Why do we lie

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

These liars are known for lying in the most blatant and devastating ways. Yet there is nothing supernatural about such fraud. All these impostors, swindlers and narcissistic politicians are just the tip of the iceberg of the lies that have entangled all of human history.

In the fall of 1989, a young man named Alexi Santana entered his freshman year at Princeton University, whose biography intrigued the admissions committee.

Having received almost no formal education, he spent his youth in the vast Utah, where he grazed cattle, raised sheep and read philosophical treatises. Running through the Mojave Desert prepared him to become a marathon runner.

On campus, Santana quickly became something of a local celebrity. He excelled academically as well, getting A's in almost every discipline. His secrecy and unusual past created an aura of mystery around him. When a roommate asked Santana why his bed always looks perfect, he replied that he was sleeping on the floor. It seemed logical: someone who has slept in the open air all his life does not have much sympathy for the bed.

But only the truth in the history of Santana was not a drop. About 18 months after enrollment, a woman accidentally recognized him as Jay Huntsman, who had attended Palo Alto High School six years earlier. But even that name was not real. Princeton eventually found out that it was in fact James Hoag, a 31-year-old man who had been serving a prison sentence in Utah for possession of stolen tools and bicycle parts some time ago. He left Princeton in handcuffs.

Years later, Hough was arrested several more times for theft. In November, when he was detained for theft in Aspen, Colorado, he again tried to impersonate another.

The history of mankind knows many liars as skillful and experienced as Hoag was.

Among them were criminals who disseminated false information, entwining everyone around them like a cobweb in order to get undeserved benefits. This was done, for example, by the financier Bernie Madoff, who received billions of dollars from investors for many years until his financial pyramid collapsed.

Among them were politicians who resorted to lies in order to come to power or keep it. A famous example is Richard Nixon, who denied the slightest connection between himself and the Watergate scandal.

Sometimes people lie to draw attention to their figure. This could explain Donald Trump's deliberately false assertion that more people came to his inauguration than when Barack Obama first took office. People lie to make amends. For example, during the 2016 Summer Olympics, American swimmer Ryan Lochte claimed to have been the victim of an armed robbery. In fact, he and other members of the national team, drunk, after a party, collided with the guards when he spoiled other people's property. And even among scientists, people who seem to have devoted themselves to the search for the truth, you can find falsifiers: the pretentious research on molecular semiconductors turned out to be nothing more than a hoax.

These liars are known for lying in the most blatant and devastating ways. Yet there is nothing supernatural about such fraud. All these impostors, swindlers and narcissistic politicians are just the tip of the iceberg of the lies that have entangled all of human history.

It turns out that deception is something that almost everyone is masterful at. We easily lie to strangers, colleagues, friends and loved ones, lie in big and small ways. Our ability to be dishonest is as deeply embedded in us as the need to trust others. It's funny that this is why it is so difficult for us to tell a lie from the truth. Deceit is so closely tied to our nature that it would be fair to say that lying is human.

For the first time, the ubiquity of lies was systematically documented by Bella DePaulo, a social psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. About twenty years ago, DePaulo and her colleagues asked 147 people for a week to write down every time and for what circumstances they tried to mislead others. Research has shown that the average person lies once or twice a day.

In most cases, the lie was harmless, it was needed to hide mistakes or not to hurt other people's feelings. Someone used lies as an excuse: for example, they said that they did not take out the trash simply because they did not know where. And yet, sometimes the deception was intended to create a false impression: someone assured him that he was the son of a diplomat. And although such misconduct cannot be particularly blamed, later such studies by DePaulo showed that each of us at least once lied "seriously" - for example, concealed treason or made a false statement about a colleague's actions.

The fact that everyone should have a talent for deception shouldn't surprise us. Researchers suggest that lying as a model of behavior appeared after language. The ability to manipulate others without the use of physical force has likely provided an advantage in the struggle for resources and partners, similar to the evolution of deceptive tactics such as disguise. “Compared to other ways of concentrating one's power, it is easier to deceive. It’s much easier to lie to get someone’s money or fortune than to hit it in the head or rob a bank,”explains Sissela Bok, an ethics professor at Harvard University, one of the most famous theorists in the field.

