In one of my interminable videos, I mentioned the fact that 90% of people lie. And ever since then, I've been subjected to abusiveinvective, criticism, mockery, and I've been pilloried in the public square.
People claimed that this figure is wrong, that it's not true that most people lie. The vast majority of people are honest, etc.
This, by the way, has a name. It's known as a variant of the Baader-Meinhof fallacy. I will not go into it.
The fact that people instantaneously trust the veracity and the honesty of other people and their statements. It's a fallacy.
The fact is that the overwhelming vast majority of people lie and they lie a lot. And I say a lot. That's the understatement of this new 21st century. Like a lot.
How much we're going to explore in this video based on statistics and so on.
But before we go there, I think the problem lies in the definition of a lie.
I define lie very expansively. Other people define lies very, very narrowly.
It reminds me that some people do not consider oral sex to be sex, because it's convenient and egosyntonic.
But of course, oral sex is sex, and lies have multifarious, multifaceted forms.
And if we put together all these formats of lies, all the possibilities of lies, all the ways people lie, then we're going to find out a harrowing, terrifying truth.
People, all people, lie most of the time.
My name is Sam Vaknin. I am the honest author of Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited and a veritable professor of psychology.
On we go.
Let's start by defining a lie.
But before we go there, I would like to refer you to a book by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz. It's called Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are. It's one of the most frightening books I've ever read.
And I suggest that you read it during the day, not before bedtime.
Because what it shows is that we are surrounded by liars, and that in all probability, we are liars too.
Okay. A lie in my dictionary is any intentional counterfactual utterance.
So there are three elements.
Intentionality, a lie has to be deliberate and premeditated.
A lie has to be counterfactual. In other words, a lie has to contradict reality. A lie cannot be based on facts, or can be based on facts, but the majority of the statement has to be based on facts to qualify as truth.
And it is an utterance. In other words, it has to be communicated somehow.
It is, as the Oxford English Dictionary defines a lie, it is an intentionally false statement.
Let's go to the dictionary of the American Psychological Association and have a look what they have to say about lies.
The lie according to them is a false statement or false presentation known to be untrue that is made with the intention to deceive.
Despite the moral and legal proscription against lies, they are a cognitive signal that the liar understands enough of what others are thinking to be motivated to lie to them.
In other words, the reality testing of the liar is intact, continues the definition, in children acquiring an understanding of this sort represents a cognitive milestone usually reached around age 3 it's a part of theory of mind.
In other words, when children understand the difference between lie and truth, that indicates that they have a theory of mind.
At that stage, a child's initial lies tend to be indiscriminate. They are not yet aware of the moral qualms associated with lying.
By age 4, children can reliably tell the difference between harmful lies and white lies, and they stop lying indiscriminately.
As they grow older, their lying becomes more sophisticated, in other words, more plausible, a social skill that is influenced by their particular culture, which plays a pivotal role in determining how they lie and when they feel it is appropriate to lie.
There's a distinction between lie and fabrication. Fabrication is the act of concocting or inventing a whole or part of a story, often with the intention to deceive.
Now, the second half of this video deals with the typology of lies, many types of lies. But I'll mention the motivations.
So, some of us lie because it's polite, it's good manners to lie.
And some of us lie in order to prevent a continuation of the conversation. So for example I ask you, how are you and you say I'm well even if you have suicidal ideation? That's a lie. And the intention is to cut the conversation in the bud and not to allow it to proceed or to develop.
Another motivation to lie is protectiveness, the wish to protect someone or someone's feelings, to avoid hurting the feelings of people, to avoid shame and humiliation.
In other words, you lie in order to hide something about yourself that is either disgraceful or inferior and to prevent the sensation of shame and humiliation that are attendant upon exposure.
Another reason to lie is to avoid inconvenience or friction in social settings. These are known as white lies.
Then there is the self-enhancing lie. Self-enhancement.
When a person is insecure or grandiose, like the narcissist and so on so forth, this kind of person is likely to lie in order to self-enhance, to buttress and maintain an inflated fantastic sense of the self-concept which is divorced from reality.
The next reason, the next motivation to lie is to manipulate people and gaslight them. Psychopaths do that. These are psychopathic lies in the majority of cases.
Another reason to lie is to avoid the consequences of your actions. So criminals lie a lot.
