Lying

Most of the time I manage to avoid paying much attention to Donald Trump, but sometimes I can’t ignore a story, especially if it is quite simply extraordinary.  Last month, three reporters wrote an article for the Washington Post about his constant stream of false or misleading claims.  The numbers were incredible:  I hope you’ll forgive this extensive quote from their piece:

In 2017, President Trump made nearly 1,999 false or misleading claims. In 2018, he added another 5,689, for a total of 7,688.  Now, with a few weeks still left in 2019, the president already has more than doubled the total number of false or misleading claims in just a single year.  As of Dec. 10, his 1,055th day in office, Trump had made 15,413 false or misleading claims, according to [the Post’s] Fact Checker’s database that analyzes, categorizes and tracks every suspect statement he has uttered. That’s an average of more than 32 claims a day since our last update 62 days ago.  In fact, October and November [of 2019] rank as the second- and third-biggest months for Trumpian claims … A key reason for this year’s jump: The uproar over Trump’s phone call with Ukraine’s president on July 25 – in which he urged an investigation of former vice president Joe Biden, a potential 2020 election rival – and the ensuing House impeachment inquiry. Nearly 600 of the false or misleading claims made by the president in the past two months relate just to the Ukraine investigation.  The president apparently believes he can weather an impeachment trial through sheer repetition of easily disproven falsehoods.[i]

Once I got over the shock of their story, I thought lying deserved a comment.  Clearly, there are several issues here.  First, given the complexities of the topics they address, isn’t it inevitable and even necessary that politicians lie some of the time?  Not just politicians, other people too, often for good reasons?  Second, in case lying concerns you, surely we can be reassured it is possible and relatively easy to find what is true through services like Fact Checker?  Anyway, many statements are so often patently untrue, the only challenge is in finding the truth if it is important to do so.  Ah, but isn’t that what Trump wants?  A deluge of dishonest tweets, and soon it flows past without our attending to what is being said, let alone taking time to refute the lies.

Before we start, we might need to agree on the use of some key terms.  Lying is stating something as a fact when knowing what is said is untrue.  In the Washington Post report, false claims are lies.  Misleading is more devious.  It refers to being deceptive by saying something which may not be a lie, but which deliberately shifts our understanding or views so that we miss the critical issue within what took place or happened.  Today we can add fake news to this list, a neologism which seems to have several meanings.  In some cases, it means the news story is not new but old (and given that, by implication it ought to be discounted); in some other cases it means lying or at least misleading; and in some cases it means irrelevant, off the point, to be ignored.  I am certain you have picked up some additional nuances, too.

There are times when not telling the truth or misleading is necessary.  I am on the board of a therapeutics company, seeking to develop a treatment for cocaine addiction.  If we are successful in laboratory testing our potential drug, the process will move on to clinical trials, and Stage 3 drug testing almost inevitably involves deception.  This is the point at which a drug is given to a large number of people, most often using the ‘double blind’ approach.  In a typical review, this means while everyone is administered a dose, half are not receiving the drug, but a placebo (or sometimes an alternative and already tested treatment).  This approach helps discriminate between the effects of expectations (I am taking a drug so I will get better) as opposed to any real therapeutic benefit.  In other words, the trial rests on not telling the truth.

Defenders of the ethics of this necessary approach explain that no-one is being misled.  Every participant in the trial knows they are equally likely to get the trial drug or the alternative.  If the trial drug proves successful, those in the trial who didn’t received it may have the opportunity to take the effective treatment later.  But an equal chance is not the same as an equal outcome.  Those who receive the real drug may well benefit, those without will not.  This is a tricky topic, as I well know from chairing a Human Research Ethics Committee for a major Australian cancer hospital (in the US the equivalent body is called an Institutional Review Board).  The issues are even trickier when a trial is proposed involving people facing a life-threatening disease.

