Sunday, January 27, 2013

Liar’s Advantage

"People lie to protect their self-image,” says Robert Feldman, a professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts who studies lying and deception. “Once they’ve told a lie, they are in it, they live in it, and they justify hurting others to protect the lie because they don’t see any way out.”

People who live a deception at the level of Lance Armstrong have what Feldman calls the “liar’s advantage” because they are telling us what we want to believe.

“We want to believe Lance Armstrong was a great superhero who overcame cancer and went on to win Tour de France after Tour de France,” Feldman says. “We always want to believe in the great comeback story.”

Armstrong, he says, was unusually energetic in trying to silence the opposition and damage his critics — a trait that, in the end, might be viewed as less forgivable than his lying.

“Lying is extraordinarily common and we couldn’t get along without it,” says David Livingstone Smith, a professor of philosophy at the University of New England in Maine, and author of the book “Why We Lie.” ‘’It greases the wheels of society.”


- More Here

No comments: