The Most Common Forms Of Deception

Liars have a powerful advantage when they seek to fool us. He reportedly kicked open doors, ransacked private residences, seized property, and put suspects in handcuffs. He did all this without search warrants, claiming that federal agents weren’t required to obtain them. It didn’t take long to uncover that it was all fiction. Sergeant Bill, it turned out, was an impostor. He was certainly a convincing one, though. He fooled the mayor, the police chief, and the town aldermen. Even after Jakob had been revealed as a fraud, for a time some in Gerald clung to the belief that he was a federal agent despite all of it, that the revelations were just an elaborate cover story. There doesn’t, however, seem to be any evidence to support this conviction. We are in many ways predisposed to trust, and this predisposition is often difficult to overcome. Jakob would engage in such an elaborate ruse? Why would someone want to impersonate a federal drug agent, conduct raids, kick down doors? What is the psychology behind taking on a new identity? Jakob, the most obvious explanations don’t seem to fit. He didn’t gain financially from his fraud.

Don't Hide Inside Yourself

His services cost the town of Gerald almost nothing in terms of dollars. Jakob was simply crazy. He took elaborate steps to hide his true identity, even going so far as to offer a fake phone number for a fake agency, the multijurisdictional task force, in support of his story. His deception was deliberate and, at least in terms of how it was pulled off, rational. Aspiration is a ubiquitous feature of modern life. Jakob’s deceit, especially since these motives may have been hazy even to him. I call such deception cosmetic deceit. Jakob shows, cosmetic deceit can encompass substantial fabrication with equally substantial consequences. Indeed, some of the most prominent scandals of recent years stem from lies that can be categorized as cosmetic deceit. Cosmetic deceit is also among the most common forms of deception. These lies can function simply to keep a conversation moving or to avoid hurting the feelings of the target of the lie. In order to impress someone, or, by the same token, salve nagging insecurities, a person may invent a fact or deceptively soften the edges of an embarrassing event.

Someday Your Ship Will Sail

That is, they may indulge in a cosmetic lie to cast themselves in a better light. Yet some argue that interpersonal lies are only one form of a much broader practice of cosmetic deceit. Some psychologists hold that most of Western culture’s fundamental activities of ornamentation, such as applying makeup or styling hair, constitute deception. Wearing a shade of lipstick darker than one’s natural pigmentation, for instance, thus represents a form of a lie. When our true appearance is interfered with, by way of blush or eyeliner or colored contact lenses, the image presented to the world is to some degree false. For the purposes of our discussion, it isn’t necessary to plumb the question of whether wearing a wig is the equivalent of lying about the length and color of your hair. It is enough to note that we are accustomed to exercising a great deal of control over our physical appearances. Whether or not we conclude that any of these activities represent deception, it’s easy to see how the attitudes that underlie them sometimes take verbal form. It’s not news to anyone that our culture is obsessed with image. What’s important to keep in mind is that the idea of image is not restricted to the visual realm. Modern society places enormous significance on the perceptions of other people. The explosion in recent years of blogs and reality television demonstrates the great interest people have in scrutinizing other people’s lives, as well as in offering up their own lives for scrutiny.

Little By Little

Given the centrality of the opinions of others, then, the temptations of cosmetic deceit aren’t difficult to understand. When we pay so much attention to what other people think, it’s hard to limit the ways we try to influence those thoughts. Representing our true selves can often take a back seat to representing what we perceive to be our best selves. And this tendency can be especially pronounced in situations where impressing another person is not just an implicit goal but the entire point of the interaction. It’s likely you’ve heard more than one story of a disastrous blind date. If you’ve been single for a while, it’s probable you’ve experienced one, too. A student of mine once offered me an interesting perspective on the disastrous blind date. He was, he confessed, the initiator of the disaster. He discussed the route he would follow, the type of bike he would buy. The problem was, he had no plans to take such a trip. Biking South America was something he’d pondered idly but had no concrete intention of doing. Unfortunately, his date was a cycling enthusiast, and as she pressed him for details, it became increasingly clear that what he’d told her was basically fiction. So this blind date entered her pantheon of horror stories. What surprised me about this anecdote was that this student was not habitually dishonest. Rather, a forthright, decent person, and one who expressed great embarrassment over his behavior on the date. How was it, then, that he had come to find himself telling a lie about biking across South America? We consider the factors underlying cosmetic deceit, the blind date presents an illuminating scenario. Such a scenario inevitably puts psychological pressure on its participants. When we are being judged, we reflexively want to be judged positively. The need to come off well, even in the eyes of an unappealing stranger, can be intense. Yet the process of coming off well is far from simple. On a blind date, we frequently choose which details in our personal biography to present. Only a pure social incompetent acts the same way in every context, with every group of people. This brings us back to cosmetic deceit.