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are you a good liar?

moshquerade

moshquerade

No Lifer
Good liars may be wired differently

By JEFF GAMMAGE
Knight Ridder Newspapers

For more than 11 years, from the moment of his arrest to the moment of his execution, Roger Keith Coleman lied.

He lied to the courts, to his attorneys, to the news media, to the aunt and uncle who stood by him, to thousands of supporters who took up his cause.

He lied as he sat strapped in Virginia's electric chair in 1992, proclaiming his innocence with such sincerity that his backers pressed on even after his death. His guilt was definitively proved only two weeks ago, through new DNA tests.

How could Coleman have lied so long and so well to so many?

The fact is, everybody lies sometimes. But some people step beyond the polite lies that color everyday discourse and into pathology.

The hard question is why that happens.

"The so-called pathological liar has learned from an early age that they get punished more often for telling the truth than they do for lying," says John Rooney, an emeritus professor of psychology at La Salle University. "They get so accustomed to devious behavior that they lie without much thought or emotion."

Recently, University of Southern California scientists offered a possible physical explanation, finding proof of brain abnormalities among people who habitually lie and cheat. Pathological liars had a surplus of white matter, the wiring that can provide tools for deceit, and a deficit of gray matter, which helps restrain the impulse to lie.

Our culture accepts a certain amount of deception - even demands it. If your wife asks you if she's getting fat, there is but one correct reply. Answering in the affirmative doesn't prove that you're honest - it proves you're a fool. But we have less tolerance for people who refuse to come clean when the evidence against them is overwhelming.

For years, Pete Rose maintained he never bet on baseball - and was banned from the game.

Rosie Ruiz has become a punch line, still insisting she won the 1980 Boston Marathon, 26 years after she jumped into the race near its end.

And Korean stem-cell pioneer Hwang Woo-suk, his career in ruins, recently apologized for claiming to have cloned a human embryo.

But as much as we castigate people for lying, some of the blame lies with ourselves. A successful lie requires at least two parties, one to tell it and one to believe it. Studies show most of us aren't very good at identifying liars. In fact, the people who think they're good at it actually score lower.

Maltin cites the research of University of California professor Paul Ekman, who conducted pioneering work in "microexpressions" - the small, involuntary facial movements that reveal true emotions. Most people never notice microexpressions in others. But to a trained observer, they represent the brain's recognition of dishonesty, even as the mouth blabbers on.

You don't detect dishonesty by looking for the lie, Maltin says, but by identifying the change in behavior that suggests a person is nervous in a situation where he or she shouldn't be. But there's a caveat.

"If somebody doesn't believe what they're saying is dishonest or deceptive, or if somebody delights in trying to deceive you, that person will not exhibit the characteristics," Maltin says. "You will never, for the most part, be able to identify a liar unless the person has a conscience."
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http://www.chron.com/CDA/archives/archive.mpl?id=2006_4050465
 
whoa..... very interesting.
I am a bad liar. Husband knows when i am not telling the truth.
 
I am a good liar, however over the years have discovered how much better things smooth over if you tell the truth. On occasion I'll bend the truth, but even that is pretty rare.
 
You want a truthful answer? This reminds me of those old puzzles about the tribes of truth-tellers and liars who live in a foreign country....
 
Yes...I'm a good liar. In fact.....I'm the BEST liar! I've won awards for lying! Yep, I was made a secret agent by the Clinton administration because I could lie to the enemy and get their secrets. The problem is, I could lie so well that they couldn't trust the information I gave them, so they gave me a billion dollars not so say anything. I told them I wouldn't---but I really did (being I'm a liar). They took my billion dollars back and made me promise to never lie again.

And ever since then I haven't lied once.
 
Hillary Clinton is an excellent liar. He's been hiding his actual genrder for a long time.

Oh wait, that's a master of disguises. Nevermind.
 
On the rare occasion that I am actually in a situation that a lie is easier than the truth... it rolls out so smoothly that i almost believe it myself.

😉
 
I'm a pretty good liar, got away with it quite often in my youth. Now I have discovered how much easier life is without the lies. It is so much easier to remember the truth, than the various lies I might have told. Also I sleep much better at night.
 
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