Everybody lies. C’mon. A little white lie? “I’m just not feeling well,” or “I have something I have to do”? That’s pretty normal. But it can turn into something much bigger.
As a teen, I went through a phase when I would lie about things that I had done in order to sound cool. My brother cured me of that by saying “that never happened,” sometimes in front of the person I was trying to fool. I learned a lesson about how hard it is to get away with lying, and another about how embarrassing it can be to get caught.
I’ve been involved with other people who lie many times in my life. One of my classmates in college was a compulsive liar. In reality he had an impressive resume, he was an athlete, he was smart, but for some reason he couldn’t help himself. I heard him tell some whoppers — he came from a royal family, he raced horses — but after a while all his friends separated themselves from him. He was so clearly full of bologna that you couldn’t believe a thing he said.
Later on I managed a publishing company that sold pre-employment psychology tests that attempted to weed out potentially dishonest hires. They were called honesty tests. These were validated instruments, which means that most of the time they worked. The way they worked was in two parts. If people admitted to prior crimes on the test, they were rejected — even though they were telling the truth. The more subtle part of the test asked questions that felt unrelated to theft or lying. The companies that used these tests saw their losses decrease, but I always wondered whether these instruments were effective enough to find all the applicants who were dishonest.
During my psychology internship I found out that a Veteran I was treating was making everything up. I did therapy with him for almost a year before I learned that much of what he was telling me couldn’t be true. My supervisor at the time helped me to understand that it didn’t need to be really true for the therapy to be helpful — if he believed what he was saying. This was my first academic experience with self-deception.
After all my experiences with lying, I really wanted to see the current movie You Can See Everything. The main subject of the film is Elizabeth Holmes, the convicted fraudster who started the company Theranos. There has been a great deal written about this film, so I don’t need to go into great detail about it. In general, she seemed slippery. She parsed words like Bill Clinton (Do you remember “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is”?). Holmes went into great detail about ‘can’ vs. ‘could’. It seems to me that whenever someone is that concerned about a statement they made, they are likely hiding something. After watching, I was convinced that she was deceptive — about many things, not just her fraud. At one point, she said she had never lied in her entire life. Right. Me neither.
“The essence of lying is in deception, not in words; a lie may be told by silence, by equivocation, by the accent on a syllable, by a glance of the eyes, attaching a peculiar significance to a word, and in countless other ways.” —St. Augustine
People lie for all kinds of reasons. They might lie to save their own skin (self-preservation), or to make themselves look good, like I did as a teen (self-enhancement), or to protect themselves from some painful truth (self-deception). There is a cost, however. Self-esteem goes down when you lie, and negative emotions increase. Low self-esteem can even lead to depression. Conversely, telling the truth has been shown to improve health.
All this makes me think about our current political situation, where lies have become so commonplace that they don’t even raise eyebrows anymore. How can we make good, pro-social decisions without the truth? It is helpful to me when someone speaks plainly, using simple language to make their points. Even then, it is tough to tell who is telling the truth. You may think that you will know when someone is lying, but you might not be as accurate as you think. Studies have shown that on average, people can only detect a lie about half the time, just a little better than a coin flip. Happy Election Day, and best of luck.
