Born to Lie: How Humans Deceive Ourselves & Others - Lionel Page
Chris Williamson (host), Lionel Page (guest), Narrator, Narrator, Narrator
In this episode of Modern Wisdom, featuring Chris Williamson and Lionel Page, Born to Lie: How Humans Deceive Ourselves & Others - Lionel Page explores why We’re Born To Lie: Reason, Self-Deception, and Coalitions Lionel Page argues that human reasoning evolved less as a truth-finding tool and more as a social weapon for persuasion, coalition-building, and bargaining. We think and talk like lawyers, not scientists, selectively using information to win arguments and improve our standing with others. Self-deception emerges as an adaptive strategy: by believing our own flattering narratives, we become more convincing and reduce the reputational risks of overt lying. These dynamics scale from intimate relationships and gossip through seduction and office politics, all the way up to democracy and political polarization, which Page frames as coalitional bargaining over social rules rather than collective truth-seeking.
Why We’re Born To Lie: Reason, Self-Deception, and Coalitions
Lionel Page argues that human reasoning evolved less as a truth-finding tool and more as a social weapon for persuasion, coalition-building, and bargaining. We think and talk like lawyers, not scientists, selectively using information to win arguments and improve our standing with others. Self-deception emerges as an adaptive strategy: by believing our own flattering narratives, we become more convincing and reduce the reputational risks of overt lying. These dynamics scale from intimate relationships and gossip through seduction and office politics, all the way up to democracy and political polarization, which Page frames as coalitional bargaining over social rules rather than collective truth-seeking.
Key Takeaways
Human reason is optimized for winning social arguments, not discovering objective truth.
Most day-to-day reasoning is used to convince others and defend our positions—more like a lawyer than a scientist—so biases like confirmation bias are features of persuasion, not bugs of irrationality.
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Self-deception makes us more convincing and reduces the cost of lying.
By genuinely believing our own inflated self-views or just-so stories, we leak fewer cues of dishonesty, maintain plausible deniability, and protect our reputations while still gaining social advantage.
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Communication is built around relevance and recursive mind-reading, which makes it incredibly complex.
We constantly tailor what we say to give others the most useful belief-changing information at the lowest processing cost, while implicitly modeling what they know, what they think we know, and so on—something computers only recently began approximating.
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Ambiguity, innuendo, and paltering are strategic tools in social and romantic negotiation.
Indirect speech (“come up for a drink”), moralized criticism, and technically-true but misleading replies (“thank you” for a store-bought cake) allow us to test boundaries, signal intent, and manage conflict while preserving plausible deniability.
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Coalitions and reputation are central to human survival and anxiety.
We are wired to track group membership and our standing within hierarchies because, historically, being excluded or low-ranked could be lethal; modern shows like Survivor dramatize this ever-present fear of being the one voted out.
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Democracy is best understood as a coalitional bargaining system, not a truth-seeking forum.
Parties and ideologies are bids by large coalitions to tilt the social contract in their favor using fairness principles; democracy works because leaders must please a broad selectorate, not because citizens collectively discover ‘the common good’.
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Many of our deepest commitments work better when we don’t know they’re strategic.
Emotions like love, loyalty, and moral conviction credibly bind us to others and make us trustworthy partners; if we saw everything as a game and calculated openly, we’d be less attractive and less reliable allies.
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Notable Quotes
“Maybe we’re not actually designed to be scientists; we’re designed to be lawyers.”
— Lionel Page
“It’s not a lie if you believe it.”
— Lionel Page (citing Seinfeld)
“We really see the world with rose‑tinted glasses—and that’s by design.”
— Lionel Page
“There is no single common good; there are bargaining problems over how to split the gains from cooperation.”
— Lionel Page
“Humans are better at playing games when they don’t know that they’re games.”
— Lionel Page
Questions Answered in This Episode
If our reasoning is fundamentally self-serving, how far can we realistically improve our own rationality without undermining our social effectiveness?
Lionel Page argues that human reasoning evolved less as a truth-finding tool and more as a social weapon for persuasion, coalition-building, and bargaining. ...
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What practical steps could someone take to spot their own self-deception without losing the confidence that helps them function socially?
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How might understanding coalitional psychology change the way we interpret online outrage, political movements, or moral campaigns?
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Can democratic systems be redesigned to incentivize truth-seeking over coalition signaling, or is that structurally impossible?
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In close relationships, how should we balance the usefulness of ambiguity and self-deception with the value of honesty and explicit communication?
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Transcript Preview
What do most people not understand when they think about human reasoning and how it works?
Yeah. L- look, uh, reason is, uh, you know, the faculty to form judgments, solve problems, uh, be rigorous. We tend to think of it as, uh, that is ... I- it's here to help us solve actual problems with, you know, facts, with reality. Um, a- a good, a good, a good, a good image that you can have for reason, how, what it is, is you know the, the movie, the Stanley Kubrick movie, um, 2001: The Space Odyssey.
Mm-hmm.
And you have this bunch of apes, and they're pretty useless, and then suddenly they wake up one morning and there is this, uh, monolith, this black monolith, and, and once they touch it, certainly kind of reason, uh, fall upon them. And then they discover that if they use it, a bone, they can use it as a tool and they can use it as a weapon. And then the movie, you know, s- say, use this, uh, as a starting point for what makes humans. Humans use reason to solve problems. And then you can think that reason help us, uh, do scientific things, uh, find the truth, send rockets in space, et cetera. But if you think about you and me, you know, normal humans, how do we use reasons? I mean, we, we rarely really solve actual problems, you know. How, when, when is the last time I kind of invented something or solved a practical problem? I mean, it happens, right? But, but it's not super frequent. But the, what we do most with reason is not really that, most often. Every day we use our reason to reason with other people. That is, we have ... Most of the problems we face in our lives, they are social problems.
Mm-hmm.
They are problems when we interact with other people. Uh, it's not solving, you know, uh, that the computer doesn't work or that the dishwasher doesn't work. It's, you know, it's solving, uh, how do I get my friends to do what I want, how to get my friends to understand me, how to get my boss to give me a raise, et cetera. These are the problems we face. And we use reason. So we are reasoning, but we are not reasoning like scientists to solve problems. We're reasoning like lawyers, to convince other people. And then the key aspect, I think one of the interesting theories which came in the last 10 years about, you know, um, what is reason, is that reason is, is this. It's, it's this, uh, it's not here to solve problems. It's here for us to convince other people. And once you take this, this, um, uh, approach, it really explain a lot of, you know, people... You have a big literature on people being irrational, making lots of mistake, et cetera.
Mm-hmm.
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