Lies reflect biases and prejudices. You are far more likely to lie if the lie aligns with or tallies with your bias or your prejudice.
Lies also emanate from there the issue of ignorance. Ignorant people are more likely to lie than educated people because they have to resort to lying in order to pretend to be knowledgeable or in order to regain a sense of safety in an environment which is largely incomprehensible.
That's precisely the reason why artificial intelligence lies all the time. This is known as hallucination in artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence bots and artificial intelligence apps lie when they don't know the answer.
Lying is connected sometimes to cognitive distortions.
So if you misperceive reality, if you have an impaired reality testing, or if your cognition is distorted somehow and that applies to affect as well affective distortions, whenever there's a distortion there your statements your utterances your speech acts could become counterfactual because you are to some extent detached from reality or you're misperceive and misinterpreted reality. You have a hermeneutic deficit. You're very likely to make statements which are wrong, which are not true.
And of course, many people would perceive this as lying. This is what happens with the narcissist.
The narcissist rarely lies or gas lies. He simply believes his own confabulations and his own fantasies.
The narcissist is unable to tell the difference between reality and fantasy. And so many of the things the narcissists says fly in the face of evidence to the contrary. And yet the narcissist is insistent upon the veracity of his counterfactual statements.
Confabulation is another type of lying. It's an attempt to bridge memory gaps by conjuring up a plausible probable scenario.
But of course, this kind of scenario has no truth value. And so it could be false.
And in this sense, confabulations are often misperceived as lies.
False promises, future faking is a form of lying.
And finally, the famous, fake it till you make it, which is also, of course, lie until you're proven true.
Now what about the statistics? The statistics of lying.
I put together a compilation of studies online in the past 10 years especially, and here are the results.
Most people lie about twice a day. One could even say that the majority of people lie twice a day.
Now that's a lot of lying. If you're constitutionally honest for you to lie twice a day is a major issue.
And in my dictionary renders you a habitual liar. It's not a pathological liar, sort compulsive, but you are not averse to using lies as an instrument, to instrumentalizing and weaponizing lies.
At four years of age, 90% of kids understand the meaning of lying.
According to research, about 60% of people, 18 years and older, are incapable of having a conversation without lying once every 10 minutes. 60% of people, adults, lie once every 10 minutes. On average, three lies are told by adults every 10 minutes.
Can you digest this?
Parents are the primary victims of lying, with 86% of lies told to parents by their children, regardless of the age of their children, by the way.
Second to parents are friends and individuals who lie to 75% of the time. We lie to friends and others 75% of the time we lie to friends and others 75% of the time these are statistics from studies, hundreds of studies by the way.
Siblings are the third most likely to, accounting for 73% of the victims of lying.
The fourth most lie to group are spouses who are victims of lying 69% of the time.
Lying ties in with behaviors such as cheating, infidelity, and other forms of betrayal.
Online lies are most often seen on dating sites where 90% of the participants engage in untruthfulness. 40% of lies are seen on resumes and bios and CVs.
On a daily occurrence, there are 12% of people, adults, I'm talking about people 18 and older, 12% of people who lie sometimes or quite often.
On occasion, 80% of women tell half-truths. On CVs and resumes, at least 31% of people lie extensively.
Doctors are often victims of lying, where 13% of patients admit to lying when talking to their physicians.
This could be from, this could be small lies, like how many times did you take this medication, to big lies, like how do you feel?
And this applies even more so in therapy, although I couldn't find data. I believe that people lie in psychotherapy even more than they do in the physician's office.
Now again, it depends on the definition of a lie. If your definition is extremely narrow, then of course the figures you would get would be entirely different.
But what about stretching the truth? Stretching the truth is considered a form of lying. And it is committed by 32% of all patients at hospitals and healthcare centers. 30% of patients have lied about their exercise routine, smoking and food eating habits.
On average, six lies are made to supervisors, partners, spouses and workmates every day. Everyone tells six lies every day. Every day, women tell three lies to their partners, supervisors, and coworkers. So women lie a bit less than men. Contrary to the stereotype, by the way.
Lying on a phone call during a voice chat, for example, is 70% more likely. So in a face-to-face chat the number of lies is two-thirds. The number of lies on electronic means. If you're face-to-face with me, you're likely to tell about two to six lies depending on the context.
