“The
first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest
person to fool.” ~ Richard Feynman, Cal Tech, 1974.
The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How
We Lie to Everyone – Especially Ourselves is a book by Dan Ariely, Professor of Psychology and
Behavioral Economics at Duke University. Throughout the book, Ariely tries to
teach his readers about honesty and dishonesty so that they can become more
ethical beings. People generally assume that others lie while they alone
consistently tell the truth, and so the first thing that they need to learn, he
suggests, is how not to fool themselves any longer. Being truthful and avoiding
lies are things that people need to work at doing, by understanding what kinds
of psychological impulses and situations lead them into temptation and working
out mechanisms for combatting these things. Ariely starts from a position that
we are all fallible and that we should not be arrogant and superior towards each
other because we all need to deal with the same issues regarding honesty and
dishonesty.
The work is
divided up into different chapters that each focus on different aspect of
people’s lives, and the different situations that can lead people to lie.
Ariely tells a short story at the outset of each chapter based upon his own
experience. These are sometimes funny, and so they help the reader engage with
the topic being discussed because the stories draw you in, and, usually, makes
you feel more comfortable about acknowledging the trait or lapse that others
have also engaged in. This seems to be his way of getting the reader to see
that they might have been fooling themselves, and allows them not to feel bad about
this. He then goes into detailed explanations for this behavior and provides a
lot of data and analysis helping the reader to assess the relevance of the
condition he is describing to his or her own life. Personally, I liked this
approach and it made reading the book a lot easier than I thought it would be.
When you pick up a book like this, you think it is going to be preachy and
judgmental, but The (Honest) Truth About
Dishonesty was anything but this!
One of my
favorite topics within the book was in Chapter 7 where Ariely discussed “The
Liar’s Brain.” Here he cited a study where researchers were looking to study
the brains of pathological liars. In this study, one-on-one interviews were
conducted with people who worked at a temporary employment agency in Los
Angeles (the researchers figured that people who can’t hold jobs must be more
likely to be pathological liars!). Interviews were also conducted with the friends,
coworkers, and family of the interviewees in order to identify any discrepancies
within their answers. The researchers were able to identify 12 pathological
liars within a group of 108 job seekers. Then, out of the group of 108, 21
people who were not found to be pathological liars (the control group) were
given brain scans to determine how much grey and white matter were in the
prefrontal cortex of their brains (this part of our brains works on higher
order thinking, such as decision making and distinguishing between right and
wrong); the 12 pathological liars were also given the same brain scans. We have
both grey matter and white matter in our brains – grey matter is responsible
for powering our thinking, and white matter is responsible for the “wiring”
that connects those brain cells. So…the scans were compared, and the
researchers found that the pathological liars had 14% less grey matter than the
control group. They also found they had 22 to 26% more white matter. So maybe
pathological liars are pathological liars because they have less grey matter
and less of an ability to make moral judgments? Also, Ariely suggests that the
white matter could also make it easier to lie, as the more connectivity one
has, the more a person can figure out ways to explain away their lies! The
first person I though of after reading this was our current president, who is
known to lie with abandon!
A real-world
problem relating to dishonesty, which leads me again to our current president,
is the phenomenon of fake news. And this isn’t just fake news, as in President Trump’s
touting of “fake news” to confuse people and cover for many of his easily
proven lies and dishonesties (does he have less grey matter?). This fake news
is real, and it feels like what we as a society are currently dealing with is
only the beginning of a long stretch blatantly manipulative dishonesty within
many facets of the media. A study recently released in the journal News Media and Society, “The Agenda
Setting Power of Fake News: A Big Data Analysis of the Online Media Landscape
From 2014 -2016” indicates that “content from fake news is increasing,” and
what’s even worse is that this study reveals that people who attempt to fact
check these media sites inadvertently increase the fake news media circulation,
which then rewards these fake news outlets and then reinforces the perpetuation
of fake news! And this is not only happening with regard to what we read; it’s
also happening with what we see. See the article and video below on how
researchers at the University of Washington are successfully creating fake
videos of politicians. Will the fact checking of these kinds of videos also reward
and reinforce this kind of fake news? I hope not, because if it does we’re in
big trouble:
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