Why So Many People Get Away with Lying

Telling lies, we’ve been taught, is a bad thing. When we lie—and are caught doing so—people see us in a new light. They realize they can’t trust us to be the person we say we are. They wonder what we are hiding and what other lies we’ve told. All at once, a shared friendship, marriage, or business relationship becomes clouded. Must someone now guard themselves against their former confidant?

Because lying is despised behavior, one would expect it to be rarely practiced. Certainly, we shouldn’t find it exhibited openly in public life, where statements can be fact-checked quickly and otherwise called into question. After all, what reasonable person would negotiate with a corrupt businessman or a government leader who will say anything to advance their own interest?

It’s convenient to say that chronic liars are simply crooks or have pathologies they can’t control. Sometimes, psychologists attribute the prevaricator’s misdoings to Machiavellianism, one of the traits of the “dark triad” (with narcissism and psychopathy) that a few individuals display. Imagining themselves smarter than other people, Machiavellians engage continually in manipulation and deceit. Their own self-interest is paramount. Other people, and relationships with them, are just stepping-stones to that end.

I don’t dispute that chronic lying is a pattern for psychological analysis. Clearly, some of us lie a lot and should confront that fact. However, I want to discuss here the social and cultural conditions that make lying—whether in broad public forums or intimate settings—possible. In essence, what is the social context that lets the liar get away with it?

Lying: It’s a Social Thing

Although there are times when people lie to themselves (typically, these are delusions more than lies), for the most part lying is a problem of interpersonal communication. When we lie, we tell others something we know to be an inaccurate or false description of a situation. Our intention is to make them believe that false account.

Frequently, our inaccuracies center on circumstances the listener would have difficulty investigating and, thus, verifying. Usually, they are attempts to enhance our own standing before that listener. So motivated, we inflate some of our educational and business accomplishments; we downplay—or omit entirely—past romantic relationships. Like public relations experts, we see this spin as necessary for keeping our personal “brand” well-positioned in the marketplace of human affairs.

However, we also circulate misinformation about other people and public events. Commonly—and who can be proud of this?—that information represents an effort to make those other people look bad or to cast situations as more confused and dangerous than they are. We’ve “heard” (and are just passing along) that an ethnic community in city X is behaving in an entirely un-American way. Government officials are bungling (and indeed, making worse) a current environmental or political catastrophe. When we know these rumors and insinuations to be false and distribute them anyway, we are lying.

Again, lying—especially when identified as such—may lead to the destruction of relationships. But it should also be analyzed as an attempt to build relationships. Pointedly, self-promotion means courting the good opinion of other people. For the prevaricator then, “getting in” with those groups involves demeaning others who stand in their way.

Rationalizing Our Falsehoods

Is there anyone who wants their misstatements to be termed “lies”? Most of us avoid this designation by using publicly accepted rationales, that is, excuses that others readily accept. Let’s look at some of these.

• I believe what I said. We’re not lying if we believe what we’re saying, and it’s almost impossible to prove what our real thoughts are. So, many times we can justify what we say by claiming it is something we’ve heard from others or learned in the past (“the way I was taught”). Repeating that information, as we see it, isn’t wrong.
• I’d forgotten that. Who wouldn’t like to forget certain painful or contradictory moments of their lives? Whether we do or not, we can claim to have forgotten them. This strategy particularly applies to problematic conversations we’ve had or commitments we’ve made. Unless the event is recorded in writing or on tape, we can insist it didn’t happen.
• I misspoke. It is easy to claim that we got “carried away” with our own storytelling. Recounting our military experiences, we place ourselves closer to the fighting than was the case. Our second place at the fair turns into a blue ribbon. Unless we’re caught directly in the mistruth, we may insist we’ve been misquoted or that past listeners misinterpreted what they heard. Maybe the remark was “taken out of context.” Still trapped, we argue we’ve “moved on” or “grown up” since those statements were made.
• I’ll acknowledge some of that. Psycholinguists use the term “scalar implicature.” For the current discussion, that means admitting to a small infraction rather than a large, more serious one. Caught in a lie about an adulterous relationship, we admit to one or two incidents. What we do not acknowledge is the much wider picture of the affair. Our hope is that the listener will give us points for our honesty about the issue at hand—and not inquire further. In a similar fashion, we may admit to a general problem (“mistakes were made”) and refrain from discussing specific events and our role in them.
• Everybody does it. In a competitive society like ours—think of business, politics, and the law—most people jockey for position. Like advertisers, they make their case, even “sell themselves” to others. Exaggerations and sometimes outright lies are parts of the process. In that context, it’s easy to argue that other people—and especially our direct rivals—are much worse than we are. We may finagle; they cheat. We may exaggerate or massage the truth; they lie. Give us credit, or so we tell our listeners, for being as honest as we are.

Deception Essential Reads

Will Telling Lies Damage Your Brain?

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

Lying in a Partisan Society

Pointedly, some people—including some prominent political leaders—are unable, or unwilling, to acknowledge their falsehoods. They ignore challenges to their veracity; they continue to repeat their lies. How is this “doubling down” possible?

In the Western tradition, philosophers commonly distinguish between pre-Socratic and post-Socratic views of truth and morality. Before Athens’s Golden Age (about the fifth century BCE), Greeks were reconciled to a world of warring city-states. Prior to the more settled time, states pushed hard to expand their territories. Might was associated with right, and loyalty to originating groups was crucial. Conquest was everything.

In such circumstances, philosophic discourse was mostly a matter of mischief and bombast, trying to bamboozle or overpower an opponent. A little lying was no cause for concern.

A different view, championed by Socrates and his great student Plato, emerged. Surely, those thinkers argued, there are universal truths about the human condition and public standards for thinking about them. The ideal society is one where people fit into some essentially peaceful, logically coherent whole. Laws—eventually written and collectively confirmed—are the guarantors of that order.

Now, 2,500 years later, some argue that this modernist vision of a “civilized” world is unworkable. Contemporary people cannot be held to one overarching standard; fragmentation—and group rivalry—are inevitable. Much like the pre-Socratics then, competing groups—and their champions—prosecute their cases. Their ways are the right ways. Those professing different views and lifestyles must be controlled. There is no general standard for truth, only arguments that fit the group’s preconceived notion of the good. Truth is not something that conforms to facts but instead to values.

This worldview is effectively a “permission system” for those who peddle misinformation and refuse to back down. Our democracy—and collective psyche—depends on confronting this challenge directly.

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