Con artists, hustlers, card sharks, they all have
to lie, it's how they get by. But we spin stories
for our spouses, co-workers and friends, every
day.
There are those of us, who constantly give in
to the pull to tell a lie. That is why many
psychiatrists consider chronic lying a symptom of
a deeper emotional problem such as delusional
thinking, psychopathy or narcissism.
Provocative new research suggests that people
lie chronically for a wide variety of reasons. In
a recent article reviewing 100 years of literature
on the subject, as well as several cases in the
news, doctors at Yale University find that some
chronic liars are capable, successful, even
disciplined people who embellish their life
stories needlessly. They don't suffer from an
established mental illness, as many habitual
fabricators do. They're just...liars.
"Many of us have known these kinds of
people; it's like they wake up in the morning and
have to tell the most preposterous stories for no
apparent reason," said Dr. Charles Dike, a
co-author of the article with Yale psychiatrists
Dr. Ezra Griffith and Madelon Baranoski. Their
findings were presented at a recent conference of
the American Adademy of Psychiatry and the Law, a
forensic psychiatry group.
These men and women are viewed as otherwise
normal. Yet they have this compulsion. As liars,
they become more sympathetic figures. They are
neither as manipulative or malicious as they may
seem. They are at least predictable.
"In these cases where there is no
underlying mental problem," Dike said,
"we then can ask: What about the individual's
life is causing this abnormal pattern of
deception?"
Psychologists have long known that some
deception is a normal, healthy part of human
behavior, often starting in children as young
as 5 or 6. In adulthood, most people lie
routinely, if usually harmlessly, throughout the
day. Remember the Jim Carrey film, Liar, Liar??
In one continuing experiment, Robert Feldman, a
psychologist at the Univeristy of Massachusetts at
Amherst, has had people record their conversations
over a couple of days. Watching the tapes later,
the men and women tally their own deceptions. The
average fib rate: three for every 10 minutes of
conversation! "One woman heard herself on the
telephone, sympathizing with her boyfriend who was
sick," Feldman said. "At the time of the
conversation, she told us, all she was thinking
was, 'What a big baby.'"
Why do people lie? To avoid hurting other
people's feelings, to cover our own embarrassment,
to reassure the needlessly anxious, to spare
unneccessary headaches. But, the lying becomes
less appropriate when used as an all-purpose
coping strategy.
A behavior common to nearly all chronic liars
is that they change their behavior when caught.
"One person who I went to college with would
make up fantastic stories, saying he was going off
to Europe, for example," said Dike.
"Then you would see him later that evening.
He'd say, 'Oh, the trip was canceled at the last
minute.' There was always an explanation."
On pyschological tests, chronic liars do show
evidence of a neurological imbalance. They have
highly developed verbal skills combined with
slight impairment in the frontal lobes of the
brain, which critically examine what we're saying.
One psychiatrist who studied pathological liars
in the early 1900s described what he called a
"double consciousness" in which a person
runs two narratives in their head, a desired life
and an actual one, with the former often
overwhelming the latter.
We all daydream. We all buffer ourselves
against painful truths and massage the past. The
pathological liar's biggest violation may be
simply in taking those private deceptions public.
How can you always tell when someone is lying
to YOU?
To learn more about how you can begin to read body
language like an expert, see Body
Language: The Basics
