The Comfort And Honesty Of Society As A Whole

It’s important to keep in mind that while lies with intent have serious, and very worrying, consequences, they are relatively rare. Rather, they are most relevant to the person who might be fooled by the lies. In short, lies with intent have the intent to harm. Yet despite their rarity, lies with intent largely define how we think about lying. We assume that people who lie to us want to gain something tangible through their deception. It’s hard to accept the notion that the most common lies we hear yield only psychological benefit, or that this benefit might even be mutual, shared by us and the liar. Yet the fact is that the kind of lie we’re most likely to hear is one our spouse tells about the results of our latest home improvement project. We don’t want to know that the paint job on the deck looks terrible, and our spouse doesn’t want to break it to us, either. Part of the reason lies with intent dominate our attitudes toward deception generally is that they are so different from such mundane acts of deceit. When we discuss and contemplate lying, we focus on the lies we hear about on television or in the newspaper, or those that are worth a recounting from friends. These tend to be lies with intent. More frequent lies just aren’t very interesting to those not directly affected.

A Haunted Heart

We need to keep lies with intent in perspective, then. Statistically, few of us will ever be caught up in an elaborate investment scheme or come to realize that our lawyer friend is in fact an impostor. The liars in our life are the ordinary people we interact with day in and day out, people who have no malicious plan to steal from us. On the other hand, lies with intent are, almost by definition, a very harmful form of deceit. While more frequent, more mundane lies may have an overall corrosive effect on the comfort and honesty of society as a whole, the effects of lies with intent are generally both painfully unambiguous and all too calculable. Further, the concrete goals of lies with intent can obscure a deeper complexity. Although greed may be the primary motive behind lies with intent, it is not necessarily the only motive. The fund attracted millions in investment and, on paper at least, seemed to be booming. The checks, it turned out, were fakes. The whole operation was a scam, a net of phony numbers and false associations meant to entrap investment capital. In a sense, it’s the logical next step from the storied con of selling a yokel the Brooklyn Bridge. Instead of selling a bridge that wasn’t for sale, Yalincak sold a hedge fund that wasn’t investing.

Contrasting Views

From a psychological standpoint, too, Yalincak does not necessarily seem extraordinary. Every day, people break into homes, steal cars, rob at gunpoint. Elaborate fraud does not have to be more psychologically nuanced than petty theft. One could even argue that it is simply a difference of the tools of the crime. If we don’t wonder much about what’s going on in the head of a mugger, is there reason to wonder about his mental state? We don’t need to aggrandize his level of an evil genius to remark that even most paper frauds don’t rise to the level of attempting to deposit fake checks for 25 million at a go. At some point, wouldn’t it have been simpler just to mug someone? The apparent contradictions in his behavior help underscore the fact that lies with intent are not as simple as they may first appear. All of us, to some degree at least, want to make money. Beyond the ethical objections, there are practical considerations. What is it that pushes con artists and frauds to disregard these considerations in their pursuit of profit? She was arrested soon after her son, in connection with his hedge fund scheme, and was eventually sentenced to another two years in prison. Looking beyond one individual’s, or one family’s, lies with intent, though, we can identify certain factors that generally drive this form of deceit, despite its inherent risks. To understand more fully why a person might tell a lie with intent, we have to reexamine another one of our preconceived notions about lying. Go back for moment to our discussion of lie detection.

See Yourself

The thinking behind most methods of lie detection, and behind polygraph machines specifically, holds that liars experience anxiety when they lie. That is why you might suspect that someone is lying if they avert their gaze and why, in theory, a polygraph machine reveals a lie when it records an elevated heartbeat. The problem is that this is only theory. The fact is that some people don’t get anxious when they lie. Good liars remain remarkably calm, and can exhibit virtually no physiological response that might betray their deceit. This is chiefly why polygraph machines have such a high failure rate, and also why you can’t assume someone is telling the truth just because he looks you in the eye. He has identified a feeling among liars he calls duping delight. This refers to the positive emotional response lying can elicit in certain individuals. The lie may be viewed as an accomplishment, which feels good. For most of us, it usually is. But just as people will jump out of airplanes and climb mountains precisely because of the physical and mental challenges, so too do people find an almost recreational thrill, as Ekman describes, in deception. Think of the concept of bluffing. We’ve probably all had occasion to bluff, perhaps literally, during a card game or, more figuratively, during a negotiation in our business or private life. Whatever the stakes, such deceptive power plays are exciting to make, and exciting to pull off. And a successful bluff is really only a step away from a lie with intent. It could be argued that the former is just a milder form of the latter.