The Person Who Experiences The Twinge

To deal with dishonesty we need to recognize that its ubiquity is tied less to society’s lapsed morals and instead has more to do with the great utility of deceit. Socially sensitive people will often hide, say, their loathing of a boss at her birthday celebration because basic civility, not to mention professional considerations, weighs against fully honest expression. Again, though, while it’s important to understand the more benign uses of deception, we shouldn’t become convinced of deception’s ultimate harmlessness. Even when lying is convenient, even when it is kinder than the truth, it can exact a toll. Social psychologist who has carried out extensive research on deception, has identified in her work the twinge of distress lying can cause it too. This occurs not necessarily for the target of the lie, who might not notice the deception. Rather, the person who experiences the twinge is the teller of the lie. Putting one over on a friend, on a loved one, even on a new acquaintance can make the liar feel at least somewhat guilty, at least to some degree less connected to the person he or she deceives. A twinge of distress means that liars can be victims of deceit as much as those they target. But at some point, we may want to know the truth that is apparent to the rest of the world. Yet we can’t easily signal to others the truths we want to know and the truths from which we want to be shielded. Indeed, this distinction may not even be clear to us.

Hand In Hand

Hence, it remains important, for practical as well as ethical reasons, to be vigilant in seeking out the truth. Lying may serve many functions, but so too does recognizing honesty. In many ways, when we try to sort out the truth from lies, the deck is stacked against us. Nonetheless, there are tactics we can employ to make ourselves better equipped to grapple with lies. Most adults in the United States know how to drive. But there are also those special few among us who describe themselves as defensive drivers. These drivers are masters of more than just the rules of the road. Like the rest of us, they follow the speed limit and signal their turns. But they take their mastery of driving a step further. They employ tactics and watch for cues that make them even less likely than an ordinary driver to be caught up in an accident. They gauge the distance between their car and the car ahead so that even if it stops suddenly, they will have time to break. They decelerate with practiced slowness at stop signs.

Can You Hear Me

They look left, right, then left again before entering an intersection. Of course, even defensive drivers have accidents. There are some things even the savviest drivers can’t control. Defensive drivers take all the extra precautions they can to keep themselves, and their fellow motorists, safe. People are not very good at detecting lies. Study after study has shown that the average person has barely a 50 percent chance of telling if a statement is true or false. Further, there are no universal clues that tip a liar’s hand. If a person averts his gaze or fidgets in his seat, he might be lying, or he might be nervous, or he might have to use the bathroom. There is just no reliable connection between behavior and deception. In other words, it is not easy to tell when we are being lied to. Even beyond what’s described above, there are numerous other components of the advantage, the edge that liars have in fooling us. We might be able to mitigate some of these factors, but ultimately it’s impossible to level the lying playing field between ourselves and those who seek to fool us.

Finding The Right Words To Say

Sooner or later someone is going to successfully deceive us. We are not destined to be the victim of every lie and liar. By employing Active Honesty Assessment, we have the power to lessen the deception we live with. The first essential piece of Active Honesty Assessment is one we’re already familiar with. To determine when someone is lying, we need to know why people usually lie. Conventional wisdom holds that people lie when they want to cheat us out of money or hide something they’ve done. The reality of the motivations behind deceit is, again, far more complex. Lies can, and do, occur in nearly every social situation, serving to calm insecurities, move a conversation along, follow rules of tact, and so forth. Knowing that lies commonly occur in so many contexts means that we need to be consistently vigilant in searching for them. We can’t, for example, let down our guard in conversations in which there is nothing tangible or important at stake. Lies aren’t limited to negotiations or arguments about money, nor to serious conversations about what someone might or might not have done. Even the most mundane interactions usually contain lies. Admittedly, some lies really may not be worth ferreting out. Is it really important, for example, to determine that our friend in the office actually doesn’t remember the guy from accounting who got fired the year before? Just as some conversations contain only trivial content, so too do some falsehoods. Yet the comparison between defensive driving and Active Honesty Assessment is again useful. It may seem tedious to refrain from passing on the right in certain situations. The Liar’s Advantage has a range of components. One of its most stubborn is the fact that all of us operate with the cognitive rule of thumb known as the truth bias. The truth bias means that we don’t judge the information we receive objectively. Instead, we assume that what we hear or read or see is true. The downside of the truth bias, of course, is that sometimes we should critique what we hear, because very often people lie to us. The truth bias, though, is not something we can turn on or off.