Ya gotta believe me, we're all damn liars

CBC GRAPHIC BY JAMIE HOPKINS Enlarge Image 

Fishing for the truth with Hillary Rodham Clinton, Vladmir Putin, Stephen Harper and George W. Bush.

The similarly themed CBC documentary The Truth About Liars responds with more of a declaration: You most certainly will.

This hour-long exploration of how humans play fast and loose with the truth, which was produced by Winnipeg-based Merit Motion Pictures, begins its examination with a simple, baseline premise -- we're all liars, whether we want to admit it or not.

"Look," says University of New England philosophy professor David Livingston Smith, one of several truth experts interviewed by writer/director Andy Blicq, "you're a liar, and I'm a liar. It's OK. If we're concerned with truth, we have to accept that."

The Truth About Liars, which airs tonight at 9 on CBC's Doc Zone, does a nice job of straddling the line between education and entertainment, offering a mix of scientific explanation and pop-culture references that puts the whole issue of truth versus deception into a pleasantly unnerving context.

According to research, the majority of us are likely to fib in one out of every four conversations that last more than 10 minutes. The statistics related to how often spouses lie to each other are downright stunning.

And according to the experts consulted by the film's makers, one of the reasons there's so much lying going on is that deviation from the truth actually works more often than it doesn't.

Why? Because it's human nature to believe what you're told, because it's too disturbing to think you're being deceived.

"Most of us are not good at detecting the lies of others, because we don't want to be," says University of San Francisco psychology professor Maureen O'Sullivan. "We want to believe that this man loves us, that this car is being sold to us at a better price than anybody else would get, and so we collude with the people who lie to us, because we want to believe what they're telling us."

So what it boils down to, basically, is that we accept the lies of others because we spend a lot of time lying to ourselves.

"Self-deception is important to our mental health," offers Livingston Smith. "Self-deception is normal -- whatever 'normal' means."

In addition to examining how lying fits into the everyday lives of average people, The Truth About Liars also takes a revealing look at those special individuals in society who deceive on a much higher level -- criminals and politicians, and those whose behaviour earns them a mention in both categories.

"The secret of politics is this: tell people the lies that are consistent with their own self-deceptions," says Livingston Smith. "If you can do that, you're a successful politician."

Blicq and his crew also speak at length with Paul Ekman, the author/researcher whose work inspired Fox's Lie to Me. His hotly debated technique of studying "micro-expressions" in human faces as a method of detecting lies is one of several deception-revealing strategies that are currently being used by law enforcement and justice agencies throughout North America.

But there's no foolproof way of knowing when you're being fooled, the experts insist. And according to Ekman, who's perhaps the leading authority on truth and lying, it's best to learn to live with the lies.

"You've got a choice in life as to whether you're going to be trusting, and risk being misled, or you're going to be suspicious, and risk disbelieving a truthful person," he says. "If you're not a policeman, don't act like one. Be trusting -- you'll be happier in life. You're much better off, with your friends and family members, to risk being misled than to risk disbelieving them when they're being truthful."

And that's -- if you choose to believe it -- no lie.

brad.oswald@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition February 5, 2009 D3