Over at Club Troppo, Paul Fritjers has once again been wondering whether we can handle the truth. Taking his cue from TV’s House, the conceptual tools of the working economist, and an old Psychology Today article reporting research on lying in social life, Paul concludes that everybody lies. House’s catch phrase becomes the leitmotif of his meditation on lying and what this means for political debate. Such as the recent brou-ha-ha over the Howard government’s recent seizure of “grass-roots control” of the Northern Territory’s indigenous communities.
The psychological study Paul refers to is described thus:
Working with her department colleagues, University Psychology Prof. Bella M. Depaulo asked 77 undergraduate students and 70 community members to record all the social exchanges and conversations in which they took part. She asked the participants to record the number of lies they told in the course of one week…
In Depaulo’s studies published in 1996 and 1998, college students lied [on average] in 38 percent of their interactions, while community members lied [on average] 30 percent of the time. In addition, 70 percent of the people who lied said they would lie again given the same circumstances…
Participants were also asked to keep track of their own reactions to their lies and to record the extent to which they felt guilty. The results revealed that all participants lied. Their lies were self-serving and were employed either to enhance the liar’s status or protect him from embarrassment, disapproval or conflict. Only one out of four lies was told to protect someone else’s feelings. Her studies revealed that socially skillful people told way more lies than people who were socially unskilled…
Those interpolations are mine - unless we’re talking about some kind of average rate of lying, that last sentence doesn’t make any sense. Think about it.
Then think about the other issues involved in the general question of deceptive conduct - or more crudely, lying. Why, for instance, did the college students in the study report that they lied more often than the “community members”? Was it the naive honesty of youth? Or the naive braggadoccio of youth? Who knows? Who cares? All that emerges with any clarity from the Psychology Today report is in these two sentences:
[The] lies were self-serving and were employed either to enhance the liar’s status or protect him from embarrassment, disapproval or conflict. Only one out of four lies was told to protect someone else’s feelings.
Well, a little clarity - in brief, average liars tells three purely selfish lies for every “little white lie”. Maybe socially skillful people exceed the average for little white lies, while the socially inept are useless at sparing the feelings of others. Again, who knows?
You may say ’so what? Big deal! Yes, everybody lies and pretends they are motivated by something else than that they claim. Yes, they pretend to be more certain about things than they could possibly be. But we all implicitly know this and discount everything we hear for the possibility that it aint true’. I have often heard and read this excuse but have never been convinced of it. Lies create smokescreens that make it harder to identify what’s going on and to get people to agree on the best course of action… (my emphasis)
At this point, Paul’s mislaid a bit of nuance in the analysis - I blame that Doctor House catch-phrase. There are degrees in deception and the first - I suggest the most widespread in ordinary social life - is withholding from other people our less respectable motivations. For example:
“Could you look this over for me? I’d value your opinion.” (because I reckon I’m probably writing complete crap this time).
“Sure, no problem” (you sad, anxious, neurotic bastard).
More nuance gets lost, in the examples Paul presents of people pretending that their motivations are not what they claim. Here’s one from earlier in the post:
Economists are as a profession absolutely convinced material incentives matter and that, for instance, welfare claimants and early retirees are in many cases on welfare and on early retirement out of monetary motives. Perhaps not the majority, but certainly a sizeable minority. Yet welfare claimants and early retirees themselves don’t tell you this.
Yes, there are monetary incentives to get onto and stay on some kinds of welfare - and every time that the subject of welfare has come up for a good old blog stoush, there has been plenty of comment on the material disincentives to getting off welfare. But the material benefits - such as they are - can be taken as read. They’re not the whole story. As a DSP pensioner, I’ll own up to the following reasons for being on the DSP:
- The money’s better.
- You get a lot less shit from Centrelink.
You might still cop a bit of the brown stuff from the punishers and straiteners who’ve supported the current Government on every hard-line it’s ever taken but they don’t actually have any power, so it doesn’t matter. At least not today. While I’ve still got two members of the medical profession convinced that going back into the nine-to-five workforce will have me in a state of suicidal depression within a few months, I’m pretty well right. It helps that doctors, by and large, are so easily fooled on these issues, especially psychiatrists.
Somewhere around the middle of Paul’s argument, it seems to go completely pear-shaped; as I understand it, deception - and self-deception - are so rife in society, we have such a strong preference for pleasing fictions over unpleasant facts that there’s absolutely no prospect of honest, open political debate on any topic. Leaving a situation where we must rely on an enlightened elite to debate the real issues behind closed doors and feed us - the populus - with the sort of fictions that will move us to go along with sound policy. There is, however, one little problem with this scenario - DePaulo’s finding that for every lie told to spare the feelings of another, the average liar will tell three lies which are entirely self-serving.
Let’s consider how that applies to the debate over John Howard’s indigenous affairs stompdown. First up, John Howard has form, as Tim Dunlop so aptly put it. He’s lied repeatedly in the past - and on each occasion, the most likely explanation - on the information available - is not that the lie was in the public interest, but that the lie was self-serving. So it’s entirely appropriate, in this debate, that two questions be asked: is John Lying again? If so, is it for his own benefit, or the benefit of the indigenous communities?
This is the simple, pragmatic response indicated by our knowledge that most people occasionally lie - some less occasionally than others - and our belief that it’s not a good thing for politicians to resort to lying to the electorate - because the majority of lies are self-serving. Somehow, in working to his depresed conclusion that unless the atmosphere for public debate improves “open discussion simply has to live in a make-believe world where the best you can do as a benevolent elite is to manipulate the fairy tale factory”, it’s that check on lying that has become the problem. Weird.