But if we are talking via a computer or via smartphone using apps, you are likely to lie to me almost twice as much.
10% of all lies can be defined as exaggerations. But 60% of all lies are definitely premeditated and deceptive. Of all liars, 70% claim to be willing to do so again.
Every week, every single American tells 11 lies.
There was a study of 11,336 lies told by 630. There was a study of 11, you see, and it's a lot of lie. There was a study of 11, you see, and it's not a lie.
There was a study of 11,336 lies told by 632 people over 91 days.
75% of these people lied between 0 to 2 times per day. 6% of the participants had low lying levels, which means that 94% had high lying levels.
Coming back to my earlier ancient video, but people in general lied more often on some days at random. We don't know why.
In total, most of the lies were trivial, such as lying about how well one's day was going. But a substantial minority of the lies were serious and manipulative and Machiavellian.
In another study, lies were studied over a brief period. The variety of people's lies tended to fluctuate. People that lie more often show greater variation than those who lie less often.
The top 1% of all liars lied 17 times each day, and these people had the most variance.
There's an open question, by the way, if you're interviewing a liar about how many times he lies, how do you know that he's telling the truth? That's an open question and that is known as the liar's paradox, something I will deal with a bit later.
The participants with little variance were the 1% with nearly zero instances of lying but not 0.
21% of people lie to avoid being around other people. 20% of people lie in order to be humorous, such as when telling a joke or making a prank.
Self-protection is the reason for 14% of people who lie. 13% of liars do so in order to make a good impression on others or to appear more favorable to other people. 11% of liars do it in order to protect someone else.
Personal gain or benefits are the reason that 9% of people tell lies. 2% of liars do it with the sole intent to hurt someone else. 5% of liars are unspecified, doing it for no apparent reason.
I would like to add to this that some liars lie because it's exciting. It is thrilling and it involves risk. They are risk takers. This would tend to be the antisocial or psychopathic liars.
So, in all this avalanche of statistics, how often do people lie?
In one survey, one of the biggest, 75% of participants admitted to lying two times a day, which is not a small number.
During communication, 7% of the communication consisted of lying, but only 10% of this were major lies. 90% of the time the lies were white.
But remember, 75% of people lie at least twice a day.
Does everyone lie?
Yes, the answer is everyone lies.
Between the ages of two and three years, the average ages for each child tells the first lie, lies are much more common, and actually constitute the bulk of the communication.
When you meet someone for the first time, this person is likely to lie to you at least twice or three times within the first 10 minutes.
I'm repeating this shocking number, for example, on dating or job interviews, or when you meet someone in the cafeteria, at the workplace, or whatever, a hobby, a club, the church, when you meet someone for the first time, they will lie to you two to three times within the first 10 minutesa very high likelihood.
In one day, the average person lies four times, so people lie 1,460 times a year at least. Men lie six times a day. Women lie three times a day, on average.
And that is exactly contra to the stereotype that women lie more. Women lie a lot less, like 50% less.
Honest people lie twice a day. Intermediate liars lie three to five times a day. Prolific liars lie six times or more a day.
So 74.7% of participants and 65.8% of the days lied twice a day. So that's 75% but if you add the other liars, intermediate, everyone lies. Everyone lies all the time, a lot, six times a day.
And so there's a question, is this a pathology? Is this a compulsion or anything?
We do have the clinical concept of pathological lie. It's a persistent, the definition in the American Psychological Association dictionary is this, but the pathological line is a persistent compulsive tendency to tell lies out of proportion to any apparent advantage that can be achieved.
This often occurs among people with alcohol dependence or brain damage, but it is most common among individuals with antisocial personality disorder.
I may add narcissistic and borderline personality disorder, who in some cases do not seem to understand the very nature of falsehood.
Now pathological line is closely allied or aligned with an earlier concept in psychology, which used to be known as pseudologia fantastica.
Pseudologia fantastica at the time was perceived as a clinical syndrome. And it involved elaborate fabrications, concocted to impress other people, to get out of an awkward situation, to give the individual an ego boost.
So pseudologia fantastica is very common in narcissistic personality disorder.
