It's the week after the holidays, and for
the last month you and your significant other have been going to friends’ holiday parties
and family get togethers stretching back to Thanksgiving. As normal for the season, both of you have
packed on a few pounds from all that goodness being served up in heaping helpings, and now
your partner is getting ready for work when suddenly they stop. Turning towards you, your panicked mind can
already tell the words they’re about to speak even before their lips form them: do
you think I've put on weight? You hesitate with your answer hoping that
in the half-second between them asking and you having to answer that the earth will suddenly
swallow you up. Maybe that 'big one' everybody's always talking
about will finally hit the West coast and rock the nation. Maybe Yellowstone will finally blow up. Maybe World War III will start. But no, nothing happens except for the ever-lengthening
stretch of silence and your partner’s growing inquisitive look. “Do you think I've put on weight?”, the
words rattle in your head as you recall the moment you fell in love together and vowed
that you would always tell the truth to your most important person in the world, because
they deserve it, they’re worth it! So, what do you do? If you're like most people you tell one of
the little white lies that we've all come to accept as part of our social norms. Honesty is a golden virtue, and nobody likes
a dirty liar. And yet, we grease the wheels of our social
interactions every single day with a plethora of little white lies, all meant to help smooth
the daily interactions that our modern city-oriented lifestyles besiege us with. Sometimes telling the truth just isn't worth
it. We all lie, but how much we lie varies on
individual morals- it turns out though that how much we expect people to lie depends on
their line of work. One study showed that 94% of people expect
politicians to lie in their line of work, and we would really like to meet that other
six percent who genuinely think they don’t. That same study showed that only 27% of people
expect their doctors to lie in the course of their work. This disparity is rather interesting when
you consider that we probably don't expect our doctors to lie because lives depend on
their integrity, and yet for a politician the fate of entire nations could rest on their
own truthfulness as well. So whether you're a polite little white liar,
or a liar-liar with pants currently on fire, what exactly goes on in your brain and your
body when you tell a lie, and how can you catch a would-be liar? When we lie often we're given away by the
fact that we're simply unable to cue up our verbal and nonverbal behaviors. Our facial expressions may not match the words
we're saying, or our posture could be out of sync with our voice. These changes may seem subtle- because they
are- but after hundreds of thousands of years of communicating amongst each other we have
become evolutionarily hardwired to detect even minute changes in body language. Some of us just happen to be better at it
than others. So one of the first things that happen when
you lie is you start acting very artificial and inauthentically, setting off the 'weird'
alarm deep inside your victim's primitive brain. Their evolutionary training sets off an alarm
that something is not quite right about the way you're moving your body in relation to
your voice, or that your face isn't quite syncing up with the sadness you're supposed
to feel when you're late to work because a truck full of orphans overturned on the freeway
and you had to help give CPR. The act of lying involves a careful balancing
act on the behalf of the liar which can leave the overworked brain unable to sync up the
proper physical movements or emotional displays. That's because when you lie you are trying
to keep track of several narratives all at the same time:
1. What you know is true: There was no truck
full of orphans on the freeway and instead you're late because you just had to squeeze
in one more match of Fortnite before work. 2. What you want to be true: I wish there really
was a truckload of orphans on the freeway that overturned because that would have been
a really handy excuse for being late to work and you'd get to look like a hero for giving
them CPR. 3. What you're presenting as true: A truckload
of orphans in fact overturned on the freeway, and then some stray kittens were caught in
the accident, and you had to stop and give CPR to all of them- and that's why you're
late. 4. All the proper emotions that are supposed
to accompany your made-up narrative: fear when the truck full of orphans overturned,
sadness when they were injured, and determination as you set about giving each orphan and stray
kitten CPR. It turns out that managing all of these thoughts
at the same time, and then trying to fabricate the proper physical reaction is pretty difficult,
and can lead to inauthentic displays which put people off your lies. As you begin to weave your tragic tale of
trucks, orphans, and kittens, your brain fires up your frontal lobe which is directly involved
in suppressing or inhibiting the truth. The act of imagining things, which is in effect
nothing but the exercise of creating lies, is believed to involve activity that passes
