Can you believe a liar when he says he is telling the truth? Is a half-truth a lie or the truth? Central to answering these questions is the definition of the truth. So let us so do. It must be an accurate, unvarnished description of events that have occurred and in the sequence of their occurrence. This is exceedingly difficult for human beings to do, even if there is no malice and self-interest, for inherent memory processes lend themselves to subjective output.
So determining the truth, is at best, very difficult and quite often impossible. But people, corporations, courts and governments need, on a daily basis, to know the truth in order make important decisions. The necessity to call out liars has thus become a fundamental human endeavour. There are five types of liars. Included are the occasional liars, compulsive liars and sociopathic liars.
Occasional liars, as the name suggests, may tell a lie once in a while and when they do, they feel very troubled and uncomfortable. Many, if not most, decent, normal people fall in this category. Compulsive liars on the other hand, feel very uncomfortable about telling the truth. So to them, lying is as natural as breathing. It is an inherently reflexive and natural act.
Of course, they easily pass the standard tests and indicators that are proposed by psychologists; like not looking into the eyes of the questioner and raising their eyes upward et cetera. Exhortations to their conscience are meaningless. For lying, to them, is a natural act and thus polygraph and other tests, based on physiological responses like increased heart/pulse beats or sweating cannot produce fool-proof results.
Sociopathic liars lie continuously over long periods of time, even over a lifetime. They do so in order to get their own way and do not care about who gets hurt or trampled upon in the process. They are very goal oriented. Pathological lying is indicative of deep psychological problems including narcissistic personality disorder.
To determine the truth, in the case of criminals and terrorists, various chemicals, generically referred to as truth serums, have been used. These inhibit or slow the speed at which the body sends messages to the brain. This makes it very difficult, but not impossible, to perform high functioning tasks like concentrating on a single activity, like walking in a straight line or lying.
They came into vogue in the 1920’s but may have been known way before that. To date, however, there are still no known pharmaceutical compounds whose proven effect is consistent or predictable enhancement of truth telling. There is, however, some hope for optimism as there are new drugs that increase the level of trust between the questioner and the questioned.
With respect to persons not confined to the penal system, the administering of chemicals is out of the question and therefore different approaches need be considered. Google, recognising the cesspool of lies, rumours and chicanery the Internet can be, has, in a research paper, proposed a new way to rank search results.
It proposes to use not popularity, but factual accuracy instead. Presently, rumours and lies are self-reinforcing as they spread quickly, thus attracting more searches which in turn attracts even more. The old saying “say a lie long enough and it is viewed as the truth” has become “Google it and it quickly becomes the truth.” So if Google were to implement this new idea, it would be a boon to seekers of the truth and a bane for the rumour-mongers and liars.
So where does this leave us? Well, back to good old fashioned intuition which is gaining acceptance in scientific circles. Listen to your gut feeling and balance it with some analysis and common sense. What are the chances that one who has been lying, over decades, for self-gain and self-promotion, would not lie again for self-preservation?
What do the billions of neurons in your gut say?
