Epstein Secrets

From: John Brockman c Sent: Tuesday, July 4, 2017 7:55 PM To: Robert Trivers; Nicholas Christakis; Abbas Raza; Michael Shermer; Sendhil Mullainathan; Richard Nisbett; Peter Lee; Michael Norton; Matthew Lieberman; Daniel Lieb

Sent: Tuesday, July 4, 2017 7:55 PM To: Robert Trivers; Nicholas Christakis; Abbas Raza; Michael Shermer

od; Jennifer Jacquet; Rebecca Goldstein; Joseph LeDoux; Elizabeth Phelps; Carl Page; Lucy Page/Southworth; Roy Baumeister; David Haig; June Gruber, Cushman, Fiery; Lawrence Ian Reed; Hugo Mercier, Richard Potts; Peter Norvig; Lori Park; Chris DiBona; Alvaro Fischer; Nathan Myhrvold; Elon Musk; Jesse Dy

lves are also the ones most likely to lash out with extreme violence when someone threatens the reality of their stature. The evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers was the first to identify the adaptive significance of self-deception and its connection to deception. As he insightfully notes in his book The Folly

s of victory in war — or any competitive arena. Though this is a costly strategy, there are clear evolutionary benefits under conditions explained by Trivers and Johnson. Self-deception is favored when opponents have imperfect information about their strengths and weaknesses, and where the payoffs are high

ron, J., & Ritov, I. (2004). Omission effect, individual differences, and normality. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 94, 74-85; Cushman, F., Knobe, J., & Sinnott-Armstrong, W. (2008). Moral appraisals affect doing/allowing judgments. Cognition, 308, 281-289; Haidt, J., & Baron, J. (19

ly applied in biological contexts to explain phenomena such as animal sex ratios (Fisher, 1958), territoriality (Smith & Price, 1973), coop- eration (Trivers, 1971), sexual displays (Zahavi, 1975), and parent—offspring con- flict (Trivers, 1974). More recently, evolutionary dynamic models have been applied

using this case, the vast majority of subjects choose the utilitarian option, judging it per- missible to cause the death of one to save five (e.g., Cushman et al., 2006; Mikhail, 2007). In the “footbridge” variant (Thomson, 1976), the trolley is hurtling toward the group of five people, but the switch to