“Do you promise to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?”
This familiar courtroom oath unpacks some of the subtleties of truth-telling. Making true statements is not all there is to it. What one says may be true, but what is omitted in the telling may present a false picture. And one may tell the truth, but that testimony may be distorted by the commingling of some untruths.
True statements come embedded in a matrix of linked propositions whose truth value we often cannot personally vouch for: Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, Oswald killed Kennedy, and quarks come in six flavors are good examples of such claims. Many true beliefs are built upon claims we must take for granted as foundational, typically based on authority or on what those around us believe to be the case. A false statement, told willingly and with foreknowledge of its falsehood, is how we define lying. But we can be misled by a simple and straightforward claim – especially if we are motivated to believe it – when some of its many underlying claims are distorted or manipulated for the purpose of dissembling.
When it comes to liars, the subtleties deepen. It is often said that “pathological liars” believe the lies they make up, and this is what contributes to their lying and their effectiveness as liars. We hear people ask: “Did Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos know she was lying or were her claims merely wishful thinking?” Of the many notions, large or small, expressed by liars, how many are directly contradictory to their firsthand awareness of the facts on the ground and how many based on flimsy premises only dimly considered or validated? How many of these premises are highlighted out of proportion to other known facts or elided entirely just to make their case?
There are numerous psychological and neuropsychiatric studies of liars, confabulators, and sociopaths. Tales of fabulists – Baron Münchausen perhaps the most well-known – make for popular reading just because each liar is unique, and the vicissitudes of their wishes and dreams present a thrill-ride of impending disclosure. The variety of “tangled webs” give some indication of what makes these tales so fascinating. Our panel today will be analyzing these many facets to what liars do when they are lying.
All Helix Center events are free and open to the public, including this one!
Roundtables are streamed live our website and the recording remains available after the event events.
This is a past event that happened on Saturday, September 21, 2019 at 2:30pm.
Participants
Anna Balas
Associate Professor, Clinical Psychiatry, Weill Cornell Medical College
Dr. Anna Balas is Associate Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College and a Training & Supervising Analyst at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. She has had a private adult and child psychiatry practice in Manhattan for over 35 years. Dr. Balas is a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association as of... read more! »
Neil Garrett
Henry Wellcome Research Fellow in Cognitive Neuroscience, Oxford University
Neil Garrett is a Henry Wellcome Research Fellow in Cognitive Neuroscience at Oxford University. His research centres around aversive behaviour and learning. As part of this, he has led a new line of enquiry examining the role of emotional adaptation in decision making. This revealed that the neural process of adaptation – a reduction in... read more! »
Emma Levine
Assistant Professor of Behavioral Science, University of Chicago Booth School of Business
Emma Edelman Levine is an assistant professor of Behavioral Science and the Charles Merrill Faculty Scholar at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. She was recently recognized as a Rising Star of the Association of Psychological Science (2019). Emma studies the psychology of altruism, trust, and ethical dilemmas. Her research seeks to understand... read more! »
Francis X. Shen
Executive Director, Harvard MGH Center for Law, Brain, and Behavior
Dr. Francis X. Shen, JD, PhD is the Executive Director of the Harvard MGH Center for Law, Brain, and Behavior; an Instructor in Psychology at Harvard Medical School; Senior Fellow in Law and Applied Neuroscience at the Harvard Law School Petrie-Flom Center; and an Associate Professor of Law, McKnight Presidential Fellow, and faculty member in... read more! »
Jonathan Stray
Research Scholar, Columbia University
Computational Journalist
Jonathan Stray is a computational journalist at Columbia University, where he teaches the dual masters degree in computer science and journalism and leads the development of Workbench, an integrated tool for data journalism. He’s contributed to The New York Times, The Atlantic, Wired, Foreign Policy and ProPublica. He was formerly the Interactive Technology Editor at... read more! »
I will definitely be there as wetware or virtually via podcast. When my now ex and I were separated and living on two separate apts in same building, kids in both, a young man rang my bell by accident in 2009 and I told him which was my husband’s bell.
My ex was afraid I would find out that he had picked up the young man at the a gay club and , as he said in a 10 day trial, “sometimes have sex with men but I’m not gay” – so he asked the police for a restraining order. A prosecutor, with the prospect of convicting the the son of someone very wealthy, pressed for reasons. My ex started giving her reasons – $60 robbery… $500 from one ATM, robbing at knifepoint… rape… kidnapping…. beating… torture with the handle of a shoehorn… and when a detective found videos from two different bank ATMs an hour and a half apart, two rapes, and being forced twice to the banks for two armed robberies. The police test of the shoehorn showed no human material, just one fingerprint of the young man.
After the defendant had been in Rikers for a year waiting trial while the prosecutor pressed for a plea deal, a defense lawyer called me, told me the charges and, before I fainted, asked if I would look at the evidence (ATM videos) – “You know your husband. We don’t see a knife and we think our client is innocent, but if you see guilt, a jury will and we will recommend accepting a plea deal; if you do not see guilt, we will risk a trial and the possibility of 20 years per felony as opposed to 10 years if he pleads guilty.”
I saw no guilt. No knife. The young man walks in ahead 6 feet never looking back to see if his victim is following. At the end, they chat outside the second bank, give each other a quick hug goodbye and walk off casually in opposite directions. I was subpoenaed to say the man was not threatening when he rang my bell.
My ex still, 9 years later, insists his charges were true. When hewanted to meet together for a family event, I said yes if he would write the young man through the defense lawyers to apologize and ask how he could make at least partial amends for 14 months in Rikers prison, fear, ruining his family relationships, horrible press, etc. The reply I got: “of course I apologized through his lawyers” (he didn’t) and two paragraphs further, “How dare you side with the man who terrorized me?!” Shifting from one lie to an opposite within 2 minutes…
Before this, I knew my husband lied about money. I thought he was embarrassed for not providing his share of parenting. I didn’t know he was so cruel that he would lie to save his façade, knowing he could basically end a young man’s life in a US maximum security prison.
