Notes

The Truth about Lying
sinn uhren

5 Recommended Readings on Lying1. Dishonesty gets easier on the brain the more you do itby Neil Garrett in Aeon (6 min) Three psychology researchers found that the more you lie, the easier it feels to lie again. Why? Two reasons. First, we experience negative emotions when we think of lying, but our emotional arousal declines over time. Second, is the principle of neural adaptation: the brain becomes less sensitive to stimuli after repeated exposure.
“The idea is that if someone initially decides to act dishonestly, they will feel bad about it, and so can only bring themselves to be dishonest by a small amount. The next time they act dishonestly, even though it still feels bad, it doesn’t feel as bad. As a result, one could be dishonest to a greater extent before reaching a point where they feel bad enough to stop.”
2. When telling the truth is actually dishonestby Jena McGregor in The Washington Post (5 min) We know the difference between “white” lies and “real” lies (or so we think. But there’s another type of lying that doesn’t feel like a like a lie. It’s called paltering. And we all do it.
“‘Paltering,’ or the active use of a truthful statement to mislead someone — is the subject of a new research study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. It finds that the tactic is not only common — more than half of business executives enrolled in a Harvard Business School executive education course admitted they had used it in some or most of their negotiations, for instance — but viewed with equal distrust as intentional lies. Participants in the study rated the behavior of someone who paltered in a negotiation as being just as unethical or untrustworthy as the person who outright lied with a known falsehood.”
3. Science is often flawed. It’s time we embraced that.by Julia Belluz and Steven Hoffman in Vox (13 min) Ever wonder why it seems like scientists are always changing their opinion on the health effects of coffee? One week it’s good for you. The next week it’s terrible. It might be because the studies you are reading about are worthless.
There’s been a lot of reporting this year about how many published scientific studies are un-replicable, and how many are based on falsified data. It’s easy to naively believe science is just about the truth. In fact a lot of what we take as scientific fact is less about the truth and more about the reputation and ego of the researcher.
“In an analysis of 300 clinical research papers about epilepsy — published in 1981, 1991, and 2001–71 percent were categorized as having no enduring value. Of those, 55.6 percent were classified as inherently unimportant and 38.8 percent as not new. All told, according to one estimate, about $200 billion — or the equivalent of 85 percent of global spending on research — is routinely wasted on flawed and redundant studies.”
4. How to Tell When Someone Is Lyingby Maria Konnikova in The New Yorker (10 min) This is a great article. Really interesting finding that we are bad at detecting whether a person is telling the truth or lying when we consciously think about it. But when we’re not really thinking about it, we’re actually pretty good at it. I thought this would be a story about micro-expressions and there’s a brief bit on that (excerpted below). But it’s more about how we can know things (like who is lying) without knowing how we know them.
“The psychologist Paul Ekman, professor emeritus at U.C. San Francisco, has spent more than half a century studying nonverbal expressions of emotion and deception. Over the years, he has had more than fifteen thousand subjects watch video clips of people either lying or telling the truth about topics ranging from emotional reactions to witnessing amputations to theft, from political opinions to future plans. Their success rate at identifying honesty has been approximately fifty-five per cent. The nature of the lie — or truth — doesn’t even matter.
“Over time, Ekman did find that one particular characteristic could proveuseful — microexpressions, or incredibly fast facial movements that last, on average, somewhere between one-fifteenth and one-twentieth of a second and are exceedingly difficult to control consciously. Those, however, were too fleeting and complex for any kind of un-trained expert to spot: out of Ekman’s fifteen thousand subjects, only fifty people could consistently point them out.”
5. Politics and the English Languageby George Orwell available here. (25 min) Some say that George Orwell is the most gifted essayist in the English language. This is one of his best-known essays. It’s worth reading just for that.
It’s also worth reading for his reflections on language and culture, particularly political culture. Culture shapes our language but, he argues, language, in turn, shapes our culture.
“In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties.
“Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism,question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers.”
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postscript Somebody’s lying. I could make that statement and be right in just about any situation. According to research by Robert Feldman, we lie, on average, three times during a ten-minute conversation.
This week, that statement applies most significantly to the Trump-Comey affair. The circumstances around Comey’s firing read like a script for House of Cards. Comey was in LA giving a speech to FBI employees when he saw the news of his firing on a TV screen in the back of the room. He thought it was a practical joke until a staffer pulled him offstage into a side room to confirm the report. Then, like a replay of OJ Simpson’s “escape” attempt, we watched Comey’s motorcade fight through Los Angeles freeways to get to the airport.
Why was Comey fired? Many Dems believe it was because of the Russia investigation. The timing is hard to understand otherwise. The White House said Comey had lost the trust of the rank and file FBI. But Deputy Director McCabe testified at the end of the week that Comey had not lost their trust at all. (His whole testimony is worth listening to or reading.)
Either he’s lying or the White House is.
Paltering Paltering is my word of the week. It describes the situation when someone says something that is true in order to mislead. And it happens all the time. The thing about paltering is that it “feels” less like a lie to the person doing the paltering, but the listener feels differently. “If people find out that you paltered, which means you told truthful statements, they react as if you lied to them.”
In Trump’s letter terminating Comey, he said he “greatly appreciated you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation.” Was this a case of Trump paltering? Or was he referring to three times that Comey paltered to him?
What happened at Trump and Comey’s dinner? Did Trump ask for loyalty? Did he ask if he was under investigation? What’s true? What’s a lie? How much of this is paltering? For now, all we know are there are at least five major contradictions about the story coming out of the White House.
If Comey testifies publicly before the Senate next week, we’ll surely learn a lot more.
English and Politics George Orwell argues that the point of political language in the modern era is to confuse things rather than to make them plain.
Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, ‘I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so’. Probably, therefore, he will say something like this: ‘While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.’ …Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.
People who use this sort of politically correct language disguise the truth rather than reveal it. And the numbers of people who do this has been growing. Trump won support in many quarters precisely because he refused to be politically correct.
But for a president who rode into office on promises to tell it like it is, his track record of truth-telling is spotty. A website called Politifact assesses the accuracy of claims made by politicians. They won a Pulitzer prize for their work in the 2008 election. Their analysis is that 48% of Trump’s statements are either “False” or “Pants on Fire.” They recently did a piece analyzing his NBC interview with Lester Holt about firing Comey. Interesting to read.
How to spot a liar You know the old joke about how to tell when a politician is lying: Their lips are moving. In reality, it’s much harder for us to tell who is lying and who isn’t. Most of us are no better than a random guesser at determining when someone is lying.
That is, if we are thinking about it consciously. As Konnikova reports, “at the University of Manheim, the psychologist Marc-André Reinhard and his colleagues found that the ability of student judges to detect deception improved drastically if they were given time to think — but only if, in that time frame, they thought about something other than the case they were judging. If they had to make an immediate judgment, they did no better than chance. The same was true if they were allowed to deliberate consciously.”
In other words, we actually do know, at some gut level, when someone is lying, but we get confused when we think about it too hard.
The question before us at this present political moment: “what are our guts telling us?”
Cheers,Max
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