Great story here on the Diane Rhem show on NPR.
Excerpt: "Spy the Lie" by Philip Houston, Michael Floyd, and Susan Carnicero (with Don T...
COMM 3150 Final Assessment
Respond to the three stems below after careful research of each context; Cuba and the Kennedy/Nixon presidential campaign, the Bain controversy, and Coach Paterno’s role in the disastrous findings of child sex abuse in Penn State’s football program.
Save and send your responses as a PDF document to comm3150@gmail.com no later than Thursday, July 19, 2012, 11:00a. No responses will be accepted after that deadline.
1. During the 1960 Kennedy/Nixon presidential campaign, one of Kennedy’s platforms was endorsing US intervention in Cuba by supporting anti-Castro exiles. Kennedy asserted that these exiles received no support from his administration. Running against Kennedy, Vice-president Nixon knew that these exiles were being trained and prepared for an invasion of Cuba, but Nixon couldn’t reveal this without undermining America’s security.
Instead, Nixon attacked Kennedy’s proposal to support these Cuban exiles as irresponsible and reckless, the antithesis of what Nixon actually believed.
Was this lie justified? If you disagree, justify your position. If you agree, justify your grounds.
2. Lots of clash happening in today’s presidential campaign having to do with Mitt Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital. Obama’s campaign asserts that Romney was complicit in outsourcing jobs to foreign markets where Romney claims he wasn’t associated with the firm at that time.
Google the issue and cite the first six headlines and stories that deal with this story. Which, in your opinion, distort or misrepresent the issue and which have more credibility for you? Does your own political bias have an effect on how you evaluate the veracity of these articles?
3. How could the image of Joe Paterno below be mislabeled? How might it be manipulated?
(If you’ve been living under a rock lately, research Paterno before you frame your responses.)
Save and send your responses as a PDF document to comm3150@gmail.com no later than Thursday, July 19, 2012, 11:00a. No responses will be accepted after that deadline.
1. During the 1960 Kennedy/Nixon presidential campaign, one of Kennedy’s platforms was endorsing US intervention in Cuba by supporting anti-Castro exiles. Kennedy asserted that these exiles received no support from his administration. Running against Kennedy, Vice-president Nixon knew that these exiles were being trained and prepared for an invasion of Cuba, but Nixon couldn’t reveal this without undermining America’s security.
Instead, Nixon attacked Kennedy’s proposal to support these Cuban exiles as irresponsible and reckless, the antithesis of what Nixon actually believed.
Was this lie justified? If you disagree, justify your position. If you agree, justify your grounds.
2. Lots of clash happening in today’s presidential campaign having to do with Mitt Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital. Obama’s campaign asserts that Romney was complicit in outsourcing jobs to foreign markets where Romney claims he wasn’t associated with the firm at that time.
Google the issue and cite the first six headlines and stories that deal with this story. Which, in your opinion, distort or misrepresent the issue and which have more credibility for you? Does your own political bias have an effect on how you evaluate the veracity of these articles?
3. How could the image of Joe Paterno below be mislabeled? How might it be manipulated?
(If you’ve been living under a rock lately, research Paterno before you frame your responses.)
Public Deception - Rubric
Read, research and write about the ethics in public lies for the benefit of the people. Being in an election-year cycle there's much to choose from, such as the recent Supreme Court ruling on the constitutionality of the Affordable Healthcare Act. With the Court's ruling there's much rhetoric involved on both sides of the isle, most of which may be questionable.
Description
Find an artifact, a speech, a press conference, a talk-show appearance, something both verbal and non-verbal. Break it down in terms of the issue's content and analyze how the rhetoric was spun to put that issue out to the people.
Then analyze the delivery of the rhetoric. Identify oculesic, paraliniguistic, kinesic, or proxemic tells that may make one suspect the "truthiness" of the content.
Finally, answer how was the truth manipulated.
