The reason for my inept ability? I absolutely suck at lying. My poker face is so bad that even Stevie Wonder could expose me.
One time I was dealt a flop; an Aston Villa of a hand, but I still called and then raised my bet.
My heart started to race, I started to get sweaty and I became red in the face. One person folded, luckily, assuming that I had a killer, however everyone else stayed in, calling my outrageous bet of 50p (I was crazy). I knew I wasn't going to win with my dire three and nine of hearts, but I persevered, upping my bet to three Freddo bars.
Anyway... I lost that hand, and when bluffing I seem to always lose them. Everyone knew I had nothing from the start. They could see I was nervous, and they could see my increased irritation after calling every one of my bets.
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| The Poker Face |
A poker bluff is just one example of a lie that humans have tried to perfect. We use lies to gain power and control, like Frank Underwood in House of Cards. We sometimes tell little white lies to make a situation less uncomfortable, or we tell a lie to increase our self-esteem, thus making ourselves look better.
Interestingly, humans aren't the only species that lie. Koko the gorilla, renowned for having a sign language vocabulary of 1000 words, ripped a sink off of the wall in her indoor enclosure. When asked who did it, Koko blamed her little pet kitten. Some animals feign death with the hope that a predator will just leave them alone. The term 'playing possum' comes to mind.
Why do we lie?
The Invention of Lying, a Ricky Gervais film hated by critics but adored by me, is about a man set in a world where lying isn't possible and everyone is very blunt. Mark Bellison, a sort of nobody who gets fired from his job because he is too boring, learns how to lie and using his ability he gets rich, gets the girl. Following on from that he decides to do good to the world and passes his ability to lie to his son.That was a terrible description of the film. After all, I'm a psychology student and not a film critic.
Mark's ability to lie came when he was need of rent money, but our ability to lie to someone may have come from our ability to cooperate.
When we help someone out, they are more likely to help us (the reciprocity principle of persuasion). In the Animal Kingdom vampire bats help each other out by regurgitating blood to another bat that hasn't eaten in awhile.
However, deceiving someone into making them believe you've helped them out before could have allowed our ancestors to be rewarded without actually having to cooperate further. McNally and Jackson (2013) backed this up with primate studies, finding that the species that requires the most cooperation also has the highest rates of lying or deception.
To sum it up: if we want to do less but still be rewarded, it might be beneficial to us to lie.
But lying isn't always bad. There are white lies that we use that don't hurt others. We may lie to flatter people, gain people's trust and make ourselves more attractive to others.
Here is a list of some sweet White lies:
- It
wasn’t me!
- The
table will be ready in 5 minutes.
- Oh,
yeah. That makes sense.
- Thank
you so much! I just love it!
- Yeah,
you look great in that dress.
- Oh,
things would have been different if I was there!
- No,
officer… I have no idea how fast I was going.
- I’m
22.
- Yeah,
I’ll start working on that ASAP!
- I
thought I already sent that email out. I’m sure I did.
The Lying Arms Race
Fall Out Boy coined: "I am an arms dealer, fitting you with weapons in the form of words" in their song This Ain't a Scene. No doubt it's one of my favourite F.O.B songs, and it is definitely one you can scream at the top of your lungs.
The lyrics make out that lies are like weapons, and when there is a weapon made, there is an arms race to better it. Just like any species that is in need of survival, an arms race breaks out in which two groups advance their defensive or offensive tactics to combat the other: The antelope was being eaten by the cheetah - so it got faster, but then the cheetah couldn't catch its food - so it too had to get faster.
In the case of the dinosaurs the leaf eaters got bigger and bigger so they wouldn't get eaten. Carnivores like good old T-Rex would have also needed to be bigger in order to catch them and not get hurt (although their arms did get smaller).
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| Argentinosaurus: Its length, from its head to the tip of its tail, was 40m.That's one big dinosaur. T-Rex would have struggled here. |
The above cases concerned predator and prey, but for lying there is a within species effect. Humans had to get better at detecting a lie so that they wouldn't get cheated. The liars would have had to combat this by getting better at lying i.e.not getting all sweaty and short of breath like I do when playing poker.
THE END (OR NOT?)
So that concludes this blog post on why we lie, but it's only Part 1!
I mentioned that an armed race of lie vs. lie detection has evolved in humans. In my next blog Part 2 is going to talk about some of the methods that we use to detect lying. I'll be talking about Paul Ekman and micro-expressions and also how technology has helped us detect lies.
If you've liked this check out some of my other blog posts and subscribe via email. You get some notifications if and when I release the next one (look on the right side of the page).
Here is a link to my blog post on the power of authority:
http://thepsychologymann.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/compliance-to-authority-power-of-uniform.html
