Why Do We Favor Truth?

Will The Truth Set Us Free?

Why Do We Favor Truth?

** Unedited **

INTRODUCTION:

A term exists in human languages for the act of lying as well as feelings of disdain toward acts of lying. To my knowledge this is universal throughout the tapestry of all current and recorded human languages. Why? Why do humans harbor an innate bias for truth telling and repulsion for liars when nearly every human engages in forms of deceptive thoughts everyday? Is this bias toward truth telling embedded within us from a creator who we are made within the image of or might there be some naturalistic reason why, on average, truth is favored over fabrications? Below I will sketch out a potential reason rooted in both the economics of scarcity and evolutionary fitness.

PRELIMINARY ASSUMPTIONS & MAIN THESIS:

This paper references a specific category of deception which I refer to as the narrative lie. Unlike other deceptive acts, narrative lies are lies in which the individual must create, index and maintain an alternative reality.

The overall thesis of this paper can be summarized as in the absence of caloric surplus high level cognition must be paid for via the redirection of calories from other parts of the body to the brain. Unlike truth telling (which is merely a process of memory retreival), narrative lying is a form of high level cognition that requires additional caloric expenditures above baseline needs. If these costs are incurred daily, across generations, and in competition with individuals who conserve it, then human behavior may be shaped overtime. All other things being held equal, nature favors energy conservation and narrative lying is not conservative.

NEURO-CHEMISTRY OF LYING:

    Below is a rudimentary synopsis of how our neuro-chemistry behaves during the initial stages of narrative lie creation and retrieval .

In the initial stages of lying, the brain orchestrates a cascade of neurocognitive and chemical activity—an effortful override of its truth-default network.

1. Prefrontal Cortex Activation: Engages to inhibit automatic truth-telling, creating mental space for fabricating a plausible alternative.

2. Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC): Detects conflict between true memory and fabricated statement, triggering emotional discomfort and hesitation.

3. Parietal Lobes Engagement: Index and encode the fabricated narrative for later retrieval, integrating it into the brain’s mental ledger.

At this point, the brain becomes a chemical bartender, serving up a potent “Long Island Neurochemical Ice Tea”:

• Cortisol: Elevated stress response—fueling vigilance and anxiety.

• Dopamine: Reward signaling—anticipating benefits from successful deception or penalty avoidance.

• Oxytocin Suppression: Weakens social bonding; ironically, the liar begins mistrusting their target, projecting dissonance outward.

CONTRASTING LIES WITH TRUTH TELLING:

     Over time, if the lie yields perceived benefit without punishment, the brain initiates desensitization protocols—reducing conflict signals and streamlining future deception. Lying becomes metabolically cheaper. The architecture learns.

     Let's now contrast the above with the act of telling/recalling the truth. Since the act of truth telling or recalling is merely an exercise in memory retrieval, it requires much less of a cognitive load. We can imagine the act of truth telling in the form of searching for a file by name within our computer. If the file is found, we open it. In contrast, the act of narrative lying is akin to saving the same file under multiple names. Upon retrieval, the individuals must search for the file, then proceed to identify which version of the file is one needed currently. The more compounded the lie, the more versions of the file that exist which translates into more retrieval and maintenance costs.

CALCULATING CALORIC COSTS OF NARRATIVE LYING:

     To my knowledge, the question of the caloric costs of narrative lying has not been asked within academic literature and thus no formal experiments have been designed nor conducted. Yet, to say we don't know does not mean we know nothing.

      We know which regions of the brain are activated during the process of narrative lying. Furthermore, we know the caloric costs of using those brain hemispheres in other areas of cognition. Thus, even a discipline outsider such as myself can infer the caloric costs of narrative lying. According to Sharna Jamadar, the difference between a normal day of cognition and one that requires a higher load (think normal day within a college semester and one day during final exam week) is about a 5-10% increase (assuming a daily diet of 1600--2000 with 350--450 calories purposed for baseline brain maintenance i.e. keeping neurons alive, maintaining ion gradients, regulating temperature and running background processes)

    If the reader will accept that higher load cognition is associated with increased caloric consumption then the next step is to show that narrative lying is indeed a form of higher load of cognition and thus would carry with it the same increase (5-10%) in caloric expenditures above the natural base line.

