
Pathological Lying: Theoretical and Empirical Support for a Diagnostic Entity - InInteraction
https://psychnewsdaily.com/about-13-percent-of-people-are-pathological-liars/
======
jessriedel
I had a friend in college who did this, lying frequently about even
inconsequential things. I asked him about it, and he said that he rarely lied
to get an obvious direct advantage over someone like we imagine. Rather, he
mostly just enjoyed knowing that other people were operating under false info,
very much like dramatic irony except in real life.

It was weird, and I don't think it served him well in the long run. However,
his girlfriends were consistently more beautiful than you'd expect for his
looks/personality/wealth.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
I had one who would tell outrageous lies, growing from simple comments. It was
ludicrous. "This window is a long way up" I'd say.

"Some animals can make that jump" he'd come out with. "Kangaroos can do it."

"No, I don't think they could. It's too far up?"

"Sure they can. I saw one do it! You calling me a liar?"

It was exhausting, the nonsense he'd spout. The first time I'd encountered
such an obvious prevaricator. I wondered how he functioned.

~~~
elwell
Are you calling him a liar?

~~~
mcv
I think that's the kind of question that always deserves a 'yes'. Nobody
honest would ask that.

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stared
As an Aspie, (almost) every neurotypical person seems to be a pathological
liar, not able to make a small talk without committing a few lies.

Examples: "I am fine, thanks", "You look great!", "It is a wonderful idea!",
"You are our best client", "For our company privacy is a priority", etc, etc.

~~~
HenryKissinger
That's just business talk, not lies.

~~~
xhrpost
Yea, "I'm fine" when you're really not, isn't a lie because there's no intent
to deceive. No one actually expects you to tell you how you truly are when
they ask "How are you?". So if anything, the initial question is more the lie
because it implies concern for the person being asked when it's really just a
salutation.

~~~
3pt14159
If you're charismatic enough you can get away with saying how you really feel
and you'll find that you make friends more quickly. I remember there was this
time in the midst of a relationship ending and my father dying and after years
of dealing with a painful medical condition I responded with "it's just
another shitty day" with a rueful smile. Instant friends with the cafe worker.
When things finally started to turn around for me and I said "things are
great!" he was really happy for me.

It's a matter of reading the person and situation. Sometimes if the person
asking the question is in a context where I can tell they don't want an honest
answer I just say "oh, how are you?" I'd rather evade the question than to say
"I'm fine" when things are shitty.

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exhilaration
Dear parents: never let your kids lie, at any age. It might be cute when
they're 3 or 4 or 5, but if you don't gently tell them that "we don't tell
lies, we always tell the truth" it will become a habit they will carry into
adulthood.

~~~
lapcatsoftware
The bigger problem is the parents. Let's start with Santa Claus. Blatant lie.
Parents teach kids that lying is ok from a very young age.

Abolish Christmas, and then get back to me.

~~~
kingkawn
Christmas is a primary method of indoctrinating people into scientific
rationalism. The childhood imagination is fully engaged by this effort, unlike
any other, to create the illusion of Santa Claus. As a kid it is a sort of
bliss. Then as a sign of the transition to adulthood the growing child comes
to realize there is no Santa. No time for mourning though, the growing youth
is immediately brought into the fold and encouraged to help maintain the
illusion for the younger children. The work is complete, the nature of fantasy
and reality is established.