This is due, Wednesday, July 18th. All claims, including the source of the artifact will be cited APA or MLA style, your preference,along with embedded hotlinks to your web sources. Submit your work as a PDF to comm3150@gmail.com.
Point Total: 300
Rubric
You identify a valid artifact intended for public consumption. Preferred is a YouTube post where one can review the artifact. 50 points.
You analyze the rhetoric of the artifact, what's true about the issue versus what the rhetor would have the audience believe. This will require research and/or background knowledge on your part of the issue. Be sure to be well-versed on the subject. 100 points.
You determine nonverbal and verbal tells of the rhetor, citing points in their delivery where they've tipped their hand. This could be in eye-movement and blink rates, in semantic aphasia, in delayed emblems, illustrators or regulators, or perhaps in the body language of the subject. 100 points.
You postulate how the truth was manipulated. 50 Points.
Description
Find an artifact, a speech, a press conference, a talk-show appearance, something both verbal and non-verbal. Break it down in terms of the issue's content and analyze how the rhetoric was spun to put that issue out to the people.
Then analyze the delivery of the rhetoric. Identify oculesic, paraliniguistic, kinesic, or proxemic tells that may make one suspect the "truthiness" of the content.
Finally, answer how was the truth manipulated.
This is due, Wednesday, July 18th. All claims, including the source of the artifact will be cited APA or MLA style, your preference,along with embedded hotlinks to your web sources. Submit your work as a PDF to comm3150@gmail.com.
Point Total: 300
Rubric
You identify a valid artifact intended for public consumption. Preferred is a YouTube post where one can review the artifact. 50 points.
You analyze the rhetoric of the artifact, what's true about the issue versus what the rhetor would have the audience believe. This will require research and/or background knowledge on your part of the issue. Be sure to be well-versed on the subject. 100 points.
You determine nonverbal and verbal tells of the rhetor, citing points in their delivery where they've tipped their hand. This could be in eye-movement and blink rates, in semantic aphasia, in delayed emblems, illustrators or regulators, or perhaps in the body language of the subject. 100 points.
You postulate how the truth was manipulated. 50 Points.
Paralinguistics and Language
- Mirroring the accusation
- Lack of contractions
- Vagueness, indirect
- Colorful, unnecessary description,
- Decoy descriptions
- Auto fill
- Third-person
- Pronoun usage - denial in lying, emphasis in truth
- Distancing language, euphemisms, switching possessives, definite and indefinite articles.
Your Lying Eyes
Oculesics - Eye Behavior
Blinking
Blink rates can indicate escalated anxiety or controlled contempt and a range of emotions in between. Normal blink rates range from two to ten times a minute depending on relative humidity and eye center. Blink rates decrease when the eye is engaged in reading or watching a screen, down to 3 to 4 times a minute.
A blink rate baseline can be derived by counting blinks per minute at resting or unescalated levels. More accurate blinks rates are determined over a period of time, averaging blink rates from at least a half dozen samples.
Increased blink rates in a subject can be a result of escalated anxiety, emotion, or result from excessive eye movement. Decreased rates stem more from the alpha-make stare, the inherent decoy from being detected in a lie.
Movement
Visual Access Theory holds that eye movement can betray whether the disclosure was retrieved from memory or created.
Visual Access Theory holds that eye movement can betray whether the disclosure was retrieved from memory or created.
Blinking
Blink rates can indicate escalated anxiety or controlled contempt and a range of emotions in between. Normal blink rates range from two to ten times a minute depending on relative humidity and eye center. Blink rates decrease when the eye is engaged in reading or watching a screen, down to 3 to 4 times a minute.
A blink rate baseline can be derived by counting blinks per minute at resting or unescalated levels. More accurate blinks rates are determined over a period of time, averaging blink rates from at least a half dozen samples.
Increased blink rates in a subject can be a result of escalated anxiety, emotion, or result from excessive eye movement. Decreased rates stem more from the alpha-make stare, the inherent decoy from being detected in a lie.
