The next time someone tries (successfully or unsuccessfully) to deceive you, consider the following. Successful deception requires a complex set of skills:
- the knowledge that other people have beliefs
- the knowledge that those beliefs can be manipulated
- the knowledge that one's behavior will be examined for clues about the truth of what they say and the genuineness of how they behave
- the ability to deploy the appropriate markers to be believed
In the same way that cheetahs and gazelles both became faster runners in response to the other, I believe that a similar evolutionary co-escalation has occurred among humans in the last 50,000 years or so: deception and deception-detection. And I think this positive feedback loop contributed to the rise of human consciousness (i.e. self-awareness). You've probably noticed that children often lie even after being told they shouldn't. They're merely testing out deception strategies to see how often and in what circumstances different strategies work and to hone those skills. So the next time someone tries to deceive you, remember that if such tendencies hadn't existed in our environment of evolutionary adaptedness, we might not now have the beautiful gift of consciousness, or at the very least we might not have as much of it as we do.
By the way, I won't ever intentionally deceive you. If I say something, that means I believe it's true.