     The reader may be inclined to state that comparing cognitive loads of narrative lying with something as intense at cramming for final exams is at a minimum unhelpful and potentially a type of equivocation fallacy. This is indeed a fair criticism but is, as I will attempt to show below, ultimately malformed.

Lets imagine a scenario where a spouse takes a day off from work in order to spend time with their secret lover. The spouse must first decide on which narrative lie they will tell their boss. Let assume they decide to use the narrative lie that "there has been a death in the family". Next, the spouse must decide which narrative lie they will tell their partner for why they missed work. Maybe they decide on "they were not feeling good and decided to leave work early". Finally, lets assume the spouse in all their sleaziness decides to tell their friends an exaggerated account of the daylong affair as a way of solidifying bragging rights.

     Using the above scenario, our cheating spouse has generated (3) alternative realities to account for the one event. Each alternative reality must be indexed for future retrieval and must undergo constant maintenance and updates as new information is made apparent to themselves or the other parties.This dance between the opposing alternative realities may diminish overtime (needing less maintenance) but the rehearsal never fully ends. This is not true for our student cramming for final exams. Their spike in cognitive load completes itself at the point where they submit their final exam. All of this to state the obvious, there are costs to engage in narrative lying that is not incurred when we engage in the act of truth telling--one event, one file, named reality.

Not accounted for in the above paper. The mental real estate costs of narrative lying.   To lie is to privately lease mental territory—maintaining simulated histories that diverge from the shared substrate of reality. The opportunity cost is acute: energy spent reinforcing illusions cannot be reinvested in external coherence, future planning, or adaptive strategy. Truth is collaborative infrastructure; deception is solipsistic architecture

COUNTER ARGUMENTS

     At this point in the paper I will begin offering proposed rebuttals followed by counter rebuttals. I will list each below so that the reader may jump to the one that is most pressing to them.

1. Rebuttal 1: Cognitive Load Isn’t Evolutionarily Salient Enough to Influence Behavior” Critique: The difference between truth-telling and lying in terms of caloric expenditure is too small to matter evolutionarily. A few dozen calories a day wouldn’t significantly shape selection pressure—especially when the benefits of deception (avoiding punishment, acquiring resources, etc.) can be substantial.5-10% above baseline cognition translates into roughly 20-40 calories (a small grapefruit). Are you claiming that a grapefruit worth of calories accounts for our bias towards truth?

2. Rebuttal 2: “Lying Can Also Be Adaptive—Perhaps Even More So Than Truth-Telling” Critique: Evolution has favored strategic lying in countless domains: camouflage in nature, bluffing in primates, social positioning in humans. Your claim that truth is evolutionarily favored ignores the competitive edge that deception provides in mate selection, resource hoarding, or social climbing. How can you look to evolution to account for truth telling when nature is full of deception (a tigers stripes for instance)

3. Rebuttal 3: “Your Framework Ignores Cultural and Technological Modulation of Lying” Critique: Social environments now reward deception in ways evolution never could have predicted—digital anonymity, deepfakes, and information silos enable constant, low-effort fabrication. Your model presumes an ancestral brain operating in a modern context without accounting for how culture rewires the game.

4. Rebuttal 4: “The Morality of Lying Isn’t Just About Cognitive Load” Critique: We don’t condemn liars because they work harder—we condemn them because they violate trust, consent, and autonomy. Reducing the moral weight of lying to a metabolic equation risks flattening the nuance of interpersonal ethics.

5. Rebuttal 5: “White Lies Still Count—And They’re Ubiquitous” Critique: Your model emphasizes high-effort, high-stakes lies, but the vast majority of deception is composed of white lies and impression management—both metabolically light but socially significant. Dismissing them as background noise understates their role in human interaction.

