The Good Health Magazine : PSYCHOLOGY : The Honest Truth About Lying : PEOPLE NOT ONLY TELL LIES BUT ACCEPT THEM; THEY WINK AT LIES THEY KNOW ARE LIES AND AT LIES THEYWISH WERE TRUTHS
When young George Washington claimed he could not tell a lie, he (or whoever made up the story) was in fact fabricating one of history’s all-time egregious whoppers.
Washington could lie, all right. And he did. Not, perhaps, to his father about hatcheting the family cherry tree but almost assuredly to his troops and his wife. And if he was like most of us, according to one study, he lied an average 13 times a week. “It’s the honest truth,” says UC Berkeley anthropologist Alan Dundes, “that telling lies--white lies, black lies, tall tales and fibs--is a universal human behavior.”
The very language of lies suggests their widespread utility. We falsify, misstate, misrepresent, gloss over, disguise, color and varnish the truth. We doctor, cook, fake, adulterate, dress up, embroider, invent, trump, forge and, in political campaigns, spin it. We concoct, equivocate, quibble, trim, shuffle, prevaricate, perjure, mystify, dissemble, evade, trick, exaggerate, beguile, double-tongue and cant, too. Psychoanalysts have even invented the term “Life Lie,” a life story we tell on airplanes or psychiatrists couches. These stories integrate lies that protect people’s psyches so convincingly that the tellers believe them.
Lying is not “good,” of course, at least not in the common understanding of the word. Any 4-year-old in Sunday school knows it’s a sin, and simple reasoning tells us that it undermines the trust on which all relationships rest.
But lies, as social scientists confirm, are part of our social and historic fabric. Despite thousands, and probably millions of years of moral, ethical, legal and religious sanctions, people not only tell lies, but accept them; they wink at lies they know are lies and at lies they wish were truths. (“You don’t look a day over 30, darling.”)
What is most interesting about lies and lying is not that they exist, but why they do, and why they persist so universally and with such strength. (There is even some evidence that chimpanzees and other animals lie, and--in experiments--rats have been taught to “lie” to get tasty rewards.) If truth and lies are not flip sides of a single coin, both apparently buy us some things we really value.
Lies have been legal tender throughout human history. Because they’ve been around so long in so many different societies, they’ve become predictable and formed patterns. So they tell us a great deal about ourselves and each other, important things about what we value.
Experts believe that lies can help tell us what we consider normal, why we raise our children the way we do, and explain our creativity (or lack of it), our business sense and our status in society. They tell us why our jokes are funny and our superstitions are not, and how carefully we honor our marriage vows. They shed light on why women value different things than men, why fraternities have initiations, why we invent colorful language and names for things, and in part what generated our laws and legal system.
In biology, a genetic trait--like color vision or the ability to grind meat with our teeth--that is conserved, nurtured and passed down to all generations is probably necessary for survival. So, too, experts now suggest, are certain psychological traits and their expression, including lying and lies.
“Lying is not an inborn skill, but is first learned early in childhood, probably as a way to avoid unwelcome consequences,” says behavioral psychologist Michael F. Cataldo, Ph.D., of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. “The fascinating thing about this kind of behavior is that it’s unbelievably durable because the occasions for needing it occur to everyone very frequently, giving all of us lots of reasons to keep it up. It is impossible for me to think that one could go through life not confronting those occasions and therefore not lying.”
As an alternative to telling the whole truth, we learn to tell more “positive” lies, repeat rumors and generate gossip that help us get what we want (“Of course I’ll still love you in the morning”); feel better or make excuses for ourselves (“My boss only got where she is by looks, not talent” or “It’s your fault I drink”); focus attention on ourselves (“I got my Ph.D. at Harvard”); hide shame (“No, I’m not in therapy”) or precipitate action (“I can’t possibly stay here without a 20% raise”).
Clearly, no one knows how or when the first lie occurred--although Genesis tells us that Adam lied to the Almighty about his role in the apple episode. One possible scenario, however, is that the first lie was told by the first person to figure out that when you don’t know the true value of something, coming to a fair trade requires some conniving. Reinforcing that scenario to this day is the expectation and fun derived from the process of bargaining. “It’s a social occasion, it gets people engaged with each other, and in the best situations, creates only winners no losers,” notes psychologist Cataldo. “That’s a very strong incentive to continue it.”
