i'm done with 4 weeks and i haven't had any tests yet. first one is wednesday.
i have to write an approx 15 page paper for my honors seminar class. on anything i want. ideally, it will explore something i'll want to explore with my thesis paper. i'm thinking of doing something on dishonesty - the evolutionary reasons dishonesty is often good for our species, and how people learn to be dishonest, and how we lie to ourselves and don't even realize it. how we lie to others not to offend them ('your haircut looks great') but that a large part of that is really so we don't have to deal with conflict and not for the other person at all.
something along those lines... i will be spending many hours on this paper and i will need to read a lot to even get a grasp of what i'm dealing with. i know some other species do purposefully trick others, for example some apes who learn that if they go to where food is the alpha ape will just push them out of the way and eat their food. so they will go to a different place, where there isn't food, and then while the alpha is frantically looking for his stolen meal, the original ape will go eat. but obviously, that's for survival reasons. we lie for so many reasons. i think exploring why we do this and what mechanisms evolve and develop in the species and ourselves that exploit this ability.
whatchu think?
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