Lie  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Revision as of 18:47, 26 March 2014

Henri Robin and a Specter, 1863 by Eugène Thiébault

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A lie is an untruthful statement made to someone else with the intention to deceive. To lie is to say something one believes to be false with the intention that it be taken for the truth by someone else. A liar is a person who is known to have a tendency to tell lies.

A lie involves the use of conventional truthbearers, (i.e., statements in words or symbols) and not natural signs. Intentional deceit involving natural signs, such as wearing a wig, shamming a limp, or wearing a fake arm cast, is not usually classed as "lying", but as "deception".

A true statement may be a lie. If the person who makes the true statement genuinely believes it to be false, and makes the statement with the intention that his audience believe it to be true, then this is a lie. When a person lies he or she is intentionally untruthful, but he or she is not necessarily making an untrue statement.

Psychology of lying

The capacity to lie is noted early and nearly universally in human development. Social psychology and developmental psychology are concerned with the theory of mind, which people employ to simulate another's reaction to their story and determine if a lie will be believable. The most commonly cited milestone, what is known as Machiavellian intelligence, is at the age of about four and a half years, when children begin to be able to lie convincingly. Before this, they seem simply unable to comprehend that anyone doesn't see the same view of events that they do — and seem to assume that there is only one point of view, which is their own.

Young children learn from experience that stating an untruth can avoid punishment for misdeeds, before they develop the theory of mind necessary to understand why it works. In this stage of development, children will sometimes tell outrageous and unbelievable lies, because they lack the conceptual framework to judge whether a statement is believable, or even to understand the concept of believability.

When children first learn how lying works, they lack the moral understanding of when to refrain from doing it. It takes years of watching people tell lies, and the results of these lies, to develop a proper understanding. Propensity to lie varies greatly between children, some doing so habitually and others being habitually honest. Habits in this regard are likely to change in early adulthood.

Those with Parkinson's disease show difficulties in deceiving others, difficulties that link to prefrontal hypometabolism. This suggests a link between the capacity for dishonesty and integrity of prefrontal functioning.

Pseudologia fantastica is a term applied by psychiatrists to the behaviour of habitual or compulsive lying.

Mythomania is the condition where there is an excessive or abnormal propensity for lying and exaggerating.

A recent study found that lying takes longer than telling the truth. Or, as Chief Joseph succinctly put it, "It does not require many words to speak the truth."

Love and war

The cliché "All is fair in love and war" finds justification for lies used to gain advantage in these situations. Sun Tzu declared that "All warfare is based on deception." Machiavelli advised the Prince "never to attempt to win by force what can be won by deception," and Thomas Hobbes wrote in Leviathan: "In war, force and fraud are the two cardinal virtues."

Representations of lying in fiction

• The Adventures of Baron Munchausen tell the story about an 18th century baron who tells outrageous, unbelievable stories which he claims are all true.
• A famous anecdote by Parson Weems claims that George Washington once cut a tree over when he was a small child. His father asked him who cut the tree and Washington confessed his crime with the words: "I'm sorry, father, I cannot tell a lie." The anecdote has been proven to be a completely fictional story.
• Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio was a wooden puppet often led into trouble by his propensity to lie. His nose grew with every lie; hence, long noses have become a caricature of liars.
• The Boy Who Cried Wolf, a fable attributed to Aesop about a boy who continually lies a wolf is coming. When a wolf does appear nobody believes him anymore.
• The Twilight Zone episode "The Whole Truth".
• In the film Liar Liar, the lawyer Fletcher Reed (Jim Carrey) cannot lie for 24 hours, due to a wish of his son which magically came true.
• In the 1985 Max Headroom, the title character comments that one can always tell when a politician lies because "their lips move". The joke has been widely repeated and rephrased.
• In the film Big Fat Liar, the story which producer Marty Wolf (a notorious and proud liar himself) steals from student Jason Shepard, tells of a character whose lies become out of control to the point where each lie he tells causes him to grow in size.
• Great Lies To Tell Small Kids, a humorous book series.
• Lie to Me, a TV series based on people who read lies by facial expressions.

See also

• Compulsive lying
• Confabulation
• Deception
• Disinformation
• Ethics
• Fabrication (science)
• Falsifiability
• Honesty
• Mental reservation
• Noble lie
• Narcissistic defence sequences
• Optimism bias
• Pathological lying
• Polite fiction
• Prisoner's dilemma
• Psychological manipulation
• Truth
• Wizards Project