Secret War Journal[July 2013][Long Post]
Recently, I picked up this book in in the library as a form of self-help during my time in camp.
Synopsis:
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Author: Robert Feldman
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0753515652 |
The Liar in Your Life describes the surprising and sobering reality of lying in everyday life, based on nearly three decades of research by author Robert Feldman. One of his most striking findings, that has been tested repeatedly, is that new acquaintances will lie to each other about three times in the course of a ten minute conversation. These may seem to be so-called "little white lies"—innocent evasions like "I feel fine" or "I like your dress" or "You were amazing"—but those lies exact a cost. When we know we’re being dishonest, we feel less trusting about our environment and the people around us. And those little lies create a climate for greater deceptions, leading to "a culture of lies" that pervades today’s society.
- Cited from http://www.robertfeldman.org/
"Because anyone who says they always tell the truth is a liar"
I remembered the initial reactions of my colleagues in the camp. They were commenting that I was being self-conscious, leading me to read this book. Here is where the assumptions of what this book is about and what it is really about are different. If you had read the synopsis carefully,you would realise that it is slightly different from what you would had imagined from just looking at the book cover. Recall that the book's author is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and that this book serves to explore the rationale behind lying and why we readily accept those lies. Of course, this would involve lies told by ourselves and it also involves strategies on leading a more honest life. (I seem to recall my goal to cut down on lies back in secondary school. Hahas!)
As you probably figured it out by now, me being self-conscious is not completely off. However, the main motivation for picking up this book was to confirm some of my suspicions about deception. After all, since young, I was fascinated by human behaviours. This book will help me to confirm if certain human behaviour are influenced by the use of deception.
Not disappointing me, the book explored many theories and models. First which would be the...
[Disclaimer: I will write briefly on the ideas covered in the book. For more elaborate, and accurate, description, please read the book itself.]
The Liar Advantage
Before we go into the 'why', perhaps we should first discuss about the 'how'. The book gave very compelling evidence on our inability to prevent lies.
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Truth Detection
At some point, most of us will feel confident that we would be able to tell when someone is lying. Unfortunately, unknown to us, our truth detection skills are not that great after all. A study by Ekman found that most trained and experienced lie-catchers did not do better than flipping a coin to guess if the person was lying. That is worrying because these are the people you would expect to be professional in detecting deception. If they are not very successful in detecting liars, where does that leaves us? If our lack of skills is not enough, liars have others up their sleeves to ensure their lies go undetected.
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Averted Gaze
Perhaps the most useful tool in the arsenal of liars would be the myth that liars often has a 'tell' when they are lying. This could be in the form of the infamous 'Avert Gaze' or the involuntary touching of the face.
While it is agreed that some liars subconsciously do exhibit such behaviour, one should take note not to generalise this observation to each and every potential person telling a lie. In fact, the book suggests that liars actually make use of this myth against us.
An experienced liar would be aware of his 'tell' when he is lying. Armed with this knowledge, he would make a conscious effort to mask the 'tell'. For example, knowing that common folks believe that avoid eye contact is an indication of lying, the liar will make sure that he makes eye contact with the victim to not rouse suspicions. In addition, if he has a habit of touching his left ear when he is lying, he would make sure that his hands are by his side at all times. It would take effort but it would not draw the suspicion of the victim. The victim, not noticing any 'tell', believes that the liar is not lying.
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Truth Bias
If this was not bad enough, studies suggests that humans may have a truth bias ingrained in our brains. What this truth bias does is to cause us to have a tendency to trust another person without question. Being social creatures, we tend to trust someone we just met than to distrust him. That is the reason why it is so easy to lie to someone without getting caught. In fact, most of us would accept what a stranger claims. How many of us would wonder if there was really a discount at the nearby supermarket when your friend took you about it?
Researchers believe that the reason that we have such a truth bias could be attributed to the fact that we are inherently cognitive misers. This means that we tend to go on "energy saving" mode. Rather than think hard on every piece of information presented to us, our brain goes lazy on us and just declare that the source is trustworthy and does not bother to utilise mental power on it. This causes us to simply accept the information as truth. Hence, resulting in the truth bias.
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Willing Accomplice
To make matters worse, sometimes we are lied to but we do not detect the lie because we do not wish to believe it is, in fact, a lie. This is not to be confused with self-deception. In this case, you are not the liar. Rather, you are what researchers call "the Willing Accomplice". You may think that this does not make sense, why would we help the liar? The fact remains that, as humans, we are socially insecure. Thus, when someone compliment us, we would want to believe it to be true. Hence, we choose to turn a blind eye to the possibility of a lie subconsciously, allowing ourselves to be lied to. This makes us the willing accomplice to the act. (Ask yourself, did you ever doubt your uncle saying you are pretty?)