After the trial, I needed good therapy, a divorce and eviction of my ex. The defendant, acquitted 100%, spent years of traumatic pain and suicide attempts. He did not sue for defamation because he was so grateful that I testified on his behalf – he had been trying to kill himself in Rikers, sure a jury would believe an established businessman. He didn’t want my children to see their father where he had been, in jail. Also, I and a friend of his helped him by phone through his suicidal times and he has written me saying “I’ve learned that what matters in life are friends and family – with you I can’t tell the difference”
I have no idea if my ex is totally delusional or viciously self-protected. He works, functions in society, his friends don’t have a clue about this event.
Hi conference presenters for the Lying session at Helix: I am a qualitative researcher trained in market research, with much experience in interviewing for corporate research projects, as well as trained in cultural anthropology and getting my PhD in Jungian depth psychology, in the dissertation completion stage. On my return from fieldwork over the past five months, there are many variations on lying, truth, and relative truth. What I find is that there are intentional and unintentional lies and truths on topics that are sensitive; I have been interviewing self-initiatied expatriates (SIEs) and immigrants from Northern industrialized countries to Southern countries in South America, emphasizing Ecuador, with a mixed methods interpretative phenomenological analytical methodology in which there is a repetition of interviews with the same participant, multiple times, with a long moratorium in between and a chance to review the transcripts of the previous interview. So much happens that differs between the words and narratives between interview 1 and interview 2. Trust between us is intensified, gained, over time. We like one another and have a coffee together. As I move into the second long depth interview — Participants can forget their words in the first interview as they answer questions in the second; my annotations on transcripts can be discussed for things that don’t make sense or that I need a simple clarification on that presents a new narrative. I notice my own reactions as the participants speak, such as my throat tightening, tears forming, slight anxiety for no apparent reason, pity, compassion, irritation, liking, or aversion, on my part that seems to bear no relationship to my own original feelings; there are participants’ overemotional responses that don’t seem in sync with their intellectual involvement in the topic, narratives that at first fit a stereotyped, appropriate pattern and later, don’t. There is what Clifford Geertz, the seminal anthropologist, called “thick data” — when there are minute, thickly described, rich. abundant details with excellent answers to my internal prompts vs. lots of thin generalities offered as truths without substance. Then, I relook the data. There is also the physical response and closeness to the recording device (some truths and non truths are revealed when the recorder is on and especially once the recorder is turned off, new information comes out). The narratives about the migration topic change over the course of a month of timing. All of it falls into so-called honest narrative.
Hence, if, there are so many variations with the same participants on a topic like my dissertation research in South America that would not seem to require lying and these once-North American and Western European participants actually say they are excited to tell the honest story of their migration motivations to Ecuador very honestly, I will be intrigued to hear what happens when lying is in the picture…when a person is actually intentionally lying about something important to them that they don’t want to reveal the truth about.
I hope I can attend the conference this Saturday since I’m on my way back from Ecuador into NYC.
I have attended numerous Saturday sessions for the past 10 years or more, and enjoy the give-and take among the panelists as well as the audience participation at the conclusion. In the last few years I have spoken about the need for more women to join the panels and I am heartened by the quality and number of female professionals in the upcoming session on Lying.
Many thanks for your sincere efforts to move into the 21 century. Now we have to figure out how to increase participation from qualified non-whites. It’s a big world, we might as well have it well-represented.
I look forward to many more years of stimulating discussions.
Here is a recommend reading list on the topic from Dr. Anna Balas:
Sigmund Freud 1913 “Two Lies Told By Children”. Standard Ed Vol 12 Pp 303-310
Sandor Ferenczi. 1913. “Stages in the Development of the Sense of Reality”. First Contribution to Psychoanalysis Pp 212-239.
Sigmund Freud. 1916. “Some Character -Types Met Within Psychoanalytic Work”. Vol 14 Pp. 302-333.
Helene Deutsch. 1921. “On the Pathological Lie” Pseudologia Phantastica Journal of American Academy of Psychoanalysis Vol 10 No 3 Pp 369-386.
Sigmund Freud. 1927. “Fetishism” Vol 23 SE Pp 148-156.
Sandor Ferenczi. 1949 (1932). “Confusion of Tongues Between The Adults and the Child (The Language of Tenderness and of Passion)” International Journal of Psychoanalysis Vol 30 Pp 225-230.
D.W. Winnicott. 1953. “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena-A Study of the First Not-Me Possession” International Journal of Psychoanalysis Vol 34 Pp 89-97.
Otto Fenichel. 1954 (1939). The Collected Papers Vol 2 “The Economics of Pseudologia Phantastica” Pp 129-140.
Thomas Mann. 1954. Confessions of Felix Krull
Anna Freud. 1966 (1937). “The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense” Denial in Fantasy Pp 69-82 , Denial in Word and Act. Pp 83-92.
Harold Blum 1983 “The Psychoanalytic Process and Psychoanalytic Inference: A Clinical Study of a Lie and a Loss” International Journal of Psychoanalaysis Vol 4 Pp 7-33
Christopher Bollas 1987 The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known London Free Association Books. Pp 173-188
Thomas Mann. 1998. Death in Venice and Other Tales Translated by Yoachim Neugroschel. 1998. Pp 161-228
Edna O’Shaughnessy. 1990. “Can A Liar Be Psychoanalyzed?” International Journal of Psychoanalysis Vol 71 Pp 187-195.