6. Rebuttal 6: What about the costs of telling the truth?

   
   

Rebuttal 1: “Cognitive Load Isn’t Evolutionarily Salient Enough to Influence Behavior”

Critique: The difference between truth-telling and lying in terms of caloric expenditure is too small to matter evolutionarily. A few dozen calories a day wouldn’t significantly shape selection pressure—especially when the benefits of deception (avoiding punishment, acquiring resources, etc.) can be substantial.

     The thesis is attempting to explain what already is a fact of reality...truth telling is the default of nearly all communication. Furthermore, since the nature of language is descriptive in function its utility is a function of how well it maps (describes) reality. Describing a few dozen calories as imaterial either speaks to a post-agricultural perspectives, confusion of evolutionary theory and fitness or possibly a misunderstanding of of population growth. Lets tackle each in turn.

     Today it's hard to imagine a ceiling existing on daily calorie consumption and even harder to imagine how a small reduction in daily calorie consumption could have net results. One need only follow the decomposition function to realize how peculiar of a time it is for our species to be alive.

Caloric inexpense isn’t accidental; it’s the end-product of nested functions:

• It’s a function of calorie production cost,

• which is shaped by market prices,

• which arise from valuation,

• which depends on the ability to barter,

• which requires surplus,

• which itself is made possible by labor specialization.

Each layer is a prerequisite for the next, and yet—astonishingly—we live in a time where this entire structure hums quietly in the background, allowing effortless calorie access to billions. For 99% of human history, this system of abundance didn’t exist and its this history that shaped our ancestral lineage.

     The fact that human metabolic rates outpace that of our distant ape relatives allowed us to fuel higher cognition. The price of a higher metabolism is additional calories. These additional calories may be brought about by extracting more from each meal (cooking food) or from calorie conservation techniques like abandoning muscle or even alternating the way we walk. All other things being held equal, nature favors energy conservation.

     This critique would be assuming that 20-40 calorie increase above 400 calories (2000 calorie diet with 20% being dedicated to brain activity) is trivial. Yet, as I stated above 20-40 calories translates to a 5-10% caloric increase. These additional calories must either be consumed, converted from storage or diverted from other uses. In absence of surplus, the most likely explanation is that they are borrowed to fuel cognition. How might this look? Normally in times of scarce resources the brain will begin the slowing down of all nonessential functions. Muscle activity is usually first on the caloric chopping block--thus reducing non essential muscle activity resulting in diminished reflexes and slower reaction time. Other caloric reduction procedures may include reducing white blood cell production or altering thermogenesis leading to potential immune system declines. In all, in a world that lacks surplus even modest caloric increases (5-10%) exacts a real cost. A cost that may only be borrowed at the expense of evolutionary fitness. This increased cognitive load must outweigh these costs for future survival success.

Rebuttal 2: “Lying Can Also Be Adaptive—Perhaps Even More So Than Truth-Telling”

Critique: Evolution has favored strategic lying in countless domains: camouflage in nature, bluffing in primates, social positioning in humans. Your claim that truth is evolutionarily favored ignores the competitive edge that deception provides in mate selection, resource hoarding, or social climbing.

     To parse out this critique we will partition it into two separate critiques; inner specie deception and outer specie deception.

      All though it is true that deception exists throughout nature, I believe it is a categorical mistake to point to non-like specie deception to critique an argument regarding like species interactions. A tiger uses their stripe pattern in tall grass as a way of breaking up their outline so that they may ambush their prey. Someone may call this a form of natural deception if they would like but only the sloppiest of interpretations (or intentions) could you label this as lying. Lying is an act of linguistic deception. It is false statement made with deliberate intent to deceive; an intentional untruth. There is no propositional content within the tigers stripes. It's deception involves no intent, no theory of mind or even a shared understanding of symbolic meaning. It is merely an emergent trait that evolution has selected for. In this sense, it is not even an act within any praxeological sense. The second critique regarding lying as a strategic advantage is much more salient and germane to the topic of this paper. We will now address this critique.