All these factors made lie detection very difficult. Their ability and our inability work hand in hand to make each lie go unseen.
Roots of Deception
The book then went on to explain the possible motivations behind lying.
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Upbringing
It is believed that our personal upbringing plays a role in our frequency of lying. How many of us never ever lied in our entire life? Studies have shown that children may lie as early as at the age of 3. (Shocking, yes) This is observed when an experiment was conducted with the subject being placed in a room fitted with one-way windows. The child is then instructed by an adult to not touch the toy placed on a table in the room. After giving the instructions, the adult would leave the room. Left alone, the child is likely to touch the toy out of curiosity. Later, the child is asked if he had touched the toy during the adult's absence. Through repeated experiments, it is found that most children would lie that they did not. What the experiment imply is that either we are designed to lie in our blood or the environment in which our children grew up in encourages deception.
This should come as no surprise as the parents themselves lie. Despite our best efforts as parents to not lie in front of our children, it is inevitable for such a situation to occur. Over time, the child will learn from the social interactions between adults and pick up the skills required to lie during social interactions.
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Lies of Convenience
The idea that evolution enabled us to use deception as a means of socialising is not as shocking as initially thought. Certain lies help to drive the conversation forward. Sometimes we lie in agreement to a question so that the conversation would not come to a halt to explain an idea. For example, during a conversation with your friends, he was sharing about his experience during his vacation in Australia. He continued to talk about his time in Mornington and he paused. He asked, "You know where is Mornington right?" Instinctively, most would reply yes even though he might not have the slightest clue where in Australia is that. (Do not laugh, I had seen such things happening when I probe further.) These are the lies we make without so much as battling an eyelid but it drives the point - Lies are everywhere. Lies are a part of what makes us human. Without it, we cannot function effectively as social beings in society. We coin such forms of lying as Lies of Convenience.
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Self-Deception
Another form that we are all more familiar with would be self-deception
I am sure that at some point of time, you would had intentionally or unintentionally lied to yourself. Whether it was to boost our self-esteem or protect our fragile mind from breaking apart, whatever the reasons, it is likely that we are guilty of it. It could be as harmless as believing that you had already arrived at the answer before your friends revealed it.
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Cosmetic Lies
A similar form would be cosmetic lies - lies which we make to make ourselves feel good. While self-deception is applied on ourselves where people would not be able to know you are actually doing it, cosmetic lies are told to a victim. A famous example would be a resume. There are people who place fictitious but outstanding credentials in their resume to land a job. The liar presents a better image of himself to others by fabricating certain achievements. This is the act of cosmetic lying. That said, adding false information in one's resume may be an extreme case. Cosmetic lies can be found in everyday conversations. Suppose you were in a conversation with your friend. He was boasting how he had found an insect with the size of his index finger. Not wanting to be outdone by him, you may had lied that you had seen insects the size of your palm. (Sometimes, you wonder if our ego is too big for comfort. Hahas.)
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Lies with Intent
Ah, this might had been the reason that you had picked up the book in the first place. This form of lies are the most notorious lies, in that, these are the lies that made it to the news. While most of us may be unaware of other forms of lies, we would be most familiar with this.
Malicious lies are grouped with this form of lies. In this case, liars use deception on their victims to profit from it. Take the case of a simple scam. You are walking along the streets and a lady approached you. She claims to be doing a donation drive for the physically disabled. Due to the fact that we are such cognitive misers, we thought it was an ordinary flag day. As such, we donated without much thought. Little did you know that you had just 'donated' to a non-existent charity foundation.
Of course, there are worse lies being carried out. Be it ponzi scams or frauds, we often heard about it.
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Media-manufactured Lies
While the other forms of lies have been around us for time eternal since we started to socialise, deception have also evolved to involve the media.
Advertisements are a heavy user of such tactics. By portraying how we should look, defining beauty, it deceives the audience that they need to purchase certain products to look good. Effectively, it takes advantage of our insecurity.
One good example found in the book was how the media was used during 2008 Olympic Opening Ceremony in Beijing. Apparently, the fireworks shown on television were not real. It was the work by the media
[1].In addition, it was later discovered that the little girl, Lin Miaoke who sang "Ode to the Motherland" during the opening ceremony was actually just lip-syncing. The real singer was another girl named Yang Peiyi. Imagine the uproar then. (This despite it being written in the programme notes)
Lip-syncing is actually a common practice but the audience still cannot help but feel cheated when they find out
[2].
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Web of Deceit
Finally, a relatively new form of deception takes place in the worldwide web. One fault of us is that we tend to accept anything found on the Internet as credible (which is not true!) This is what makes such deception so widespread. Write a story and the audience will believe it to be true.
Conclusion
If you are interested in the workings of the various means of deception and the motivations behind it, do pick up this book. I hope I had piqued your interest in this book. :)
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