What is a lie, and when is someone lying?
They are questions that we all assume we know the answers to and that are in fact universal truths.
However Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak claimed in an interview for the New York Review of Books that Palestinians (Arabs) have no compunction about telling lies and see truth as irrelevant.
He is quoted as saying that "They are products of a culture in which to tell a lie ... creates no dissonance. They don't suffer from the problem of telling lies that exists in Judaeo-Christian culture. Truth is seen as an irrelevant category. There is only that which serves your purpose and that which doesn't. They see themselves as emissaries of a national movement for whom everything is permissible. There is no such thing as 'the truth'."
Interviewed by the Jewish historian Benny Morris, Mr Barak not only related his comments to Arab society in general, but specifically to a meeting with Yasser Arafat in particular. He quoted as an example an incident in October 2000, shortly after the start of the 'intifada', when the Israeli and Palestinian leaders, together with Madeleine Albright, the then US secretary of state, were meeting in Paris to discuss a ceasefire.
Mr Arafat had apparently just agreed to phone his West Bank police commanders to implement a truce. At this point Mr Barak stated that he complained "But these are not the people organising the violence. If you are serious, then call Marwan Bargouti and Hussein al-Sheikh [two West Bank Fatah leaders]. Arafat looked at me, with an expression of blank innocence, as if I had mentioned the names of two polar bears, and said, 'Who? Who?' So I repeated the names, this time with a pronounced, clear Arabic inflection... and Arafat again said, 'Who? Who?' At this, some of his aides couldn't stop themselves, and burst out laughing. And Arafat, forced to drop the pretence, agreed to call them later."
He added that the then US FBI Director agreed with him .... "The deputy director of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation once told me that there are societies in which lie detectors don't work, societies in which lies do not create cognitive dissonance [on which the polygraph tests are based]."
All of which raised some interesting questions about lying, cultural perceptions of lies, and the efficacy of lie detector testing.
The historian Ken Alder wrote in 'Lie Detectors: The History of an American Obsession' that “What distinguishes a culture is how it copes with deceit. The sort of lies it denounces, the sort of institutions it fashions to expose them.” Which is pretty obvious, and in fact the quest to defeat lying is as old as humanity .... Yet tests show that human beings are only 54 per cent accurate in spotting another human lying, which is pretty poor. This figure drops to around 25 per cent, when asked to determine if a person from another race or culture is lying.
This poor ability to determine lies has led to various methods of trying to be more accurate:
This latter point makes you wonder why the lie detector, or polygraph to use its official name is not used instead.
Leonarde Keeler, its inventor administered the first lie detector test in a court in the 1935 trial of Bruno Hauptmann (Lindbergh baby abduction). He said at the time that “I wouldn’t want to convict a man on the grounds of the records alone" .... however he later added "It means the findings of the lie detector are as acceptable in court as fingerprint testimony," after the guilty verdict. But in fact an earlier an earlier US Supreme Court case, had already decided that the polygraph, which didn’t have approval from the scientific community, wasn’t able to give admissible evidence in a US court .... this has remained the case ever since.
Yet in the US, the police and other security organisations, still regularly use the polygraphs (including voice stress devices in some states), to try and identify, or eliminate, potential suspects from their enquiries .... even though there is no scientific evidence that they are actually effective. This, especially as questions can be badly phrased and be open ended, thus evoking false positives or negatives e.g. “Have you ever betrayed anyone who trusted you?” ..... You, I, and 99 per cent of the population, would have trouble with that one!!
Its a fact that lie detecting machines have been described as an “American obsession,” particularly as they are rarely, if ever, used outside of that country. However that doesn't mean that others don't flirt with the idea. In Turkey a team of researchers recently created a polygraph 'customised' to Turkish culture, since, as professor Nevzat Tarhan told the Hurriyet Daily News, “That which can be considered a ‘lie’ by regular polygraphs used in the West, may not be considered a lie by Turkish people.” So, Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak's assertion that there are different perceptions of lying in the Arab/Muslim world, has received some validation from the Turks.
In 2006, the 'Global Deception Research Team' survey, asked people in 58 countries, “How can you tell when people are lying?” They found a remarkable degree of agreement in the main. Most people asked (Sixty-five percent of the study respondents), agreed with the premise that people look like they are lying when they don’t look you in the eye, when they don’t move a lot, and when they contradict themselves. In 51 of 58 countries, they found that looking away was “more prevalent than any other belief about lying". .... but the 65 per cent of people who believe that, are wrong. Other studies have confirmed that there is no scientific evidence to suggest that eye behaviour, or gaze aversion, can gauge truthfulness reliably.
