Many studies have suggested that humans are not as adept at deception detection as once thought. Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche posited that our true aim in conversation is self-presentation and social standing, not necessarily truth-seeking. That is a bit upsetting, but if we look at our politicians, their social and political standing seem to far outweigh sharing the truth with us.
Herman Melville, after writing many wonderful books such as Moby-Dick, wrote one called The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade. As was usual with Melville, the story takes place on a ship and is about vignettes involving conmen, cheats and chumps. This was the world as he saw it. There were hustlers, cynics and gullible dupes. As one might expect, the gullible came in last. He maintained that any dupe with money will end up poor.
Think about that for a moment in our world of scams and the poor victims who believe that they owe taxes and the sheriff will arrive shortly to arrest them if they don’t wire the funds. Their grandchild is in trouble, but don’t tell his parents. Just send $1,000 in gift cards from Target. Your Gmail account will be closed tonight unless you act immediately. How about all the memory cures that you can buy online with Elon Musk delivering the message? God love AI.
Humans lie all the time. Most lie 30 times a day. Lying is the trick we use to get an advantage over other people. Detection comes along with experience. In today’s world, you must be able to smell a rat, or never buy in, even if it is truly a bargain and for real.
Good people lie for a number of reasons, starting with the existence of Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. Sometimes we lie so that another is not injured by the truth. “Do I look fat in this dress?” Be careful on that one.
I wrote once on the necessity to lie. The Gestapo shows up (the prior example of ICE) and wants you to tell where your child or husband is. Fearing the worst, you tell a lie to save them. No one blames you for these types of necessary lies. This may well continue into business. The truth about a product that needs to be sold. Which product is best? Ours or theirs?
This has led our philosophers to coin a phrase of which I was unaware. The term is “epistemic vigilance.” This is the argument that we possess a variety of tools to identify and call out a lie. The idea is that humans have a cognitive mechanism called epistemic vigilance that targets misinformation and that we have a built-in lie detector.
This “ability” rests on how reliable we consider others to be. We assume that most people at least start out as being honest. Over time, if someone tells us lies, we calibrate our vigilance and conclude that the person doesn’t really know anything about the subject on which he spoke, and we will not touch that topic with him in the future.
The second observation starts in our childhood, and by examples, we learn whom to trust or not. Those who were found to be wrong by the child on prior occasions give the child a clue toward competence.
Other philosophers have called this term pure fabrication. They do not dispute the fact that most are vigilant but dispute that this vigilance is inborn or quite so failproof. They illustrate how bad the human is at telling the truth from a falsehood. They believe that their research demonstrates that the human is quite poor at deception detection. The “built-in” lie detector is often inaccurate and more often is turned off. They believe that the human isn’t very good in determining when a person is competent.
These researchers have shown how people use other factors to determine whether someone is good at his job. We wrongly believe that someone with the right facial features and presentment is competent. Unfortunately, the way a person holds himself out should not be a sufficient reason to believe in him. That is the skill often possessed by the conman.
Nietzsche has a thesis where he argues that our goal in conversation is not primarily to acquire truthful information but for self-preservation. In other words, we accept or reject statements based on a personal goal, not necessarily on their truthfulness. We learn to want truths that are “pleasant” or even life-preserving, and we are hostile to potentially harmful or destructive truths.
The reason I have pursued this line of truth-seeking comes from some of the bold conspiracy theories that have arisen. If epistemic vigilance were truly inborn, we would all be fact-checking and dismissing conspiracists all the time. But we don’t. The lies we were told during the Vietnam War were accepted by most. Many still believe the Holocaust never happened. So often when a charismatic speaker delivers a statement, we accept it. There is no internal safeguard that makes us question it. Thus, our politicians have a head start.
If we are not wired to automatically determine the truth or falsity of a statement, we are drawn in. Think of witnesses in a trial and the jury’s duty to discern the truth. How about so many of the statements made by our present political leaders. Makes some of us pretty scared.
· Dennis Marek can be contacted at llamalaw23@gamil.com.