Liars; Yes You!

I find lying an extremely interesting area of human behaviour; we all do it at some point or another, although some significantly more than others. As children we test the water for what lies we can get away with without significant punishment. So where do we learn this dishonesty? Is it innate or learnt from those around us? If it was the latter it would make sense as to why those with impaired social skills are bad liars; they can't pick up the skills from their parents / family / friends as easily and so they get caught almost every time they tell a lie. However, I am more inclined to believe it is mixtures of both as many cases go beyond the realms of imitation.

Studies have indicated that socialisation does play an important role in whether we grow up to become liars. They conclude that those with a bad upbringing lie much more than those that had a happy childhood, but I'd take it a step further. Those with a bad upbringing are more likely to be caught out lying, as they've learnt from bad liars; we all lie. You don't? Thanks for proving my point! Those who are socialised better are more likely to examine the risks behind the lies i.e. they are more cowardly in their lies. If the chances are that the risk of being found out and the punishment is worse than telling the truth then they will do the latter. To me, there is a huge parallel between criminal behaviour and lying. The clever will use it to their advantage whereas those that aren't so smart with suffer the consequences of their behaviour.

The expansion of communication technology apparently makes it very easy to lie, because along with learning how to lie successfully we learn how to detect lies. This link describes some key ways of spotting dishonesty. In the introduction it highlights the weakness:

The following techniques to telling if someone is lying are often used by police, and security experts. This knowledge is also useful for managers, employers, and for anyone to use in everyday situations where telling the truth from a lie can help prevent you from being a victim of fraud/scams and other deceptions.

This is brilliant if you can see the person with your very own eyes, but behind a letter, e-mail or website you'll be pretty hard pushed to spot an honest comment from a lie. Here it is obvious that ways of deciding whether someone is lying are very limited, because nerves can always be confused.

As this is a blog entry, I think one of the most important elements of this behaviour is that which is found on the internet. Lying on a website, forum or msn should be much easier as stated above, because you take away any leakage from non verbal communication, but it adds one huge hurdle. When telling a series of lies it is much harder to recall everything that you have typed compared to speaking. For compulsive liars, I'm sure it would be commonplace to tell different people a different set of lies, as they lie not to get themselves out of trouble, but for the addiction to the adrenaline rush it gives them. What happens when those people collide though? If you go to a few forums with a common theme then before long you normally hear of 'old' stories of people who have been banned which normally are routed in a web of lies. They're also the people that are normally still there under a different name and a different set of lies, but their lies do no harm apart from humiliating the people who fell for them in the first place. Sometimes I have to laugh at how naïve people really are, myself included. On the internet, we can target a specific group of people by joining a forum on a subject area we are interested in, we believe we are surrounded by people who are alike to us and drop our guards and wonder why we fall for such lies. You've got to laugh at yourself sometimes.

However, the Internet is also a wonderful playground for the human imagination. People who had stopped role-playing and making fairy tales in their childhood suddenly find the avenue to do so again on the Internet. You could be anybody at all, anybody you ever wanted to be - and better still, there is no one to question you about what you are doing. There is a certain sense of freedom in living your dreams where there is nobody to be critical about them.

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More sugar coated bulls##t please.