So it's not confabulation. Unlike the fictions of confabulation, the fantasies in pseudologia fantastica are believed, actually, and they're believed, but then they're dropped as soon as they're contradicted by evidence.
So pseudologia fantastica is open to refutation, and in this sense, that's why all pseudologia fantastica is closely allied with narcissistic personality disorder. It is not considered to be an integral part of the disorder, let alone a diagnostic criterion, because people with pseudologia fantastica are open to being convinced otherwise. They're open to evidence, to the contrary.
And so they change their fantasy or they change their mind once they evince incontroversible evidence that the fantasy is wrong.
And so, for example, tall tales, told by people with antisocial personality disorder.
So malingerers, individuals with factitious disorders, neuroses, psychosis, they all do this.
In the case of the narcissist, the pseudologica fantastica, such as it is, segues into a delusional disorder. It becomes a delusion, and I'll deal with it a bit later.
People lie so much that we can't even trust them to answer correctly or truthfully in psychological tests for their own good. We can't even trust them to report their own systems, their own symptoms, honestly, in order to get the help they need.
And so all psychological tests, especially the major ones, like MMPI and so, contain what we call a lie scale. A lie scale is a set of items within a psychological instrument to test, for example, a personality assessment.
And these items are used to indicate whether a respondent has been truthful in answering.
For example, an honest participant would respond similarly to the item, I never regret life decisions that I've made, and to the item, never regret life decisions that I've made and to the item I have never done anything that I later wished I could take back.
These are different ways of saying the same thing, of presenting the same concept.
So the answer should be in both cases, yes, in both cases, no. If the answer is yes on one of them and no the other, the person is lying.
Conversely, a respondent trying to present themselves as positively as possible, may answer such related questions inconsistently.
So this is known as the lie scale. There is an assumption that people lie all the time.
And of course it gave rise to the famous polygraph, a device that measures and records several physiological indicators of stress, such as heart rate, blood pressure, galvanic skin response and conductivity, conductance, and so on. It's an instrument, it's a device, and it has been widely used in interrogation of criminal suspects and employee screening and so on so forth.
And the idea is that if you measure marked physiological reactions to questions about such issues as criminal conduct, sexual deviation and truthfulness, if the physiological reactions are abnormally high or there's a state of excitation and hyper arousal which can be monitored and recorded by the device, that proves you're lying.
And this is why it's known as a lie detector.
Let it be clear. There are no studies that support a close relationship between physiological patterns and deceptive behavior, believe it or not, there are no rigorous studies that connect deceptivity the tendency to deceive lying and so on to any physiological response.
This is a myth.
However, it is the myth that renders the lie detector efficacious.
People believe erroneously that when they lie their heartbeat or heart rate, they're sweating, they believe these change when they lie.
So when they attend a session with a lie detector, they are already inculcated, they're already cultured or nurtured in a way that would indeed betray their line.
It is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The accuracy of polygraph examinations is controversial, of course, and the results are not accepted in evidence in many, many countries, especially in the United States.
The lie detector was invented in 1917 by an experimental psychologist, William Marston. And ever since then, it has been the topic of heated controversies and discussions.
I mentioned confabulation, which is common in psychosis, psychotic disorders, in narcissism, which is also in some way a psychotic disorder.
Confabulation is the falsification of memory, in which gaps in recall, memory gaps, are filled by fabrications that the individual accepts as fact.
It is not typically considered to be a conscious attempt to deceive other people, and in this sense, confabulations do not qualify as lying.
Confabulation occurs most frequently, as I said, in psychotic disorders, but also in, for example, Korsakoff syndrome, conditions associated.
The Korsakoff syndrome is the brain destroyed by alcoholism, and in conditions which induce neurologically based amnesia like Alzheimer's and so.
In forensic context eyewitnesses may resort to confabulation if they feel pressured to recall more information that they can remember and this gives rise to what came to be known as false memories.
And finally I would like to discuss two additional types of deviation from reality and from the truth.
One is known as fabulation, not confabulation but fabulation. Fabulation is random speech that includes the recounting of imaginary incidents by a person who believes these incidents to have been real.
And delusion is a highly personal idea or belief system, not endorsed by one's culture or subculture, for example, religion. And this idea, this tenacious idea, is maintained with conviction in spite of the irrationality of the idea or evidence to the contrary.
