Honesty and deception
Simon Baron-Cohen, noted researcher of autism, has written this article about honesty and deception. He describes dishonesty as “one defining characteristic of what it is to be human”, and discusses the different mental skills that go into deceiving others. You must be able to hold in your mind different levels of representation (what is true, what someone else believes about what is true) and understand that these may not match.
Your average human brain (a neurotypical brain) figures out that other people have minds with contents that may differ from their own (and that the contents of other minds can be manipulated) in childhood, usually before kindergarten, whereas an autistic brain has a much harder time with these concepts. Baron-Cohen’s main point is that the utter honesty of autism has value, and that while not being able to see into the minds of other people is a social deficit, autistic people have the capacity to focus on the real world in great detail to a degree that most neurotypical people lack. He is arguing that we shouldn’t treat autism as a disease but as a different set of traits, some of which require treatment but some of which have value.
I have no quarrel at all with his basic point, but the article got me thinking about aspects of honesty and deception that Baron-Cohen didn’t directly address. Deception can be used in pursuit of a worthy goal (deceiving the authorities by hiding Jews during the Holocaust, for example, or helping slaves to freedom), and deception can be prudent and useful for purposes of self-defense that do not have to do with harming or defrauding others (e.g., Galileo taking back what he said about the heliocentric nature of the solar system to avoid being burned at the stake).
I’ve known people who were very open about expressing what they were feeling moment to moment, and this is generally described as honesty. I’m not so sure that it’s always the most honest way to deal with people though. Moment-to-moment feelings add up to the truth eventually but are not the whole truth in and of themselves. To me it seems like it might be more honest to keep your mouth shut, maybe not lie outright but conceal your feelings and thoughts, until you can express something closer to the whole truth. Maybe that’s just because I’m an introvert, and for me it takes awhile to see all the aspects of a situation and know what I feel or think about it. But it seems to me that concealing the contents of your mind until you’ve integrated your thoughts on a situation can make you more truthful (and sometimes more kind) than if you express your moment-by-moment truths. I’d be really curious to hear what other people think about this.
If all the moment-to-moment truths add up to the whole truth… there might not be much of a difference, except who gets to do the adding. OTOH, biases in which moments are reported would bias the overall result & it’s a much less efficient means of communicating. You also create the possibility for all kinds of feedback loops.
Sometimes you want to know how hot it got yesterday, sometimes you want to track minute-by-minute temperature; appropriateness is context-dependent.
Good point; I like the weather analogy. Funny, this also applies in a completely different context. I was just talking the other day about how one of my problems with writing fiction is knowing when to use minute-by-minute detail, when to average out, and most important, how to shift between them.
Anyway, Sandy G. at the Mouse Trap has some interesting thoughts on honesty, deception, autism, normality, and schizophrenia, spinning off of the same Baron-Cohen article.