Lying: Protect Yourself From Deceptive People and Politics

When you realize you’ve fallen for a lie, it’s cognitively exhausting. Second-guessing begins. Was a relationship a sham? What did you miss in that job description that seemingly fit your education before being assigned menial tasks?

What led you to believe stump speeches and rallied resentment that now you see as nonsensical, even menacing?

How Liars Reel Others In

In It’s Not You, Ramani Durvasula, Ph.D., details how people fall for attention-seeking and deceit projected onto others. Narcissism hijacks well-being with the middle spectrum having enough bad days to take a toll but enough good to keep one hooked.

Classic signs of lying: manipulation, exploitation, gaslighting, antagonism, and arrogance. Trusting people feeds these behaviors, granting narcissistic supply, Durvasula writes. “Anyone around them must bring supply or face their wrath.”

Why People Shade the Truth

Most people don’t think like a manipulator, but attempting darker thoughts may work here.

“Acting as if” is a cognitive-behavioral technique. Walking in someone’s shoes typically fosters empathy. Not that you feel for the con artist or fast-talker who sold you something or got you to cast a vote.

Imagine you want something so badly. What would you do to get it? Jot down ideas. Imagine sacrificing your values to achieve the end. In this hypothetical, be a villain to get a glimpse into how others obfuscate, muddle, bewilder, and blur lines of human decency. To cover up a lack of substance, some self-aggrandize or just make stuff up.

Addiction can fuel lying for the next fix. With romance, love bombs ingratiate. In the 2024 election, some chucked party loyalty because their values outweighed bluster and bombast. They could no longer toe the line but had to differentiate themselves.

How to Catch a Liar

Shattered Glass chronicled a brazenly confident journalist’s professional fall. In staff meetings, this young man entertained colleagues, who had his back when he was first accused of mistakes until they, too, felt exploited.

Deceptive people hide feelings and true motives. It behooves us all to learn the red flags.

Source: Geralt/Pixabay

Competitors investigated the fictional tales peddled as non-fiction as they seemed too beyond the pale. Here are signs to discover deceit:

Fragmented speech: Rambling words distract from the substance, if there is any, to keep the listener off balance.

Shifting movements: People who lie shift their torso, fidget, wring hands, touch their faces, pinch themselves, tug on their hair, sweat, or clear their throat to release tension and distract.

Mixed messages: Enter behavior you haven’t seen before, maybe the angry smile. When people genuinely convey humor, you see it in the crinkled corners of their eyes. A mere mouth smile may hide true feelings. Crossed arms and closed body posture are also red flags.

Recurring words: The story gets repeated verbatim, practiced so as not to contradict; it's oddly chronological. People who tell the truth talk in a natural free flow.

Eye revelations: Less eye contact and blinking upon uttering falsehoods, liars look back after to gauge your reaction and may now blink more.

Lofty language: Liars aim to look good with a wide vocabulary as they deceive. Their replies take longer as they pepper people with verbiage.

Question replies: If you ask something, you get a question back at you. Stay engaged, keep them talking, and ask them to tell you more. Beware they may also use evasive phrases such as “probably” or “sort of” to couch truths.

Types of Lies

“Does this dress make me look fat?” If you replied, “What do you think, dear?” that’s a question, only this evasion doesn’t have a poor motive nor overall bad outcome.

Prosocial lies are often motivated by compassion. However, if you deliberately avoided feedback someone truly needed—an important impression at stake and you sabotaged the person’s appearance by being secretly upset with them—now that is not only passive-aggressive but also classic deceit.

Deception Essential Reads

Will Telling Lies Damage Your Brain?

When It Comes to Finding a Liar, Honesty Isn't Enough

Where Lies Abound

There’s the kid who swore he ate his sandwich before his bag of chips, addicts with physical dependence, and the spouse who lied about overtime to conceal an extramarital affair. Other scenarios include:

Dating deception with overlap between dating partners. This might slip under the radar unless it’s outed by timeline and when “I was just ending that” proves too suspect. If those hurt by the shading consider it to be cheating, it likely is.

Divorce deceit, where unscrupulous lawyers advise one spouse to instigate a quarrel, cause a reaction, and now have leverage to intimidate or get someone to cave on requests. This presents a slope that slides one’s personal morality (client) and ethics (lawyer). In the throes of a zero-sum mentality, that might not seem important. However, deception slowly erodes into more of the same. And, when there’s light to be seen by friends, family, and children… it will be.

School ruses exist when students enlist others to do their work and lie on college admissions applications. People rationalize their behavior such that it’s easier to commit another lie. Headlines showed how lying ended in prison and tarnished reputations.

Workplace fabrications can mean fluffing one’s resumé or posting a job where you already know the candidate is cherry-picked to firing someone for a slight mistake because of age, gender, or another unsavory reason that is against the law.

Family lies get told to separate people, especially to vulnerable adults, when greedy relatives eye inheritances or others (caregivers, even lawyers) see money to make theirs. Sadly, tales that get told often favor the guilty over the innocent. The elderly end up swindled in loneliness when peace and companionship serve them far better.

The emotional aftermath of deception ends depending upon severity and accountability.

How one looks in an outfit vs. one’s vote for a leader in the free world. There’s a spectrum of damage and how many get ensnared. People’s emotions and lives hang in the balance.

Disillusioned from being lied to? Counseling can help you to restore trust. If you frequently twist the truth, use professional help and psychological testing to uncover the root causes. The more deep-seated a personality pattern becomes, the harder a disorder will be to correct.

Copyright © 2024 by Loriann Oberlin, MS.

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