No prehistoric life-style reporter recorded the first “social” lie, either, but anthropologist Dundes strongly suspects that our hunter-gatherer ancestors certainly knew the value of circumlocution. “If you knew where there was good hunting, you sure might want to keep it to yourself or to your small clan to assure enough to feed your offspring and survive,” Dundes notes. “You might not tell an outright lie, but you might not tell the whole truth, either. You might share part of your bounty, but never quite tell about all you had.”
Some of today’s styles in business rhetoric are at least the psychological descendants of such pragmatism. There are some Asian, Indian and African rhetorical traditions, for example, in which one never asks a direct question in a transaction because that would require a direct answer that could force the answerer to lie about what his wishes or resources are.
In Philippine courtships, the same style holds, Dundes notes. For instance, the groom never asks the bride’s family for her hand in marriage, but will instead ask what kind of weather the bride’s family has been experiencing. It’s understood that if her family says “not good, lots of rain,” then the request is not looked upon with favor. “No one is exactly lying, but no one is asking direct questions,” he adds.
Superstitions are another outcome of early social lies, anthropologists say. In much of the Indo-European and the Semitic world, for example, there is the concept of the “evil eye,” the notion that if you are truthful about good fortune, spirits, gods or other forces will want--and take-- what you have and need to survive.
Dundes suggests this oft-told joke among Jews, Italians and Greeks to illustrate:
First man: It’s been very good to see you again, my friend, but it occurs to me that you haven’t asked me how I feel or how my business is going.
Second man: You’re right, how rude of me. So, how are you and how is your business going these days?
First man (with exaggerated look of despair): Don’t ask!
There appear to be social contracts in which all parties agree that certain untruths are acceptable and others are not and that certain lies are acceptable in some contexts and not in others.
People lie in “good” causes, to protect others, to shield from pain and horror, to soothe and comfort. History tells us that people have lied to stop wars, stabilize governments, keep the peace, feed the hungry and catch criminals. They have lied to entertain, to save nations, to encourage progress, to allay irrational fears and to conduct scientific research. “Truly,” said Sophocles, “to tell lies is not honorable, but when the truth entails tremendous ruin, to speak dishonorably is pardonable.” This planet, from a moral standpoint, might be better off without any lies, but it might not be populated.
Philosophers have spent lots of time defining what exactly a lie is, in what ways we use lies and how lies reflect the way people think about their place in the world.
From the philosophical standpoint, the subtlest lies involve behavior, or failure to tell the whole truth. If, for instance you sleep with another man’s wife, you are lying in the philosophical sense by “saying” that she is your wife. If you steal a person’s book, the casual passer-by thinks it’s your book and you are therefore lying to that passer-by because that is what you intend him to believe. If a speaker hides his nervousness before a speech by coughing or drinking water, he is also engaging in a “lie” in order to help his image before the audience.
“There are many different rationales for telling truth and therefore, for telling lies,” says Jerome Schneewind, professor of moral philosophy at the Johns Hopkins University. “Those rationales lead to different ways of dealing not only with the white lies, the social lubricants we all feel more or less comfortable with, but with the hard cases, the real moral issues.”
At least in the West and in Judeo-Christian tradition, truth telling has for centuries been considered the bedrock of civilization, a fundamental requirement for living with each other.
This tradition, however, acknowledges that there are soft edges, made necessary by equally compelling but “competing values,” such as justice, benevolence, kindness, helping others and charity.
A moral man, said Samuel Pufendorf in his 17th century standard text on ethics and values, should always tell the truth in order to assure trust. But if telling the truth means handing over a fugitive hiding in your house to a murderer who comes to your door looking to kill him, competing values take hold. Said Hugo Grotius, the Dutch-born moral philosopher, someone who stands to benefit from a deception is unlikely to be upset if someone violates the truth.
For example, a child as yet unprepared for the death of a parent might benefit if an adult tells her that “Daddy will get better,” at least for the moment. Grotius thought it was OK to lie to sick people who don’t want to know the worst, and many doctors today believe it is all right to lie to a patient rather than to dash all hope.
Philosophers recognize that what wins in the competition for moral values reflects what’s most important to individuals, groups and society. And what’s important can vary from minute to minute and situation to situation.
Thinking on the role of lies has ranged from the purely utilitarian ethics of those who rule out moral absolutes in favor of a case-by-case approach to 18th century German Immanual Kant who believed, absolutely, that all lies are immoral and that there is no rational basis whatever for telling a lie.
