Do you remember the first time you told a lie? My initial thought was I don't lie, but then I had to think about my own question to myself for a moment. When I was a very young boy at the old age of 5, my mother enrolled me in a nursery school. To this day I can remember Mr. Baptiste, a very nice black man that came around the week before school started to introduce himself to me. I remember that he was a very kind man, spoke very slow and clear and brought me a toy truck and a box of animal cookies. He told me that he would be picking me up every morning in his station wagon car to go to a school to play with other kids, draw pictures, play games and have good food to eat. Afterwards he would bring me back home. I remember him asking me if that sounded okay. Once again, I thought about it and asked how early would he be picking me up. My mother laughed and gave me the eye to go and play.
After my first day I can remember my mother asking with a big smile, "Did you have lots of fun today at school?" Being a very intuitive kid, I could tell that she was more excited about school than I was and that If I told the truth she would be upset and I might get a spanking, so I smiled and nodded my head to indicate that I enjoyed it. It helps having an older brother to teach you a few tricks on how to analyse people. He called it telling a little lie to make someone else feel good or to protect someone. He said to always place one hand behind your back and cross your fingers, making it not a lie. Once I disobeyed my mother and took a cookie out of the cookie jar. When asked if I had eaten a cookie without her permission I panicked and said, no. That was a spanking day. I didn't know that cookie crumbs were all over my face, hands and on the front of my shirt, not to mention all over the floor. I learned how to do it with perfection the next time. Today, I still love oatmeal raisin cookies, yum.
When do you think children start to lie? Children learn to tell lies from an early age, usually around three years old. This is when a child starts to realise that the parent or adult isn't a mind reader, so they can say things that aren’t true without them always knowing.
Children lie more at 4-6 years of age. They often get better at telling lies by matching their facial expressions and their tone voice to what is being said. Children sometimes will eventually tell the truth if asked a lot of questions. There are several types of lies that we all use:
• Lying to protect the feelings of others
• Lying to protect yourself
• Lying to yourself
• Lying to get out of an awkward situation
• Lying to hurt others
• Lying to maintain privacy
• Lying to avoid embarrassment
• Lying to obtain a reward or a job by faking one's experience
• Lying to win admiration from others
• Lying to exercise power over others. Famously embodied by Hitler & Trump, this is
arguably the most dangerous motive for telling lies.
I must agree that most of us lie all the time about something, no matter how small. Here are a few examples to jog your memory. At work or in any setting you may run into someone that will say how are you doing and we normally will say great or I am doing well, thank you as we try to keep moving, especially if we don't know the other person. Or, if you are at a restaurant or at a friends place for lunch or dinner, they may ask, do you like the food? Instead of saying the beef was overcooked and horrible, most people to be polite would say, it was delicious, but I have been having some problems with my stomach over the past few days, but may I take some home with me for tomorrow? Through my observations I have noticed that parents will demand children to lie to protect the feelings of, say, a gift giver who gives something the child doesn't want. Many of us feel that we have to lie sometimes out of politeness or tact.
One of my favourite games to play is to identify a liar in the office or one that slipped into my network of friends and listen to them lie and keep lying when I know they are not telling the truth. I find it amusing until I get bored then it's like the old saying, bye Felicia. Try it sometimes, it's fun to watch the liar dig their hole deeper and deeper before they stumble and fall into it.
Some liars are really good and can fool most of us most of the time but eventually they trip on their own stories. It takes a lot of practice to remember every detail of a lie. So how do you know when someone is weaving a lie? There are a few red flags to alert you when someone may spinning a web of lies, they include:
• Being vague; offering few details when questioned
• Repeating questions before answering them
• Speaking in sentence fragments
• Vocal uncertainty — unsure or insecure
• Failing to provide specific details when a part of the story is challenged
• Indifference — shrugging, lack of expression and a bored posture
• Grooming behaviours such as playing with their hair or pressing fingers to lips
• Overthinking — trying too hard to fill in the details of a story
One way to catch most liars is to ask them to tell their story in reverse. It can increase the accuracy of lie detection. Remember, lying is more challenging than telling the truth. Liars will usually exert more mental energy toward monitoring their behaviours and evaluating the responses of others. Another way to trick a liar is to ask a lot of why questions. They can have lots of trouble explaining their intentions and become distracted. In reality there is no surefire way to spot a liar, but it's important to follow and listen to your gut instincts.
Many years ago, someone I thought of as a friend turned out to be a liar, but taught me a valuable lesson about lying. They said to me, "Just keep saying the lie over and over again every day for as long as it takes until you believe it. Once you can believe that the lie is true, it's no longer a lie and you are not lying and you can repeat it with confidence and gain whatever it is you want from that person or that organisation." I must admit that some of their lessons helped me to obtain key positions in different organisations by answering key questions very differently. For example, when asked if I had experience in a certain area, I would respond with a smile and a confident yes, I have experience but I am a bit rusty. I always added, that I would be willing and excited to learn the way they do things once hired. What I wasn't told by my fake liar of a friend was that once hired, it was necessary to hit the ground running and to prepare myself for what I said I had some experience doing. That's when I started to wonder if everyone lies or as many will say, stretch the truth. After many years of working I discovered that most of the people on interview panels had lied to get where they were and many still lacked the skills they were questioning interviewees about. Once I discovered this I started to work with friends and colleagues on how to get through tough interviews by preparing a list of questions for panel members in order to obtain more clarity about positions. Most couldn't answer the questions, had no idea, and would always change the subject.
To my surprise studies have shown that the frequency of lying does change based on the medium. People tend to lie more when using email versus pen and paper. People lie more, reveal less information, and feel more justified when using email. Most felt their lies would not be discovered.
One of my favourite crime television series was called Lie to Me, starring Tim Roth. Through applied psychology, Roth played the part of Dr. Cal Lightman, he and his colleagues accepted assignments from local and federal law enforcement agencies and assisted in investigations to discover the truth. That's when I became interested in observing liars.
My latest disgusting fascination is with Kayleigh McEnany, Trump's latest White House Press Liar. She truly believes her lies and does not care how many people are hurt as a result of her vicious words. It's clear to see that she is a stone cold liar, just like Trump. At her first press briefing when she stated, "I will never lie to you, you have my word on that," which lasted for 15 minutes before lies spilled from her mouth. McEnany’s first lie from the White House podium came in response to a question about comments President Donald Trump made earlier in the day characterizing Tara Reade’s sexual assault allegation against Joe Biden as “far more compelling” than the accusations made against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearings. Asked to flesh out Trump’s thinking, McEnany characterized the Kavanaugh allegations as “verifiably false.” She added, “I think it was a grave miscarriage of justice with what happened with Justice Brett Kavanaugh. There’s no need for me to bring up the salacious, awful, and verifiably false allegations that were made against Justice Kavanaugh,” she said. Yet another bold face lie.
Instead of being “verifiably false,” multiple accusations against Kavanaugh were found to be credible during the course of an investigation conducted by the New York Times that was published last fall, roughly a year after his confirmation to the court. The lies continue and I would recommend watching her legal techniques of lying disguised as a legal argument. The best liars are in complete control and when called upon to explain something, they terminate the meeting or refuse to respond to a question.
Each and every day I keep wondering why the lesson my mother taught me and my siblings about liars hasn't come true yet. She use to say, liar, liar pants on fire and that would put the fear into us kids until we were old enough to know that it would never happen. My wish today is to actually see a few people go up in a blaze for all their lies that are hurting so many people.
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