Cathexis

There is a lot of fascinating research on how to spot a liar–and such research has amped up in the last ten years with the increase in security consciousness. I’ve done a fair amount of reading of the literature and will discuss various aspects of the research over a few posts. I’ll start with the overview: what do all researchers agree upon?

Contrary to popular belief, there is no single, simple way to detect a liar. Shifty eyes, guilty look, halting speech–these may or may not reveal a liar. What all liars have in common, though, is that lying causes an increase in mental processing and cognitive dissonance as the liar tries to keep two contradictory idea in mind at the same time. This increase in mental processing and the disquieting nature of the cognitive dissonance are what the lie-spotter is really detecting.

This takes training, for most people. People in general are pretty bad at spotting lies, even if they think they are good at it. Judges and police officers don’t fair much better than average, although there are a few really good lie spotters. There is a technique to detecting lies, and I will get into that in future posts.

Of course, any increase in understanding about how lies are detected allow people to adjust their behavior to lie better. But no one can lie perfectly because there will always be increased difficulty involved in concealing something.

So here is one simple bit of advice: cross your fingers. What does this do? Lying, especially for people who consider themselves honest or feel bad about lying, makes people feel a little bad. In people unused to lying or concealing, this tends to show up (in stereotypical ways I will get into later). Crossing fingers behind your back brings relieves some of that guilt. The idea is that crossing your fingers is a “socially accepted” way of lying (more for kids than adults, granted). There is the feeling that the deceived would understand that it wasn’t really lying at all because the fingers were crossed. Although this is not terribly logical, it make it easier and less troubling to lie, and so less apparent.

I got into a discussion with someone recently about whether spending tens of thousands (sometimes hundreds of thousands) for a college education was really worth it. He felt that it was not, and that it was a “moral hazard” to encourage people with easy loans to get themselves well into debt.

This discussion led me to think over exactly how a college education is beneficial. I think there are many ways that it can be worth the time and money. The benefit that most people cite when talking about college is learning “critical thinking,” but I think this is really overblown. Many students take that to mean being able to criticize, and they often come out of college able to critique things, but that skill often doesn’t go over well in the job world (“I can tell you ten reasons why your idea won’t work”).

I realized that the biggest benefit of a college education is learning how to abstract things—how to model the complexities of the real world in a simplified system that can be analyzed, tweaked and applied. How to recognize when a difficult problem is really the same as a simple problem that has been solved in another field. How to cut through the clutter of seemingly unique qualities and identify the essential, universal elements.  Learning to create and apply abstraction is the most powerful think students can take from college.