The Role of Deceit in Social Communication: From Biology to Politics

In today’s world, the widespread proliferation of fake news-especially in an era where traditional journalistic fact-checking barriers have disappeared-suggests that deception is a natural state of the human mind. Humans have always operated within systems of lies or deception presented as truth. When political candidates make promises they don’t keep, or when television broadcasts one thing while reality shows another, these are all vivid examples of the lies that accompany us daily.

This indicates that we are mistakenly oriented toward expecting honesty and proper behavior, believing the world is built on truth. In reality, the world may be constructed on errors and rule violations, with ideals serving only as unattainable standards. For example, the hybrid war faced by Ukraine is built on deliberate structures of deception, both within Ukraine and in the international community, making it difficult to develop effective countermeasures.

Deceit in Evolutionary Biology

Mathematician E. Weinstein, head of Peter Thiel’s investment fund, notes: “Evolutionary biologists Richard Alexander and Robert Trivers have recently emphasized that deception, not information, often plays a decisive role in natural selection systems. Most of our reasoning treats deception as a distortion of pure information exchange, leaving us unprepared for a world where fakes can reliably displace the truth. Future systems of natural selection in humanity will likely remain tied to economic theory, which today relies on market models based on accurate information. If we take selection more seriously, we can honestly ask: what strict system can connect the altered reality of layers of lies, where nothing can be accepted as it appears?”

Richard Alexander is also credited with the thought: “Human social life is so fundamentally filled with deception (of oneself and others) that the only reason to tell the truth, which we sometimes presumably do, may be to facilitate the spread of self-serving falsehoods among the audience.”

These evolutionary biologists demonstrate that natural selection favors deception over truth. Human survival is linked to the ability to deviate from accurate communication-this is the correct social behavior within a group. Alexander, in his work on the biology of moral systems, states: “Few can deny that most people behave selfishly when given the chance, which can usually be labeled as immoral. It’s difficult to apply the adjectives moral or immoral to individuals, let alone entire societies, so the problem of human duality arises. These terms are better used to describe individual acts. Moreover, morality within a group (patriotism, loyalty, collective effort) often correlates with opposite behaviors toward members of other groups, raising the question of whether cooperation for competition was the historical function of group unity.”

Deceit and Self-Deception

Another evolutionary biologist, Robert Trivers, even wrote a book on deceit and self-deception. He argues: “Self-deception arises to aid deception. The main function of self-deception is to better deceive others. Both make it harder for others to detect deception, allowing you to deceive with fewer cognitive costs. If I consciously lie to you about something important, you’ll look for clues in my eyes, voice, and behavior that betray my knowledge of the lie and my nervousness about being caught. But if I don’t know I’m lying, these detection methods are unavailable to you.”

Trivers further explains: “Our approach is to consider self-deception among a variety of processes directly comparable to those involved in interpersonal deception.” He also notes: “Most research on detecting deception has been conducted on people unfamiliar with each other. Our ability to detect deception may be poorly prepared for this task, as this approach eliminates the possibility that people can learn to use idiosyncratic cues that help determine if a specific individual is lying.”

Biology pushes people into groups, where survival is higher by definition, and shapes social behavior within those groups. For Trivers, deception is also a means of better survival: “The deceived usually lose knowledge, resources, or something else, which results in a decrease in the spread of their genes. This leads to what is called a co-evolutionary arms race: on one side, natural selection improves deception; on the other, it improves the ability to detect deception.”

Steven Pinker of Harvard called Trivers “one of the greatest thinkers in the history of Western thought,” noting that in the early 1970s, Trivers revolutionized evolutionary biology with several brilliant, original papers that shaped research paradigms for decades.

Types and Functions of Self-Deception

Trivers identifies five types of situations where self-deception is needed:

• Denial of future deception
• Unconscious behavior involving deception
• Self-deception as self-promotion
• Constructing one-sided social explanations
• Fictitious narratives of future intentions

He writes: “A distinctive feature of self-deception in the service of deception is the denial of deception, unconscious management of selfish and deceptive tricks, creating a public image as an altruist and someone interested in others’ lives, constructing self-serving social theories and internal narratives of current behavior built on bias and hiding real intentions.”

Trivers’ main book on the topic, “The Folly of Fools,” even includes a chapter on false historical narratives, showing that deception operates effectively at the level of entire states.

Deceit, Empathy, and Group Psychology

In a 2006 discussion with Noam Chomsky, Chomsky emphasized that the psychology of deception and self-deception is linked to group thinking. When control is external, it’s intimidation and blackmail; when it’s our control, it’s liberation and freedom. Trivers responded that psychologists discuss such verbal switches in the context of “us vs. them” situations.

Trivers was once asked about empathy and why it wasn’t included in his book. He replied: “Empathy is a very important part of deception, and I regret not exploring it. It’s not sympathy; it’s feeling the feelings of others.”

Trivers also notes that self-deception is most common in military actions, highlighting that “military incompetence-losing while expecting victory-is accompanied by four common symptoms: overconfidence, underestimating the enemy, ignoring intelligence reports, and ignoring casualties. The logic of self-deception maintains a conscious illusion of insensitivity to contrary evidence, even when provided by your own agents whose goal is to provide accurate information.” This is a precise analysis of Stalin’s thinking before World War II.

He also discusses institutional self-deception, such as the Challenger and Columbia shuttle disasters, where NASA leaders ignored scientists’ warnings. Regarding the Iraq War, he notes that self-deception was aimed not at Iraq, but at internal and external audiences.