While there are good grounds to defend double blind drug testing, there is very little to justify the trickery that has been used in some psychological experiments.  The classic in this field is the notorious study carried out by Stanley Milgram in the 1960’s, whose ‘memory and learning experiment’ was set up to measure obedience to authority by looking at the effects of punishment on learning success.  Briefly, he recruited volunteers (through advertising in a local newspaper) to taking part in a learning test.  The volunteers were to be teachers, placed in a specially constructed booth with an intercom and a ‘Shock Generator, Type ZL’!  The learners were actors, briefed to play their role, and once they had been taken into a separate room with electrodes strapped to their wrists, the exercise began.  Each volunteer teacher was instructed to issue the ‘learner’ with an electric shock every time they gave a wrong answer in a memory task. With every mistake, the shock was to be raised by 15 volts. In fact, no shocks were being given, but the actor-learners made increasingly dramatic pleas and protests, and the volunteer-teachers were told to ignore them.  Whenever the volunteers faltered or refused, they were encouraged to proceed by a series of pre-scripted prompts.  “Please continue. The experiment requires that you continue. It is absolutely essential that you continue. You have no other choice, you must go on”.

The study continued through several, often quite horrible, variations.  Quite apart from the ethics of what was done, the results proved unhelpful, as they left room for various interpretations.  Many volunteers did give increasing shocks, often to a high level:  however, there are competing perspectives on these results. The volunteers might have been responding to authority.  However, they might have been anxious to help people learn, or seeking to please the research assistant in the room.  They might have been responding to cues about the importance of science, themselves as quasi-scientists, etc.  More to the point, by lying the researchers were creating a situation which led to many volunteers becoming very disturbed by what they had apparently done. [ii]

It’s an old study, and an old story: scientists can be unethical.  Since we began with Donald Trump, perhaps we should return to politicians and lying.  Most people are likely to agree there are some circumstances in which we would accept lying by politicians is acceptable, especially by those in government.  We can recall examples of dishonesty during wartime or when rescuing hostages, where subterfuge was essential to allow the successful completion of a mission.

Outside of those times, it’s less clear cut.  This has been made clear in the recent debate over reporting politicians’ statements on Facebook, following Facebook’s decision to remove what is described as ‘manipulated media’, media that has been altered using some kind of smart software, to change a person, words, or whatever else is modified.  Apparently, if Facebook determines a politician has shared manipulated media, they will remove it. But Facebook will not censor political speech as such ‘if it is in the public interest to see it’, even if it contains outright lies – as long as it hasn’t been manipulated by some kind of smart digital application!  Moreover, it will be Facebook which determines what is in the public interest, judging this against the ‘risk of harm’.  What an extraordinary situation.  “Who exactly at Facebook will be doing that weighing? Who determines the nature of potential harms? It’s unclear.  But this much seems clear: It’s perfectly fine to lie, harass and manipulate by the millions online, provided you are an elected official or fall into the amorphous loophole of “newsworthiness.” It’s the one protected class of people who can get away with behavior that would see others banned.  Politicians, it seems, have a license to behave badly, made possible by technology companies that kowtow to the powerful rather than stand up to them.” [iii]  Hey, it’s all systems ‘go’, Donald!

Were he a reader, Trump would have been be happy to have seen a recent study of 42 US presidents, up to and including George W Bush.  The researchers asked historians, who were chosen as experts on each president, to identify both their negative and positive personality traits, and then correlated these with independent assessments of presidential performance.  It turned out that “successful presidents scored high in the prevalence of a trait known as ‘fearless dominance’, characterised by an almost complete lack of fear in the face of great danger. Heroes have the trait, but it ‘also reflects the boldness often seen in psychopaths’, Lillienfeld says. His study on the presidents, published in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2012, noted that ‘fearless dominance’ was associated with ‘better-rated presidential performance, leadership, persuasiveness, crisis management, Congressional relations’. It was also associated with ‘initiating new projects and being viewed as a world figure’ … Highly entitled people don’t have stronger desires, they just have less conflict – less guilt and overthinking when it comes to acting on those desires.”  Unconcerned lying – now why does this sound alarmingly familiar?

