STAWAR: Lies and pyramid schemes

By TERRY STAWAR

A few weeks ago we went to a museum in Cincinnati with our daughter and four young grandchildren. Since we neglected to take along a stroller, my wife Diane rented one at the museum.

After an exhausting afternoon learning about mummies and pyramids we were finally ready to leave. Diane went to return the stroller in the midst of a lot of tired and cranky whining. Even the kids were starting to feel tired.

The woman at the service desk examined Diane’s receipt and told her that the stroller had already been checked in and they had given her deposit to someone else. Diane produced the stroller, her receipt and driver’s license. The woman at the desk, who apparently thought that Diane was lying, showed her the signature of the person to whom they had given the deposit. It was an illegible scribble. They finally acknowledged that they had not asked for proper identification.

My daughter had gone to get the car, leaving us with the four kids, including a 3-year-old and a baby. Things were getting tense. Diane assertively told the lady that they needed to clear this up on their own time, as we had four little kids fighting on the floor and we needed to go.

By this time, the older children were squabbling, the baby was crabby and the 3-year-old was tired of being restrained by having his hand held. He was doing that “limp as a rag” thing, in which he imitates a boneless chicken and manages to get on the floor, while you’re still holding his hand. The stroller lady could see that we were a riot in the making and just handed over the deposit.

Comedienne Julia Sweeney tells a similar story about how people at a well-known coffee shop always lose her order. Then she has to ask for her coffee and they act as if she is lying just to scam them out of a two dollar espresso. Sweeney says the worst part is that it usually ends with the clerk sighing in a resigned tone, “Oh, just give her one.”

The accusation of lying is a serious charge. More than two-thirds of Americans strongly disapproved last September when South Carolina representative Joe Wilson shouted out, “You lie!” during President Obama’s speech on health care. The public outcry forced Wilson into making an apology to the president.

Few things are more upsetting than being thought dishonest. I still remember being falsely accused of taking a ring from a jewelry shop when I was a teenager. I felt so humiliated when I was asked to empty out my pockets. The whole thing still makes me cringe, just thinking about it. Even if you can objectively prove your innocence, you know, deep down, that the people still believe that you’re lying and there is no way to change their opinion.

Most of us think we can tell when someone is lying to us, but evidently this is a rare skill. Psychologist Paul Ekman is an authority on facial expressions, who has studied people’s ability to detect deception for decades. Over the years he has tested over 20,000 elite law enforcement and intelligence officers, psychologists, judges and lawyers. Only one out of 400 of these highly trained professionals were able to detect deception consistently. Ekman calls these people “Truth Wizards.”

Back in high school I had a friend who constantly bragged about how his old and decrepit car was so fast. I tolerated this for months until the time he told us this absurd story about taking his piece-of-junk car to the local drag strip and winning his division.

I felt obliged to challenge this obvious fabrication and did so quite vocally. He looked so hurt and I kind of felt bad about bursting his bubble. However, I felt even worse the next Monday, when he brought this enormous racing trophy to school. Obviously, I’m no truth wizard.

Although we Americans hate to be thought of as liars, we have mixed feelings about lying, itself. In an Associated Press poll, 52 percent of respondents said that lying was never justified. However, 65 percent of the same group turned around and said that it was sometimes all right to lie to avoid hurting someone’s feelings.

Over the years theologians and philosophers such as St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and Immanuel Kant roundly condemned lying, saying that there never could be any justification for it. Apparently none of them had ever been asked, “Does this pair of jeans make me look fat ?” Among the most cogent arguments against lying is that it perverts the natural communicative intent of speech and undermines the trust necessary for civil society.

According to Washington Post writer Shankar Vedantam, when all kinds of lies are considered, research shows that ordinary people tell approximately two lies every 10 minutes in normal social discourse. Of course, many of these are white lies and lies of omission, in which we fail to tell the whole truth.

Robert Feldman a social psychologist at the University of Massachusetts found that liars are generally more popular than people who never lie. According to Feldman, “It is not that lying makes you popular, but knowing when to say something and not be completely blunt, is in fact a social skill.” Lying has been said to “grease the wheels of social interaction.”

Children began to lie convincingly at about age 41⁄2 years, when they are first able to understand that other people look at things from a different perspective. They develop the cunning known as “Machiavellian intelligence” — the ability to use deceit for social gain (usually to avoid punishment or disapproval). This is a heady discovery for many children.

Even animals have been known to practice deception. For example, mother birds feign having a broken wing to distract predators from their young. Also in a creepy display of human-like behavior, Koko the famous gorilla who was taught American Sign Language, once vandalized her cage by ripping a sink from the wall. Afterwards she pointed to her pet kitten and signed to her keepers that the cat did it.

There are now plans to send Koko to live in the new Maui Ape Preserve in Hawaii. If the preserve has a stroller concession they better keep an eye on Koko, she seems just the kind of liar liable to swipe someone else’s deposit.

Terry L. Stawar, Ed.D., lives in Georgetown and is the CEO of LifeSpring, the mental health center in Jeffersonville. He can be reached at tstawar@lifespr.com. Check out his Welcome to Planet-Terry blog and podcast at http://planetterry.wordpress.com

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