straight through the frontal lobe, and that's no accident. The limbic system is then activated due to
a flood of stress hormones which are themselves caused by the rising anxiety your brain starts
to feel. Fear of being caught in a lie and the mental
gymnastics required to successfully pull a lie off all take a huge toll on your brain,
and your brain's electrical activity makes it light up like a christmas tree due to all
the frantic activity that takes place. By contrast, telling the truth requires far
less brain activity and keeps the brain relatively quiet. Because you're telling a giant whopper though
your brain is practically doing somersaults as it fires up the regions of the brain needed
for imagination, the part of the brain that accesses your memories so you can make sure
your lie lines up somewhat with reality, and the part of the brain that coordinates your
body's physical reactions so it can sell the lie. Basically you're putting your poor brain through
a triathlon and this causes a huge stress response- this rise in stress signals throughout
the body is exactly what a lie detector is tuned to detect by the way. With all that stress your heart starts beating
just a little bit faster- the bigger the whopper or the greater the consequences, the more
your heart beats. Many people will often experience a telltale
reddening of the ears as well as the blood rushes to the overworked brain, however this
is not necessarily an accurate method of detecting a lie as being part of a stressful situation
can often produce the same effect. If your ears suddenly start burning red in
the middle of normal conversation though, this can be a pretty good indicator to people
around you that you're telling a fib. Some people believe that you can tell if someone
is lying by their eye movements- erratic movements or an inability to meet your gauze is often
considered a sign of lying, but the truth is far more complicated than that. Most people have normally very active eyes
when they are in the midst of conversation, but it’s hypothesized by some that you can
tell what a person is thinking about by simply observing how they move their eyes as they
talk to you. If someone looks up and to the left they are
typically thinking about an image that they had to construct themselves, something they
are being asked to imagine. Moving up and to the right on the other hand
typically signifies that someone is thinking of an image that they have previously seen
and are trying to remember. This could be a handy way of spotting a liar,
if the question you are asking is something visually centered. For example, asking someone if they really
did see something they claim to have seen would likely have the person either looking
up and left because they are trying to imagine what it is that they claimed to have seen
so they can answer follow-on questions, or up and to the right because they are genuinely
recalling a visual memory of what they saw. But this connection between eye movement and
cognitive function has been called into question by many and has yet to be conclusively proven
one way or the other. Lying and the physical stress it causes also
tends to manifest in the shoulders, and you might see someone literally bending over slightly
from the sheer weight of the mega-whopper they've been telling. A very slight crunch or roll in the shoulders
could be indicative of the weight of someone's untruth as it rests on their mind. Often someone under the stress of a particularly
big lie will engage in self-pacifying actions, small gestures that bring comfort and help
calm us in very stressful situations. This can include things such as touching your
face, licking your lips, or massaging your neck- though again, these signs typically
only manifest during large or stressful lies. Overwhelmingly though the stress of a lie
will lead to higher blood pressure, as well as an increase in respiration. If someone appears to be breathing just a
tad bit faster than normal this could be a strong indicator that they are telling you
a lie. The average person lies 1.5 times within the
first minute of meeting someone. The vast majority of this is of course the
greasing of social wheels which makes our daily lives livable, yet the stress of telling
real lies is proven to be detrimental to your health. Lies force your brain to work overtime and
your body to respond as if in a high-stress situation. The more you lie, and the more you have to
keep up with old lies and pretend you're not lying, the more stressed out your body and
brain become. So take a cue from us and learn to live telling
the truth, because in the end it turns out that honestly really is the best medicine
in this case. Sure, you might have to deal with a few awkward
social situations, but as long as you're respectful and polite, people will learn to value and
even admire you for your unshakable integrity- and anyone who doesn't, frankly isn't someone
worth keeping in your life in the first place, because they're probably a liar themselves. How many lies a day do you think you tell? What's the biggest whopper you ever told? Let us know in the comments, and as always
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