by Jim Wygant
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If self-defense is the most common reason for trying to hide the truth, probably the second most common is an effort to avoid conflict. This results in the “white lie,” in which the liar is not accused of anything but recognizes that a truthful answer or comment will have unpleasant consequences. When a woman asks “do these pants make my butt look bigger” no honorable man who silently agreed with that suggestion would ever give voice to it. There is nothing to be gained and much to be lost. Most men would recognize that the purpose of the question is not to elicit an honest evaluation but rather to invite a compliment. A truthful answer, if it were to agree with the prospect that the person filling the pants does have a large spread in the rear, would only be hurtful and likely lead to an extended period of unpleasantness. It’s much easier, more polite, and more considerate to simply say “no,” without regard to the truth.
It is not only women who pose such questions. Men often engage in the same search for compliments, but often disguise their purpose as statements rather than questions. For instance, if a man says “I got my project in the basement finished” he is not simply stating a fact. If his wife were to reply “after two years, it’s about time” nothing positive would be accomplished. Most fair-minded women would not make that kind of remark, for the same reasons that a man is less than truthful when questioned about his wife’s appearance. The man, like the woman in the pants, is soliciting a compliment. Polite and considerate social interaction suggests agreement.
In either case, there is a desire to avoid conflict, partly because the issue is trivial and the harm from a negative response would be far greater than any good that might come from it.
These are spoken deceits. In the realm of attempts to avoid conflict we also encounter lies of omission. Those are not spoken. They are the secrets that we carry, the silence we maintain, when someone says something that we know we should correct, something about which we conceal contrary information.
The father asks his teenaged son, “Where did you go last night?”
The son answers, “I went over to Jason’s and we played video games.” He omits some details he knows his father would not like to hear. He doesn’t mention that they went from Jason’s home to a party where he drank too much alcohol and then drove his car across a nearby golf course, leaving tire ruts that pointed accusingly toward his home.
At work, an employee is told by her supervisor that money is missing from the petty cash drawer. The employee doesn’t mention that she saw her friend getting something out of that drawer.
In a relationship, a man comes home late after an evening out without his partner. “What did you do?” the other person asks. “Nothing much. Just met a couple of the guys, had a few drinks, swapped a few stories.” He omits that he spent about half an hour sitting at the bar away from his pals, chatting up a stranger he found appealing.
These are all lies of omission. The liar did not directly speak any untruth, but deliberately omitted details that would have been important to the interviewer and would likely have been met with disapproval. The golf course driver and the bar cruiser were engaging in classic self-defense reactions. But what about the employee? She had nothing at stake, except her loyalty to another person. She did not omit details for self-protection, but rather to protect someone else. That might be either because she did not want to lose that other person’s friendship or because she did not feel any equivalent loyalty to the employer. The opposite is even possible: no particular loyalty to the co-worker but a compelling desire to exact some form of retribution against the employer for some past act perceived as unfair.
Understanding the possible motivations for lying – the consequences as perceived by the liar – is an important first step to recognizing lies. While most liars don’t get themselves into situations in which they risk arrest or imprisonment, we all experience moments in which we risk embarrassment, humiliation, or loss of something important, such as home life, a job, or the trust of someone close. Strength of motivation is difficult to measure. Does the murderer feel any more motivated to lie than the person who stole money from the petty cash drawer at work? Possibly not. We tend to measure consequences by the most immediate possibilities. The murderer often is not thinking about life in prison. He may be thinking no further than what will happen later that same day or the next day, but probably no further than that.
A debate arose between the FBI and the CIA during the Iraq War about using torture to extract confessions. CIA interrogators took the position that consequences had to be raised to the maximum level to get information, so they resorted to water-boarding and various other physical measures. The FBI countered that respectful treatment and persistence produced better results. FBI agents reduced the threat of consequences and instead tried to shift the focus to possible rewards.
In daily life we do not ordinarily need to decide between water-boarding and logical persuasion, but we may need to recognize whether we have already resorted to angry demands or rational arguments, and then decide which might be the most effective in a particular circumstance.
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We have looked at liars who have a distinguishable reason to hide the truth, whether it is for self-protection, a concern about hurting someone else, or spite to make trouble for someone else. There is, however, one kind of liar who has no evident reason to lie but does it anyway. That is the person we once called a pathological liar, or sometimes a sociopath, or more recently someone suffering an antisocial personality disorder.
The “ordinary” liar is often subject to some form of persuasion to admit the truth, once his or her reason for lying has been clarified and potential consequences have been made apparent. That person is lying about a particular situation that can be addressed. And at some level that person probably has some sense of what we call conscience – recognition and concern for the effects of our acts on others. Conscience may be buried beneath a heap of self-protection, but the “ordinary” person has limits on how much damage he will do. He may not care about some particular co-worker or relative or acquaintance. He may even hate someone enough to entertain extreme ideas of the violence he wishes on that other person. But the strength of his hatred is part of what distinguishes him from a pathological liar. And his caring regard for others, for whom he does not hold similar hatred, also sets him apart.
