This is the season of lies.
We watch with fascination as candidates for the world’s most powerful job trade falsehoods and allegations of dishonesty.
Republican US presidential hopeful Donald Trump routinely calls Senator Ted Cruz “Lyin’ Ted.”
News organizations such as The Associated Press and PolitiFact dedicate enormous resources to separating candidates’ truthful wheat from their dishonest chaff.
However, if we have come to expect office-seekers who seem truth-averse, many of us have given little thought to our own fibs, and how they compare with politicians’ deceits.
For more than two decades, researchers of different stripes have examined humanity’s less-than-truthful underbelly, and this is what they have found: We all stretch the truth. We learned to deceive as toddlers. We rationalize our fabrications that benefit us. We tell little white lies daily that make others feel good.
“I feel more worried about lying in public life — specifically by politicians, and in particular, Trump — than I ever have before,” psychology researcher Bella DePaulo at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said in an e-mail.
When lies succeed, they make it “more tempting to lie,” DePaulo said. “Lies can stick. They can have a lingering effect, even if they are debunked.”
Children learn to lie at an average age of about three, often when they realize that other people do not know what they are thinking, said Kang Lee, a professor at the University of Toronto.
He has done extensive research on children and lying. Lee set up an experiment in a video monitored room to see if he could catch children lying about peaking at a toy when an adult left the room.
At age two, only 30 percent lie, Lee said. At age three, half do. By five or six, 90 percent of the kids lie and Lee said he worries about the 10 percent who do not.
This is universal, Lee said.
In 1996, DePaulo, author of The Hows and Whys of Lies, put recorders on students for a week and found that they lied, on average, in every third conversation of 10 minutes or more. For adults, it was once every five conversations.
“I would say we’re lying constantly. Constantly,” said Maurice Schweitzer, who studies deception and decisionmaking at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, Trump’s alma mater.
Experts split on whether to count white lies. When your spouse tells you that you do not look fat in that outfit when you do, does it really do any harm?
Some lies “fall under politeness norms and are not very harmful,” Schweitzer said. “There are other lies that are self-interested and those are the ones that are really harmful. Those are the ones that harm relationships, harm trust.”
DePaulo said there is no distinction.
“It doesn’t matter if the attempt was motivated by good intentions and it doesn’t matter if the lie is about something little,” she said.
Regardless, society rewards people for white lies, said Robert Feldman at the University of Massachusetts. “We don’t like people who tell us the truth all the time.”
“The lies that we accept from politicians right now are lies that are seen as acceptable because it’s what we want to hear,” he said.
Or perhaps we feel that lying is necessary.
“The reason that people want their politicians to lie to them is that people care about politics,” said Dan Ariely, a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University. “You understand that Washington is a dirty place and that lying is actually very helpful to get your policies implemented.”
When people deceive beyond white lies, they spend a lot of effort justifying and rationalizing what they are doing.
“Dishonesty is contagious,” said Simon Gaechter of the University of Nottingham.
His study last month examined honesty in a dice game in 23 different countries and then compared them to a corruption index for those countries. The more corrupt a society was, the more likely the people there were willing to deceive in the simple dice game.
Most people want to be honest, but if they live in a country where rule violations are rampant “people say: ‘Well, everybody cheats. If I cheat here, then that’s OK,’” Gaechter said.
However, there is a high cost in everyday society — a loss of trust that is difficult to regain — when someone is discovered to be lying, Lee said.
There are also costs to the liar, he said, adding that studies have claimed to measure the effect of deception on the body and brain and how much energy it takes to create and maintain a lie.
“When you tell lies, it costs your brain a heck of a lot more resources than when you tell the truth,” Lee said.
‘IN A DIFFERENT PLACE’: The envoy first visited Shanghai, where he attended a Chinese basketball playoff match, and is to meet top officials in Beijing tomorrow US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday arrived in China on his second visit in a year as the US ramps up pressure on its rival over its support for Russia while also seeking to manage tensions with Beijing. The US diplomat tomorrow is to meet China’s top brass in Beijing, where he is also expected to plead for restraint as Taiwan inaugurates president-elect William Lai (賴清德), and to raise US concerns on Chinese trade practices. However, Blinken is also seeking to stabilize ties, with tensions between the world’s two largest economies easing since his previous visit in June last year. At the
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese