Why We Lie: The Evolutionary Roots of Deception and the Unconscious Mind by Smith David Livingstone

Author:Smith, David Livingstone [Smith, David Livingstone]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2007-08-06T22:00:00+00:00

A Cure for the Common Code2

One way to approach the subject of unconsciously coded communication is the more intuitively accessible route of conscious encoding. We are all familiar with double entendre. “Is that a gun in your pocket?” purred Mae West, “Or are you just glad to see me?” The technique of double entendre enabled West to speak of subjects that were at the time unmentionable in polite society, to hilarious effect. This technique is not restricted to the conscious domain. Sometimes we come out with double entendres unconsciously, such as the man at a party who decides to step outside for a moment and, encountering an attractive woman exposing an expanse of cleavage, mumbles, “Pardon me, I need to get a breast of flesh air.” Although inadvertent, and literally nonsensical, the meaning of this slip of the tongue will not be lost on anyone who understands its context.

Sometimes we encode information for purely practical reasons. Codes such as the Morse code or the “One if by land, two if by sea” that Longfellow put into the mouth of Paul Revere can aid the transmission of a message. Other codes, such as shorthand, assist transcription. Coding can also enhance the efficiency of storage: the binary code used by my PC allows me to house a bulky manuscript inside a frail floppy disk.

The purpose of some codes is to conceal information from third parties. Military codes, such as the infamous “Enigma” code used by the Germans during WWII, are well-known examples of this type. A more mundane example is parents’ practice of spelling out words that they do not want their young children to understand (“the c-o-o-k-i-e-s are in the c-a-r”). Sometimes coded messages are attempts to get a third party to falsely believe that they understand a message. The spirituals sung by African-American slaves during the nineteenth century used religious lyrics to conceal a subtext about escape and resistance that was impenetrable to the ears of the slave-owners and bounty hunters.

Military coding typically makes use of an arbitrary, digital system of symbols (for instance, representing letters of the alphabet by numbers). In contrast to this, Mae West’s double entendres and the lyrics of the slaves’ songs expressed hidden messages by using analogy. Analogical coding differs from digital coding in that it represents by resemblance: the symbol actually looks like the thing that it symbolizes. The word C-A-T (a digital code) looks nothing like the furry animal that purrs and rubs against your ankles. A stylized drawing of a cat, on the other hand, actually resembles the beast, albeit on a rather abstract level. Mae West’s “Is that a gun in your pocket …” works because the protuberance caused by a revolver in a man’s trouser pocket resembles the visual effect produced by an erection. A song lyric about crossing the river Jordan to the Promised Land delivers its subversive punch because of the resemblance between this and the act of crossing the Ohio River to the free states.

The examples of

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