Limits and Paradoxes of Self-Deception

Psychologist Albert Bandura pointed out a weakness in the theory of self-deception: “It’s impossible to make yourself believe something while simultaneously knowing it’s a lie. Therefore, self-deception cannot exist. Attempts to resolve the paradox of how a deceiver can deceive themselves have not succeeded. These attempts usually involve creating a divided self, considering one part unaware.” While this is a valid point, it can be addressed by recognizing a double-layered scheme of deception, where a person, while deceiving another, consciously behaves in a way to avoid detection, effectively “deceiving themselves” in their behavior.

Political Consequences of Deceit and Self-Deception

The first candidates for the application of these human abilities are the media and politics, especially at their intersection-elections. Political pressure on the media arises because politics is a more organized force with greater finances and influence. Researchers note: “Citizens do not form political judgments in a vacuum. The truism that ‘voters, not the press, determine election outcomes’ is more false than true. Citizens need information to make decisions, and in politics, most of this information comes from news media.”

Politicians strive to ensure that the right information appears at the right time and place, making their influence stronger than that of journalists, who become transmitters of content beneficial to politicians. Media outlets set the status of candidates in the race, as noted by classics Lazarsfeld and Merton: “Media confer prestige and enhance the authority of individuals and groups by legitimizing their status. Recognition by the press, radio, magazines, and newsreels proves that someone has appeared, is important enough to be singled out from the anonymous mass, and that their behavior and opinion are significant enough to receive public attention.”

Researchers identify four components of election campaign coverage: candidate decisions, values of news organizations, economic incentives of news organizations, and decisions of readers and viewers. For example, Trump received more coverage than other candidates.

Deceit in Modern Politics

Tony Schwartz, co-author of “The Art of the Deal,” has given several interviews about Trump’s relationship with the truth: “In civilized society, it’s assumed that another person tells us what is factual. If this connection breaks, we fall into chaos. I seriously believe that Trump will pay little attention to the truth as president, as I observed him 30 years ago during real estate deals.” In another interview, Schwartz emphasizes: “He lies strategically. He has no regret about it. Since many people are ‘constrained by the truth,’ Trump’s indifference gives him a strange advantage.”

Others echo this sentiment: “If you listen to what Donald Trump says on any issue, you’ll see he takes opposite positions, sometimes even in the same sentence.” This type of communicative behavior is rooted in his love for attention and media manipulation-an area in which he excels.

Politics is a vast field for the use of lies, a property inherent in politicians’ promises, since we elect them at one point in time, but their promises are fulfilled (or not) later. The modern world is structured so that the rich govern the poor. Gramsci emphasized the role of culture in maintaining the dominance of the ruling class, leading to the natural acceptance of this dominance by the governed.

Gleb Pavlovsky, for example, says: “The poor are a political concept. Power belongs to a group of billionaires, and this usurpation of power is justified by caring for the poor. The poor are a demonstrative specimen of the people cared for by a group of good, patriotic billionaires, so this topic will always be on the agenda.”

Informal Networks and Patronal Politics

Alongside official political institutions, shadow ones operate actively. Ukraine is no exception. Andreas Umland notes that Ukraine is built on the principle of patronalism-a hidden political structure based more on informal connections than formal ones. Henry Hale, in his book, describes highly patronalized societies as those where “connections are not only significant (as they are almost everywhere), but extremely so. Such societies are usually characterized by strong personal, friendly, and family ties, weak rule of law, pervasive corruption, low social capital, strong patron-client relationships, widespread nepotism, and what sociologists call ‘patrimonial’ or ‘neo-patrimonial’ forms of dominance.”

Hale argues that in the post-Soviet space, patronal legacy means that politics is primarily a struggle between vast networks of personal acquaintances, not between formal institutions like parties, parliaments, firms, or even the presidency and the state. These networks often have roots in formal organizations (like the Soviet KGB and its successors), but most have people in all major spheres-state bureaucracy, business, NGOs, media, and a range of ideologically diverse political parties. Competing networks may share common roots, as seen in the rivalry between former KGB members in modern Russia.

Hale also discusses how constitutions in highly clientelist hybrid regimes shape people’s expectations about which network will dominate in the foreseeable future, helping to resolve or complicate coordination problems for political actors. He defines a clientelist regime as one where politics and economics are organized around personal exchanges of specific rewards and punishments, rather than abstract ideological principles or people unknown personally-something akin to feudal or even more ancient social structures. The importance of informal patron-client networks in structuring political and economic processes is also highlighted by O. Fisun.

This model of the state serves and benefits only those embedded in such networks, leading to endless lists of “godfathers” in Ukrainian politics. Thus, criticism of oligarchs is not entirely accurate-they too must be integrated into these personal networks to stay afloat. This helps explain why three decades of post-Soviet development have yielded little progress: the same informal groups retain power and use it for personal enrichment, while beautiful words with no relation to reality are spoken on the surface.

This model prevents Ukraine from breaking existing ties, as they are informal, while formal institutions-like small anti-corruption ministries-are created to fight them. According to the laws of network-centric warfare, hierarchies cannot defeat networks; only networks can defeat networks, which is what happens during property redistribution when a new, personally-oriented network comes to power, pushing out the old ones. On the surface, this is called democracy.

Conclusion

Biological deceit has evolved into political deceit. From a biological perspective, we are natural deceivers, and since we haven’t fully realized this, we are exceptionally skilled at it-something we might even congratulate ourselves for.

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