quite commonly lie about their sex lives. This helps explain why sexual surveys
always show a gross disparity between the number of partners men and women have
had (the other cause is that men exaggerate the number of their partners).
Researchers found that if they hooked female college students up to a fake lie
detector and then asked them about the number of sexual partners they had, women
suddenly reported almost twice as many as the women who were not hooked up to
the bogus lie detector. For men, there is a quick and easy way to try to get a
sense of a woman’s fidelity—if they can get her to divulge her sexual fantasies.
One researcher has found that women who have more sexual fantasies about other
men are also more likely to be unfaithful. Women also tend to lie about their
bodily appearance, although they probably prefer to consider things like padded
bras and control-top panty hose enhancements, rather than outright
deceptions.
Women I interviewed frequently
admitted that they did not tell men the truth about their sexual pasts. To give
one example, an attractive woman in her late twenties was incredibly
self-confident about her sexuality and had no problem sleeping with a man for
her own pleasure and then never seeing him again. She had already racked up more
than thirty partners, and she used to proclaim that fact proudly to the men she
was dating—until she realized that they couldn’t handle the information. Some
immediately freaked out. Others went off to sulk. In almost every case, it hurt
the relationship and sometimes even ended it. Now when she is asked, she always
answers that she has slept with six men, which seems to strike the perfect
balance between being a prude and being a slut. Another woman said that men she
had dated were often afraid to ask because they didn’t want to break the
illusion that she had never been with other men, which was an illusion she was
happy to allow them to cling to.
While men’s greatest concerns center
on a woman’s potential promiscuity, women get more angry when a man has lied
about his income or status or when he has exaggerated his feelings in order to
have sex, and studies confirm that men lie more about their resources and their
level of commitment as well as how kind, sincere, and trustworthy they are.
Needless to say, nearly every woman I interviewed had experienced some form of
this. One woman later found that her boyfriend had lied to her about virtually
every aspect of his life—his age, his family, his previous jobs. The only thing
he didn’t lie about was his current job, and that was only because they worked
together.
What makes deception an even bigger
problem is that it turns out that, while seemingly all of us are reasonably
adept at lying, we are terrible at telling when other people are lying to us.
According to research, people can only distinguish truth from lies 54 percent of
the time, which is not much better than random guessing. We’re even worse at
picking out lies, which we only manage to achieve 47 percent of the time.
Sometimes even the person who is lying isn’t aware that he or she is doing so,
which makes detecting the lie nearly impossible.
Men are so quick to lie in order to
have sex that evolutionary psychologist Glenn Geher advises women that if they
can’t judge a man’s intention with at least 90 percent accuracy, they are better
off being skeptical all the time. Women should also be more careful prior to
entering a relationship. Once they are in a relationship, studies show that they
tend to shut off their skepticism and become more vulnerable to deception. If
you want to take a more active approach, you can try to train yourself to become
better at figuring out when someone is lying, in which case you could turn to
Paul Ekman, an expert on facial expressions. He has devoted a substantial part
of his professional life to figuring out how to “read” deception in the face of
other people and has found that our faces are constantly leaking information
about what we are feeling. For example, if your boss makes an annoying request,
you might cover up your feeling with a polite smile and a nod of assent, but
there was likely a split second (less than a fifth of a second to be more
precise) when your face sent a very different message, albeit too fleeting for
your boss or even you to notice. Ekman calls these brief moments
microexpressions, and with training, you can become better at noticing these
facial “leaks.”
Deception, genetic warfare, measures,
and countermeasures—we are a long way from the romantic story line. Although
evolutionary psychology offers a great deal of insight into human mating and
dating, it is not a pretty picture. Luckily, that is not the end of the
story.
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