For example, in perhaps his most famous essay, “On a Supposed Right to Lie From Altruistic Motives,” Kant argued that it is not all right to lie to the murderer at your door because “if, by telling a lie you have prevented murder, you have (also) made yourself responsible for all the consequences,” many of which may be unknown to you. Perhaps frustrating the murderer sends him to murder someone else. Any lie, he said, hurts society; it always “harms another (or) mankind generally.”
“We could all go around viewing truth-telling as an absolute,” Schneewind says, “but in truth that’s not very useful; truth must be viewed in context, or else you’re into religion or faith. Most religions were born that way, investing elite or special groups with the job of spreading important values by various means, including what we now call myths, legends, miracles and even lies.”
Today’s moral philosophers may use Kant as the far-out end of the line drawn about lies, but most are more interested than he seemed to be in how people justify their lies.
In some cases, the rationales change as a society’s knowledge changes. For example, in the case of the doctor who lies to a hopelessly ill patient, perhaps he read about new evidence that the state of mind influences the body’s immune system, its ability to fight back against cancer and other illnesses.
On the other hand,” Schneewind points out, “how would you feel about a doctor who says to you, ‘I don’t believe in telling you everything about your case?’ How far would you trust him to preempt your right to the truth? To maintain the trust on which every relationships is built, people must not only tell the truth, but know that others are truthful, too.”
Many people feel we are more likely to lie to each other these days than in the past. That is probably impossible to prove, but one way of exploring it is to examine the role of lies in today’s urban civilizations.
Consider, for instance, the lies in the idea of the “free rider.”
If 99% of the people on a bus pay their fares, and the bus is crowded and Mr. Jones can get away with not paying his fare, who is hurt by this lie? If everyone thought that way, the city bus line would stop operating. But as Schneewind points out, the very reason Jones thinks he can do this without guilt (at least occasionally) is because, ironically, he trusts that most people are honest. In this sense he is reinforcing the value of truthfulness to himself and others. He tells himself that he can’t really hurt the system and he can occasionally take a free ride. In short, he gets benefit from both lying and telling truth, so that one could argue there is benefit when a few like Jones each day lies (fails to pay the fare.)
“For Kant, this was wholly irrational and unacceptable,” says Schneewind, but I think a lot of people in our society today are free riders. I don’t know if it’s good or bad, but it’s one way of thinking about how we view the telling of truth.”
In general, philosophers tell us that societies that place high value on respect for others, for benevolence, lie less because lies are seen as a way to use, exploit or manipulate.
And cultures that place high value on language, literacy and debate also probably put higher value on truth telling. Babies and children could not even learn language if they were constantly lied to, linguists argue. Says Schneewind: “In order for children to learn to trust that a word means what it means universally, he has to experience the truth of that most of the time. Language depends on trust.”
Societies that encourage and support moral philosophers and whole university departments devoted to this work can also be seen by some as evidence of how much we value truth. “What a philosopher can usefully do is go over rationales, make people think about the usefulness of truthfulness and encourage them to keep up the old veracity,” says Schneewind. “That’s a pretty good thing for the most part, but we’re not preachers.”
Moral philosophers may not be, but there are certain kinds of lies that do preach, or at least teach, moral lessons, directly or indirectly.
Among these are tall tales, certain kinds of humor and even fraternity initiations and rites that involve complicated practical jokes or deceptions. By this measure, the United States is very concerned indeed with truth.
“This is a nation--and there are others--that loves to play jokes, exaggerate the truth to get a laugh or make an important point,” says Berkeley’s Dundes. As a specialist in American folklore, Dundes points to such stories as Paul Bunyan, John Henry and his hammer, the celebrated jumping frog of Calaveras County, and such hybrid or fantasy creatures as jackelopes and snipes.
“At least once in life, most people are told that someone actually believed they saw a herd of jackelopes in the Texas panhandle or stayed out all night during a full moon to bag snipe, even though they can’t tell you whether a snipe is fish, fowl or rodent,” says Dundes.
One purpose in telling and retelling such stories is to underscore their lack of veracity and to help the innocent (especially but not always children) learn how to sort out lies from truth.
Joe Isuzu, Madison Avenue’s mendacious car salesman, exaggerates and satirizes the untruthful hyperbole of the stereotypical automotive huckster and in so doing lets us not only laugh at him but at our own gullibility. In the process, he might make us smarter buyers--at least of Isuzus. The hayseed pair who sell us Bartles & James Wine Coolers also are in this tradition, Dundes explains. They use what is known as the “liar’s bench” approach to peddle the purity and goodness of their product.
