SoylentNews

taylorvich writes:

From MIT Technology Review:

Evolutionary biologists have long thought that lying ought to destroy societies. Now computational anthropologists have shown that nothing could be further from the truth.

It's easy to see how lying reduces the level of trust between individuals and so threatens the stability of societies. So how do societies survive all this lying?

Today, we get an answer thanks to the work of Gerardo Iñiguez at Aalto University in Finland and a few pals (including Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist from the University of Oxford of Dunbar's number fame). These guys have simulated the effect that lies have on the strength of connections that exist within a social network.

But they've added fascinating twist. These guys have made a clear distinction between lies that benefit the person being lied to versus lies that benefit the person doing the lying. In other words, their model captures the difference between "white" lies, which are prosocial, and "black" lies, which are antisocial.