A Typical Feature Of Our Everyday Experience

I believed, with the great conviction and zeal of a young assistant professor determined to understand the nature of lying, that I might be able to learn more about deceit by listening to the words of one of its most infamous practitioners. However, when I listened to the Nixon tapes, I was frustrated that I could not determine from tone or intonation the moments when Nixon or his cronies were lying. Instead, to my ears, Nixon’s conversations and soliloquies were remarkable most of all for how unremarkable they were. Overall, though, from what I could tell, the conversation was not much different from what I might have heard from recordings of any office, oval or not. After subsequent decades of research and dozens of studies into the topic of deception, I now see that my frustration was misplaced. My failure to distinguish a Nixonian office from any other had less to do with my own inability to recognize lies and more with the fact that there is simply not much distinction to notice. The scale and impact of Nixon’s lies set him apart from probably every other president and surely most people generally. But what my research and the research of many others has shown is that lies occur regularly in every office. In a sense, the very fact that the National Archives houses both the Nixon tapes and our most esteemed texts is paradigmatic. While we talk a great deal about respecting the truth, while most of us regard the truth with genuine respect, the fact is that lies are common in American life, and in Western society in general. I went to the National Archives because I thought lies were hard to find. In fact, lying was then and is now nearly ubiquitous.

Up In Flames

If I wanted to listen to people lying, I could have listened in on practically any conversation between any two people. There is a liar in your life. In fact, there are a lot of them. Dishonesty is deeply ingrained in our everyday interactions and in our broader culture. As we will see, it colors our perceptions of who other people are and our perceptions of their behavior. It even affects how we perceive our own behavior. Just as importantly, we need to consider why we’re so prone to believing and even embracing the deception we hear from others, as well as the lies we tell ourselves. We need to explore why we view certain lies as harmless, while rejecting others as manipulative and shameful. And we need to consider how lies play out in broader societal contexts such as the business world, the media, and the new realm of digital communication. The primary purpose of The Liar in Your Life is to describe and explain the prevalence and consequences of lying in contemporary life, as well as to discuss the ways in which these lies affect us. Understanding lying is more a matter of discussing how it occurs, not whether it ought to occur. Hence, the emphasis is on clear explanation as opposed to principled judgment.

One Day Like This

Further, from whatever perspective one approaches deception, it is hard not to feel surprised, or even alarmed, at the discovery of just how much lying goes on in our lives. I think it’s safe to say that we all share the goal of building a more honest society. It may take you a minute. Most of the time when I ask people about when they were last deceived, they need a few moments before coming up with something. Eventually, they will recollect the story of the mechanic who overcharged for an unnecessary repair, or the date who promised to call the next day and was never heard from again. Lies that took some kind of emotional or financial toll are the ones that generally spring to mind when we think about the deception we encounter. My guess is that the lie you came up with as the one you most recently encountered involved a blow to either your heart or your wallet. The reality of deception, though, is very different from what such painful memories lead us to believe. Our relationship to lying is far more intimate than the occasional encounter with a duplicitous mechanic or dishonest lover. Or maybe you were in line at the grocery store and you struck up a conversation with the woman in line ahead of you. Maybe she told you she’d never had to wait in line so long before. Maybe an infomercial promised you savings, but only provided you act now.

It's Not The Way

The truth is, we are lied to frequently, even in the course of a single day. Most of the lies we don’t notice, or don’t even consider to be deception. Regardless of what we choose to accommodate or ignore, though, the fact remains that lies are a typical feature of our everyday experience. That we do disregard so much deception only underlines how common it really is. Lying is not limited to one aspect of our society, one type of person, or one kind of institution. As we’ll see, lying permeates the way we get to know one another and the way we form relationships. It is a part of how we educate our children and how we elect our leaders. It is essential to our economy, and it is essential to the social media today. More strikingly, while lying sometimes occurs as an aberration in these and other arenas, often its manifestations are the rule. We tend to think of lying as something we censure. But just as we smile when the man handing us our dry cleaning lies about the pleasure he took in laundering our clothes, there are lies society accepts, and even encourages. Indeed, deception is so deeply ingrained in the functioning of our society that if we removed it, we might not recognize the society that resulted. The fact is that much of what we think we know about deception is, simply put, not true.