From cuttlefish to cuckoos, the natural world abounds with con artists and tricksters
I have done alot of posts on fakes and fakery (see related posts below). When I would talk about signal theory in economics in class, I would often mention things like what Barash has. Excerpts:
"The world is full of liars, a fact brilliantly depicted in Lixing Sun’s slender but important book about cheating and deception among animals and plants, as well as that hairless bipedal species that is the biggest deceiver of them all."
"Nearly every species includes lotharios (of both sexes) that sneak around doing their best to hide their gallivanting from their social partners.
Possums, of course, play possum—pretend to be dead—when accosted by a predator. Some birds—notably the North American killdeer—perform a broken-wing display to lure predators from their nestlings, before flying off to safety. Amphibians and reptiles, as Mr. Sun notes, are especially adroit at changing their body color to match their surroundings (camouflage is a kind of lying). Chameleons are the most renowned practitioners of this trick, but they’re not unique."
"courting males [Cuttlefish] are able to quickly adjust the side of their bodies that is nearest a potentially receptive female to emphasize their bright and irresistible sexual desirability—while simultaneously displaying protective camouflage on the other side."
"many birds and monkeys, socially subordinate individuals may “cry wolf” not only when a wolf is near, but also to induce their fellows to abandon attractive food, leaving it to be consumed by the liar."
"the prevalence of cheating (of which lying is simply a special case) has prompted the evolution of counter-cheating strategies. This in turn selects for counter-counters, in a never-ending race of ever-greater complexity. Nest parasitism among birds, for example, involves a cheater mom laying an egg in the nest of another, “host” species. The interloping species then monopolizes food intended for the duped host’s chicks, which are often killed by the just-hatched parasite."
"“Couples of the great spotted cuckoo parasitize magpie nests and may play Bonnie and Clyde to pull off a major heist,” the author writes. “If they target a particular magpie nest but the magpie couple are attentive, the male cuckoo will stage a mock attack to distract and draw the magpies away from the nest. This gives the female cuckoo the opportunity to sneak into the nest to get her job done.”"
"counterstrategies can be brilliant, such as one maneuver practiced by fairy-wren mothers, who are vulnerable to certain cuckoos that slip their eggs into fairy-wren nests: “To distinguish her own chicks . . . each fairy-wren mom sings a secret password to her nest before the chicks hatch. She finishes the education for her own chicks before the cuckoo chicks have time to learn. After hatching, if there’s no password, there’s no food. The parasitic chicks will starve to death.”"
"During courtship, they [males] strut and preen, advertising themselves to be sexier (larger, healthier, more aggressive defenders of any potential offspring) than they actually are. The fake alarm-call ploy emerges as well, when members of a mated pair proclaim a predator in order to break up a rival’s copulation attempt."
"individuals of each sex often seek “extra-pair copulations” (EPCs)—something that researchers were largely ignorant about before the emergence of DNA fingerprinting, which revealed that social monogamy doesn’t always correspond to sexual monogamy. Females typically engage in out-of-pair copulations while their identified social partner is away foraging, defending the home territory or looking for his own EPCs. Among some cichlid fish, Mr. Sun notes, the female carries eggs in her mouth, retrieving them if they fall out; in certain species, males have evolved what look like egg spots near their anal fins and when a solicitous female cichlid attempts to scoop up these apparent eggs, she gets sperm instead, thereby fertilizing the eggs she is already carrying."
"large human neocortex may have evolved as a response to the complexities of social living, not least the demands of manipulating others via lies and of recognizing and countering one another’s lies. In other words, we might owe much of our cognitive ability to “Machiavellian intelligence,” and deception might be the cause of our unusual mental capacities."
Related posts:
You can hire someone to do the job interview for you (2022)
How to Spot Fake Reviews and Shady Ratings on Amazon (2022)
Making Money Off of Fake ATM Receipts (2021)
People are hiring out their faces to become deepfake-style marketing clones (2021)
Why would men bring fake cell phones to bars? (2021)
Are sellers paying Amazon customers to delete negative reviews? (2021)
Fake Reviews and Inflated Ratings Are Still a Problem for Amazon (2021)
The Myth of Authenticity Or The Story Behind Products (2010)
Fake Authenticity (2011)
Students: Make a mistake on purpose, its good for you! (2007)
A fake job reference can be just a few clicks away (2015)
Fake Economist Fools Portugal (2013)
Slave Redemption in Sudan (2007) (Fake slaves are sold to those who buy slaves and then give them their freedom)
Can A Product Work Just Because It's Expensive? (2008) (fake medicine)
If It Pays To Have Friends, Can You Pay To Have Friends? (2013) (you can hire fake boyfriends)
Study: Half of American Doctors Give Patients Placebos Without Telling Them (2008)
Saudis grapple with fake street sweepers (2017)
Rent a White Guy: Confessions of a fake businessman from Beijing (2010) (by Mitch Moxley in The Atlantic Monthly, excerpts below)
Can adding a phantom third story to their homes help families find a wife for their son? (2018)
Why do employers pay extra money to people who study a bunch of subjects in college that they don’t actually need you to know? Signaling (2018)
Mexicans buy fake cellphones to hand over in muggings (2019)
Conspicuous Consumption, Conspicuous Virtue, Thorstein Veblen (and Adam Smith, too!) (2007)
How does a company selling used luxury goods spot fakes? (signalling and conspicuous consumption) (2019).
Why do stores sometimes pay people to be fake shoppers? (2019)
What if companies can't afford real models for their ads? Use AI generated fake pictures (2020)
Excerpts from "Rent a White Guy"
"Not long ago I was offered work as a quality-control expert with an American company in China I’d never heard of. No experience necessary—which was good, because I had none. I’d be paid $1,000 for a week, put up in a fancy hotel, and wined and dined in Dongying, an industrial city in Shandong province I’d also never heard of. The only requirements were a fair complexion and a suit.
“I call these things ‘White Guy in a Tie’ events,” a Canadian friend of a friend named Jake told me during the recruitment pitch he gave me in Beijing, where I live. “Basically, you put on a suit, shake some hands, and make some money. We’ll be in ‘quality control,’ but nobody’s gonna be doing any quality control. You in?”
I was.
And so I became a fake businessman in China, an often lucrative gig for underworked expatriates here. One friend, an American who works in film, was paid to represent a Canadian company and give a speech espousing a low-carbon future. Another was flown to Shanghai to act as a seasonal-gifts buyer. Recruiting fake businessmen is one way to create the image—particularly, the image of connection—that Chinese companies crave. My Chinese-language tutor, at first aghast about how much we were getting paid, put it this way: “Having foreigners in nice suits gives the company face.”
Six of us met at the Beijing airport, where Jake briefed us on the details. We were supposedly representing a California-based company that was building a facility in Dongying. Our responsibilities would include making daily trips to the construction site, attending a ribbon-cutting ceremony, and hobnobbing. During the ceremony, one of us would have to give a speech as the company’s director. That duty fell to my friend Ernie, who, in his late 30s, was the oldest of our group. His business cards had already been made."
"For the next few days, we sat in the office swatting flies and reading magazines, purportedly high-level employees of a U.S. company that, I later discovered, didn’t really exist."
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