Groups
For Thursday, June 21, Group A will meet at the conference room in the Jennings Building at 11:00a, and Group B will meet at noon.
If you missed class on Wednesday, shame, shame.
If you missed class on Wednesday, shame, shame.
Assisted Detection
Current polygraph testing begs false positives and alternative detection technology is expensive, invasive and cumbersome. The FBI’s Webster Commission recognizes the polygraph as flawed due to its false positive potential. Polygraphs measure primarily for physiological responses and are an indirect indicator of anxiety that may relate to heightened conditions brought on by lying, providing the subject isn’t savvy to countermeasures that render polygraphs useless.
Polygraph reliability is questionable since multiple testing contexts with low variability rarely produce the same outcomes. Accuracy wanes depending on the situation; polygraphs tend to be more accurate in criminal investigations than in screening future employees.
Since the polygraph measures physiological tells and these tells relate to the subjects' psychological arousal, the validity of polygraph testing is threatened simply due to the varied nature of subject responses under certain stimulus conditions. Heart rate, blood pressure, respiratory rates and sweating have no correlative baseline, and when subjects are already heightened due to anxiety of not being found truthful when in actuality they are, polygraphs record data that lead operators to false positives.
As well, polygraphs are ineffective in detecting major security threats and are useless in determining deception in subjects engaged in countermeasures against detection.
Polygraphs are invasive causing latent anxiety secondary to proofs searched for in the process. They depend on psychophysiological indicators including respiration, heart rate, blood pressure, eccrine secretions that change electrical conductivity; autonomic and somatic activity that until now are not detectable without invasive telemetry. These anxiety indicators can mask primary tells of lying.
Positron Emission Tomography
Positron Emission Tomography
Other detection technologies include positron emission tomography (PET) where brain activity can be measured, and functional magnetic resonating imaging (fMRI), in recording event-related characteristics of brain activity following discrete stimuli.
These technologies depend on cumbersome equipment tied to a central location costing millions to acquire and maintain along with additional personnel to operate, and yet the data they provide are shallow.
Thermography
Eye Tracking
Human Observation
Human observation is used along with these technologies to detect and confirm deception. Nonverbal indicators including occulesics (eye behavior), kinetics (body movement), paralinguistics (verbal emphases, semantic aphasia, and non-semantic tells), kinesics (specific non-verbal gesticulation), haptics (touch, self-touch), and proxemics (territory, spatial relationships, and artifacts). Human observation has proven extraordinarily effective in lie detection due to its vast data of indications, but relies heavily on trained and experienced human detectors.
At issue in global contexts where the truth is increasingly difficult to discern, current lie-detection technologies lack accuracy, validity and reliability. Inter-agency studies conclude the polygraph marginal in its efficacy of determining whether a subject is lying.
The Tell-tale Heart
Physical Indicators of Escalation
The carotid artery, the main blood vessel that course through the neck, can display a heavy and escalated heart rate. As anxiety ncreases, so does blood pressure and and heart beat rate and often this can manifest in the neck through careful observation.
Other indications of elevated blood pressure can be found in the temples. The discerning observer will look beyond upper manifestations to find a pulse rhythm in the dangling foot of a leg crossed over the other at the knee, a good point to get a pulse baseline without being intrusive.
Escalated respiratory rates can result in Hypoventilation, not being able to blow off accumulated carbon dioxide. This may result in pursed lip breathing, heavy sighing, yawning.
Face touching, scratching, behind the ear and the back of neck can indicate an adrenal dump, escalation in anxiety resulting in a flight or fight response. A side effect of this is itching about the face and neck causing the target to unwittingly scratch as adaptor.
More prevelant in women than men is the rupturing of tiny capillaries, starting in the skin of the chest and working its way up to and through the neck, the result of a pounding heart.