Delusions can be transient and fragmentary, and this is known as delirium. Delusions can be highly systematic and elaborate, and we call these delusional disorders.
In this sense, the narcissist grandiosity is akin to a delusional disorder.
But most delusions are in between.
Common types include delusional jealousy, delusions of being controlled, delusions of grandeur in narcissistic personality disorder, psychopathy, borderline, delusions of persecution in paranoid personality disorder, for example, delusions of reference, referential ideation, nihilistic delusions, and somatic delusion.
Now, we have a lot of data on delusions because it's been a topic that's been studied over the last two centuries, almost. And the data suggests that delusions are not primarily logical errors. They're derived from emotional problems. Delusions are reactions to emotional problems.
In this sense, they are compensatory. It's compensatory, it's effective compensation. Delusions have come to represent a very important factor in systems for diagnostic classification. Some researchers believe that delusions may be the most important symptom of schizophrenia, for example.
So here I gave you a survey of lying and what appears to be lying, but is not lying.
And I think, I hope I have set your mind at peace, and you realize that what I've said, that 90% of people lie a lot is quite true, unfortunately.
We're exposed to a lot of lies, thousands of lies, depending on the number of social interactionsyou're having, on a typical day. You're likely to be exposed to anywhere between 40 and 60 lies, about 60 percent of which would involve deception and about 10% of which would it intent to manipulate you or harm you in some way.
That is a truly terrifying picture and it is the truth.
It is a chilly Sunday and I am unkempt, disheveled and gashlimft. Gashlimft is an ancient German word that I've just invented.
You know the liar's paradox? It's someone who tells you every single sentence I say is a lie.
Well, there are two options, of course. Either he is telling the truth and then he is lying about lying all the time. Or he has just lied and this sentence is true which means that he always lies and this sentence is a lie so this is known as the liars paradox it was invented in ancient Greece I encourage you to go online and have a look it gave rise to numerous developments in mathematics arithmetic logical systems and so on so forth.
Lies, this is today's topic. There are 11 types of lies. And this is the truth.
Well, you know what I mean?
Okay, Shfanin, Pasochim, Shovabim.
Let's start with the first two types of pseudo-lies or quasi-lies.
I don't think these are actually lies. I think there are only nine types of pure unadulterated lies.
And these two behaviors which I'm about to expound on masquerade as lying, but they are actually not lying.
Start with gaslighting.
Gaslighting is a strategy. It's a strategy intended to make you doubt your own perception of reality, on judgment.
It's premeditated, it's cunning, it's orchestrated, it's carried out mostly by psychopaths, not by narcissists, not by narcissists, my fellow pseudo-experts, but by psychopaths.
Gaslighting is about disorienting you. Disorientation, dislocation, inability to tell apart, internal and external reality, confusion as to what is really happening, a impairment of reality testing.
Gaslighting is the construction of alternative realities or an alternative reality, which on the face of it appears to be palatable, reasonable, and rationals. But in reality, it's not reality. It's the psychopath's reality.
And the aim is to make you doubt yourself to the point that you will substitute the psychopath's judgment and perception of reality to your own.
This is gaslighting. Gaslighting uses lies, leverages lying, is one of the elements in the strategy.
But it's not actually the dominant element.
Still, some of the types of lies that I'm, some of the types of lies that I'm about to describe are used in gaslighting.
Now, the second type of behavior known as confabulation is common in psychotic disorders and in narcissism, pathological narcissism, according to many scholars, starting with Kernberg.
According to many scholars, pathological narcissism is indistinguishable from psychosis or on the border, the verge of psychosis.
Confabulation is a desperate attempt to breach memory gaps and memory lapses.
Narcissists are highly dissociative. They construct reasonable narratives as to what might have happened during the period that they fail to remember.
So they say to themselves, I remember point A and I remember point B, but how did I get from A to B?
Well, this must have happened. And this is confabulation, construction of plausible narratives, plausible storylines and scripts, which somehow flimsy bridge gaps in memory.
Now, confabulation is not lying. There is no premeditation here. There's no planning. There's no construction of an alternative reality. There's simply extrapolation.
They're simply saying, well, I remember hitting the ball and then I remember the ball entering the golf part. So I remember A and I remember B, what must have happened in the meantime, the ball traversed the air. I remember walking to my club and I remember exiting my club. I don't remember what it happened in between.
