The Guardian recently published an excerpt from Robert Feldman’s The Liar In Your Life: How Lies Work And What They Tell Us About Ourselves, an in-depth look at all things 9th Commandment-related, and wow! (In the US, the name of the book was changed to The Liar In Your Life: The Way To Truthful Relationships – classic!) Most of the article details the results of a recent study on lying, conducted by Feldman at UMass. As riveting and sobering as the data itself may be, the conclusions are even more so; they tie dishonesty pretty directly to self-justification. Yet another example of how the Law of Who You Must Be – in order to liked or seen as competent – can be counterproductive, in this case the fruit being deceit (and self-deceit). But extinguish the “should” by embracing an identity (a righteousness) more secure than what we ourselves can conjure/maintain – something historical, something objective, for example or, dare I say, imputed – and who knows, transparency might just be byproduct. Just sayin, ht SZ:
All told, I found that most people lied three times in the course of a 10-minute conversation. Some lied as many as 12 times, and those are just the lies participants admitted to. It’s possible the frequency was even higher. Of course, it would be easy to conclude that the randomly selected participants in my study just happened to be unusually duplicitous, or that some factor in my study induced people to lie far more than they normally would. But my subsequent research on conversations between unacquainted strangers has shown, fairly consistently, that they lie to each other about three times every 10 minutes, both inside and outside the lab.
Participants in my study confessed to lies that were big and small, rooted in truth and fantastic, relatively defensible and simply baffling. Further, the lying was not limited to those to whom I had given a directive to appear likable or competent. These people lied with greater frequency, but even those with no specific agenda lied regularly.
Indeed, psychologists have found an association between socially successful people and skill at deception. Popular people tend to be good liars.
But why lie to appear competent or likable? Why not just be yourself? In fact, “just being yourself”, if we examine it closely, takes creative effort. Our expression of who we are involves choices that reflect social and interpersonal context, our mood, our personality, our need to maintain our self-image and so on. If we consider self-presentation as a creative process, we can see how it can easily slide into deception. Every interaction involves decisions about which attributes to emphasize and which to minimize, which impulses to follow and which to ignore. At some point, we may not be choosing among our actual traits and our sincere reactions. We may simply fabricate the traits and reactions the social situation calls for, or that we think it calls for. In other words, we might lie.
On a related note, I got to catch the new documentary Forbidden Lies this past weekend, which I highly recommend to anyone interested in the human capability for deception. Unbelievably gripping.
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4 responses to “Lying Liars and Their Lying Faces”
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Thanks, DZ. I had not heard about this movie at all. I have GOT to see it!
PS. A parallel story happened in the 80s/90s. An autobiographical book was written describing atrocities in Guatemala (entitled "I, Rigoberta Menchú"). It became a huge success in the West, sold millions of copies, became required reading in a large number of university courses; and eventually garnered for Rigoberta Menchú the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize. It was exposed in the late 90s by anthropologist David Stoll (and later the NYT) as a tissue of lies (mixed with truth).
On of Stoll's most interesting observations about our willingness to be deceived was this:
"Books like 'I, Rigoberta Menchú' will be exalted because they tell many academics what they want to hear. Such works depict rebels in far-off places, into whom careerists can project their fantasies of rebellion."
I think this story is hilarious. Basically, everyone lies to each other all the time, and often we're hardly even aware we're doing it.
I struggle to agree that insincerity is deceptive.