The carotid artery, the main blood vessel that course through the neck, can display a heavy and escalated heart rate. As anxiety ncreases, so does blood pressure and and heart beat rate and often this can manifest in the neck through careful observation.
Other indications of elevated blood pressure can be found in the temples. The discerning observer will look beyond upper manifestations to find a pulse rhythm in the dangling foot of a leg crossed over the other at the knee, a good point to get a pulse baseline without being intrusive.
Escalated respiratory rates can result in Hypoventilation, not being able to blow off accumulated carbon dioxide. This may result in pursed lip breathing, heavy sighing, yawning.
Face touching, scratching, behind the ear and the back of neck can indicate an adrenal dump, escalation in anxiety resulting in a flight or fight response. A side effect of this is itching about the face and neck causing the target to unwittingly scratch as adaptor.
More prevelant in women than men is the rupturing of tiny capillaries, starting in the skin of the chest and working its way up to and through the neck, the result of a pounding heart.
The Reid Technique
Nine Steps of Interrogation
STEP 1 The Positive Confrontation
By accusing the suspect at the outset, the interrogator immediately establishes an atmosphere of confidence, and is also able to observe and evaluate the suspect’s reaction to being accused. As part of the same step, the interrogator neutralizes the suspect’s reaction by moving from a dominating and accusatory position to one of understanding.
STEP 2 Theme Development
Obtaining an admission of guilt from the suspect is easier if the suspect is given the opportunity to couple that admission with a reason or excuse that helps to preserve some of his or her self-respect. Most suspects have either minimized their actions (“The company has plenty of money... this small amount will never be missed.”) or justified them (“My family really needs this.”). For this reason, a successful interrogator develops “themes” or reasons that allow the suspect to salvage self-respect while confessing.
STEP 3 Handling Denials
Before a suspect can become attentive to theme development and confess guilt, they must be stopped from continuing to deny involvement. Recognition and forestalling of denial is covered in this step, as is handling of situations where denials cannot be stopped.
STEP 4 Overcoming Objections
There's a difference between denials and objections (excuses) and it's important to recognize and overcome objections.
STEP 5 Procuring and Retaining the Suspect’s Attention
Any suspect who is going to confess moves from using offensive tactics (denials and objections) to a defensive mode where they become quiet and begin to listen. It is at this point where physical closeness and verbal techniques used by the interviewer are methods for acquiring and maintaining a suspect’s attention.
STEP 6 Handling the Suspect’s Passive Mood
Recognizing that the suspect has “given up” and is ready to confess is critical. At this point focus the general theme onto one or two essential elements that will stimulate the confession.
STEP 7 Presenting an Alternative Question
To obtain the first admission of guilt from the suspect, a question with only two possible answers (either of which is incriminating) is asked.
STEP 8 Detailing the Offense
Corroboration of an admission of guilt is obtained through details of the offense supplied by the suspect. Encourage revelation of such details along with methods of correcting discrepancies in the suspect’s story.
STEP 9 Elements of Oral and Written Statements
Proper handling of the suspect’s oral statements and the reductions of such statements to a written, typed or recorded confession is imperative.
Unassisted Detection
- Third Party - Whistle Blowers
- Physical Evidence
- Confession - Confrontational, Unsolicited, Inadvertently
- Behavioral Observation
the wizards
- Intense attention to non-verbal indications
- Mixed messages, distancing language and semantic aphasia
- Looked beyond the standard cues and tells
- Erred in determining truth as well as falsehoods, indicating little truth or lie bias
- Culturally and socially engrained
- Intense, emotional frames of reference
- Motivated and focused
- Introverted, high-self monitors
Assessment One
Respond to the items below using short answers. Email your responses to comm3150@gmail.com no later than 11:00a, June 14th.
