Why Lying Persists Despite the Consequences

Source: Image by Matthew Sharps

Lying and falsehoods create a tremendous problem for the criminal justice system, resulting in large numbers of wrongful convictions (National Registry of Exonerations, 2025), despite the extreme legal consequences of perjury. The problem of dissimulation is significant in other areas, as well; the majority of people polled by the Pew Research Center believe that government communications and business advertising are filled with deliberately misleading or false information (Pew Research Center, 2025).

The Ubiquity of Falsehood Is Strange

Granted, the liar may gain a short-term advantage in any given case, but once you’re exposed as a liar, future victims would have to be awfully dissociated, psychologically, to believe you any further. Lies are frequently detected, presumably to the disadvantage of the liars. Why are humans so ready to dissimulate?

Falsehoods or the equivalent are ubiquitous in the natural world. For creatures that live moment to moment, falsehoods may prove entirely advantageous; dissimulation may have no long-term consequences, especially if those creatures and their conspecifics possess shorter or less sophisticated memories than their human counterparts. For example, some female fireflies give off mating signals to lure the males, after which they eat the males without a shred of the promised romance. Certain cuttlefish change their color and configuration to mimic females, preventing the need to fight or compete with larger males. These female impersonators swim right past their larger competitors to mate with available females while literally wearing false colors. A bird called the fork-tailed drongo, whose predator warning calls are heeded by other species of birds and mammals, which then fly or scurry away to escape, sometimes gives those calls when the other creatures are eating, causing them to flee their own meals. At that point, the “lying” drongos swoop in and scarf down the unearned meals (for example, Trecek-King, 2026). Dissimulation in the natural world depends, of course, on the physical and intellectual characteristics of the species in question, but it is found everywhere, in species as diverse as viruses and infrahuman primates (Trecek-King, 2026).

How a given creature lies depends on its physical nature and its normative ecology. If you're a cuttlefish, your chromatophores allow you to change color. If you're a drongo, you give alarm calls when there’s danger, but you can also squawk falsely but alarmingly whenever you want to scare hell out of the local meerkats and fly down to enjoy a meal of purloined bugs or maggots, once the original meerkat owners have fled in terror. And if you’re a human, you can lie via the gifts of language and dissociation.

Human beings can use language to express truth, of course, but we can also dissociate our minds from physical reality to create false mental impressions, which we can then express linguistically. Even if we might get caught, we can lie, and we do.

Dissociation is a two-edged sword. In its most egregious forms, it can contribute to dissociative identity disorder; it can also convince us of “realities” that have no existence outside our own minds (Sharps and Price-Sharps, 2026). The positive side of dissociation, however, lies in our ability to imagine possibilities that don't yet exist, and then bring them into reality through our creative and inventive powers.

Unfortunately, a side effect of all the dissociative creativity means that we are also capable of lying like hell (Sharps, 2024; Sharps and Price-Sharps, 2026).

All of this might seem to provide some comforting justification for human falsehood. After all, lying in various forms is part of nature, so it must be okay; natural things are good, right?

Dissociation Again

As conventional religion has declined in many societies, beliefs in a benevolent nature may have become more prevalent and more influential (Sharps and Price-Sharps, 2026). Such beliefs originate more in the dissociative powers and properties of our minds than they do in the physical properties of nature itself, however. Nature does contain a great deal of that which the human species finds beautiful, true; but it also contains helpless maggots by the thousands who are horribly devoured by dissimulating drongos, or by cute little meerkats, who in turn die in screaming meerkat agony in the slavering jaws of hyenas, or poisoned painfully by puff adders, or crushed in the claws of screaming eagles. Granted, eagles are beautiful and majestic, at least when they’re not pecking bits of rotting meerkat out of their feathers, but the human constructions we place upon the natural world are the product of our minds, not of the entirely dispassionate reality of nature itself.

Dissociation, in more subtle and far less spectacular forms than we see in dissociative identity disorder, is essential to create the false pictures of reality with which we lie; but it is also essential to create the interpretations of the natural world which would enable us to justify our lies in some kind of weird kinship with the fork-tailed drongo (Sharps and Price-Sharps, 2026). Nature doesn’t justify anything. It just is.

But because nature is, with a physical existence on which we depend for our survival, we can pay attention to it with as little dissociation involved as possible. One of the inescapable facts of nature today is the existence of over eight billion people on this single planet, all having to eat, survive, and cohabit while hopefully minimizing the carnage involved. Since lying and falsehood cause a lot of human conflict, it would therefore, with our current unprecedented world crowding, be a good idea to find psychological and cultural methods of reducing human dissimulation, across cultures, as much as possible. Unlike the drongos, we humans can explain lying in psychological terms; we might therefore be able to reduce it.

Deception Essential Reads

Why We Defend the People Who Con Us

What I Learned From Being Catfished

This is, of course, a naive, perhaps even a dissociated, proposition. However, unlike the drongos and the cuttlefish, humans can imagine possibilities that are not inherently immediate in our natures.

Let's hope we imagine, and perhaps even implement, the right ones.