     There is no contesting that lying may be a strategic way of solidifying resources and mating opportunities. Yet, the success rate of the liar strategy is dependent on both its scarcity (relative to most interactions) within a population as well as the size of the population. A population where deception is normalized and expected would be a population guarded against deception within interactions. Moreover, the smaller the population the higher social costs incurred from lying and thus lower the expected payoff. There probably are exceptions to these dependence's, as I will outline below, but even these exceptions may not fully apply.

     Dating, like job interviews, can be summarized as an exercise in exaggeration. The interested party generates an exaggerate prototype of themselves that may no longer exist if it ever existed in the first place in an attempt to swoon the other party. If successful the date may become plural, leading to courting, mating and potentially a long term partnership. As time elapses both parties may regress back to the mean of who they always were and yet, along the way they may have found love. One could argue that what started off as lies ended with love. The problem with this entire thread is that both parties have an accepted expectation of deception rooted in the dating process. Each party is prepared, if not willing, to be deceived which makes the entire endeavor hard to classify as an example of lying.

Rebuttal 3: “Your Framework Ignores Cultural and Technological Modulation of Lying”

Critique: Social environments now reward deception in ways evolution never could have predicted—digital anonymity, deepfakes, and information silos enable constant, low-effort fabrication. Your model presumes an ancestral brain operating in a modern context without accounting for how culture rewires the game.

Again, the liar strategy becomes more effective as the number of independent interactions increase. Today's social landscape only serves to reinforce this notion. Yet, this entire line of thought takes place after-the-fact and completely sidesteps the point of this paper. That is to offer a justification for why truth telling became the default strategy within interaction.

Rebuttal 4: “The Morality of Lying Isn’t Just About Cognitive Load”

Critique: We don’t condemn liars because they work harder—we condemn them because they violate trust, consent, and autonomy. Reducing the moral weight of lying to a metabolic equation risks flattening the nuance of interpersonal ethics.

I fail to see how offering an explanation for why truth telling is the default within human interactions discounts any moral condemnation for the act of lying. Furthermore, I fail to see how the absence of my explanation in any way supports the "nuance of interpersonal ethics" claim. In fact, it is the absence of a naturalistic, justifiable working theory for truth-by-default that requires new propositions. The criticism seems to be laboring under the conclusion that the two theories are mutually exclusive without offering an argument.

 Rebuttal 5: “White Lies Still Count—And They’re Ubiquitous”

Critique: Your model emphasizes high-effort, high-stakes lies, but the vast majority of deception is composed of white lies and impression management—both metabolically light but socially significant. Dismissing them as background noise understates their role in human interaction.

I can see how the reader may claim that I am potentially leading my data to my conclusion as opposed to following the data toward a conclusion. The reader may view the focus on narrative lying as a form of cherry picking data to support a preconceived conclusion. I can acknowledge all the above if the reader will define what they mean by the term liar? Clearly we could define a liar as anyone who has ever told a lie but operationally speaking this is never what we mean by the term. This rigidness may be applied in other areas (for example when labeling someone a murder or a thief) but not the act of lying. A child who lies about eating a cookie or a husband who lies to their spouse about the delicious taste of a burnt meal is nowhere close to the ways in which we use or ascribe the term liar.

The fact that nearly 80% of all act of deception may be classified in the form of white lies is not an act of omission on my part in order to cherry pick the data. It serves as a testimony to this papers original thesis; lies worthy of the label liar i.e. narrative lies, are rare to human communication.    

Rebuttal 6: What about the costs of telling the truth?

Critique: The paper assumes there is no costs associated with telling the truth when in fact there are the implicit costs (memory retrieval) and the potential explicit costs associated with things like standing up to wrong doers, speaking your mind, etc. 

This is an extremely clever critique and one that took me sometime to consider. I will given my initial thoughts on the topic but I would like to consider the question some more. My initial thoughts are that truth telling, like lie telling, can be separated by cognitive load. In other words, not all truths are equally taxing in terms of cognitive load. Low cost truths (like routine facts or shared experiences) would make up the vast majority of the truths we tell (Like white lies) where as costly lies (like whistleblowing, speaking truth to power, etc) would be rare (just like narrative lies). If my theory of caloric expenditures is correct then it would explain why most people most of the time both refuse to rock the boat in terms of telling the truth as well as refuse to engage is costly narrative lies.