1. How does lying and deception serve as part of our social system?
2. Describe the Knapp's inclination to the four ways we determine what's true. What's your take on this?
3. What's problematic with observation as a method of discerning what is true?
4. Discuss the difference between certainty and the probability of what is interpreted as truth.
5. From your liary, describe how you may have justified lying for the right reason.
6. Describe the purpose, strategy and means of the natural deceiver pictured below:
1. How does lying and deception serve as part of our social system?
2. Describe the Knapp's inclination to the four ways we determine what's true. What's your take on this?
3. What's problematic with observation as a method of discerning what is true?
4. Discuss the difference between certainty and the probability of what is interpreted as truth.
5. From your liary, describe how you may have justified lying for the right reason.
6. Describe the purpose, strategy and means of the natural deceiver pictured below:
7. What's the best way for parents to teach children about honesty?
8. How can we be fooling ourselves?
9. Describe and give an example of the blood relatives to lying.
10. Identify five characteristics of Dr. Robert Hale's PCL-R scale and show how at least two of these relate to the female contestant's behavior in the scene below:
Pants on Fire
...if only it were that easy.
Remove the moral turpitude from lying and one is left with its pragmatic applications, instinctive methods of deception to perpetuate survival. We've been lying as long as we've been communicating.
As a result, lie detection is highly contextual, making it sophisticated and difficult, but possible.
Contextual circumstances include:
Falsifying
Concealing
Low-Stakes Lies
High-Stakes Lies
Cognitive and Emotional Processes
Blood Relatives of Lying
Remove the moral turpitude from lying and one is left with its pragmatic applications, instinctive methods of deception to perpetuate survival. We've been lying as long as we've been communicating.
As a result, lie detection is highly contextual, making it sophisticated and difficult, but possible.
Contextual circumstances include:
- Expectations
- Consequences
- Target
- Motives
- Avoid punishment
- Protect from harm
- Obtain reward for self
- Protect another
- Win admiration
- Get out of awkward situations
- Save face
- Maintain Privacy
- Power
- Fulfill social expectations
- Fun
Falsifying
Concealing
Low-Stakes Lies
- Quotidien conversation
- Self-presentation
- Dating
- Flattery and Ingratiation
- Games and Sports
- Magic
High-Stakes Lies
Cognitive and Emotional Processes
Blood Relatives of Lying
- Equivocation
- Contextomy
- Spin
- Bullshit
- Doublespeak:
- Euphemisms
- Jargon
- Bureaucratese
- Inflated language
Fooling Ourselves
A Psychological and Social Process
Why We Do It
- Self-confirming
- Groupthink
Why We Do It
- Aggrandize our own perceived value
- Establish continuity between past and present
- Increase projected sincerity in deceiving others
- Perpetuate optimism to heal or to have something to look forward to
- Increase motivation, even delusion in competitive performance
How We Do It
1. Create a Bias - Favorable Self-Evaluation
- Feedback
- Comparison - Driving
- Trait Identification
2. Maintain the Bias
- Reconcile dissonance
- Self-persuasion
3. Self-Defense
- Denial
- Rationalization
- Repression
- Dissociation
- Projection
Personal Baseline Rubric
Description
Establish your personal baseline as an interpreter of verbal and non-verbal signals. This will be reflected in a personal assessment in the following areas:
- Your personal biases influenced by value drivers,
- Your frame of reference,
- Your inherent influences on how you both perceive and manipulate the truth,
- And whether you're a high or a low self-monitor, or in some cases, both.
Point Value: 200
Rubric
1. Inventory your value drivers that may influence your perception and discover the link in how you're biased as a result. 100 points
For example, the hierarchy of my drivers stem from my role as a husband and as a father. So, I value love and commitment, devotion and dedication, continuity of character, open and direct communication, security and certainty of family, opportunity for growth, and work for dependability.
All these values drive how I perceive how you might communicate about your significant other or your family or your children, biasing me if we're both in agreement or in disparity. Either way, this bias skews my ability to discern whether you speak the truth as it relates to marriage and family. If we agree in value, or rather, if I perceive we agree in value, I'm more vulnerable to believe your position. If we have no or little agreement, I may be prone to suspicion.