~~~
ancarda
I find it fascinating how kids, without being told, eventually realize that
Santa Clause isn't real. Is it because they never get to see him? "Mall
Santas" are a common thing all over the world, so I don't think it can be
that.

~~~
JakeTheAndroid
I think they do get told, just not in as direct of a manner.

Different things get dispelled that changes their foundation that Santa relies
on. Such as magic isn't real. Without magic, how can Santa perform his job?

As they get older, it becomes 'childish' by peers to believe in things people
2 years younger believe.

Media created for the demographic starts hinting at the possibility of parents
being Santa.

They're fed enough information over the years to piece it together by
themselves.

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buzzy_hacker
Don’t take the following too seriously, but studies might preselect for liars.

You usually need to meet certain criteria to be eligible and participants may
fudge their answers to participate. I’ve done food testing on and off through
the years and you always need to answer some questions beforehand to determine
eligibility. If you gave a “wrong” answer, the survey-asker would say
something like “Are you sure?”, prompting you to pick the other choice that
made you eligible for the study. Or even without prompting, if I’m trying to
get paid to taste bubblegum and they ask how often you have bubblegum, I’m
more likely to inflate my reported frequency compared to my actual frequency
of gum chewing.

~~~
Cthulhu_
Wouldn't be surprised if this is down to people trying to conform, to answer
what is expected of them, or to try and answer what others have.

There was a study I saw the other day, may have been Explained on Netflix,
where six people were asked a simple question ("which line is the same length
as this one"); five were in on it and intentionally gave the wrong answer, the
sixth, the actual person under test, would follow the 'consensus' answer in
75% of cases (after three or four others answered with the wrong answer). Herd
behaviour is a thing and probably hard to correct for.

------
ppg677
Obvious to many:

After working for 13+ years at wildly successful silicon valley companies and
seeing who climbs the latter, it is those who are good at lying. There is a
spectrum ranging from blatant lying to manipulative, selective withholding of
information.

~~~
spicywatermelon
Would you characterize the ladder climbees as Machiavellian?

------
phaedrus
My first wife was a pathological liar. I'm bad at reading people and tend to
think the best of people, so I remained naive (or willfully blind) to it for a
long time. It came to a head when a sweet, mutual friend of ours asked an
innocent question about what we were doing later in the day, and my (now ex-)
wife gave a completely made up answer. It wasn't a white lie to get out of
something, or a deflection to keep privacy, it was simply a pointless
falsehood clearly produced on reflex.

She was good at keeping track of who she told what lie, so this was the first
time I'd been the 3rd party observer to something I could definitively know
she was lying about. I confronted her about it later privately, "<name> is our
friend, why would you lie to her for no reason?" and she gave a dismissive
non-answer.

That was the first loose thread that unraveled the whole sweater. It turned
out she'd been lying to me and everyone close to her, about things big and
small, for many years.

It's difficult for me to understand the psychology behind it, but I think it
comes down to she feels alternately safer and superior when she knows some
truth that someone else doesn't know. Her parents are estranged but stayed
together, constantly low-key gas lighting each other. Maybe growing up in that
environment is why she reflexively lies. Or maybe it's heritable and the lying
leads to that kind of relationship. Either way, I wasn't going to live the
same way and peaced out.

~~~
oceanghost
I had the same problem with one more level of abstraction: My wife didn't know
she was lying.

My ex-wife lied about _everything_ , and like you it took me years to figure
it out. Everything was always someone else's fault (it was my fault she
couldn't work, my fault she didn't clean, my fault she didn't cook), she often
rearranged the order of events or even fabricated events in their entirety.

Like you, I caught her mother in a bizarre "lie" that unraveled the thing. On
XMas eve her mother called very hurt that we hadn't come over for out
"traditional Xmas eve." She explained that we just always came over so she
didn't think to call and make sure we were coming.

The fact is, I have spent every XMas eve with my own family, we have a
tradition of having a party on XMas eve, and I have only missed it once due to
being hospitalized. You have to understand the sheer madness of this. She
imagined that we were going to come over, convinced herself that we had always
done so, and that there was no reason to even let us know she expected us.

This set off alarm bells in my head, I could see that my wife was remembering
things that didn't happen or altering events in her head and this was why we
could never talk about anything or reach any common ground because we couldn't
agree on ground truth.

Eventually I found out she had suffered some trauma, and as a result something
called "confabulation" which is more or less a unreliable/false memory.

