Great Throughts Treasury

"A lie has no power whatsoever by its mere utterance; its power emerges when someone else agrees to believe the lie."

"If you?re in an average married couple, you?re going to lie to your spouse in one out of every 10 interactions."

"Any lie is moot until it has a recipient who has agreed to believe it. A lie has no power whatsoever by its mere utterance. As Freud documented over a century ago, and as researchers have proved since, liars reveal their deceitfulness through physical or verbal "tells." Within the last week, Congressman Anthony Weiner gave himself away as a liar through multiple channels. He was as easy to read for trained liespotters as the average eye chart is to a fighter pilot."

"Deception is complex. Though we hate to admit it, we all wish we were better husbands, better wives, richer, smarter, more powerful... the list goes on. Lying is an attempt to bridge that gap -- to connect our wishes and fantasies about how we wish ourselves and our world could be -- with what it really is."

"It turns out that liars often look you in the eye too much in order to appear authentic. They subscribe to the myth that liars will look away, look down, avoid direct eye contact when in fact honest people will only look others in the eye a comfortable 60% of the time. When someone stares you down, checks your face to see if you can read theirs, looks you in the eye in order to prove truthfulness, think again."

"Lying is a costly and serious business. Recent studies have shown that 1 in 5 employees is aware of fraud in their workplace, 25% of C suite executives falsify their resumes, half of all employees admit to undertaking one illegal or unethical action per year. Corporate fraud cost close to a trillion dollars last year. Honesty and integrity are the underpinnings of our democracy and of our rule of law. When politicians lie it erodes the very fabric of our republic. Deception is serious business."

"Lying is an attempt to bridge a gap, to connect our wishes and our fantasies, about who we wish we were, how we could be, with what we?re really like."

"Studies by several different researchers have shown that the number of lies we're told each day is anywhere from 20-200. To many that will seem shockingly high. Yet it isn't, in light of humans being ill suited to detect lies. The average human can detect a lie only 54% of the time. Why? Because when someone lies to us, we rarely find out about it immediately -- we learn much later that we were lied to and we don't remember if someone covered their mouth or shrugged their shoulders. We don't learn a lie's distinguishing features on the spot. When you hit a tennis ball out of the court you can instantly correct your serve... but deceptive behavior doesn't provide the same kind of learning curve. To make matters worse, it turns out evolution is the equivalent of a kind of "arms race" in which our ability to detect deception must keep up with our ability to deceive. The better we get at detecting lies, the better the liars' stories become. The more sophisticated the stories, the more advanced the techniques required to detect them. We can spot this evolutionary progress almost hourly by opening our email. Even as we arm ourselves against the latest scams with firewalls and filters, spammers jump a step ahead with new tricks. Lying is the rule, not the exception."

"Researchers have long known that the more intelligent the species, the more deceptive it is. By studying our close ancestors -- the primates -- a pair of Scottish researchers found that frequency of deception is directly proportional to the size of the neocortex -- in other words, the bigger the brain, the more frequent the use of deception. Koko, the gorilla who was taught sign language, once blamed her pet kitten for ripping a sink out of the wall. We are hard wired to become leaders of the pack."

"Lying is a cooperative act."

"We?re against lying, but we?re covertly for it, in ways that our society has sanctioned for centuries and centuries."

"There are as many reasons for lying as there are liars, but what's clear is there is usually an element of denial involved. Many liars deny their own sense of helplessness and vulnerability to themselves and others. One might go as far as to suggest that the twittering sexting Weiners of this world appear to even want to be caught at their escapades -- but it's dangerous to make further assumptions about the underlying causes."

"White lies we embrace: telling a homely teenager he or she looks handsome or beautiful on prom night, telling children there's a tooth fairy in order to give them a consoling gift for a fractured smile -- but we can be deeply ambivalent about the truth. In diplomacy, withholding the whole truth is considered politesse. The courts have proved time and again that truth must be titrated. In the world of law, lying and deception are not only tolerated but have a form of legal sanction. Many people consider bilking an insurance company fair game. Others admire a falsified resume if it gains the perpetrator a highly sought after and lucrative position. "Massaging the numbers" in certain precincts of the accounting world is a highly esteemed skill, though a species of fraud. Criminals from Jesse James to Bonnie and Clyde to the Corleones are glorified, often praised for their nerve or chutzpah. Dishonest negotiators and duping salespersons are often lauded as "realists" and exalted for having "street smarts." Truth in our society often takes a back seat to securing gainful consequences."

"Trained liespotters get to the truth 90 percent of the time; the rest of us, we?re only 54 percent accurate."

"When you combine the science of recognizing deception with the art of looking, listening, you exempt yourself from collaborating in a lie."