h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

"But what about compulsive lying? There are those who are compulsive liars, who are compelled to tell lies even when it would do them no good, or when the truth would serve them better. These are people who say they'd bought a certain item from Shop X when in fact they'd obtained them from Shop Y; people who would say that they had been to a certain place even when they have not. How does it profit these people to lie?

Paul Ekman, a psychiatry professor from the University of California, San Francisco, attributes this to 'duping delight'. People who tell such lies do so not to get out of trouble, but for fun. For them, lying is like a drug that provides an adrenalin surge or a 'kick' sensation, and the feeling of being able to control the person they are lying to.

However, there are individuals who seem to lie automatically without the intention to deceive. Jerald Jellison, a psychology professor at the University of Southern California, suggests that this may be due to momentum. A person who gets away with his first lie may be carried by the momentum of how easy it is to slip a lie past people. The second time around, it gets easier to repeat the lie with embellishments. The more you get away with it, the more you lie. And before you know it, lying has become second nature."



I have to admit that I lie in this category. For some reason I get a kick out of lying for absolutely no reason. It is afterall, the best kind of lie. If you have no motive, there's no suspicion of there being a lie! It's brilliant!

I've found recently that rather than responding to a question with a lie, I often just say it in my head rather than out loud. Pleased with myself I then smile manically. The response I'm getting isn't a good one I'm afraid. Friends and collegues now think of me as a bit of an insane psycho. Ahh well, back to actaully saying the lies methinks.

This is a great piece - best into the EG for quite some time. Well done!

(Trouble is, you don't know if I really meant that, do you? )

What constitutes compulsive lying depends, I think, on people values. I can think of one guy who "changes his story" with disturbing alacrity according to new experience. It's as if he has to believe that he "knew that all along", when he obviously didn't. When you've seen him do this many times, he looks like a charlatan. But he spins the tale so well that he looks clever and acute the first few times you see it.

Not a nice person? Dunno really. Best salesman the firm's got? Undoubtedly.

I'm not sure that we can do without liars!

In writing this reply, it's also occurred to me that people's reactions to lies are as interesting as the lies themselves. I bet you could write a great follow-up entry on "Crying Wolf", for example. How about it?

Or possibly one on "Tongue in Cheek"?

...You brought this on yourself, you know!

No, seriously...it is a great entry. Honest. *snigger*

Pin

i know what you mean. we had this friend whom we once thought oozed charisma and personality, and who was a marvellous raconteur - until we discovered that he'd been lying to us about a lot of things. and we only found out 'cause we'd gotten suspicious and kept a running tab of his stories, and found that they didn't add up. and then when he started lying outrageously about things that one would never lie about because they'd know that you'd know they were lying (he told us last year that the fifth harry potter book was out, and that its title was 'harry potter and the dark death', and that a certain girl harry liked would die in the book - and mind you, we were all serious fans, so there was no way we'd ever get fooled by something as stupid as that) -well, that was the final straw.