Robert Trivers

Who they are

This page records the public professional record only. Nothing adverse is recorded and no motive is attributed.

An obituary in the Boston Globe gives his birth as 19 February 1943 in Washington, D.C. He graduated from Harvard in 1965 and did graduate work in biology there. He held posts at Harvard and at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and joined Rutgers University in 1994. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded him the Crafoord Prize in Biosciences in 2007. He died on 12 March 2026, aged 83.

Nothing else about his career was checked for this page.

Key papers

Trivers, R. L. (1971). The evolution of reciprocal altruism. The obituary describes it as using game theory to explain helping between unrelated individuals, a behaviour it says pays off when roles are likely to reverse and cheaters are punished.

Trivers, R. L. (1974). Parent-offspring conflict. The obituary describes the argument as one of conflict of interest between parents and offspring in place of simple harmony.

von Hippel, W., & Trivers, R. (2011). The evolution and psychology of self-deception. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 34(1), 1-16. doi:10.1017/S0140525X10001354. In Trivers's account, self-deception evolved to make interpersonal deception more effective, by hiding the cues of conscious lying, lowering cognitive load and limiting retribution.

von Hippel, W., & Trivers, R. (2011). Reflections on self-deception. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 34(1), 41-56. doi:10.1017/S0140525X10003018. The authors' response to the commentaries on the target article.

Trivers's books include Natural Selection and Social Theory: Selected Papers (2002), The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life (2011) and the autobiography Wild Life: Adventures of an Evolutionary Biologist (2015).

Key ideas

The obituary dates his first statement of the self-deception idea to 1976, in his foreword to Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene, where he proposed that humans bury lies in the unconscious to avoid detection. The 2011 article gave the idea its full form: self-deception as outward-facing. In that account a person who believes the story leaks fewer of the cues that give a liar away, and the self can be both deceiver and deceived through dissociations between conscious and unconscious memories and attitudes.

The idea has had empirical tests and critics. Experiments reported in 2019 and 2020 found that people who expected to persuade became more overconfident about their own performance. Alfred Mele has argued that motivated bias is enough, with no inner trickster, and Neil Van Leeuwen has argued that self-deception is a spandrel and not an adaptation. In the authors' response in 2011, von Hippel and Trivers concluded that the ten major questions raised by commentators did not compel major modifications to their theory. The page for strategic self-deception sets out the evidence and the disputes in full.

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