Everybody Lies

From Menletter January 2011

By Tim Baehr

"Everybody lies." These two words are a leitmotif often repeated by Dr. Gregory House, the eponymous main character of a popular show on Fox. House is an irascible, misanthropic, misogynistic, drug-addicted, brilliant diagnostician whose efforts in solving medical riddles are often thwarted or delayed by a patient who omits, or lies about, critical information.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics

While House's assessment of human nature may be misanthropic, it is also realistic. Everybody lies. Some more often than others, some more maliciously than others. But we all do it.

The worst perpetrators are politicians and public officials (or course), but also advertisers, much of the news media, our bosses, and spokespeople for businesses. We're all familiar with broken promises, unsafe or shoddy products that don't live up to their hype, news stories that are later debunked, bosses who screw us over while talking nice, and business leaders who intentionally mislead the public and their shareholders.

It's disheartening when the liar knows that we know he's lying and doesn't care. Equally disheartening are the big lies, repeated over and over, until many people believe them. All it takes is a charismatic entertainer like Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh.

Even scientists and number-crunchers are not immune from lying. Mark Twain popularized two sayings: "There are lies, damned lies and statistics" and "Figures don't lie, but liars can figure." Two areas in which research and numbers are important have come under scrutiny recently: medical and drug research, and the behavioral sciences. It turns out, according to recent articles in The New Yorker and Newsweek, that experiments or investigations with positive results are far more likely to be published - even in peer-reviewed journals - than negative results. And when negative results are reported, they are often published far later than the positive reports. Negative results never won tenure, a promotion, or a new drug patent.

Institutions and Individuals

Institutional lying is so pervasive that we are justified in feeling cynical and a bit done-to. But very few (if any) of us in our personal lives tell the absolute, honest truth all the time to everyone we come in contact with. Whether it's telling our kids about Santa Claus and the tooth fairy, or concocting an excuse for a late project, or portraying ourselves in the best possible light, we lie.

And we lie to ourselves in at least two ways. One is the direct lie: We delude ourselves about our motivations, and we make promises to ourselves that we cannot keep. Another is the complicit lie: We allow ourselves to be led astray by other people's lies: flattery, for instance, or convincing ourselves (often against facts) that a sales pitch or advertisement or news analysis or political speech is true.

Collaborate and Corroborate

How do we defend ourselves against all this lying? First, we can acknowledge that we lie to ourselves, and that nothing we experience is ever completely as it seems. We can try to recognize self-delusion and step away from the more harmful aspects of it. This attitude shouldn't cripple us by making us unsure of ourselves, however. Rather, it should provide us with some humility in making decisions and a willingness to change our minds in the face of new information.

We can also, with some care, collaborate with people and institutions we trust or whom we've found to be trustworthy over time. After all, many aspects of the reality we live from day to day depend on shared perceptions and agreements.

And we can corroborate even when we can't be sure of our sources: We can choose sources of information and compare them against each other. We may not arrive at the truth all the time, but we can increase our chances of getting close.

We haven't heard, and will never hear, the last word. So let's keep listening.