The liar’s bench, Dundes says, is a synonym in many parts of the country for the seat or stool in front of the barbershop or town hall or under the tree in the square where old men hang out and swap fish stories and some down-home truths. “In the old days,” he notes, “people would walk by and the old men would say ‘stop and tell me a lie,’ and what they meant was ‘tell me a story that teaches me something.’ One common response to the request was ‘I can’t stop right now and tell you a lie, John just died and I’m off to console the widow,’ and that was known to be a lie.”
What’s going on here? In part, a reinforcement of values about truth telling and lying. A lie that’s shared, says Dundes, is often in the form of a prank, a joke, a trick and a very “bonding” experience for a community in which traditions and values are passed down. The phrase, “a liar’s bench,” is a term of endearment, not a pejorative.
The pranks and tricks that are part of initiation rights, military hazing and discipline and even such bar games as liar’s dice and poker with its bluffing, teach players ultimately about fidelity, loyalty, teamwork and, by contrast, the value of truth, too. What makes poker a game of fun for most of those who play it is not the bluff, but figuring out the bluff, agreeing that everyone will try to “lie” but by the same rules. Someone wins and someone loses, but trust in the game and its players is intact.
Dundes considers April Fool’s Day, versions of which survive in most European and Indian cultures, in the same vein. “The whole purpose of these festivals is to fool people, deceive and lie to them, but the point is for A to fool B by enlisting C, D and E. The fun is in the wink, the sharing of the lie and not giving it away too soon.”
It’s an entertaining way to teach social rules and teamwork, planning and execution, gamesmanship and being a good sport. In short, it’s a lie that teaches moral values.
All social systems have built into them certain personal, psychological and social structures and social scientists are seriously interested in the means by which groups smooth out conflicts in these systems, how they deal with aggression, violence, inequality, injustice and potentially explosive differences in gender and status.
Among the more universal means are those that help individuals, institutions and whole societies “let off steam.” “No society does not lie, because lying is a socially accepted outlet for the strains of living,” says Marcello Suarez-Orezto, an anthropologist at the University of California in San Diego. “All societies need white lies and what is defined as a white lie is defined differently from society to society. In many respects, we can define ourselves by the lies we allow or don’t allow.”
Suarez-Orezto, who has studied the folklore of Southern Mexico and other parts of North America, notes for example that children in the United States are allowed and encouraged to fantasize and use their imaginations, an activity that often blurs the distinction between lies and truth. “If we want to know about certain cultures, we can look at their fantasy, their myths, their legends and fiction,” he says. Greek mythology, American Indian lore--these were lies of sorts, but what truths they told about the values of those who created them.
In Western culture, lies about money are far less well tolerated than they are in some societies in New Guinea and South America, where suspecting the motives of others is a universally recognized right. Societies that place a huge value on the smoothness of interpersonal relationships are very concerned about the true motives of people and the way this surfaces is that people become almost obsessed with other people’s real motives.
Social scientists also observe that in some cultures, women and men lie more or less about certain topics. In Southern Mexico, for example, women probably lie more because lies are the social lubricants. “The women are in charge of making certain that men are kept in line and they do this by using gossip and rumor to repeatedly smooth relationships among men,” Suarez-Orezto says. For example, a man who is suspected of cheating on his wife may be defended by his wife even though she knows he has cheated, and the lie may be agreed to by the woman he’s cheated with. The alternative--the truth--might lead to fights and broken marriages that no one really wants.
In the business realm, men may lie more than women simply because they have more need and opportunity to do so. And in societies in which contracts regulate business, legal language becomes very important in defining what is truth and what is a lie. “In literate societies,” notes Suarez-Orezto, “the boundaries between truth and lies is much more clearly defined than in preliterate societies or in those cultures in which oral tradition, gentlemen’s agreements or a person’s word, are all-important.”
Women struggling to get a footing in a man’s world often will adopt men’s “acceptable” social and professional lies, as well, and sometimes hold on to them more strongly than men do. Bernice Buresh, a political journalist who has written widely about women and the way they report the news, says that until recently, women accepted the convention of male reporters that one didn’t report the peccadilloes of politicians because it was not relevant to the politician’s function as a legislator or governor. “But as more women enter journalism and politics, we find it harder to live that lie, because women have been reared to pay attention to personal relationships, to be the social glue, to value openness.”
In politics, particularly in the United States and Europe, stereotypes are replete with images of liars and politicians who are in some sense expected to lie and steal. (Many anthropologists tell some version of the story of the Minnesota winter that was so cold the politicians kept their hands in their own pockets.)
