Current and Recent Research
Jun 10th, 2007 by David
Curent and Recent Research
Recent Projects
My work on deception and self-deception, summed up in my 2004 book Why We Lie: The Evolutionary Roots of Deception and the Unconscious Mind suggests that a propensity to lie, both verbally and non-verbally, is an evolved feature of the human mind. Although deception is common throughout nature, human beings have developed this capacity to an unprecidented degree. Our ability to speak not only makes of virtuosos of mendacity, masters in the poker game of social life, but it also gives us the unique ability to lie to ourselves: we hide the truth from others by hiding it from ourselves. Why We Lie has been translated into Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and will appear in Spanish in 2010.
My 2007 book The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War describes how the human penchent for group violence has roots extending deep into our primate past. Killing others to acquire their resources is advantageous to the victors. However, this tendency clashes with another, equally biological, disposition: a primal inhibition against shedding the blood of members of our own kind. Caught between these two opposing forces, we override the taboo against killing by representing the Other as a non-human predator, as prey or as a vector of infection. A brief summary of The Most Dangerous Animal” can be found in my essay “Why War?” on this website.
Identifying the origin and function of the incest taboo has been one of the abiding problems of anthropology since the 19th century. Over the years, the explanation proposed by the Finnish anthropologist/philosopher Edvard Westermarck has gained ascendency, and is now something of an orthodoxy amongst sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists. According to Westermarck, individuals raised in close proximity naturally form sexual aversions to one another, and the adaptive purpose of these aversions is to prevent mating between close kin. My work on incest avoidance shows that the evidence taken to support Westermarck’s hypothesis is not as strong as it is often thought to be. I also propose two alternative evolutionary theories of incest avoidance with greater expalanatory power, and propose how they can be tested. Much of this is set out in my paper “Beyond Westermarck: can shared mothering or maternal phenotype matching account for human incest avoidance?” which appeared in the online journal Evolutionary Psychology earlier this year. A more sophisticated version entitled ‘Interrogating the Westermarck hypothesis: limitations, problems, and alternatives’ was published in Biological Theory (Vol. 2, No. 3: 307–316).
Current Projects
I am currently working on a book on the phenomenon of dehumanization–or tendency to regard other people as subhuman creatures. It will be published by St. Martins Press in 2010. I am also working on two major papers. One of these is a contribution to the philosophical study of self-deception. In it, I use Ruth Millikan’s biosemantic theory as the basis for analyses of both deception and self-deception, thus providing an alternative to existing theories, all of which are riddled with problems. I am also working on a critique of Freud’s analysis of the psychology of theism, which will be published by Jason Aronson next year in a volume of responses to Adolf Grunbaum’s seminal paper on “Psychoanalysis and Theism” edited by Benjamin Beit-Hallami.