That’s a Lie : Elaborate Fabrications Have One Basic Motive: Avoidance of Punishment

Neither police nor child abuse experts were surprised recently when an 18-year-old Tustin man’s story that he had bought a newborn baby from a drug addict for $10 turned out to be a hoax.

Less than 36 hours after turning the infant over to a church, Robert Garcia confessed that he had made up the bizarre tale to hide the fact that the baby belonged to him and his 17-year-old girlfriend, who had given birth alone at home after concealing her pregnancy from her father by wearing baggy clothes.

By then, however, Garcia’s story had taken an unexpected twist: His lie had turned into a bona fide media event that attracted reporters from as far away as England and Germany. Garcia was even called a hero for rescuing the infant. And that’s when, as one Tustin police sergeant put it, “he got a real case of the ‘guilties.’

“I think you’ve got some pretty frightened young kids who weren’t thinking straight and who felt very isolated and very alone,” said William G. Steiner, director of the Orangewood Children’s Foundation, which raises money for the home where the infant was taken. “The act was very impulsive, and I don’t think they understood the implications of this sort of tale.”

Garcia, who police say will not face criminal charges, is far from alone in having a lie exposed under the harsh glare of the media spotlight.

A San Diego woman’s claim in January that she had been raped at knifepoint in a Nordstrom fitting room shook the city and generated national media attention. Ten days later, police announced that the story was a fabrication by the 49-year-old woman, who was described as “an unhappy person.”

Last spring, a UC Irvine student admitted that she lied to campus police about seeing a gang rape in a park in the middle of campus. Her reason: A classroom paper was due, and she needed an excuse to take more time to finish it.

In a notorious case, a New York grand jury in 1988 concluded that a teen-ager had made up the story that she had been abducted and raped by six men, possibly to avoid punishment for staying out late.

Although the stories vary, psychologists say, the motivations for lying are often the same.

“The most common reason for children and adults is to avoid being punished,” said Paul Ekman, a psychology professor at the UC San Francisco School of Medicine and author of “Telling Lies.”

“A hackneyed example of that is when a traffic cop pulls you over and you say, ‘I thought I was only going the speed limit’ when you know you weren’t.” You do it simply to not get punished.”

Ekman, who has spent more than 25 years studying the psychology of lying, said a similar motive was at work in the Garcia case.

“What makes it newsworthy is that it’s a lie that very few people have ever heard of before,” he said.

“The other thing that makes it an interesting story is that the plight of this couple is sort of ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ where there is a father who the pregnant daughter feels so estranged from that they think they have to resort to this strategy.”

Other common motives for lying, according to Ekman:

* To gain an advantage that you couldn’t gain otherwise: When you cheat on a test, for example, or when you apply for a job and claim you have experience you don’t have.

* To impress people or build up your self-esteem. People may brag or embroider the truth to appear more important.

* To get out of an awkward social situation, such as telling a telephone solicitor that you’ve got something cooking or that you’re on your way out the door.

* To protect someone from harm: If you know your brother came in after the curfew and you don’t tell your parents because you want to protect him. Or someone in the school room breaks a computer and the children say they don’t know who did it.

People often are tripped up by their lies because they don’t think clearly when they’re making them up, said Ekman.

“It doesn’t matter what the lie is about, what you find is when people embark upon a lie, they don’t think of how difficult it will be to maintain and what the costs will be when it gets detected,” he said. “If they did, many people would not get themselves in these pickles.”

The Garcia incident reminds Ekman of a famous Illinois case that had far more serious consequences.

In 1977, 16-year-old Cathleen Crowell Webb picked Gary Dotson out of a police lineup as the man who abducted and raped her. Dotson, despite tearfully pleading his innocence, was convicted and sentenced to prison for 25 to 50 years.

But in 1985, after becoming a member of a fundamentalist Baptist church and being haunted by guilt, Webb said she had made up the story to cover up her sexual encounter with a boyfriend. Four years after Webb recanted her story, Dotson finally had his conviction overturned.

Guilt, as Ekman observed, “is one of the things people often feel. It’s one of things that prevents you from lying, and if you are a liar, it is what you have to live with.”

Although some believe changing moral standards are causing more people to lie more often, Ekman maintains that is a matter of opinion, not fact.

“This is still a country that has pretty high incidence of church attendance, and we know all organized religions take a moral stance against lying,” he said. “I believe the reason Ross Perot appealed to people is because they want someone who tells the truth. In every national poll, (when asked) what is the most important thing to you in someone whether it’s a friend, partner or political leader, honesty always is either the first or second thing.”

The big cost of lying, Ekman added, “is you may lose the trust of the other person, and you have to say, ‘Do I want the trust of that the other person?’ ”

In the Garcia case, Ekman said, “They had bad luck, and they didn’t think it through too well as to what might happen, and then they got stuck.”

As with other lies that have made headlines, Ekman said there is something to be learned from the Garcia incident.

“I think the big lesson is it’s not an uncommon situation where an under-age girl is having sex and gets pregnant,” he said. “As a parent, you want your children to know your standards and to discourage them from having sex at this age, or at least to use protected sex.

“On the other hand, you want them not to be so afraid of your disapproval that they have to resort to this sort of subterfuge.”

The second lesson, he said, is to be aware of the risks you’re taking when you lie.

“You never know what’s going to happen, and you have to think through what you’re going to do if you’re caught, because the chances are you will get caught,” he said. “Unless you’re very lucky or a professional con man, most of us end up getting tripped up or detected on our lies.”

A week after Garcia’s hoax was announced to the press, Tustin police were still fielding phone calls from TV talk shows and tabloid newspapers.

“The girl is a minor, and her family has requested to remain anonymous, but the word no does not work (with the tabloid press),” said investigator Bergquist. “My concern is they’re not going to let these two kids get on with their lives.”

In looking at the incident, he said, it’s important to examine Garcia’s intent: He made up the story to protect his girlfriend and took their newborn to the church hoping the nuns would raise the child.

“You’ve got to remember this was very unsophisticated thinking,” said Bergquist. “They just wanted to be sure the baby’s welfare would be taken care of. But the story took off on him, and then he couldn’t stop it. He was essentially trapped by his own well meaning.”

Bergquist is concerned with the “long-range damage and impact” on the two young people.

“At least their families are supportive, and this is really what we were hoping for and it is what we got,” he said.