A pathological liar is apt to have several identifying characteristics. First, He may not have strong emotions of any kind. His most distinguishing emotion is likely to be disregard or indifference. He doesn’t care that his lies have any impact on anyone else. He is apt to lie about anything, even what others regard as trivial matters. He may lie about having seen a movie or what he had for breakfast. He is usually polite, often gregarious and patronizing, and almost always manipulative. In other words, on first encounter he usually succeeds in being likeable. He has a strong sense of self-preservation, which makes him suitable for polygraph testing and also suggests his most common motivation: self-aggrandizement. He lies because he wants to be in control and to present himself as powerful and desirable. There is usually no one to whom he would not lie. We have all met this person, but we may not have realized it. If we maintained a relationship with this person long enough, we probably reached a point where we were disappointed, felt that our trust had been betrayed, and, worst of all, concluded that we had been played for a fool. Pathological liars do not have long-term relationships.
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We have a distorted regard for the words “lie” and “liar.” We generally think of them as always involving two people. One person lies to another, whether it is someone else lying to us or the reverse. We tend to forget the solo lies, the lies we tell ourselves when we don’t want to acknowledge something. In many cases our solo lies are part of a conspiracy we silently invoke with another person, a liar, when we would rather avoid the truth.
Surely the most unfortunate of those solo lies, one that any investigator of sex offenses aga
inst juveniles has observed many times, is the lie that some women tell themselves when a daughter complains about being sexually molested by the mother’s boyfriend or husband. The mother tells herself that the girl is lying. To do this, the mother must imagine a motive for the girl to lie, maybe jealousy or a feeling of neglected attention, maybe because she’s angry about some task the mother asked her to complete, or criticism of her behavior. A person lying to himself about somebody else is quite capable of engaging in the paradoxical behavior of imagining a motive for the other person to lie and at the same time blocking any acknowledgment of one’s own motive for refusing to recognize the apparent truth. To be clear, this is not a situation in which the self-deceiver has made a mistake out of gullibility or ignorance. It is a deliberate denial of what that person would recognize as a lie if he or she were not so strongly motivated to resort to denial.
The common motivations for self-deception are familiar. Some are the same that motivate us to lie to others. At the top of that list must be the extreme reluctance to suffer embarrassment or humiliation. To admit that we have misplaced our trust or devotion, that we have been played for a fool by someone else, is for many people an insurmountable barrier to facing the truth. To preserve some element of dignity, the self-deceiver would rather reaffirm loyalty to someone who doesn’t deserve it than have to admit bad judgment.
In its most innocent and relatively harmless aspect, we regularly commit this kind of self-deception regarding political views. We pledge loyalty to a politician for frivolous reasons, maybe his or her apparent support for one particular political position we like, or maybe just the politician’s appearance: the way he looks or how she delivers a speech. In the process of personally endorsing a politician, we often willingly blind ourselves to other aspects of the politician’s life or views that would be disagreeable and would make it difficult for us to maintain our support. When that same politician gets into trouble, many supporters continue to deny the possibility that their candidate could have done anything wrong, even in the face of overwhelming evidence.
We lie because at the very moment we commit ourselves to deception we are weak and afraid. Lying is a natural defensive mechanism, except for pathological liars. For those of us who are not sociopaths, it is likely that at some point when we have had sufficient opportunity to reflect, we will abandon the lie, admit defeat and humiliation, and move on. It helps if others have already reached a sane judgment and can reinforce our resolve to admit the truth. In some cases we continue to see the possible negative consequences as greater than anything favorable we might accomplish by admitting the lie. The argument that would persuade us to drop our deception has not yet taken hold. As time passes, circumstances change, attitudes mellow, and with advancing age and the eventual recognition of mortality we often become motivated to address lifelong unresolved issues. Some murderers confess years later. Some who had knowledge of another’s evil deeds break their silence when the person they have protected dies. But some lies are never corrected.
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Understanding another person’s motivation is the first step toward sound judgment. We can not always be certain of where the truth lies, but we often surrender to the compelling need to bring some definition to a complex, troubling, or confusing situation. Imposing a fixed determination is a false solution that often only complicates circumstances and creates discord between opposing parties. We don’t like uncertainty – in politics or in personal relationships – and we often mistakenly jump to a conclusion that we later regret. It is in our nature to regard refusal to make a fixed judgment as a sign of character weakness or indecision, even if the facts to support a definite decision are nowhere in sight. We demand that our politicians take positions on issues before the debate is finished. We also make that same demand in personal relationships. The insistence, “Did you do it, yes or no?” is likely to encourage a lie of absolute denial, when allowance for an explanation or excuse, combined with a temporary suspension of judgment, is more likely to produce something much closer to the truth, and something upon which further revelations and admissions can be built.
