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Truth About Lies: They Tell a lot About a Liar
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In fact, few human behaviors are viewed as paradoxically as lying. We teach our children that it is wrong, yet we lie every day in the name of civility. We deem those who lie too often or extensively as untrustworthy, while we may call those who lie too little guileless. And though we routinely expect marketers and politicians to lie, we spare them no end of moral outrage when they do.
But lying is much too interesting to be left just to the mercy of moral examination. Lies may not be as sexy or revelatory as dreams, but they can tell us a lot about the psychology of their owners.
There may be nothing uniquely human about deception: some experts say chimpanzees can fake out rivals. But lying requires something special that, so far, seems the sole province of humans: a theory of mind. To lie effectively, one has to have a notion that other people have minds and can be deceived.
By the time most children are 4, they have acquired the ability to deceive others, a skill critical to survival. For example, shown a tube of Smarties candy filled with pencils, 4-year-olds can imagine that other children who don't know the trick will falsely assume that the tube contains candy. In other words, these normal 4-year-olds have learned that others can be fooled by a false belief.
Of course, most of us have mastered the skill of lying. And lies, like secrets are rarely as interesting as the psychological reasons behind them.
For some, the aim of lying is to feel better about themselves. A successful businessman told me that he routinely exaggerated his accomplishments. He would inflate his test scores and claim that he had won athletic competitions when he had really placed only second or third.
He had, like others with narcissistic personality disorder, the constant fear of being unmasked as a fraud, a sense that no achievement could relieve. Lying for him was a means to bolster his fragile self-esteem.
Perhaps the most interesting liars are people with antisocial personality disorder. Antisocial people have deficient or absent consciences that allow them to engage in all kinds of mischief with little or no guilt.
They can be superficially charming, but they often lack empathy and have no trouble lying, stealing or being violent. They lie frequently to get their hands on something that isn't theirs or to escape a mess that is.
In contrast to normal people who experience anxiety when they lie, antisocial people can lie with complete composure. And because they experience little physiological arousal, they can often fool a polygraph test, which detects peripheral signs of anxiety like a rapid heart rate.
Anxious truth tellers, meanwhile, can easily fail simply because they're nervous, throwing the validity of the polygraph into question. there is no way to know for sure whether the increased activity in this area is the neural signature of lying or is just being nervous about lying.
So we can all just relax. No one can yet read our minds, or hearts. For now, there is no technology that will make lying obsolete.
Q1) Recently, have you deceived somebody or have you been deceived by someone? Then, when and why? Please tell your experiences.
Q2) Do you agree or disagree that we believe 'Honesty is the best policy.' these days? Give some specific reasons.
Q3) Have you told a well-intended lie to your friends or parents or anyone else? Then, did it work?
Q4) Some people say that telling well-intended lie is better than telling the truth because it can have better results. What do you think of this?
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