help only 31% of the time; group size dominated all other effects. Whether another bystander was male, female or even medically qualified made essentially no difference [513]. The diffusion of responsibility has visible effects in many other contexts. If you want something done, you'll email one person to ask, not three people. Of course, security is usually seen as something that other people deal with.
However, if you ever find yourself in danger, the real question is whether at least one of the bystanders will help, and here the recent research is much more positive. Lasse Liebst, Mark Levine and others have surveyed CCTV footage of a number of public conflicts in several countries over the last ten years, finding that in 9 out of 10 cases, one or more bystanders intervened to de-escalate a fight, and that the more bystanders intervene, the more successful they are [1166]. So it would be wrong to assume that bystanders generally pass by on the other side; so the bystander effect's name is rather misleading.
3.2.4 The social-brain theory of deception
Our second big theme, which also fits into social psychology, is the growing body of research into deception. How does deception work, how can we detect and measure it, and how can we deter it?
The modern approach started in 1976 with the social intelligence hypothesis. Until then, anthropologists had assumed that we evolved larger brains in order to make better tools. But the archaeological evidence doesn't support this. All through the paleolithic period, while our brains evolved from chimp size to human size, we used the same simple stone axes. They only became more sophisticated in the neolithic period, by which time our ancestors were anatomically modern homo sapiens. So why, asked Nick Humphrey, did we evolve large brains if we didn't need them yet? Inspired by observing the behaviour of both caged and wild primates, his hypothesis was that the primary function of the intellect was social. Our ancestors didn't evolve bigger brains to make better tools, but to use other primates better as tools [936]. This is now supported by a growing body of evidence, and has transformed psychology as a discipline. Social psychology had been a poor country cousin until then and was not seen as rigorous; since then, people have realised it was probably the driving force of cognitive evolution. Almost all intelligent species developed in a social context. (One exception is the octopus, but even it has to understand how predators and prey react.)
The primatologist Andy Whiten then collected much of the early evidence on tactical deception, and recast social intelligence as the Machiavellian brain hypothesis: we became smart in order to deceive others, and to detect deception too [362]. Not everyone agrees completely with this characterisation, as the positive aspects of socialisation, such as empathy, also matter. But Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber have recently collected masses of evidence that the modern human brain is more a machine for arguing than anything else [1296]. Our goal is persuasion rather than truth; rhetoric comes first, and logic second.
The second thread coming from the social intellect hypothesis is theory of mind, an idea due to David Premack and Guy Woodruff in 1978 but developed by Heinz Wimmer and Josef Perner in a classic 1983 experiment to determine when children are first able to tell that someone has been deceived [2032]. In this experiment, the Sally-Anne test, a child sees a sweet hidden under a cup by Sally while Anne and the child watch. Anne then leaves the room and Sally switches the sweet to be under a different cup. Anne then comes back and the child is asked where Anne thinks the sweet is. Normal children get the right answer from about age five; this is when they acquire the ability to discern others' beliefs and intentions. Simon Baron-Cohen, Alan Leslie and Uta Frith then showed that children on the Aspergers / autism spectrum acquire this ability significantly later [178].
Many computer scientists and engineers appear to be on the spectrum to some extent, and we're generally not as good at deception as neurotypical people are. This has all sorts of implications! We're under-represented in politics, among senior executives and in marketing. Oh, and there was a lot less cybercrime before underground markets brought together geeks who could write wicked code with criminals who could use it for wicked purposes. Geeks are also more likely to be whistleblowers; we're less likely to keep quiet about an uncomfortable truth just to please others, as we place less value on their opinions. But this is a complex field. Some well-known online miscreants who are on the spectrum were hapless more than anything else; Gary McKinnon claimed to have hacked the Pentagon to discover the truth about flying saucers and didn't anticipate the ferocity of the FBI's response. And other kinds of empathic deficit are involved in many crimes. Other people with dispositional empathy deficits include psychopaths who disregard the feelings of others but understand them well enough to manipulate them, while there are many people whose deficits are situational, ranging from Nigerian scammers who think that any white person who falls for their lure must think Africans are stupid, so they deserve it, right through to soldiers and terrorists who consider their opponents to be less than human or to be morally deserving of death. I'll discuss radicalisation in more detail later in section 26.4.2.
The third thread is self-deception. Robert Trivers argues that we've evolved the ability to deceive ourselves in order to better deceive others: “If deceit is fundamental in animal communication, then there must be strong selection to spot deception and this ought, in turn, to select for a degree of self-deception, rendering some facts and motives unconscious so as to not betray – by the subtle signs of self-knowledge – the deception being practiced” [906]. We forget inconvenient truths and rationalise things we want to believe. There may well be a range of self-deception abilities from honest geeks through to the great salesmen who have a magic ability to believe completely in their product. But it's controversial, and at a number of levels. For example, if Tony Blair really believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when he persuaded Britain to go to war in 2003, was it actually a lie? How do you define sincerity? How can you measure it? And would you even elect a national leader if you expected that they'd be unable to lie to you? There is a lengthy discussion in [906], and the debate is linked to other work on motivated reasoning. Russell Golman, David Hagman and George Loewenstein survey research on how people avoid information, even when it is free and could lead to better decision-making: people at risk of illness avoid medical tests, managers avoid information that might show they made bad decisions, and investors look at their portfolios less when markets are down [782]. This strand of research goes all the way back to Sigmund Freud, who described various aspects of the denial of unpleasant information, including the ways in which we try to minimise our feelings of guilt for the bad things we do, and to blame others for them.
It also links up with filter-bubble effects on social media. People prefer to listen to others who confirm their beliefs and biases, and this can be analysed in terms of the hedonic value of information. People think of themselves as honest and try to avoid the ethical dissonance that results from deviations [173]; criminologists use the term neutralisation to describe the strategies that rule-breakers use to minimise the guilt that they feel about their actions (there's an overlap with both filter effects and self-deception). A further link is to Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber's work on the brain as a machine for argument, which I mentioned above.
The fourth thread is intent. The detection of hostile intent was a big deal in our ancestral evolutionary environment; in pre-state societies, perhaps a quarter of men and boys die of homicide, and further back many of our ancestors were killed by animal predators. So we appear to have evolved a sensitivity to sounds and movements that might signal the intent of a person, an animal or even a god. As a result, we now spend too much on defending against threats that involve hostile intent, such as terrorism, and not enough on defending against epidemic disease, which kills many more people – or climate change, which could kill even more.
There are other reasons why we might want to think about intent more carefully. In cryptography, we use logics of belief to analyse the security of authentication protocols, and to deal with statements such as ‘Alice believes that Bob believes that Charlie controls the key
