Pathological Lying: Theoretical and Empirical Support for a Diagnostic Entity
psychnewsdaily.com
psychnewsdaily.com
It was weird, and I don't think it served him well in the long run. However, his girlfriends were consistently more beautiful than you'd expect for his looks/personality/wealth.
"Some animals can make that jump" he'd come out with. "Kangaroos can do it."
"No, I don't think they could. It's too far up?"
"Sure they can. I saw one do it! You calling me a liar?"
It was exhausting, the nonsense he'd spout. The first time I'd encountered such an obvious prevaricator. I wondered how he functioned.
Examples: "I am fine, thanks", "You look great!", "It is a wonderful idea!", "You are our best client", "For our company privacy is a priority", etc, etc.
Having a degree both in mathematics and computer science makes me have an often unerring eye for both potential hidden bugs in code and lies that people tell all the time. So, I can share your sentiment.
I often think: How can people become good at math and/or programming, where they have to learn to become very precise and truthful, if they are surrounded by (also "white") lies all the time. Yes, I particularly have all those politicians in mind who, on one hand, claim how important STEM skills are, and, on the other hand, lie all the time.
It takes more precision to lie and memorize who you lied to and about what and to not make conflicting statements around people whom you have told opposing versions of the truth than it does to tell the truth.
What allowed me to adapt my brain to the imprecision people expect was to realize that anything you say necessarily leaves out more details than it includes. You can't get all of your mental state or the state of the world into words even your listener had the patience.
Tricking your client that you care about privacy when you don't give a damn, is.
What's worse, it is pretty much normalized that in business, dating, politics etc people lie. Even if they are caught red-handed, it is considered a minor thing.
For example gambling is illegal here in Japan. Yet there are pachinko games, where you get prizes, which you can later exchange for money. Everyone knows this is gambling, yet everyone pretends that it is not.
Now I wonder what else everyone knows to be true that I still haven't realized.
It seems that socializing is a very subtle anthropological game, where the only goal is to feel a bit close to human beings without feeling bad, threatened and able to make some noises like the other peers. The rest is useless if not counter productive. Aspie probably want to turn spin their neuron to feel the joy of thinking.. most people absolutely don't want to think (maybe a result of natural limits... you can die thinking for too long but being a follower ensure better outcomes ?)
Hey, how are you doing? [SYN]
Great thanks, and you? [SYN-ACK]
Yeah doing good. [ACK]How are you? (person does not actually care) Great! (person is not interested in detailing the good or bad in their life or day)
It's a matter of reading the person and situation. Sometimes if the person asking the question is in a context where I can tell they don't want an honest answer I just say "oh, how are you?" I'd rather evade the question than to say "I'm fine" when things are shitty.
Reading the description of the study in OP article (but not the source paper), I felt there was no way to tell how reliable the result might be without knowing a great deal about how the study framed their questions.
But that context matters because if it's both accepted and expected to the extent no one would make any material decision based on it, then there's no material intent to deceive, much less expected or actual harm.
I do agree that such meaningless platitudes are better left unsaid as they's just a waste of time.
While, on its face, it seems like a good idea to discourage lying, presenting children with such a binary approach to deception might leave them underprepared for the "bullshit" (marketing, propaganda, etc...) they will encounter in the real world.
EDIT: I'm not a parent and don't want to offer parenting advice. My point is simply that saying "we never lie" seems overly-reductive, versus something more nuanced like "lying is bad." I would worry about creating the expectation that most people don't lie, or even that good people never lie (e.g. white lies).
Your kids will inevitably catch you lying and their understanding of "lying is bad" would become "lying is bad if you get caught" and "You're allowed to be outraged when catching others' lies".
Teaching your kids how and when to lie, now that's a very tricky thing that I don't have a grip on.
Do you have any evidence to back up the assertion that lying too much at 4/5 is how one becomes a pathological liar?
Anyway there've been instances where after losing at football or Minecraft or whatever, the younger nephew has launched on a long monologue to us about how the contest was unfair, that really he should have won, that actually if you look at it a certain way he did win, yes he won and his older brother lost and... on to increasingly fantastic made up story about what happened.
It's not so much lying as a "revisionist history" with a magical realism element. It's almost like... grit gone wrong. I.e. grit would be, "I failed once but I won't accept failure permanently and next time I'll try a new tack" versus this is, "I can't accept failure therefore I must justify and explain why I actually was perfect."
I find this behavioral tendency worrying.
Abolish Christmas, and then get back to me.
Different things get dispelled that changes their foundation that Santa relies on. Such as magic isn't real. Without magic, how can Santa perform his job?
As they get older, it becomes 'childish' by peers to believe in things people 2 years younger believe.
Media created for the demographic starts hinting at the possibility of parents being Santa.