The easiest thing in the world is to make a decision and move on. Men are particularly adept at this and are impatient with fussing over details. All of the jokes and anecdotes about husbands having to move furniture or settle on remodel plans while their wives keep seeking alternatives are based on common experiences. In that regard, women who are analytical and patient might make better interrogators than men.
All of us, men and women, don’t like lack of resolution about anything unpleasant. We want to resolve suspicion, correct personal injustice, remedy injury. We don’t want to wait. If something is wrong we want to fix it immediately. That makes sense with furnaces and washing machines. It is not a good approach for resolving problems in the human realm.
In my work as a polygraph examiner I have encountered many cases in which an estranged partner or a close relative immediately became the primary suspect, to the exclusion of any others. Any homicide detective will tell you that most murders are committed by a partner or someone else close to the victim, so it’s natural to look there first for suspects. But a good detective will not stop looking at other possibilities at the same time. If the initial suspect is eliminated from consideration, any delay in bringing focus to someone else can close down an investigation. Liars have a chance to polish their deceptions; evidence is destroyed; and witnesses disappear. The path to other potential suspects vanishes and the investigation falters, sometimes for weeks, even for years.
There is an odd mechanism at work in our psyches. When we have decided where the truth must lie, we don’t want to learn anything else. We deliberately banish any other contrary considerations, maybe because we know they signal the beginning of an unpleasant task, forcing us to start over in our search for a definitive answer. It’s as though the curious part of our nature, the part that enjoys a quest, is overwhelmed and shut down by the lazy part, the part that doesn’t want to have to resume a task we thought we had put in its box on a shelf.
There are, of course, exigent factors that push us toward a quick determination. Among the most common is the desire to remove doubts and suspicions that might injure relationships. Less common, but still compelling, is pressure from others to reach a conclusion.
The desire to remove doubts and suspicions can force us prematurely toward either an accusation or a defense. If we accuse someone of lying, we effectively validate the truthfulness of those who make allegations against that person. If we defend someone’s claims or statements, we move in the opposite direction, rejecting any arguments in opposition. These are very black or white conditions, although we often try to avoid that level of inflexibility by equivocating about opposing evidence with statements like, “I know about that, but it’s going to resolve itself. You’ll see.” It’s the equivalent of waving a magic wand to make the stuff we don’t like disappear.
When pressure to reach a conclusion arises from sources outside of the involved parties, delaying a determination can become nearly impossible. We often see examples of this in flamboyant, persistent press reports that encourage the public to demand resolution when none is possible. One of the most notorious examples happened decades ago. After the infant son of Charles and Anne Lindbergh was kidnapped and murdered in 1932, newspapers ran stories every day for two years, usually explaining over the course of several paragraphs that there were no new developments in the investigation. When a suspect was arrested after two years, the tone of the stories shifted to feverish characterizations of the suspect as a monster who was already known to be guilty. Because of the circus atmosphere surrounding the investigation and the trial, a cult mythology developed that persists to this day based on the supposition that the suspect was innocent and was wrongly executed. The lesson might be that people who feel they have been denied access to the truth will establish their own version of it. The Area 51 cult arises from secrecy that surrounds that military faci
lity and leads to tales of space aliens being held there. There are many other examples. Occasionally speculators may be correct in their less fanciful elaborations, but ultimately there will be many experiences we share that are likely to remain clouded, despite the insistence of some.
In routine domestic situations – maybe a mother asking her daughter if she took twenty dollars out of mom’s wallet – the pressure for a quick answer might come from the daughter’s sibling, who fears he will be the next suspect if sis is cleared. He wants it settled that sis stole the money. The daughter might also exert pressure to be exonerated as soon as possible in order to resolve the issue before dad gets home. Dad’s response might be more severe and more arbitrary than mom’s.
In a police agency pressure to make a speedy decision is apt to come from supervisors, whose interest may have less to do with justice and more with clearance statistics, and from the media when a case achieves celebrity status. In other professions, which only need to resolve their own internal problems and not those of the general population, pressure to hurry a conclusion often comes from bosses who do not want to be perceived as weak. Co-workers who don’t like a person they regard as bringing suspicion upon all of them would be pleased to find an excuse to get rid of that person, whom they probably didn’t like anyway. In consulting about internal thefts for businesses, I routinely asked the business owner to identify a suspect, and I usually had to conclude in the end that the named suspect was not the real culprit. Suspicion initially fell on an employee because he didn’t socialize well with other employees, or because she had recently gotten divorced, or because she was known to be in debt, or because he drank too much. In such situations, it was often one of the more “trustworthy” and likeable employees who was ultimately determined to be the actual thief.
