The social world is probably the single most complex thing that we ever have to deal with in everyday life. A surprising number of scientists think that finding food is the most complex thing animals have to face. I am inclined to observe that the problem with most such scientists is that they don’t have much of a social life.
—Robin Dunbar, Friends, Little Brown, 2021
Romantic relationships as well as friendships result from our deliberately putting reality on hold: we place a halo round the individual concerned. Not to put too fine a point on it, it is not another person that we fall in love with, but an avatar that we have created in our mind.
—Robin Dunbar, Friends, Little Brown, 2021
(…) falling in love, or just become besotted with anyone or anything (including your pet dog), seem to switch off the rational capacities of the brain that would normally allow us to evaluate other people and situations more critically and sceptically. Of course, this makes it possible for us to give ourselves wholly and unstintingly to the object of our affections without being too shy and retiring or too critical of their behaviour. In a word, your rational thinking centres are being deliberately switched off so that you don’t ask too many questions and give up to early.
—Robin Dunbar, Friends, Little Brown, 2021
Adrift in the liberating, late light
of August, delicate, frivolous,
they make their way to my front porch
and flutter near the glassed-in bulb,
translucent as a thought suddenly
wondered aloud, illumining the air
that’s thick with honeysuckle and dusk.
You and I are doing our best
at conversation, keeping it light, steering clear
of what we’d like to say.
You leave, and the night becomes
cluttered with moths, some tattered,
their dumbly curious filaments
startling against my cheek. How quickly,
instinctively, I brush them away.
Dazed, they cling to the outer darkness
like pale reminders of ourselves.
Others seem to want so desperately
to get inside. Months later, I’ll find
the woolens, snug in their resting places,
full of missing pieces.
—Jennifer O’Grady, Poetry, 1992
A sample of a thousand American adults found that on average people claimed to tell around 550 lies a year — equivalent to slightly more than one and a half lies a day! But not everyone behaved the same. Nearly a quarter of all the lies were told by just 1 per cent of the people sampled. In other words, the 1 per cent of habitual liars were telling nearly forty lies a day — thought most are likely to be of a rather minor nature. This at least suggests that habitual liars are fairly rare, with most people telling the truth most of the time. In other studies, 92 per cent of people sampled admitted to lying at some point to their romantic partner, while 60 per cent of women and 34 per cent of men said they had lied to obtain sex. Of course, that mighty have been only once over a period of many years, so that the average frequency could be quite low. Nonetheless, it is clear that the temptation is there. Even in experimental games run in the laboratory, people were two to three times more likely to lie if the game was designed so that there was a benefit to be gained from lying. It seems that while most people are fairly honest, a small number of people can’t help themselves, and probably become such habitual liars that they actually come to believe their own lies.
—Robin Dunbar, Friends, Little Brown, 2021