“In all societies,” says Suarez-Orezto, “there are those with more status and those with less, those with more power and those with less. And for those in power, there is often greater latitude given in defining what is truth.”
With the latitude, however, comes more attention to discretion and in some cases more consequences, ultimately, for those who abuse the power. The lies told in the Iran Contra cover-up and Watergate are cases in point. Buresh, who currently is writing a book on gossip, rumor and lies in political coverage, believes that the rules of disclosure have dramatically changed in politics over the past five or ten years.
“When I was covering the Senate in the 1970s, we were all keepers of certain kinds of secrets. We did not write about John Tower’s behavior or that Wilbur Mills was drunk on the floor of the House, and we had a covenant of sorts that aimed at only telling certain things we said were relevant to the functioning of the government. One way of looking at this covenant is that the picture we conveyed was untrue, a lie, because we didn’t tell things that would have given the public a fuller picture.”
Since the Gary Hart affair, says Buresh, “more women have gone into public life and into journalism, and they looked at Tower’s antics and did not see anything at all amusing. What they saw instead was abuse of power and sexual harassment. The feminist movement now constitutes a real factor in political life, and so now all journalists feel the need to disclose more in order to be considered truthful.”
Ironically, however, the news media also seem vulnerable to charges that they participate in and spread lies, or at least undermine the bigger truth. “Part of the problem,” says Buresh, “is that the more we disclose, the more open certain subjects become, the more emphasis we put on telling the whole truth, the more we feed readers the idea that we can understand the world better if we understand individual behavior. But this People Magazine approach to world history is distorted in its obsession with the individual. So, a Republican comes along and dishes dirt, lies or truths, about a Democrat and the media repeat them. News agencies will assign six or eight reporters to check out a piece of gossip, but won’t put any resources into telling stories about how things work because that’s perceived as boring. The upshot? Truth can be told so out of context that it becomes an untruth.”
If Buresh is hopeful that political journalism will be more truthful about political lies, others are not so sure about politics itself. Marvin Kalb, the former network television commentator and now director of the Joan Shorenstein Barone Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard, says that “what we are now seeing in Washington, Beijing, Moscow and San Salvador in terms of big lies and blatant lies is nothing new. It’s life and I’m not stunned by any of this. I’m under no illusions that some incredibly wonderful turnaround is going to happen in the body politic. The best we can hope for is that we can begin to mitigate the excesses of gossip, rumor and lying behavior we have been witnessing.”
Whether the subject is politics or car ads, card games or con games, litigation or love, war or peace, all of the experts interviewed for this article agree: People can neither understand nor learn lies unless they understand and learn truth as well. “No lie,” writes essayist Ann Weiss, “will work--be accepted as true--unless the person who is to be deceived anticipates being presented with the truth . . . lies cannot stand except upon a solid foundation of truth and trust.”
Pathological and neurotic liars often specialize in self-aggrandizing lies, evasive lies, lies that hide guilt and lies that attract attention to themselves. But psychiatrists also recognize that the ability to lie is a natural part of normal development. “The crucial human skills are among those that equip children to lie,” says psychologist Paul Ekman of the University of California at San Francisco. These skills are: “independence, intellectual talents, abilities to plan ahead and take the other person’s perspective and the capacity to control your emotions.”
By age 4, normal kids can and do lie for the same purposes as adults: to avoid punishment, get something or excuse themselves. New Jersey psychologist Michael Lewis and his colleagues recently used a don’t-peek-at-the-toy game to demonstrate that children as young as 3 can intentionally cover up their feelings to deceive grown-ups.
“Lying,” psychiatrist Arthur Goldberg of Rush Medical College in Chicago, has written, “is as much a part of normal growth and development as telling the truth.”
He adds, “teen-agers start to test limits, to see what they can get away with, and lying to parents can be a large part of that.” Lies, in this sense, are a necessary part of moving away from dependence on parents, the renewed search for ideals and for other models of behavior that mark the adult.
In psychoanalytic theory, a child’s first lie, if it works, is her first experience in learning that her parents are not omniscient, and that, too, is necessary for growth. But only in about 3% of all children does lying occur so often that it becomes a problem.
“At the bottom of it all,” says psychologist Cataldo, “is the reality that the people we tend to respect and pay attention to for the most part act on a bit of a higher moral plane. They admit to wrongdoing, they don’t stonewall. And they don’t lie about essential things.”
Perhaps Dundes put the bottom line best: “Everybody lies. The important thing to remember, though, is what happened to Pinnochio.”
DR, Color / CARTER GOODRICH