As in the above example, it may be easier to identify your value drivers through your social and cultural contexts, the roles you play and the beliefs you hold. If you're a daughter, an aunt, a student, a baby-sitter, and a girlfriend, the values that drive your perception in each become a baseline through which you identify truth.
This list need not be exhaustive, but should be drawn from contexts where you feel discerning truth is paramount.
So, you've inventoried value drivers based on certain social roles you fulfill, and have identified potential biases that may color your perception or thwart your acuity in discerning veracity.
2. Identify the influences on your frame of reference as they relate to vulnerability and/or skepticism. 50 points
Got a history of being hurt by a lie? Versed with betrayal? Experiences like these impact your baseline in how you discern both verbal and non-verbal content. Over-suspicion or naivete can shade how we accept truths and lies alike.
3. Admit your inherent influences on how you both perceive and manipulate the truth. 30 points
Are you more swayed or more put-off by someone you evaluate as attractive? Is integrity automatically implied if you and your target share the same faith? Is it easier for you to lie to someone masculine or feminine? Older or younger? Thick or thin? How much do you give up when it comes to credibility if you find yourself aligned on most of the value-levels with your target?
4. Arrive at your predisposition of high- or low-self-monitoring. 20 points
This task alone will raise your self-monitoring, but more from a meta-monitoring standpoint: pay attention to how you respond non-verbally in expression and openness. Draw the 'Q' to start.
Natural Deception
The Bee Orchid
The Swallowtail Butterfly
Cleaner Fish
The Mantid
The Photuris firefly (notably not the Photinus)
The Hognose snake
The Canus-Annie retriever
Apology
From imnosaint, January 9, 2012
I posted on the last day of last year something that’s turned trite and tinny, and I must apologize, because it’s nothing more than an empty promise.
“It gets better,” I said, an emulation or a ripoff of a message intended for those who live with bullying, or rejection, or judgment, or fear. You can add to that list.
That’s not true, though. It doesn’t get better. It just is. It does what it wants. It has a mind of its own. It doesn’t regard you, how you’re feeling, what you wish for. It just is. You are inconsequential to it.
The blown red light, the wrong place at the wrong time, the injustice of a decision, the errant division of cells, the poison of words; whatever is decried just happened or worse, even terrifying to most, is that it will. And you can’t stop it.
Really, what you can do with it is relatively limited.
You can fear it. Most do. Much of our communication is driven by the fear perpetuated by it. Fear of judgment, failure, disappointing, consequences beyond our control, as if we had any. Control, that is.
You can resist it. Fate or fortune swings that quotidian pendulum to a place that hurts or a place that feels really good, but the spin of this old orb seems to centrifugally draw that swinging indicator back to where we’ve allowed it to rest, resisting both the differences of what fate and fortune can offer.
You can deny it. Fear is often managed through denial. Not my kid. Not in my backyard. Not in our schools. Not in this country. It kills, it divides, it’s unjust, it’s liberating, it evolves, it teaches.
You can embrace it. All of it. Remove the value; good, bad, right, wrong, heaven, hell, and it just may begin to fit within the circle of your arms. It’s a risk. It will hurt.
And you can heal. It doesn’t get better, you do.
You can get better, better at it. It just is.
You are so much more.
I posted on the last day of last year something that’s turned trite and tinny, and I must apologize, because it’s nothing more than an empty promise.
“It gets better,” I said, an emulation or a ripoff of a message intended for those who live with bullying, or rejection, or judgment, or fear. You can add to that list.
That’s not true, though. It doesn’t get better. It just is. It does what it wants. It has a mind of its own. It doesn’t regard you, how you’re feeling, what you wish for. It just is. You are inconsequential to it.
The blown red light, the wrong place at the wrong time, the injustice of a decision, the errant division of cells, the poison of words; whatever is decried just happened or worse, even terrifying to most, is that it will. And you can’t stop it.
