Every day, radio, television, newspapers, and just those around them bring us all new clear examples of lies. Criminals, politicians, just our relatives and friends sometimes cannot say a word without lying. Why it happens? Why is humanity so prone to lies? American psychologists tried to figure it out. And that's what they did.
“Wrong is an integral part of everyday life. We won't live a day without lying somewhere,”said Lenard Heps, professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts.
Until recently, the problem of lies was entirely in the jurisdiction of ethicists and theologians, who interpreted the ninth commandment in all versions and details. And now psychologists have taken up the study of this phenomenon, which is characteristic of almost every person. Bella de Paula and her colleagues from Virginia began the first serious research on lies in 1996, when they recruited 147 volunteers, aged 18 to 71, to the experiments. They were asked to write down in a secret diary the slightest lie they uttered during each day.
As a result, it turned out that Nietzsche was right: a lie is truly a condition of life. Most people lie quite seriously at least 1-2 times a day, that is, at least as often as they brush their teeth. And both men and women lie equally often. For example, if you analyze a 10-minute dialogue that spouses or just acquaintances of both sexes exchange, then a lie will take at least 2 minutes of their dialogue, psychologists say. If you check all the conversations in a week, it turns out that a person deceives every third interlocutor.
Moreover, there are types of relationships - for example, between teenagers and their parents - that are riddled with lies from top to bottom. College students, it turns out, lie to their mothers every second they talk to them.
At the same time, the researchers have not yet taken into account the jokes said in passing, standard phrases like "I'm fine." But when a person, for no reason at all, is scattered in compliments about the hairstyle of his new acquaintance, which actually looks like a vulture's nest, or convinces his creditor by phone that the check was written to him on Friday and it is necessary to figure out why there is still no money, then, of course, an undoubted lie is obvious.
Dr. Hapes notes that many people do not have a definite attitude towards lying. On the one hand, we have been told more than once, and we, in turn, tell the children that lying is bad. On the other hand, every day anyone can make sure that society encourages and even rewards liars.
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Here's a simple example. You are late for work or school because you overslept. But would you tell your boss or teacher directly about this? No, most likely you will refer to the absence of a bus, traffic jams, an accident, etc. And although there is nothing unexpected in such a traffic jam, and in theory you should have taken into account the possible delay in your schedule, such an excuse is accepted. But infant sleep is not considered a good reason.
And what mountains of lies are piled up by lawyers, composing, at first glance, convincing theories about the motives that drove their clients at certain moments of their lives! To listen to them, so a hardened recidivist is not able to offend a fly …
Why are there lawyers … "Inaccuracies, exaggerations, and even pure deception - that's what the so-called romantic relationship is," de Paula said. In the early 90s, she interviewed dozens of college students who were love couples, and found that 85 percent of partners of both sexes hid their past from their beloved, including all unseemly acts.
In general, as it turned out, lovers are lied to even more often than to parents. However, in marriage, the situation changes. The positions have already been won, and the spouses deceive each other three times less than just acquaintances. Lies account for only about 10 percent of their conversations, and even then these are mostly petty, everyday lies aimed at hiding trifles.
True, quite often the spouses secretly cheat on each other. But such a big lie, contrary to popular belief, is not so frequent: about 25 percent of women and about 30 percent of men have lovers.
Nevertheless, every fourth participant in de Paula's experiment argued that he was lying for good, in order to soften the perception of the unsightly sides of life to his associates. Such a "positive deception", consisting, for example, in the phrase "I have never eaten anything tastier than your pies in my life!" - occurs 20 times more often than negative lies. "So I vote for this two-faced rat!" - someone is indignant. And nevertheless he is voting because he has not found a better candidate.
Women are more likely to spare the self-esteem of the deceived than men. The strong half of the sex is 8 times more likely to lie about itself in conversations with friends (especially when it comes to relationships with the beautiful half of humanity).
Representatives of different sexes are not the same and discern falsehood. Women are quite discerning in conversations with interlocutors (less - with interlocutors), and their ability to distinguish lies increases as she gets to know more of a partner in conversations. But men cannot say about themselves that their insight increases with time. True, initially the percentage of truth recognition among men is higher than among women.
They lie to people they know more often than to those they see for the first time. Lies are more easily communicated over the phone than face to face. Moreover, a person quickly gets used to everything, and 75 percent of the participants in the experiment claimed that they were ready to repeat again and again a lie that had already been said, thereby turning it, as it were, into the truth.
Moreover, the investigation showed that no more than 20 percent of the said untruths emerge. And this, oddly enough, is a blessing: a person who indiscriminately cuts the truth in the eyes of everyone, often has a very difficult time, they simply try not to communicate with him.
All humanity, psychologists believe, is divided into two large halves. There are people who lie out of necessity, and there are liars by vocation - they tell stories willingly, with enthusiasm, quite often they fantasize without any practical need. Moreover, representatives of the latter category, as a rule, are good-looking and are extroverts, that is, people who, as they say, have a wide open soul. Introverts lie much less often, only out of necessity.
Many liars, being exposed, are simply lost, they are thrown to the sidelines of life. True, it is not so easy to expose a skilled liar. It can even fool a lie detector - a device designed 75 years ago by order of the police.
After all, the detector does not record the very fact of telling the truth or lies, but the excitement that accompanies this word. And if the skin of another person becomes wet from the very thought that he could be caught in a lie, then the other is lying, as they say, without a twinge of conscience, and the device does not record any change in his physiological parameters.
Therefore, today experts believe that the detector itself tends to lie 75 percent of the time. It is much more reliable to listen to the subject's voice, to look for signs of excitement in his face and movements. “When a person lies,” experts say, “he betrays himself with all sorts of small movements: scratches, twirls something in his hands, blinks continuously, adjusts his glasses, etc.”.
However, this again refers more to excitement than directly to lies. Many are worried at the exam not because they do not know the subject, but because they are worried about the exam procedure itself: which ticket will drop out, is the examiner too strict, etc.
So it is safer to use the method developed by psychologists at the University of Michigan to determine lies. "If a person tries not to use the first person pronouns" I "," my "," me ", if he does not use words with a pronounced emotional connotation, tries to keep his story in measured tones, then the person is most likely lying."
In general, it is probably worth relying on the centuries-old experience of mankind. As the Bible says, “do not bear false testimony against your neighbor,” but for the rest follow the advice of the poet:
And low truths are dearer to us
The deception that elevates us …