Here we are back again discussing deception. I love this subject, I have a deep interest in thinking about power, narrative, and the result on people of hearing stories. I often find myself relating a process or problem with a story myself, one that explains context and conveys understanding much better than the technical explanation could, and often I use a scenario that isn’t true, but plausible. People respond to a story in a way they never can to a simple list of facts and there has to be a reason for it. We remember stories in a thematic sense, even if we cannot retell them, or remember the details. For facts the details matter, for stories the only thing that matters is what is understood and taken away.
A fascinating aspect, for me in particular, is the mechanism whereby a person may come to believe their own delusion based narrative, as maybe an effort to evade your, or someone else’s natural or professional scepticism. A sophisticated deception fools almost anyone, but a crude one fools almost nobody, so there must be a developed narrative in place to fool even the most casual sceptic. Often when hearing a badly constructed story you may find yourself merely playing along. The deceptions we create around our personal narratives tend to lack nuance, they are bold and outlandish, unbelievable, easily refutable. What they ordinarily rely on is the personality of the person who is offering them. Where you spot the tiring, in yourself, of hearing yet again how the hero of the day is ever the person recanting the story, the “I had to step in” scenario, you know that you are listening to a narrative that is more likely to be imagined than real. Stories told as witnessed may be embellished but have a kernel of truth, this is because there is not need for the person telling them to gain anything, since they are not attempting to be the hero.
Good deceptions, the ones you buy in to, contain believable claims, plausible elements, their most important component being consistency. People don’t remember the stories they tell you in any other way than vaguely, like seeing a comedian and trying the next day to replicate his jokes it is impossible, though if you heard him again you will recognise the tale and know if it differs even slightly. In a strange mechanism of the brain you will spot when narrative details, ones you only recall thematically, differ in the retelling. An oft used tactic to spot a lie is to ask the person telling a story of what happened, their actions, to recant it in reverse. A true tale will be possible, but a false one is not built in the same way as a memory, it is much harder to tell backwards. Imagine I told you that I went for a pizza with a friend, I left work, went home, drove to pick my friend up at his house, took us both to a pub in Wrexham, ordered a margarita, had a beer, phoned my spouse, then dropped my pal off at his house, and got petrol on the way back to my house. If this happened I could tell you the events in reverse order, if not I would leave something out.
You would think that in the modern world it would be easier to spot lies, and that is true. Technology captures much of what we do and say so it can be reproduced to prove a claim against a false actor. Yet that fact doesn’t seem to make deception unattractive to those that wish to lie. The US president has been proven inconsistent, and experts have said that he is a deliberate fabricator of narrative, not simply a man who guesses or misremembers. This means he says things that he knows to be untrue, deliberate deceptions. In another case we could look at Steven Segal for an inconsistent teller of his own narrative, having been captured on video many times claiming heritage from just about every nationality, and making bold claims about his achievements in martial arts that cannot be proven, or talking vaguely about his involvement in covert military operations that also cannot be verified. For Segal we may be witnessing a cognitive issue, he may not know that he is at the very least wildly exaggerating his story, or at the most making it up entirely. It’s a good tactic on his part though to stay away from that which can be proved or disproven. I know this because of one thing, only people who didn’t do covert government work would ever tell you that they did.
Deceptions, when accompanied with consistency, is a tactic. When you see a pause following a question, and then you receive a slowly delivered vague answer that seems implausible, it is very likely a lie. People answer quickly about themselves because they are experts on their own lives, though we will often make mistakes about details and there is the possibility that we misremember. Deception requires creativity, and that is the pause, very few people can think creatively and talk at the same time. I’ll give you an example, in the military a fabricated story for potentially captured prisoners of war is practiced so that it can be delivered at the right time without seeming fake. This is not just a story remembered, it is often a false story told to a soldier that believes it to be true so that they can, when captured, offer it as true. This is a deception of the soldier/sailor/airman for the benefit of the forces overall. In other cases it is the limitation of what the soldier is told that defines what they can say, omitting parts so that they cannot recant when pressured.
For a spy, a con person, an ex wife, a CEO, or a plain old vanilla lunatic, it may be quite different. I imagine these types will start out knowing that what they are saying, or about to say, is a lie. So to not be caught out they may employ a deliberate cognitive trick in fabricating their cover, they may fool themselves. They may, just like the Walter Mitty fictional character, or the real life president of the US, repeat their internal narrative often enough for it to seem a truth to them, that way they can come to believe it. They may use power to create a situation where others repeat their falsehoods also, repeating back to them until it makes them lose all doubt about their own bullshit. Those repeating never challenging of course because that is an effect of power, it makes people go along. Christopher Hitchens, a very strong atheist writer and speaker (god is not great, how religion poisons everything), once declared that the catholic practice of limbo was real because people felt it so strongly. What he was saying was that in some cases, in theories non-science, social constructs, there are relative truths that are real to the people that believe them; as real as a just stubbed toe, as valuable, as a theory, as any other socially constructed theory. But those aren’t facts, and in the absence of believing them they have no impact, still a con though.
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