Review of Robert Trivers' The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life
Cognitive Neuropsychiatry (forthcoming)
| Abstract | Here I review Robert Trivers' 2011 book _The Folly of Fools_, in which he advocates the evolutionary theory of deceit and self-deception that he pioneered in his famous preface to Richard Dawkins' _Selfish Gene_. Although the book contains a wealth of interesting discussion on topics ranging from warfare to immunology, I find it lacking on two major fronts. First, it fails to give a proper argument for its central thesis--namely, that self-deception evolved to facilitate deception of others. Second, the book lacks conceptual clarity with respect to the focal term "self-deception." | |||||||||
| Keywords | self-deception deception Trivers belief evolution natural selection adaptation delusion evolutionary psychology bias | |||||||||
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