Learning to Be More Truthful: Awareness

To continue excerpting from the draft of my book called, Realville, How to Get Real in an Unreal World, I now wish to examine the crucial role of being aware of one’s own habits and the behavior of others. 

Habit

Any attitude or behavior, if sufficiently rehearsed, becomes a habit. Once formed, habits automate attitude and behavior, producing mental “knee-jerk” responses to the events of life. To paraphrase the Jerry Lee Lewis song title, in our society, there is a “Whole lot of knee-jerking going on.” The key to honorable behavior is to be aware of one’s own attitudes and behaviors. Obviously, it is hard to be aware of one’s behaviors that have become an unconscious habit. If habits contribute to personal integrity, habit is a good thing. However, if you continue to repeat untruthful attitudes and behaviors, you are creating a habit to behave untruthfully. You are making yourself a dishonorable person.

A clear example of teaching oneself to be dishonorable comes from a British university study showing that people become desensitized to lying. The experiment involved creating scenarios whereby people could lie repeatedly, and they would get paid more based on the magnitude of the lies. In the experiment with 80 people, pairs of people in separate rooms viewed a photograph of a jar filled with pennies. The photo was clear only for one person in the pair, whose task was to advise the other person how many pennies were in the jar. The person making the estimate was told that the reward would vary on each trial, without knowing critical details about the built-in incentive structure. They received no feedback. The game was rigged so that the more the advice was deliberately exaggerated, the more financial reward was given. Experimenters set the conditions so that lying could benefit both partners, benefit the advising partner at the expense of the other partner, or benefit the advising partner only without affecting the other person.

The greatest lying occurred when it benefited only the lying person. Dishonesty persisted at lower levels if the partner also benefited. There was zero lying under conditions were lying was punished by lower reward while the partner benefitted. People's lies grew bolder the more they lied. They were getting into the habit of lying. Brain scans revealed that activity in a key emotional center of the brain, the amygdala, became less active and desensitized as the dishonesty grew. The amygdala processes fear, which suggests that the people became less fearful of the consequence of lying. In essence, the brain was being trained to lie.

We should conclude that a little bit of dishonesty is a slippery slope that can lead one to grow more dishonest. This provides a rationale for early realization and corrective action of untruthful behavior in children, with the aim of nipping such behavior in the bud before it becomes a habit.

If left unchecked, a person who benefits from repeated untruthfulness will likely do more of it to the point of it becoming automated. This is a classic example of the basic principle of operant conditioning: people are more likely to repeat behaviors that are repeatedly rewarded. The authors of the British study asserted that lying increased in terms of self-interest, because the greatest lying occurred when only the adviser and not the partner benefited. However, because the experiment did not allow subjects to know when their advice was being rewarded, the likely remaining explanation for the lying is that they just adapted to lying, and it didn't bother them so much to exaggerate their estimates. The absence of feedback was a crucial part of the design. The authors point out that in the real world, feedback greatly affects the extent of dishonesty in terms of whether the deceiving person thinks there will be benefit or punishment.

Emotions are at the core of the problem of drifting into a habit of untruthfulness. Normally, we tend to feel guilty when doing something we know is wrong, that is, when we have gone beyond our untruthfulness set-point. However, as we get in a habit of being untruthful, the associated shame or guilt dissipates. We get used to it, and our conscience doesn't bother us so much—a lower set-point emerges. So, we are less constrained in our future behavior. Each little untruthful act can escalate and negatively change the person we are.

One bad habit that is easy to fall into is denial. What is the typical first reaction to getting caught at bad thoughts or bad behavior? Remember when you were a kid in school when the teacher wanted to find out who did a certain bad deed. How did the class respond when she said, for example, “Who wrote this graffiti on the board?” A knee-jerk, “Not me,” goes out the cry, including from the kid who was the perpetrator. In other words, a common first response to being confronted is to deny the facts. Many children never outgrow this denial tendency.

Such denial and rationalization can become a habit. For example, a student may deny that laziness or personal problems are responsible for poor grades, rationalizing instead with a belief that the teachers are ineffective or the courses are irrelevant and boring. Eventually, people with problem attitudes and behaviors may have no choice but to admit the facts when denial becomes too awkward and implausible. Once denial is no longer tenable, an automatic response is to develop a habit of deception, deceiving others and even oneself. The alcoholic may try to hide bottles of liquor or to sneak drinks when family or friends are not watching.

The most common response to having one’s misdeeds or poor behavior discovered is to make excuses. I used to do a lot of that, now hopefully much less. I could write a whole book on that, and I did (Blame Game. How to Win It).

Behavior of Others

People certainly learn values about truthfulness from others. If the people you work and associate with place a high value on truthfulness, then you are more prone to be truthful to fit in and to avoid ostracism.

Various forms of untruthfulness can spread like an infectious disease. For example, some experiments by behavioral economist, Dan Ariely, were conducted so that unpunished cheating could occur. In one such study, experimenters planted an actor student in the room who publicly claimed he solved an implausible number of the test problems. The level of cheating by other students in the room increased, suggesting that cheating can be infectious. In test teamwork experiments, students increased cheating if they thought it would benefit their teammates as well as themselves.

Under real-world conditions, the most common way to spread untruthfulness is to repeat it, again and again. A lie, for example, repeated often enough becomes believable. This is why advertisers keep repeating the same commercial. Whatever the exaggerated claims of benefit of the product, the repetition seeps into an audience’s subconscious to become engraved as believed. This is why news media push an agenda by harping on a story theme until they shape public opinion about an issue or politician. This is why politicians use repetition to discredit and demonize their opponents.

As misinformation is repeated again and again, more and more people come to believe it.  This leads to “argument by authority” to rationalize dishonesty. Then too, the more prevalent lying, denial, pretense, etc. become in a social group, the more we either become accepting or tolerant of it. People tend to tolerate what is common, because that is “just the way things are.”  Even if you want to mount a challenge, it would just be too much trouble and not likely to be successful. Complying with the group norm is akin to the thinking error of arguing from authority, only in this case, the deception has undeserved status.

Sources:

Ariely, Dan (2012). The (Honest) Truth about Dishonesty. New York: Harper Collins.

Garrett, N. et al. (2016). The brain adapts to dishonesty. Nature Neuroscience. 24 October. doi: 10.1038/nn.4426