As soon as lying was recognized as a primordially human trait, sociologists and neuroscientists began to make attempts to shed light on the nature and origins of such behavior. How and when do we learn to lie? Where do the psychological and neurobiological foundations of deceit come from? Where is the borderline for the majority? Researchers say that we tend to believe lies, even when they clearly contradict the obvious. These observations suggest that our tendency to deceive others, like our tendency to be deceived, is particularly relevant in the age of social media. Our ability as a society to separate truth from falsehood is at great risk.

When I was in third grade, one of my classmates brought a sheet of racing car stickers to show off. The stickers were amazing. I so wanted to get them that during the physical education lesson I stayed in the locker room and transferred the sheet from the classmate's backpack to my own. When the students returned, my heart was pounding. In a panic, afraid that I would be exposed, I came up with a warning lie. I told the teacher that two teenagers drove to the school on a motorcycle, entered the classroom, rummaged in their bags and ran away with stickers. As you might have guessed, this invention crumbled at the first check, and I reluctantly returned what I had stolen.

My naive lie - believe me, I've gotten smarter since then - matched my level of gullibility in sixth grade when a friend told me that his family had a flying capsule that could take us anywhere in the world. While preparing to fly this aircraft, I asked my parents to pack me some lunches for the trip. Even when my older brother was choking with laughter, I still didn’t want to question my friend’s claims, and eventually his father had to tell me that I had been divorced.

Lies like my lie or my friend's were commonplace for kids our age. Like developing speaking or walking skills, lying is something of a developmental basis. While parents are worried about their children's lies - for them it is a signal that they are beginning to lose their innocence - Kang Lee, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, believes that this behavior in toddlers is a signal: cognitive development is on the right track.

To investigate childhood lies, Lee and his colleagues use a simple experiment. They ask the child to guess the toy hidden from him by playing the audio recording. For the first toys, the audio clue is obvious - the barking of the dog, the meow of the cat - and the kids respond with ease. Subsequent playing sounds are not associated with the toy at all. “You turn on Beethoven, and the toy ends up being a typewriter,” explains Lee. The experimenter then leaves the room under the pretext of a phone call - a lie in the name of science - and asks the toddler not to pry. When he returns, he asks the answer and then asks the child a question: "Did you spy on or not?"

As Lee and his team of researchers have found, most kids can't resist being spied on. The percentage of kids who peep and then lie about it varies by age. Among two-year offenders, only 30% are not recognized. Among three-year-olds, every second person lies. And by the age of 8, 80% say they have not spied on.

Plus, kids tend to lie better as they get older. Three- and four-year-olds usually just blurt out the correct answer, not realizing that it gives them away. At 7-8 years old, children learn to hide their lies by deliberately answering incorrectly or by trying to make their answer look like a logical guess.

Five- and six-year-olds stay somewhere in between. In one of his experiments, Lee used a toy Dinosaur Barney (a character in the American animated series "Barney and Friends" - approx. Newochem). A five-year-old girl, who denied having spied on the screen, asked Lee to touch the hidden toy before answering. “And so she puts her hand under the fabric, closes her eyes and says, 'Oh, I know it's Barney.” I ask,' Why? ' She replies: "It is purple to the touch."

Lying becomes more cunning as the child learns to put himself in someone else's place. Known to many as a model of thinking, this ability appears along with an understanding of other people's beliefs, intentions and knowledge. The next pillar of lying is the executive functions of the brain, which are responsible for planning, mindfulness, and self-control. The two-year-old liars from Lee's experiment performed better on model tests of the human psyche and executive functions than those children who did not lie. Even among 16-year-olds, well-lying teens outnumbered unimportant cheaters on these characteristics. On the other hand, children with autism are known to have a delay in developing healthy mental models and are not very good at lying.

Recently in the morning I called Uber and went to visit Dan Ariely, a psychologist at Duke University and one of the world's best experts on lying. And although the interior of the car looked neat, there was a strong smell of dirty socks inside, and the driver, despite the courteous treatment, had difficulty finding his bearings on the way to the destination. When we finally got there, she smiled and asked for a five-star rating. “Absolutely,” I replied. Later, I gave it a three-star rating. I reassured myself with the thought that it’s best not to mislead the thousands of Uber passengers.