Returning to the work of psychologists, the field is packed with studies of deception, trickery, and a fascination with dishonesty.  I can’t quite bring myself to consider why this might be so.  However, some research does lead to interesting findings.  In 2014, Francesca Gino at Harvard Business School and Scott Wiltermuth of the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California published a study on the connection between dishonesty and creativity inPsychological Science (in 2014).  Given creative people and divergent thinkers are involved in a certain amount of rule-breaking, thinking ‘outside the box’ and seeing possibilities between unrelated ideas or things that others might miss, the two researchers wondered if creative people might be prone to other forms of rule‑breaking, such as cheating and lying.  Going further, they proposed a study to examine whether dishonesty can lead people to be more creative.

Sad to report, that did seem to be the case.  Of course, the connection between dishonesty and creativity is complex, and the research was exploratory at best.  However, Wiltermuth explained: “I can’t go out and say to everyone: “Let people lie to you so they can be more creative.” Yet cheating gets people out of a rule-following mindset.” And creativity can be the result.” [iv]

What about research on cheating in the professions, in law and medicine?  One of many similar studies, researchers at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston looked at cheating in medical school. The results were worrying: no conclusive data, but the researchers were “distressed at the level of cheating described and at how efforts to combat it have failed. The cheating behaviours that they looked at cover a wide range, from copying notes from class to entering data in the medical records that is not based on examination. ‘You hate to see this in a profession where you want everyone held to a higher standard,’ Falik tells me – one in which lives are at stake.” [v]

Surely lying can be uncovered.  Members of older generations like to think they know how to find out the truth, and most have sources on which they rely.  In the US, The Washington Post and The New York Times are seen as credible and authoritative, although many other people rely on Fox News for facts, which is less likely to offer a balanced, truth-laden commentary!  These older generations are following long-ingrained media habits, but what about younger people?

Towards the end of last year, The Economist reported on a study that revealed between 2009 and 2018 the share of teenagers who read newspapers declined from around 60% to close to 20%.  Where do they get their news?  According to Pew Research Centre, 95% of American teens have access to a smartphone and 45% are online “almost constantly”. That’s no surprise.  Technology gives teenagers an extraordinary reach, well demonstrated by those following Greta Thunberg’s global “school strike for climate”, now in 150 countries.  Six months of student led protests in Hong Kong are being supported by sharing digital data.  I read a US 13-year-old told Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, “I’m not old enough to vote yet, but I can follow you on Instagram!” [vi]

Earlier, I commented on Facebook’s limited oversight.  No matter; many Western teenagers see Facebook as “deeply uncool. It is for old people. Nor do many of them hang out on Twitter, which plays an outsized role in journalism and politics only because it is full of journalists and politicians. They have little time for youth-focused websites such as BuzzFeed either. “It’s clearly adults trying to relate to young people,” says Victoria, a 16-year-old in Kentucky. … Action has shifted to Instagram (owned by Facebook), WhatsApp (ditto) and YouTube (Google), each of which has well over a billion users …  Common Sense, an American non-profit group, found in a recent study that 69% of American teens watch online videos every day, mostly on YouTube. They spend nearly seven and a half hours a day looking at screens of all kinds.” [vii]

How do teenagers know what’s true?  With less use of traditional media, are they are relying on peers, online celebrities, and activists, likely to believe those they follow?  If more ‘objective’ sources are ignored, claims can flourish unchecked, misleading statements taken on face value, and fake news accepted.  It’s not just young people.  As more people rely on smartphones and tablets for news, so digital media have created an environment ripe for lying, as truth manipulators like Donald Trump well understand.  Today, perhaps, the best liar wins?

[i] President Trump has made 15,413 false or misleading claims over 1,055 days, by Glen Kessler, Salvador Rizzo and Meg Kelly, Washington Post, Dec. 16, 2019.  Just over a month later, it shot up to 16,241!

[ii] For a summary, see Aeon, Antonio Melechi, 4 September 2015

[iii] Why Politicians Get a License to Lie, Charlie Warzel, New York Times, January 7, 2020

[iv] Reported in Kristin Ohlson, A touch of Evil, Aeon, 28 April, 2015

[v] Kristin Ohlson, op cit

[vi] Seize the memes: Teenagers are rewriting the rules of the news, The Economist, Print edition, Dec 18th 2019

[vii] Ibid

Recent Posts

Categories

Archives