'No, that doesn't make you look fat."
"I loved your book, but the others on the jury outvoted me."
"Wow! What an … amazing looking baby!!"
The list of benign, almost obligatory lies that escape our lips every day is longer than we may care to admit. We tell a hostess that we loved her Brussels sprouts (not true). Politicians say they won't raise taxes, and then they do. A doctor assures his terminally ill patient that there is still hope, when there isn't.
But in this persuasive and wide-ranging book about the useful role that deception plays in our lives, British author Ian Leslie argues that lies are not just the refuge of the cowardly, the Machiavellian, or the too-kind. Not coming entirely clean with other people and practising various degrees of self-deception are part of what it means to be a social animal, he claims. To successfully live with others is to learn to lie. (Chimpanzees practice deceptive behaviour too.)
We embellish our qualities in an effort to attract a better mate ("… loves taking long walks, training rescue dogs and playing polo …"). Good poker players win by bluffing and novelists are skilled liars. Even the way human perception works is an inventive case of connect-the-dots, a story we impose on the raw data our eyes take in. Deception, Leslie maintains, has always played an important role in human evolution.
We like to think we're good at "reading" people, and that liars reveal themselves through nervous twitches or a jumpy pulse on a polygraph. But lie detectors are not especially accurate. The best liar in a group is not sweating and fidgeting, according to Leslie; it's more likely to be the most charming, charismatic, "credible" person in the room. (Some experts in face-reading claim to able to capture a "leakage of truth" when "for a fraction of a second, the honest face disrupts the false face." "The face is like the penis," one expert likes to say. "It has a mind of its own.")
As for self-deception, it runs the gamut from the artist whose vision teeters on the verge of delusion to Arnold Schwarzenegger, who lived a lie for 10 years of his married life. What's striking, in fact, is not that lying is so prevalent in society, but that we assume total honesty is always within our reach. You'd think that decades of controversy about the wobbly line between fact and fiction in memoirs would have enlightened us; memory is its own breed of fiction, a fallible, malleable record of the past. We are all unreliable narrators of our own true stories.
The problem comes when we lie and don't know it. In the mentally ill, this is called "confabulation." But a similar "compulsion to narrate" can be found among artists. The young Bob Dylan liked to lie about his origins, claiming he was born in Gallup, N.M. Marlon Brando called the job of acting "lying for a living," and the DNA of many movies and plays is an act of deception that the audience is in on.
Of course, police work has caught some highly evolved liars. Leslie cites the example of a husband who murdered his wife and then staged her suicide. It was the punctuation and syntax of the fake suicide note he wrote that gave him away. She just wasn't the type to use a lot of periods, and he was.
Leslie explores the recovered-memory movement, when social workers and therapists managed to elicit "repressed" accounts of childhood abuse that turned out to be false memories, implanted by the suggestive line of questioning. What we believe about ourselves, it seems, is alarmingly open to revision.
Born Liars also goes into the powerful role that belief and self-deception play in our health, and how we experience suffering. During the Second World War, Henry Beecher was a doctor tending soldiers on the battlefield. When he ran low on morphine, he began injecting some of the badly wounded with a "painkiller" that was nothing more than a saline injection. The placebo proved almost as effective as morphine. He also discovered that the soldiers seemed to suffer less than patients undergoing surgery in a hospital – because, he concluded, the meaning of their pain was different. A wounded soldier is on his way out of the chaos of battle, and headed for home. The pain arrives as good news. But a postoperative patient is facing uncertainty and disruption of his normal life. The pain is more ominous.
The size and colour of the pills we take also influence their effect on us, Leslie reports. Blue sleeping pills work better than other colours, and tiny pills are more effective than big ones. Yellow is best for antidepressants. Many studies suggest that a placebo can be as effective in treating depression or pain as a high-powered, high-cost pharmaceutical product. But the effect of a placebo is no mirage; it has a measurable physiological effects on the body, marshalling our own powerful healing resources.
There are limits to the power of belief, of course; we can't think away a fractured hip, or wish ourselves free of cancer. But when it comes to mental and physical suffering, what we believe about the help we receive plays a huge role in how we feel. Maybe psychic surgery or rituals involved chicken guts could work as well as Western medicine, if we were culturally disposed to believe in them.
Humans come off looking a little silly when Leslie cites an experiment with some wine-tasting juries. Experts given the same wine in two glasses, one labelled Grand Cru, the other plonk, inevitably gave the fake "expensive one" higher marks. No wonder we fall in love with the wrong people, and buy bad outfits. To be human is to be remarkably gullible, and endlessly crafty. As Benjamin Franklin said, "There is a wonderful deal of credulity in the world."
Leslie brings intelligence and a wealth of thought-provoking research to his topic. You will probably begin the book thinking you've already got a pretty good grip on the subject of truth and lies. But by the end, you'll be convinced that this is just another case of self-deception.
Marni Jackson is the author of Pain: The Science and Culture of Why We Hurt, as well as two inventive memoirs.