This Duke University psychology professor has made a distinguished career out of analyzing irrationality, deceptions and quirks of human behaviour. This book, a layman’s guide to much of his work, is notable for a few surprise research conclusions, the main one being the apparent propensity of all of us to cheat just a little, but not a lot, thereby being able to maintain a self-image as totally honest, via self deception. The factors that seem to determine the boundaries of our dishonesty are carefully teased out.
There seem to me to be some major caveats before accepting his sometimes sweeping conclusions. First, most of the research studies have been done with university students as the research subjects in highly artificial laboratory settings- their psychic makeup may deviate significantly from that of the broader population. If nothing else the probably narrow age range (he never mentions the age ranges of his research subjects) make generalization from the studies problematic. I doubt that the boundaries of my propensity to lie, cheat and deceive others and myself now are the same as I had when I was 25. Secondly, I am well aware of the very major problem, particularly in social sciences, of non-reproducibility of research studies. I found the design of the studies at times to be quite ingenious, though bright young suspicious university psychology students might well be on to the subterfuge of some of them and be quite pleased to lie and thereby sabotage their professor’s research.
The writing style is fluid and keeps the reader interested, with some very personal anecdotes and some wry humour. In the latter category, before giving the obvious answer, he speculates about what makes the period just before deadlines for term papers and final exams so lethal for the grandmothers of university students, particularly those students who are doing poorly.
One caveat of my own. I have not reviewed the extensive original research publications in the scientific literature that he summarizes in this book and uses to draw his conclusions, and can’t comment on the statistical validity of those findings.
Are we as a society becoming more or less honest? I don’t see any answers to that question in this book, and realistically, it would require longitudinal studies over decades to answer that.
question. With the Liar-in-Chief now in the White House, my hunch is that western society as a whole may be less honest than in past generations. A blurb in the March Atlantic claims that minor workplace theft by employees has doubled in the last two decades. Most of the research discussed in this book concerns being dishonest in social and monetary interactions rather than in the verbal realm. The examples of dishonesty usually relate to what most of us would consider to be minor lapses such as not correcting a retail clerk who gives you too much change, reporting dubious work-related expenses, or claiming to have finished the crossword without peeking at the upside-down answers. And if a border guard in a booth asked me what I thought of Donald Trump, (it happens), I would be tempted to lie to avoid being indefinitely barred from visiting my daughters in the U.S. But I would probably say that he is a dangerous, racist, egotistical, incompetent idiot and then point out that some in his inner circle have used far worse adjectives to describe him
A recent debate in The New Yorker about care for demented people makes a strong case for compassionate ‘therapeutic lying.’ I would not want any man to be repeatedly reminded of the death of his wife if he could not retain that truth and kept asking where she was. Would it not be better for his caregivers to simply agree with him that she must have gone shopping? And when I was leaving a dear friend whom I knew was slowly dying of cancer, not sure if she knew her grim prognosis, she whispered to me as we hugged at the airport “You don’t need to pretend that you will see me again.” “Of course I will” I lied. Was that dishonesty justified?
The Passionate Reader 