Arieli first took a keen interest in dishonesty about 15 years ago. Looking through a magazine on a long flight, he came across a quick wits test. After answering the first question, he opened the answer page to see if he was right. At the same time, he glanced at the answer to the next question. Unsurprisingly, continuing to solve in the same spirit, Arieli ended up getting a very good result. “When I finished, I realized that I had deceived myself. Apparently, I wanted to know how smart, but at the same time and prove that I am that smart. The episode sparked Arieli's interest in learning lies and other forms of dishonesty, which he retains to this day.

In experiments conducted by a scientist with his colleagues, volunteers are given a test with twenty simple math problems. Within five minutes, they have to solve as many as possible, and then they are paid for the number of correct answers. They are told to throw the sheet into the shredder before being told how many problems they have solved. But in reality, the sheets are not destroyed. As a result, it turns out that many volunteers are lying. On average, they report six solved problems, when in fact the result is about four. The results are the same across cultures. Most of us lie, but only a little.

The question Arieli finds interesting is not why so many of us lie, but rather why they don't lie much more. Even when the amount of reward increases significantly, volunteers do not increase the degree of cheating. “We give the opportunity to steal a lot of money, and people cheat only a little. It means that something prevents us - most of us - from lying to the very end,”says Arieli. According to him, the reason is that we want to see ourselves as honest, because to one degree or another we have internalized honesty as a value presented by society. This is why most of us (unless you are, of course, a sociopath) limit the number of times we want to cheat someone. How far most of us are willing to go - Arieli and colleagues have shown it - is determined by social norms born of tacit consensus - like taking home a pair of pencils from a filing cabinet at work has become tacitly acceptable.

Patrick Couwenberg's subordinates and his fellow judges at the Los Angeles County Superior Court saw him as an American hero. According to him, he was awarded the Purple Heart Medal for his injury in Vietnam and participated in covert CIA operations. The judge also boasted an impressive education: bachelor's degrees in physics and master's degrees in psychology. None of this was true. When he was exposed, he justified himself by the fact that he suffered from a pathological tendency to lie. However, this did not save him from dismissal: in 2001, the liar had to vacate the judge's chair.

There is no consensus among psychiatrists whether there is a link between mental health and cheating, although people with certain disorders are indeed particularly prone to certain types of cheating. Sociopaths - people with antisocial personality disorder - use manipulative lies, and narcissists lie to improve their image.

But is there something unique about the brains of people who lie more than others? In 2005, psychologist Yaling Yang and her colleagues compared brain scans of adults from three groups: 12 people who lie regularly, 16 people who are antisocial but irregularly lie, and 21 people who have no antisocial disorder or lie. Researchers have found that liars have at least 20% more volume of neurons in their prefrontal cortex, which may indicate that they have stronger neural connections in their brains. Perhaps this pushes them to lie, because they lie more easily than other people, or maybe this, on the contrary, was the result of frequent deception.

Psychologists Nobuhito Abe of Kyoto University and Joshua Greene of Harvard scanned the brains of subjects using functional magnetic resonance imaging and found that dishonest people showed higher activity in the nucleus accumbens, a structure in the basal forebrain. which plays a key role in generating rewards.“The more your reward system gets excited about getting money - even in a perfectly fair competition - the more you tend to cheat,” explains Green. In other words, greed can increase the disposition to lie.

One lie can lead to the next, over and over again, as can be seen in the calm and unflappable lies of serial crooks like Hogue. Tali Sharot, a neurologist at University College London, and her colleagues have shown how the brain adapts to the stress or emotional discomfort that accompanies our lies, making it easier for us to lie next time. On the brain scans of the participants, the research team focused on the amygdala, an area involved in processing emotions.

The researchers found that with each deception, the reaction of the gland was weaker, even as the lie became more serious. “Perhaps small deceptions can lead to larger ones,” says Sharot.

