“How was everything?” Yeah, good.

No doubt you’ve had countless such exchanges when finishing up brunch at a local cafe.

And no doubt you still said “yeah, good” (or something slightly more eloquent), even though the eggs were runny, there was about one-fifth of the advertised sujuk sausage on your plate, and you left hungry after dropping $30 on what appeared to be $5 worth of ingredients.

There are several evolutionary reasons we say “yeah, good” rather than give the waiter or waitress an honest assessment.

Three Evolutionary Reasons For Our Dishonesty

1. We don’t want to be ostracized from our tribe

This would have meant imminent death on the African savannah tens of thousands of years ago, and despite the fact that it is now 2020, we are still imbued with innate behaviours that served us well many, many moons ago.

2. We are predisposed to taking the path of least effort

Conserving energy was fundamental to survival on the savannah because your next meal wasn’t exactly around the corner at the Circle K. When it comes to brunch, it’s just so much easier to nonchalantly declare that the food was fine (even though you might never return to said cafe) than it is to be honest and create conflict. This brings me to the third point.

3. We shy away from conflict, and optimise to avoid negatives

We humans avoid conflict, because from an evolutionary standpoint, positive experiences (like finding some berries) were nice, but negative ones (like finding a member of an opposing tribe) often meant death. Research has found that we remember negative events and hold on to them much longer than positive ones. Therefore, we are prone to a negativity bias, and we optimise for less negative experiences than more positive ones.

Of course, our tens of thousands of years-strong biological predispositions aren’t isolated to our cafe visits — they permeate our lives, and our work.

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