And so I must have sat there, drank, had some drinks, and read the newspapers or surfed the internet on my smartphone. This is what I usually do when I go to the club. So this must have happened on that occasion as well.
This is confabulation.
Confabulation, therefore, is not lying. Although many people misperceive it as lying. That's why narcissists are accused of lying.
Narcissists actually very rarely lie. They either confabulate or they create a fantasy in which they are emotionally invested in which they fully believe. They believe their own fantasies. They believe their own daydreaming. They believe their own confabulations.
Narcissists are no longer with us. They have a fantasy defense gone awry. They're taken over by a dream-like state.
So narcissistic confabulation, narcissistic fantasy, shared fantasy, they are not forms of lying.
Narcissists do not future fake. Psychopaths future fake.
Narcissists believe their own promises about the future. They are firmly ensconced in their fantasy. They say, this is going to happen. This is going to happen for sure. I'm going to do it a million percent. There's not doubt in my mind that I'm committed to this course of action.
The psychopath, of course, knowingly and intentionally misleads you.
The psychopath is goal oriented. You want something from you.
So he fakes the future. He wants your money, for example. He tells you he's going to marry because he wants your money. Or he wants to have sex with you. So he promises you a relationship.
The psychopath is goal oriented. And because of the goal orientation, everything he does is Machiavellian and cunning and scheming.
The narcissist is simply deluded. Deluded beyond reason and beyond measure. He inhabits a paracosm, a fantastic space that is akin to augmented or alternative reality. And he firmly believes the narcissist that is really there and that you belong there as well.
So there's no lying when it comes to, well, of course, everyone lies, but there's no lying as a strategy when it comes to narcissists.
In addition to this, there are nine types of lies that all of us, without a single exception, engage in daily life.
And here are the nine types.
Number one, utilitarian lie. That's a lie that is intended to accomplish something. A lie that is goal-oriented, a lie with structure and content are planned to promote or inspire changes conducive to the furtherance of the liar's aims and aspirations. Instrumental, utilitarian lies.
The next type is the smoke screen lie, a lie whose purpose is to obscure, conceal, hide, or remove true information. And this way mislead other people. This is common in the military, in espionage, in command operations. Smoke screen lies are intended to avoid facing, a humiliating, shameful or dangerous truth.
Number three, the compassionate lie, a lie that is geared towards sparing other people's feelings, catering to other people's sensitivities and vulnerabilities, and allowing other people to save face and to avoid shame and embarrassment. Most white lies are compassionate and empathic.
Number four, the ceremonial lie, lies and dissimulations whose function is to establish a hierarchy, a pecking order by demonstrating reverence and glossing over facts and behaviors that inconveniently contravene the accepted hierarchy, manners, etiquette. These are highly elaborate forms of ceremonial lying.
Number five, the compensatory lie, lies that are used in order to disguise the oft-humiliating fact that we do not know the truth or cannot remember it. Lies of this type amount to fiction, but with most of the interlocutors being unaware of it.
Number six, the confabulatory lie. These are intricate lies that weave a fabric of alternate reality, which is frequently an exaggerated form of the liars' traits, conduct, and personal history. Though of course confabulatory lies can be completely unrelated to anything real in the confabulat's life.
Number seven, the inferential lie. These are fallacious conclusions or extrapolations based on true assumptions or statements. Most logical fallacies are inferential lies.
And finally, the hybrid lie. Hybrid lies contain markers of an occult hidden truth or pathways to true information. They allow the recipients to read between the lines. People in communist countries used to do it when they were consuming the official media. And today, when you consume mainstream media, you would tend to do this. Hybrid lies are common in authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, or when there is a monopoly of group think and individuals are not allowed to think for themselves.
The logical lie is a pernicious phenomenon. Regrettably, all too common.
We need to accept that with the emergence of mass media and especially social media, lying has been legitimized as a form of art.
And so maybe we need to add a ninth type of lie. The artistic lie, the self-fashioned life, the self-reinvention lie, the I wish I were like that lie, the fantasy type lie, the lies that are common on social media, the lies which reflectsuppressed wishes, frustrations, hopes, and the sadness and tragedy of coming short.