Much of the knowledge with which we orient ourselves in the world is told to us by other people. Without our initial trust in human communication, we would be paralyzed as individuals and have no social relationship. “We get a lot from trust, and sometimes being fooled is relatively small harm,” says Tim Levine, a psychologist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham who calls this idea the default theory of truth.

Natural gullibility makes us inherently vulnerable to deception. "If you tell someone that you are a pilot, he will not sit and think, 'Maybe he is not a pilot?" Why did he say that he is a pilot? Nobody thinks so, "says Frank Abagnale Jr. Abagnale, Jr), a security consultant whose youth crimes of forging checks and impersonating an airplane pilot served as the basis for Catch Me If You Can. that this is the tax office, people automatically think that this is the tax office. It does not occur to them that someone could spoof a caller's number."

Robert Feldman, a psychologist at the University of Massachusetts, calls this the "liar advantage." “People do not expect lies, do not seek it out, and often want to hear exactly what they are told,” he explains. We hardly resist the deception that delights and reassures us, whether it's flattery or the promise of unprecedented investment gains. When people who have wealth, power, high status lie to us, it is even easier for us to swallow this bait, which is proved by the reports of gullible journalists about the allegedly robbed Locht, whose deception was later quickly revealed.

Research has shown that we are particularly vulnerable to lying that is consistent with our worldview. Memes that say Obama was not born in the US, denies climate change, blames the US government for the 9/11 attacks and spreads other "alternative facts", as Trump's adviser called his inauguration statements, are becoming more popular on the Internet and social networks precisely because of this vulnerability. And rebuttal does not diminish their impact, as people judge the evidence presented through the lens of existing opinions and biases, says George Lakoff, professor of cognitive linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. “If you are faced with a fact that does not fit into your worldview, you either do not notice it, or ignore it, or ridicule it, or find yourself in confusion - or harshly criticize it if you see it as a threat.”

A recent study by Briony Swire-Thompson, PhD in cognitive psychology at the University of Western Australia, proves the ineffectiveness of factual information in debunking wrong beliefs. In 2015, Swire-Thompson and her colleagues presented roughly 2,000 American adults with one of two statements: "Vaccines cause autism" or "Donald Trump said vaccines cause autism" (despite the lack of scientific evidence, Trump has repeatedly argued that such there is a connection).

Unsurprisingly, supporters of Trump took this information almost without hesitation when the president's name was next to it. The participants then read extensive research that explained why the link between vaccines and autism is a misconception; then they were again asked to rate the degree of faith in this connection. Now the participants, regardless of political affiliation, agreed that the connection did not exist. But when they checked again a week later, it turned out that their belief in disinformation had dropped to almost their original level.

Other studies have shown that evidence that refutes a lie can even increase belief in it. “People tend to think that the information they know is true. So every time you refute it, you risk making it more familiar, making the refutation, oddly enough, even less effective in the long run,”says Swire-Thompson.

I experienced this phenomenon myself shortly after speaking with Swire-Thompson. When a friend sent me a link to an article listing the ten most corrupt political parties in the world, I immediately posted it on a WhatsApp group where there were about a hundred of my school friends from India. My enthusiasm was due to the fact that the fourth place on the list was the Indian National Congress, which in recent years has been involved in many corruption scandals. I was beaming with joy because I am not a fan of this party.

But soon after posting the link, I discovered that this list, which included parties from Russia, Pakistan, China and Uganda, was not based on any numbers. It was compiled by a site called BBC Newspoint, which looks like some kind of reputable source. However, I found out that he has nothing to do with the real BBC. In the group, I apologized and said that this article was most likely not true.

This did not stop the others from uploading the link to the group again several times over the next day. I realized that my refutation had no effect. Many of my friends, who shared a dislike for the Congress Party, were convinced that this list was correct, and each time they shared it, they unconsciously, and maybe even consciously, made it more legitimate. It was impossible to resist fiction with facts.

How, then, can we prevent the rapid onslaught of untruth on our common life? There is no clear answer. Technology has opened up new avenues for deception, once again complicating the eternal struggle between the desire to lie and the desire to believe.