The problem is not, as Paul implies in his final question that we, and the general public (whoever they are - me and every other adult Australian who isn’t actually a politician, policy wonk or a member of any other profession engaged in the thankless task of speaking truth to stupidity, I suppose) can’t handle the truth. The problem is the assumption that there must be a fairy-tale factory in the first place. Because the fairy-tale factory always ends up in the hands of a self-serving elite, labouring away at producing private truths and public lies under the self-deluding conceit that they are benevolent.
So true.
Nice post, Gummo.
Ta muchly, Mark.
I’m starting to think we should drop the acronym “MSM” and start using “FTF” instead. It’s a nicely turned phrase and I hate Paul Fritjers for thinking of it before I did. Begrudging credit where begrudging credit is due and all that.
The noble lies of a self-serving elite?
Maybe it’s just coincidence, but it all sounds a little Straussian.
I think this article went too close to conflating ‘positive spins’ with lies… In certain contexts (eg. job interviews, polite discourse), everyone expects you to focus on the best side of things. But I think this is a categorically different phenomenon to saying that children were thrown overboard if they weren’t.
Of all the people who self report their frequency of lying,how can you believe a word they say?If they say that they lie say three times out of four(on average) you would have to be certain that it was the fourth time(on average) on their list of recent utterances that imparted the 3 out of 4 information to be able to believe them.I think essentially you would have Buckley’s.
I do not think that there is a fairy tale factory and I came to this conclusion working for a company run by members of the Liberal Right on the Northern Beaches of Sydney.It was my distressing observation that there were no “private truths” and “public lies” promulgated by them for staff to consume because their “lies”(as I perceived them) in their minds were believed by them to be “truths”.I think the same applies to Ratty, he cannot tell the difference.I think it is called “doublethink” but whatever it is it presents someone who has quite disturbing personality problems.
Well, that’s another issue again, Dany, but I didn’t want to resort to the easy option of invoking the Cretan paradox. The short answer is that you can believe them if they have nothing to lose by telling you the truth.
One interesting possibility is that the higher rate of self-reported lying among the college students was that they were in awe of the researchers and took very seriously the idea that this was valuable scientific research, while the general community members didn’t give a shit, basically. Which points to another interesting lost nuance - that people exercise discretion over which matters they will lie about and those where lying is completely unacceptable to them.
David,
True. Everybody expects you to pump your resume, treat smart-arse HRM questions seriously, instead of laughing your head off and refrain from telling them how you’re really doing. All areas where we expect to be misled and any other response is socially inappropriate.
Gummo,
The post on “Troppo” was silly because it virtually postulated that political bullsh#t was justified because citizen punters are too thick to be able to take take dispatches of truthful political or economical detail.In other words the masses are ignorant of what is good for them and benign fairytale utterances are what is best for popular consumption.This attitude suits a ruling class self endowed with a sort of noblesse oblige but not a govt. subject to the usual processes of democracy.This cannot work any more because there are now too many politically aware people whose knowledge trickles down to the politically unaware.
The Cretan paradox has long since been demystified but I could not resist using my version because the research in the original post really is tainted by a lack of understanding of it.
And I still think that right wingers in power are unable to see when they are telling a political lie because they think of their lies as legitimate management tools.
Dany,
I’m not sure we’d have too many disagreements over what you’ve just said.
Thanks for the timely bounce
Gummo,
you set up a straw man, mate. You missed important nuances in the post. Nowhere does it claim that elites are benevolent. What is claimed is that a country is lucky if it has a benevolent elite who’s willing to mislead the public. Are you going to argue with that? Of course the issue of how one gets a benevolent elite in the first place is important (its the old Marxian question of who ‘teaches the teachers’), but outside the remit of the post.
If you want to argue the point seriously that one CAN have truthful politicians and truthful media, you are going to have to disprove my chosen Australian examples (merit pay, advertising, global warming, welfare policy) or come up with an historical example of successful politicians who never told a lie and yet were able to tackle the sensitive issues of their time.
Paul,
As fine a “Nah, I never said that, never!” as I’ve read in my life. Perhaps you’d care to explain the esoteric meaning of this part of your post - all I got was the exoteric meaning “It’s good for countries to have elites that lie to their populations while they implement the public good in private” (especially since that you went on, with apparent approbation, to cite several examples):
I have no interest in “disproving” your chosen Australian examples. First, observational and empirical evidence isn’t susceptible to “disproof”. Second, your besetting sin in argument, is to reduce everything to the most stark dichotomy you possibly can, then pick a “right” side.
Finally, there’s no straw man here - if you read over this post again you’ll find that the key piece of evidence for your argument - the study you cite to support the assertion that everybody lies has been used to completely discredit your conclusion:
Oh yes - I think we need some explanation of the esoteric meaning of that bit too - once again all I get is the exoteric meaning. But I digress - applying reason and logic, I tried to demostrate that your premises were in contradiction with your conclusion. You obviously disagree - but as usual, it’s up to the readers whose side they take on that point.
Gummo,
you seem rather desparate to disagree with me at length despite having no time to go into any specific examples. We really disagree much less than you think. I too for instance use the words ’self-appointed elites’ to make clear that there’s no inherent reason why elites would always be benevolent. That elites would shape the agenda behind closed doors is surely someone calling himself Trotsky would not disagree with? Or have you forgotten that Trotsky organised the Red Army in order to do the bidding of a rather small set of Bolshewicks who violently appointed themselves at the head of the Russian state?
Sure, I dichotomise in my blog but only after giving extensive lists of examples and background information such that the reader knows what empirical regularities are being reduced to their bare essentials. How else would you want to argue any point?
By the way, I take it as a compliment when you say “First, observational and empirical evidence isn’t susceptible to “disproofâ€?.” Its the nicest thing you’ve said so far.
Paul,
As you’ve already expressly disowned your original argument, I see no point in any further discussion.