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  3. We learn to lie when we are children, discovering as we get older and as our awareness of self and others grows what we can and

We learn to lie when we are children, discovering as we get older and as our awareness of self and others grows what we can and

admin2011-02-05  34
问题     We learn to lie when we are children, discovering as we get older and as our awareness of self and others grows what we can and can’t get away with. Come on, admit it. we’ve all been guilty of blaming a lack of homework on the unfortunate eating habits of the family dog. Child psychologist Jean Piaget, in his study of moral development, says that "the tendency to tell lies is a natural tendency ... spontaneous and universal." It seems that to lie is to be human.
    The Evolution of Lying
    As humans, we communicate with each other via various verbal and non-verbal signals such as spoken language, facial expressions, and body gestures.  But our ability to communicate is enhanced by our understanding of what is going through someone else’s mind—our capacity to empathize with each other.
    Not all living things on this earth have the ability to empathize. Although animal psychologists may protest, evidence of empathy has really only been witnessed in higher primates that means chimps, gorillas, you and me.
    This ability to empathize is a product of being able to recognize other minds as separate from your own—something that you are able to do after about the age of two. Robert Wright, author of "The Moral Animal", suggests that lying is a fundamental part of this empathy, a by-product of sorts. If you want to purposefully deceive someone, you first have to be able to understand what that person might be thinking.
    Many plants and animals deceive others around them in order to get ahead in life. The Tawny Frogmouth is camouflaged to look like the tree upon which it is perched to deceive its predators and hide itself during the day. Some orchids deceive male insects by looking like their female partners, getting a free pollination and fooling the male into thinking it’s his lucky day.
    However, the distinction between deception and lying is an important one. How aware are these plants and animals that they are engaged in deception?
    Although deception in the animal kingdom can look like lying, finding examples of conscious lying amongst animals is difficult, says Richard Byrne, Professor of Evolutionary Psychology at the University of St. Andrews in the UK and author of The Thinking Ape. But, according to Byrne, there is certain evidence that the higher apes—chimps, bonobos and gorillas—do engage in a conscious form of deception that is different to the plant and animal deception mentioned above.
    Monkey Liars
    When chimpanzees are foraging for food, a chimp who comes across something tasty will occasionally pretend not to have noticed the food so as not to alert the chimps nearby and lose his prize. But sometimes a competitor chimp will walk past the pretending chimp, then hide behind a tree and peep out to see if the pretending chimp really does have some food.
    There are many examples of animals pretending not to have seen food in order to save it for themselves later, says Byrne, but not of a competitor hiding and turning back to peep.
    Byrne suggests that this could be an example of lying, monkey-style. "Why would you do that if you didn’t have an idea that something is going on? If you have some kind of idea that there is something secret going on, you understand deception. "
    Lying in this sense is part of an ability to take into account the likely response of another. This is the ability to understand another’s mind. Such an ability evolved because individuals and groups that possessed this skill thrived. Why? Because they were able to communicate and interact more effectively as a group, which in turn affected their capacity to survive.
    Ability to Speak=More Lies
    In the case of humans, the possibility for lying increased even further because of our use of oral language. To quote Robert Wright again, "We are far from the only dishonest species, but we are surely the most dishonest, if only because we do the most talking. "
    However, there is a restriction to the advantages of lying and the benefits it can bring. Otherwise, we’d just lie all the time! Paul Ekman, Professor of Psychology at the University of California, San Francisco, believes that we did not evolve to be inherently deceptive creatures because it would pervert our success as a society. "I suspect that our ancestral environment was not one in which there were many opportunities to lie and get away with it, and the costs for being caught in a lie might have been severe. "
The book The Thinking Ape was written by ______.
选项
答案Richard Byrne
解析 (见文章第七段。)  
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大学生英语竞赛（NECCS）

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