END NOTES

Unified Taxonomy of Deception: Cognitive & Agentive Dimensions

Deception Type	Agentive?	Symbolic Meaning?	Theory of Mind?	Praxeological?	Cognitive Load	Key Brain Demands	Estimated Frequency	Example
Passive (Emergent)	No	No	No	No	None/Minimal	Evolutionary selection	N/A	Camouflage, mimicry in animals
Social Soothing (White Lie)	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Low	Mild inhibition, emotional sensitivity	~40–50%	Saying food tastes good to protect someone’s feelings
Impression Management	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Low-Medium	Social cognition, emotional attunement	~25–30%	Complimenting a coworker’s idea you don’t believe in
Strategic Omission	Yes	Implied	Partial	Partially	Medium	Inhibition, memory gating	~10–15%	Not mentioning a prior commitment
Constructive Fabrication	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	High	Narrative construction, emotional regulation	~5–10%	Inventing a cover story to hide infidelity
Self-Deception	Mixed	Internally symbolic	Self-referential	Ambiguous	Unknown	Dissociation, motivated reasoning	~5–10%	Believing rule-breaking was “not really wrong”
Strategic (Narrative)	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Very High	Cultural modeling, mass-scale manipulation	Variable (contextual)	Propaganda, branding, legal fictions

Notes on Methodology

• These estimates are behavioral approximations, not hard counts. They’re drawn from studies on lying frequency (e.g., DePaulo et al., 1996), social desirability bias, and impression management scales like the Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding.

• Social soothing dominates because it’s metabolically cheap and socially adaptive.

• Constructive fabrication is rarer but metabolically expensive

• Self-deception is tricky to quantify because it’s often unconscious—but it’s likely underreported and context-dependent.

POTENTIAL FUTURE RESEARCH DIRECTIONS:

Below you will find some notes about potential opportunities for future research on this topic.

1. Establishing a caloric clock-speed multiplier across the various categories of lying. The model would obviously need to account for activated neural regions, duration of the activated regions as well as the intensity of each activated region. Each of these categories could be modeled as a gradient curve, with x-axis as narrative complexity and y-axis as metabolic load, showing the various clusters of lie types along the trajectory. This could also be viewed as a type of bar chart modeling the frequency of each lie type alongside their associated cognitive load.

2. Drafting a Neurological Load Matrix for Lying. You could try modeling this a type of stacked entropy-cost curve, showing how frequency and metabolic load diverge across deception types

3. Creating a caloric burn map for neural loads through the repurposing of current data to serve as proxies where similar neural circuits are activated such as

4. Stroop tasks → ACC and PFC (conflict monitoring)

5. Working memory tasks → DLPFC and parietal cortex

6. Moral decision-making → vmPFC, TPJ, amygdala

7. Social cognition / Theory of Mind → medial PFC, TPJ

8. One promising avenue for further study involves developing a quantifiable framework for assessing the metabolic cost of deception at the neuroregional level. By establishing baseline “clock speed” metrics—resting metabolic rates (RMR) in kcal/hour for key brain regions such as the prefrontal cortex (PFC), anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), and hippocampus—researchers could begin modeling cognitive spikes during deceptive activity as temporary overclocking events.

This framework might consider:Baseline Clock Speed: Standard glucose utilization rates at rest (e.g., ~0.5 kcal/hour for the PFC).Cognitive Load Spike: Measurable increases in metabolic activity during deception, potentially 2–3× baseline in implicated regions.Duration Multiplier: Short deceptive acts may be negligible, but sustained or chronic fabrications (e.g., maintaining a false persona) could produce cumulative caloric and cognitive strain. Composite Index: A Lie Load Index (LLI), defined as • R_i: its resting metabolic rate (e.g., kcal/hour) • M_i: the intensity multiplier triggered during deception • D_i: the duration of activation The composite cost of a deceptive episode can then be modeled as: Using LaTeX or Equation editor Lie Load Index (LLI): \text{LLI} = \sum_{i=1}^{n} R_i M_i D_i