Anders Sandberg’s post last week prompted a debate on the role of intent in explaining behaviour. Anders would give significant weight to conscious stated goals, while some commenters preferred the economic methodology of ignoring stated goals and assuming behaviour is ultimately based on self-interest.
Perhaps evolutionary psychology can help reconcile these positions. The evolutionary methodology, like the economic methodology, takes self-interest to be the ultimate motivation. But, as Richard Alexander and Robert Trivers have pointed out, being deceived is disadvantageous, which implies that there will be selection to be good at spotting deception, which implies that there will be selection in favour of self-deception. In short, the best way to lie convincingly is to believe your own lie. For that reason, there is often likely to be a mismatch between stated and actual (ultimate) motivations; people are likely to posit noble objectives in the pursuit of their own self-interest.
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