They're fed enough information over the years to piece it together by themselves.
There's more than one Christmas.
Definitely a lie. Saying he's not is another lie, even if you're lying to yourself.
If the category "Lies" is identical to the category "Not Literally True", then it seems to be fairly useless.
A basic facility with lying is a fundamental social skill. Unless you intend for your children to be socially awkward / socially ineffective, lying is necessary.
The point, much like physical strength or any other sort of double-edged human ability, is to plug it into their broader moral framework, to guide when and for what purposes and to what degree.
I hear this a lot but do you have any examples?
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1021369327584
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0261927X9514300...
https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/11808412/personality_a...
This was like, five minutes on google scholar. I'm not going to pretend it's a slam dunk "here's a paper from the esteemed Harvard Professor of Lying-is-Awesome, presenting the grand unified theory of 'deceptiveness and social skills are overlapping traits'," but it's pretty much the null hypothesis.
I've known a handful of pathological liars, one of whom is my nephew. My nephew's caregivers are not model parents. They are extremely hot and cold: either ignoring the kids for hours at a time, or screaming at the kids over every trivial accident and annoyance. Example: nephew was pouring a glass of water, knocked the cup on the floor, and his parents screamed at him and hit him until he was broken down in tears.
Newphew's day-to-day routine is an exercise in walking on eggshells to avoid triggering mom and dad's short temper. Anytime his parent's said a word to him, nephew assumed he'd done something bad again. He began lying at a very young age as a defense mechanism to avoid punishment.
He became very distrustful of adults. We had a family get-together once where my nephew was playing with toy dinosaurs. I walk up behind him and say "hey buddy what are doing over there" and he immediately startles and says "I didn't do anything!"
I noticed that he started lying habitually. And even lying about things that didn't even matter. If he had a bowl of cereal for breakfast, he'd tell everyone he had a bagel. If he got up early, he said he'd slept in late. If he watched Finding Nemo, he'd say he watched Spongebob.
I started challenging him on these things: "why did you just tell me ate a bagel? I was right here fixing the computer when you rolled out of bed at 10am to eat a bowl of cereal this morning." He'd double down, "well actually I got up early and ate a bagel when you didn't see me. And then I had cereal afterward." I'd say "why are you lying to me about something so stupid? I'm not mad, I just don't see why you'd lie about it. What's the point?" "I'm not lying, I swear!"
He's 11 years old and his lies are getting bigger, more absurd. He told me his friend's dad is the president of the Pokemon factory and he can get any rare Pokemon card he wants for free, and that he gets to ride around in his friends Lamborghini.
I literally think he's lying for sport now, like a game to see what he can get away with. He's going to have a hard time making and keeping friends if he doesn't break the habit soon.
I think all of this started from bad parenting. The kid didn't feel safe in his own home, and his defense mechanism became habit, which then became a pathological obsession.
I suspect there's two factors at play; one that he sometimes gets away with it, where we can't be bothered to double check, and second that he may get a little 'thrill' from lying and getting away with it, moreso than the adverse reaction from being called out on it. Mind you, that said, negative attention is also attention, so subconsciously for him it's likely a win-win.
Anyway, it's still annoying. It's not (yet) serious things, just mainly some responsibility dodging behaviour.
Everybody lies. Sometimes it's good, e.g. in order to avoid someone having a surprise spoiled. Or sometimes it's inconsequential, like telling someone that you're fine because you don't have the mental energy to get into what's bothering you (and you know they won't let it go if you were to just say that). Sometimes it's bad.
Telling your kids "we always tell the truth" is a lie, because you don't. And it has a high likelihood of (as a sibling comment said) making them unprepared for people who do lie, at least while they're still young. And you can bet that the first time they catch you in a lie, it will be that much worse.
And from there, it just builds on.
To the liars out there don't think there is something wrong with you.
You have your purpose too - Google psychopathy or dark triad in the work place and know that Managers actually use/need you guys too, not just honest Abe.
Basically we still live with a stone age level of understanding of personality traits and their pros and cons.
But if everyone understands there is a diff between a banana tree, a redwood and a cactus. All having different needs and personalities, only then do we get a good looking botanical garden.
Murder might also have a use, but I feel free to pass judgement on it.
You usually need to meet certain criteria to be eligible and participants may fudge their answers to participate. I’ve done food testing on and off through the years and you always need to answer some questions beforehand to determine eligibility. If you gave a “wrong” answer, the survey-asker would say something like “Are you sure?”, prompting you to pick the other choice that made you eligible for the study. Or even without prompting, if I’m trying to get paid to taste bubblegum and they ask how often you have bubblegum, I’m more likely to inflate my reported frequency compared to my actual frequency of gum chewing.
