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
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.
THE INTELLECTUAL CHESS GAME
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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 all: 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.
Robert Trivers has argued that to deceive others well, an
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
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predicting reactions—is all there in the chimps and baboons, too.
As Geoffrey Miller, a psychologist at the University of Stanford, has put it, 'All apes and monkeys show complex behavior replete with communication, manipulation, deception, and long-term relationships; selection for Machiavellian intelligence based on such social complexities should again predict much larger brains in other apes and monkeys than we observe: '48
There have been several answers to this puzzle, none of which is entirely convincing. The first is Humphrey 's own answer, which is that human society is more complex than ape society because it needs a 'polytechnic school ' in which young people can learn the practical skills of their species. This seems to me merely a retreat to the toolmaker theory: The second is the suggestion that alliance building among unrelated individuals is a key to success in human beings and that this complication vastly increases the rewards of intellect: To which comes the response: What about dolphins? There is growing evidence that dolphin society is based on shifting alliances of males and of females so that, for example, Richard Connor observed a pair of males that came across a small group of other males that had kidnapped a fertile female from her group. Instead of fighting them for the female, the pair went away and found some allies, came back, and with superior numbers stole the female from the first group: 49