------
Hackbraten
“I have read and consent to the terms of service and the privacy policy”

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and_statistics
I am a pathological liar. From the small scale (What did you do yesterday?
Completed a videogame) to the large scale (lying about my job) to the extreme
(multi-year affairs).

How does one stop?

~~~
bmmayer1
Have you gotten professional help? You're clearly aware that you have a
problem and you seem to want to fix it, which is a really important first
step.

------
foobarbecue
I'd like to see this broken down by profession. Lying seems to be part of the
job in many.

------
tdons
I've made a conscious effort to stop lying after reading
[https://samharris.org/books/lying/](https://samharris.org/books/lying/)

Can recommend, it feels great.

~~~
archi42
Seems like an interesting read, and I thought about getting it (though I'm
kind of biased since I agree with Harris' premise). But the top review on
Amazon mentions that the author simply "dismisses him [Kant] by saying that he
[Harris] has no reason to take Kant seriously.", especially after Kant's
extensive work on the topic. (And the reviewer mentions that this seems to be
common to Harris work).

This is a huge vice in itself. Yes, sometimes arguments are weak, or there is
a new idea, or the argument doesn't work anymore because the world changed so
much, or whatever - but then just ignoring them feels pretty similar to the
occasional white lie, and an entry to "my argument is superior because I gave
it".

~~~
P_I_Staker
I've been a fan of Harris in the past, but I've been getting sick of him
lately. He's ridiculously pretentious, arrogant, and a massive asshole about
communicating his ideas. He seems to come up with the most unpleasant argument
possible. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised about him completely
dismissing a respected viewpoint.

I don't know why I liked him before, except I was a young atheist, and I was
angry. I guess now that I'm older the whole "I am very smart" shtick is no
longer appealing.

------
raxxorrax
Honesty just doesn't pay.

~~~
elwell
Also, "Not stealing doesn't pay". But, I think on average the long-term is
opposite, and it's certainly more important, because, eventually, the long-
term dictates future short-terms.

------
mcv
I can imagine there are professions where the threshold for lies to count as
pathological would be higher than others.

If you barely talk, if the few things you say are all lies, that's pretty
serious. But for people who talk a lot, like politicians, salesmen, managers,
etc, 10 lies per day doesn't sound very high at all.

~~~
frank2
I heard lying is endemic in Hollywood.

------
throckmortra
I worked with a co-worker who couldn't stop lying about even the smallest
stuff. I took it as a weird personality quirk and it never felt malicious to
me because the lies felt like they were created to entertain others

~~~
Cthulhu_
Sounds like they were 'stuck' in a mode of lying, or they don't consider it to
be lying. And that they haven't been called out on it enough for them to think
about what they say.

------
recursivedoubts
_The researchers recruited them in 2019 from various mental health forums,
social media, and a university._

This seems like a classic reflexive problem: why would we expect liars to
produce reliable data regarding their lying?

------
Brushfire
What about the lies we tell ourselves?

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thdrdt
_" The study found the pathological liars were more likely to experience
distress and impaired functioning, especially in social relationships."_

I am quite interested in the behavior of Trump. As far as we know he tells a
lot of lies but it seems the above quote does not apply to him.

Could it be that distress and impaired functioning only apply to people who
are able to experience negative consequences of their lies?

Meaning two things:

* There are negative consequences, so they experience them.

* They see the consequences as negative.

~~~
mercer
I don't get the impression Trump is lacking in 'distress and impaired
functioning, especially in social relationships'. He seems rather thin-
skinned, unhappy, and as far as I can tell he doesn't seem to have any real
friends.

What makes you think he makes it 'work' other than being, by some measures,
successful?

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miguelrochefort
That's lower than I expected.

~~~
foobarbecue
It's higher than I expected. This is just the % that admitted to it, too!

~~~
SigmundA
And thats 10 lies per day, how many people tell 1 lie a day?

