Most of us say we value the truth. And sure enough, telling the truth is one of the first lessons parents work to instill in their young ones. Time and time again,
public-opinion polls show that honesty is among the top five
characteristics we want in a leader, friend, or lover; the world is
full of woeful stories about the tragic consequences of betrayal. At
the same time, deception is all around us. Public figures lie to a disturbing degree; many of our social
relationships are based on little white lies we tell each other, and sometimes our children, only to be deceived by them in return. The
average person, says psychologist Robert Feldman, the author of a new
book on lying, tells at least three lies in the first 10 minutes of a
conversation. "There's always been a lot of lying," says Feldman, in his
new book, The Liar in Your Life. "But I
do think we're seeing a kind of cultural shift where we're lying more,
it's easier to lie, and in some ways it's almost more acceptable." Newsweek brings the truth to light.
As Paul Ekman, one of Feldman's longtime lying colleagues and the inspiration behind the Fox TV series "Lie To Me,"
defines it, a liar is a person who "intends to mislead,"
"deliberately," without being asked to do so by the target of the lie.
Which doesn't mean that all lies are equally toxic: some are simply
habitual—"My pleasure!"—while others might be altruistic. But each,
Feldman argues, is harmful, because of the standard it creates. And the
more lies we tell, even if they're little white lies, the more
deceptive we and society become.
We are a culture of liars, it seems, and our deceit is so deeply ingrained in our psyches that we hardly even notice we're engaging in it. Spam e-mail, deceptive advertising, the everyday pleasantries we don't really mean—"It's so great to meet you!" "I love that dress"—have, as Feldman puts it, become "an omnipresent white noise we've learned to tune out." And Feldman also argues that cheating is more common today than ever. The Josephson Institute, a nonprofit focused on youth ethics, concluded in a 2008 survey of nearly 30,000 high school students that "cheating in school continues to be rampant, and it's getting worse." In that survey, 64 percent of students said they'd cheated on a test during the past year, up from 60 percent in 2006. Another recent survey, by Junior Achievement, revealed that more than a third of teens believe lying, cheating, or plagiarizing can be necessary to succeed, while a brand-new study, commissioned by the publishers of Feldman's book, shows that 18- to 34-year-olds—those of us fully reared in this lying culture—deceive more frequently than the general population.
So, sounds like we're a bunch of liars, doesn't it? Yet, almost amusingly (I did say almost), is that while we admit to lying, studies show that most of us believe we can tell when others are lying to us. And while lying may be easy, spotting a liar is far from it. A nervous sweat or shifty eyes can certainly mean a person's uncomfortable, but it doesn't necessarily mean they're lying. Gaze aversion, meanwhile, has more to do with shyness than actual deception. Even polygraph machines are unreliable. And according to one study, by researcher Bella DePaulo, we're only able to differentiate a lie from truth only 47 percent of the time, less than if we guessed randomly. "Basically everything we've heard about catching a liar is wrong," says Feldman, who heads the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Ekman, meanwhile, has spent decades studying micro-facial expressions of liars: the split-second eyebrow arch that shows surprise when a spouse asks who was on the phone; the furrowed nose that gives away a hint of disgust when a person says "I love you." He's trained everyone from the Secret Service to the TSA, and believes that with close study, it's possible to identify those tiny emoticons, or micro expressions. One of Ekman's colleagues, Maureen O'Sullivan, PhD, a professor of psychology at the University of San Francisco, says, "Micro expressions are fleeting facial expressions that occur when some people try to repress or suppress an emotion. If they are unable to do so completely, the emotion may flash onto the face very rapidly, sometimes for as short a time as 1/125th of a second."
A micro expression suggests that someone may be trying to conceal an emotion. Your recognition of the micro expression tells you what that emotion is, as long as you're correct. Here's the final trick in our puzzle of deception: the emotion may or may not be related to a lie.
So just where does this leave us in determining a liar in our midst? How about bringing that beautiful Golden Rule into play? Treat others as you would have them treat you. Do your best to not lie, and trust those around you. It sure would be great to get that back, wouldn't it?
John
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