To catch the consummate liar who spoke proudly of his ability to detect lying in others, the most devastating American spy, the mole within the FBI, John Hanssen, the young FBI agent, Eric O’Neil was asked by his bosses to lie repeatedly to entrap Hanssen. On a plane flight back from speaking in Washington D.C. (ironically the setting for this story), I sat engrossed in watching the scenes of mutual mental seduction between these two FBI agents in the movie, Breach.
One way people who are going to lie unconsciously perfect their ability is to deceive themselves about what they are doing, according to renowned evolutionary biologist, Robert L. Trivers.
Deliberate deception takes considerable effort. One must hold both the truth and the untruth in one’s mind, and consciously suppress the truth. To reduce the tension of such a mindset, habitual liars tend to make themselves believe the untruth they are telling.
In short, they deceive themselves into believing what they are going to say, at least for the moment.
Thus, the “best” way to lie is to marshal evidence that supports one's view and ignore evidence that contradicts it.
Like many other aspects of brain functioning, self-deception does not require people to sit down and decide they are going to lie to themselves. (That would actually defeat the point of self-deception.) No, it usually happens subtly, without the person even being aware of it.
Before you begin to feel righteous about those other people who lie, researchers remind us, we all lie sometimes. And self-deception is a universal trait of being human – just like other attempts to influence.
"The costs of deception are being detected and punished," Trivers said. "There is definitely a downside to self-deception, and that is you are putting yourself out of touch with reality, but it cuts down the risk of getting caught." The traitor, Hanssen deceived his colleagues in the FBI for years. I thought that the cost to his psyche may have led to his double life of sexual perversion and religiosity – or vice versa.
Since the disturbing-sounding fMRIs are not yet widely available, you can learn how to detect lying more often by reading Paul Ekman’s Telling Lies.
