A Lie Is a Lie Is a Lie
In the "game of lies," all forms of lie are equally harmful and detectable.
Posted November 2, 2024
Reviewed by Abigail Fagan
□ □ □
A Lie Is a Lie Is a Lie
▲参考单词↑↓翻译&考纲单词▼
In the "game of lies," all forms of lie are equally harmful and detectable.
Posted November 2, 2024 | Reviewed by Abigail Fagan
When the intent to deceive results in a false belief, one form of deception is not less harmful than others. All forms of deception are equally disbelieved by recipients. People intending to deceive are not less likely to deceive even if they have to tell outright lies.
At election time, when accusations of deception run high, “The Lying Game,” a 2021 Negev University study by Cohen and Zultan, sheds light on the ways deception shows up. The authors consider the moral implications of the three most common forms of deception. All three forms involve communicating information known to be untrue to another person with the intention that the other person believes the information to be true.
The authors offer the following definitions of these three kinds of deception:
Lying: asserting falsehoods or simply communicating something known to be untrue.
Falsely Implicating: communicating truths that in a given context will predictably cause false beliefs such as stating income without revealing expenses that reduce that income.
Nonverbal Deception: nonverbal action in which the predicted interpretation is intended to create false beliefs, such as placing campaign signs next to those of other candidates to imply support of one for the other.
The experiment covers financial conflicts of interest, misrepresenting unfavorable information by withholding information about potential losses, presenting partial information rather than all facts, and gaslighting by convincing recipients of communication that what they see is other than what they see. These are economic circumstances often encountered by government officials and their constituents.
··◇·· 您已读到文章中部，稍憩继续！··◇··
The researchers consider whether one form of lying is more harmful than others or more likely to be believed and discuss previous research. They assert that the bedrock of human communication involves relying on others to be truthful and that deceiving, by any means is a betrayal of trust based on the moral principle that others have a right to the truth.
The authors explain that normal upbringing includes a long process of conditioning not to say what is false; this results in greater psychological difficulty in uttering falsehoods compared with uttering truths, even when those truths are in the service of deception. It is widely accepted that trust is placed with respect to some particular kind of performance. Russell Hardin describes trust as ‘a three-part relation: A trusts B to do X.’
Lying
Lying demands less preparation, effort, and imaginativeness than other, craftier deceptions. Lying to a person’s face is considered more disrespectful than less direct lies, entailing a greater loss of credibility as a communicator. For some, it is psychologically more difficult to lie to someone’s face than to deceive in other ways. Lies inspire a special ‘sense of violation or outrage,’ thus liars encounter deeper inhibitions to lie.
The authors suggest that other things being equal, for a person to overcome greater inhibitions to commit a wrong exacts a greater psychological cost than non-lying deception and could be considered more malicious.
Falsely Implicating and Non-verbal Deception
Non-lying deceptions are ways of misleading others, which otherwise decent people may adopt in delicate social predicaments or under duress. Many who find themselves unable to utter face-to-face falsehoods resort to using misleading truths or performing nonlinguistic actions intended to mislead. The success of these forms of deception depends on the inferences others make, which shifts part of the responsibility away from the non-lying deceiver. These two forms of deception are more treacherous because they involve evasive maneuvers aimed at not lying and thus implicating others in their own deception.
One Size Fits All
Based on the above premises, the researchers find in their study of 436 economics students that while the distance between truth and lie is lesser in false implication or even more vague nonverbal deception, the level of deception is not measurably different. It makes no difference what method is used to deceive: when the intent to deceive results in a false belief, all forms of deception equally wrong recipients. Not only do all three forms of deception have similar negative effects, but they also have similar believability by recipients.
Further, the tests show that people intending to deceive are not less likely to deceive even if they have to tell outright lies. In other words, if someone will deceive you one way, they are equally as likely to deceive you the other ways if necessary to complete the deceit. To the benefit of recipients of lies, the experiment shows that they are no more likely to trust one form of lying over another.
The study provides something to ponder for the voter receiving, and the candidate delivering a message. Whether more or less socially acceptable, all forms of deception are equally harmful and equally detectable to those receiving them. When the public trusts elected representatives to honor its basic right to the truth, regardless of how it is couched or occurs, deception violates that trust.
/////////