Really, what you can do with it is relatively limited.
You can fear it. Most do. Much of our communication is driven by the fear perpetuated by it. Fear of judgment, failure, disappointing, consequences beyond our control, as if we had any. Control, that is.
You can resist it. Fate or fortune swings that quotidian pendulum to a place that hurts or a place that feels really good, but the spin of this old orb seems to centrifugally draw that swinging indicator back to where we’ve allowed it to rest, resisting both the differences of what fate and fortune can offer.
You can deny it. Fear is often managed through denial. Not my kid. Not in my backyard. Not in our schools. Not in this country. It kills, it divides, it’s unjust, it’s liberating, it evolves, it teaches.
You can embrace it. All of it. Remove the value; good, bad, right, wrong, heaven, hell, and it just may begin to fit within the circle of your arms. It’s a risk. It will hurt.
And you can heal. It doesn’t get better, you do.
You can get better, better at it. It just is.
You are so much more.
Born Liars
My son was five years-old when I first detected a lie from him, or better, when I first admitted he was capable of lying. It was a Saturday morning and he was zipping through the house without his recently prescribed glasses.
“Hey Buddy, where are your glasses?”
And he stopped dead in his tracks and locked his eyes on mine, unblinking.
“I don't know.”
I was floored. How did he know how to do that? With him still locked on me I asked a follow up,
“Well, where did you have them last?”
And his eyes moved up to his right. He was visually accessing, but he was accessing the side of his brain that is creative, instead of the side more prone to memory.
“At Jake's.” Eyes back on me, boring into the back of my head. Lie number two. I was incredulous at that point. Not my kid.
A few years later his kid sister came along. She was at the brink of toddling when I noticed her first deception. She was down for a nap and was obviously awake by the sound of her crying. I made my way down the hall to her room. I'm guessing she must have heard my footsteps because she stopped crying. So, I stopped my walk and made a more stealthy approach to her door.
I peeked in between the jamb. There she stood in her crib, listening intently. Hearing nothing, she belted out another completely convincing cry of catastrophe. Her little body still standing, holding onto the crib rail, her mouth in full scream-engagement, her eyes dancing across her room.
Silence. A wry little smile on her perfect little lips.
Well, I'll be darned.
Well, I'll be darned.
A Northeastern University study on gossip revealed that the human brain is wired in a way that exploits gossip as a defense mechanism; gossip, that social faux pas our good mothers taught us to avoid. If you don't have anything good to say...
The study finds that gossip is an innate defense mechanism.
As is that other social faux pas, lying.
Remove the moral turpitude from lying and one is left with its pragmatic applications, instinctive methods of deception to perpetuate survival. We've been lying as long as we've been communicating.
But not my kid, right? Wrong. Realizing this somehow assuaged the sting of being lied to by my son. It wasn't an indication of my parenting, rather it was his innate survival skills at work.
Ditto his sister. She wanted attention, and to this day more than a decade later, she knows how to get it.
His mother found his glasses, broken. Somewhere in the reasoning of his remarkable little mind he concluded he'd risk the punishment of lying over the punishment of having broken his new glasses. Perhaps he thought he'd get away with it. Self-preservation. In fact, in modern human history we might coin that as the impetus to lying; saving face.
Go back a bit further and find tribes decoying big game in hunting, indigenous survivors falsifying warning signs of serpents in petroglyphic carvings to keep others away, an ancient massive terracotta army.
She catches me peeking through the door jamb and giggles. I think it's adorable, giving no thought to how I had been manipulated.
Regardless the reason, the lie is justified in the most innocuous contexts and severe circumstances.
The body responds to lying. It's a physiological effect from a psychological impetus, a neurological transmission that something's amiss, usually because the liar knows the lie, that inconsistency of character, and has taken the risk to see if the lie works.
It's in that inconsistency where the body responds, the detection of which is very complicated in the density of human expression.
That's what this class is all about.
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