Everyone’s lying. People lie and deceive each other sometimes for profit, other times to get away with whatever they’ve done, and sometimes – just for the sake of sounding nice. Anyway, humanity is mired in lies, and it doesn’t seem like it is planning to get out of it. Here are 10 surprising facts about lying that you probably didn’t know.
10 – Are the eyes the mirror of the soul?
All over the world, there is a widespread misconception that when a person tells a lie or hides something, they don’t look directly into the face, and their eyes continuously “run around”.
As psychologists say, this is a myth. Experts studied video recordings of one experiment, during which some participants told the truth, and others lied. Both groups sometimes quickly looked from left to right and back, which created the effect of those “running eyes”. Liars did this no more often than” truthtelling” volunteers so that it is impossible to tell by the eyes whether a person is lying or not.
9 – The lie detector is lying
In some courts, the testimony of lie detectors is accepted as evidence, but it is impossible to rely entirely on the reliability of such information. In fact, all lie detectors are based on detecting signs of anxiety and stress in a person, but many liars may not have them — this already suggests that such data can not be considered objective.
Some researchers are trying to create a device that recognizes lies based on the testimony of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the brain, but there is no evidence of the effectiveness of this method yet. Nowadays, experiments to create lie detectors working on other principles are continuing to be conducted.
In the course of some experiments, an interesting data was obtained: it turns out, with the help of transcranial magnetic stimulation (impact on cortex brain with short magnetic impulses), a human can be forced to lie more often than usual.
8 – People often lie to themselves
Although fraudsters and liars almost always hurt others, such people likely deceive themselves too.
For example, studies conducted in 2011 show that if people are tricked into answering test questions and thus artificially inflate the results, they tend to overestimate their abilities, even if they remember that they got the answers in a dishonest way. In other words, a person is as easy to deceive himself/herself as he/she is to deceive others.
7 – Lack of time provokes lies
According to research conducted by psychologists, most often lies are not planned in advance: people mainly lie when they need to make a quick decision, and there is no time to think about the possible consequences of deception.
Employee-psychologist of the University of Amsterdam, Shaul Shalvi, explains: “When people are forced to act quickly, they tend to get the most out of the situation, without taking into account ethical and moral considerations. When a person can think carefully about his next actions and words, he is usually not inclined to lie.”
6 – Almost every person lies at least once a day
American scientists conducted studies in which people were asked to assess how often they lie, and the vast majority of participants admitted that they tell lies once or twice a day.
By the way, another experiment of researchers shows that on average 56% of Americans believe that they will get away with a lie, among Protestants 55% were sure of this, and Muslims have this figure slightly lower – only 47% of them believe that a lie will not have any unpleasant consequences.
5 – “You have the goods, we have…?”
At the dawn of its existence, humanity had a hard time, and to survive, people were forced to invent various ways to unite and establish contacts with fellow tribesmen.
According to the authors of the study, the results of which are published by the Royal Society of London, one of the tools of this kind could well be a lie: “Tactical or deliberate deception allows the deceiver to establish cooperation, creating a distorted idea of the actions of the fraudster and his intentions.” So maybe if people didn’t lie to each other, they would never be able to agree with each other.
4 – Two-year-olds can deliberately lie
If you think that children are always crystal clear in their intentions and even deceive only because they are not aware of their lies, we have to disappoint you. Studying child psychology, scientists have found that a child learns to lie consciously soon after he stops crawling. Even two-year-olds can intentionally lie to their parents (and not only).
3 – Conscious deception makes a person smarter
In 2005, a psychological study found that constantly lying people work better with their heads. Compulsive (those who are aware of their lies) liar’s brain contains an average of 22-26% more white matter and a more developed prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain responsible for cognition and intelligence.
The explanation of this fact is presented in an interview with “NPR” by one of the leaders of the study, Yaling young: “The brain of the people who often and consciously lie, better connects different concepts and images that in reality may have nothing in common — and, white matter is responsible for such connections in the human brain.”
Some, for example, find it challenging to come up with “reasons” for their lateness to work, and hardened liars quickly make up stories one more plausible than the other.
“The development of neural connections allows a person to quickly move from one story to another and generate many ideas, combining seemingly completely different things,” explains Young.
2 – Serum of truth “does not prevent a person from lying”
Pentathol sodium, a substance that usually appears under the name “truth serum” in numerous books and films, cannot really make people “open their souls”. This drug only removes mental filters for a while, as a result of which a continuous stream of information flows from the lips of a person, some of which may turn out to be true, but you still should not believe the rest.
1 – Politicians started lying a long time ago
Politics was and still is a dirty business, in which it is impossible to stay afloat, not having mastered the art of saying anything with an honest expression, and this feature was manifested in the powers starting from the ancient times.
One of the brightest figures of this kind was the ancient Greek orator and General Alcibiades, who is known for having twice crossed the front line during the Peloponnesian war.
At first, he was on the side of Athens, in every way inciting and provoking the resumption of hostilities against Sparta, then, fearing an investigation of some of his actions, he fled to the Spartans, whom he had only recently called enemies. He gave the Spartan commander some valuable information that almost led to the defeat of Athens, but when the envious Spartans almost killed him, Alcibiades again became a loyal Athenian.
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