There was a study I saw the other day, may have been Explained on Netflix, where six people were asked a simple question ("which line is the same length as this one"); five were in on it and intentionally gave the wrong answer, the sixth, the actual person under test, would follow the 'consensus' answer in 75% of cases (after three or four others answered with the wrong answer). Herd behaviour is a thing and probably hard to correct for.
After working for 13+ years at wildly successful silicon valley companies and seeing who climbs the latter, it is those who are good at lying. There is a spectrum ranging from blatant lying to manipulative, selective withholding of information.
She was good at keeping track of who she told what lie, so this was the first time I'd been the 3rd party observer to something I could definitively know she was lying about. I confronted her about it later privately, "<name> is our friend, why would you lie to her for no reason?" and she gave a dismissive non-answer.
That was the first loose thread that unraveled the whole sweater. It turned out she'd been lying to me and everyone close to her, about things big and small, for many years.
It's difficult for me to understand the psychology behind it, but I think it comes down to she feels alternately safer and superior when she knows some truth that someone else doesn't know. Her parents are estranged but stayed together, constantly low-key gas lighting each other. Maybe growing up in that environment is why she reflexively lies. Or maybe it's heritable and the lying leads to that kind of relationship. Either way, I wasn't going to live the same way and peaced out.
My ex-wife lied about everything, and like you it took me years to figure it out. Everything was always someone else's fault (it was my fault she couldn't work, my fault she didn't clean, my fault she didn't cook), she often rearranged the order of events or even fabricated events in their entirety.
Like you, I caught her mother in a bizarre "lie" that unraveled the thing. On XMas eve her mother called very hurt that we hadn't come over for out "traditional Xmas eve." She explained that we just always came over so she didn't think to call and make sure we were coming.
The fact is, I have spent every XMas eve with my own family, we have a tradition of having a party on XMas eve, and I have only missed it once due to being hospitalized. You have to understand the sheer madness of this. She imagined that we were going to come over, convinced herself that we had always done so, and that there was no reason to even let us know she expected us.
This set off alarm bells in my head, I could see that my wife was remembering things that didn't happen or altering events in her head and this was why we could never talk about anything or reach any common ground because we couldn't agree on ground truth.
Eventually I found out she had suffered some trauma, and as a result something called "confabulation" which is more or less a unreliable/false memory.
As years went by, I noticed a tendency to "fish story" everything. What was weird is that I'd remember something very clearly, like we ran for 4 miles or whatever, and as I listened them retell the story, it would be 5, 6, 9 miles, growing with each retelling. When challenged, they'd act surprised as if they truly believed it, and simply misremembered. Sometimes, they'd try to convince me that I was the one with the faulty memory. Shit, who's gaslighting who here?
This turned into a big problem after the honeymoon period. It took me a very long time to figure out that they would hear me say something, interpret it as an attack, and then deduce that I was attacking them for a certain purpose. Then they'd challenge me on attacking for whatever purpose, I'd be like "I don't remember doing anything like that" and they'd accuse me of gaslighting. Whatever their true beliefs, I was being gaslit through this "fish story" cycle. We tried counseling for years, and I eventually broke it off after it became clear that they weren't going to miraculously start a good faith approach to our relationship.
I planned the end of our relationship around a significant life event of theirs -- I didn't want to fuck that up, and I had patience. The morning of my planned departure, the day after their big thing, I learned that the whole fucking thing was a lie -- they admitted that they wanted me to be impressed, so they fish story'd that too. To this day, I don't understand that moment of honesty. They suspected that I was on the way out, and when... maybe it was guilt, maybe it was a hail mary... but what I do know is that they were conscious and deliberate about that lie, I'd never trust an answer to the question, and I'm glad they're out of my life
How does one stop?
Can recommend, it feels great.
This is a huge vice in itself. Yes, sometimes arguments are weak, or there is a new idea, or the argument doesn't work anymore because the world changed so much, or whatever - but then just ignoring them feels pretty similar to the occasional white lie, and an entry to "my argument is superior because I gave it".
I don't know why I liked him before, except I was a young atheist, and I was angry. I guess now that I'm older the whole "I am very smart" shtick is no longer appealing.
If you barely talk, if the few things you say are all lies, that's pretty serious. But for people who talk a lot, like politicians, salesmen, managers, etc, 10 lies per day doesn't sound very high at all.
This seems like a classic reflexive problem: why would we expect liars to produce reliable data regarding their lying?
I am quite interested in the behavior of Trump. As far as we know he tells a lot of lies but it seems the above quote does not apply to him.
Could it be that distress and impaired functioning only apply to people who are able to experience negative consequences of their lies?
Meaning two things:
* There are negative consequences, so they experience them.
* They see the consequences as negative.
What makes you think he makes it 'work' other than being, by some measures, successful?