Nonverbal communication: Evolution and today

One aspect of social intelligence is the ability to identify when others are being deceptive. It would seem that individuals who were bestowed with such an ability to recognize honest signals of emotion, particularly when attempts to suppress them are made, would have a reproductive advantage over others without it. Yet the research literature suggests that on average people are good at detecting only overt manifestations of these signals. We argue instead that our evolution as a social species living in groups permitted discovery of deceptive incidents due to the factual evidence of the deception transmitted verbally through social connections. Thus the same principles that pressed for our evolution as a cooperative social species enabled us to develop the equivalent of an intelligence network that would pass along information and evidence, thus rendering a press for an individual lie detector moot.