In fact most of the behavioural cues that we often associate with lying, are simply signs of stress, and that the indicators of lying in some cultures, are often indicators of truth in other cultures, and even what counts as a lie, differs markedly from place to place. American polygraph operators have reported that using them in other countries elicits odd results. For instance “the Russians value truth among their fellow citizens, but will unhesitatingly lie if they perceived doing so as a duty to the state,” and that “lying to prevent problems between people is acceptable in Arab culture” ....
So the little white lies that smooth social situations in some cultures are not to be considered lies at all, and wont register as such on polygraphs. It seems that lying is just as difficult to detect as ever, and that there is no truth in machine testing.
 |
| Some People Are Obvious Liars ...... |
They are questions that we all assume we know the answers to and that are in fact universal truths.
However Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak claimed in an interview for the New York Review of Books that Palestinians (Arabs) have no compunction about telling lies and see truth as irrelevant.
He is quoted as saying that "They are products of a culture in which to tell a lie ... creates no dissonance. They don't suffer from the problem of telling lies that exists in Judaeo-Christian culture. Truth is seen as an irrelevant category. There is only that which serves your purpose and that which doesn't. They see themselves as emissaries of a national movement for whom everything is permissible. There is no such thing as 'the truth'."
Interviewed by the Jewish historian Benny Morris, Mr Barak not only related his comments to Arab society in general, but specifically to a meeting with Yasser Arafat in particular. He quoted as an example an incident in October 2000, shortly after the start of the 'intifada', when the Israeli and Palestinian leaders, together with Madeleine Albright, the then US secretary of state, were meeting in Paris to discuss a ceasefire.
Mr Arafat had apparently just agreed to phone his West Bank police commanders to implement a truce. At this point Mr Barak stated that he complained "But these are not the people organising the violence. If you are serious, then call Marwan Bargouti and Hussein al-Sheikh [two West Bank Fatah leaders]. Arafat looked at me, with an expression of blank innocence, as if I had mentioned the names of two polar bears, and said, 'Who? Who?' So I repeated the names, this time with a pronounced, clear Arabic inflection... and Arafat again said, 'Who? Who?' At this, some of his aides couldn't stop themselves, and burst out laughing. And Arafat, forced to drop the pretence, agreed to call them later."
He added that the then US FBI Director agreed with him .... "The deputy director of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation once told me that there are societies in which lie detectors don't work, societies in which lies do not create cognitive dissonance [on which the polygraph tests are based]."
All of which raised some interesting questions about lying, cultural perceptions of lies, and the efficacy of lie detector testing.
The historian Ken Alder wrote in 'Lie Detectors: The History of an American Obsession' that “What distinguishes a culture is how it copes with deceit. The sort of lies it denounces, the sort of institutions it fashions to expose them.” Which is pretty obvious, and in fact the quest to defeat lying is as old as humanity .... Yet tests show that human beings are only 54 per cent accurate in spotting another human lying, which is pretty poor. This figure drops to around 25 per cent, when asked to determine if a person from another race or culture is lying.
 |
| Finger Pointing Correct 54 Per Cent Of Time ....... |
This poor ability to determine lies has led to various methods of trying to be more accurate:
- In the Bronze Age in China and India, suspects had to chew uncooked rice and spit it out to reveal if their mouths were dry.
- Medieval Europe had trial by fire or water.
- In the 1950s and ‘60s, the CIA experimented with LSD as a truth serum.
- Then there’s torture, formalized in ancient Greece and Rome as a method to compel honesty.
- Waterboarding aka “enhanced interrogation” and used by the USA's allies in the middle east, while observed by US intelligence operatives, is simply a recasting for the 21st century of torture.
This latter point makes you wonder why the lie detector, or polygraph to use its official name is not used instead.
Leonarde Keeler, its inventor administered the first lie detector test in a court in the 1935 trial of Bruno Hauptmann (Lindbergh baby abduction). He said at the time that “I wouldn’t want to convict a man on the grounds of the records alone" .... however he later added "It means the findings of the lie detector are as acceptable in court as fingerprint testimony," after the guilty verdict. But in fact an earlier an earlier US Supreme Court case, had already decided that the polygraph, which didn’t have approval from the scientific community, wasn’t able to give admissible evidence in a US court .... this has remained the case ever since.
Yet in the US, the police and other security organisations, still regularly use the polygraphs (including voice stress devices in some states), to try and identify, or eliminate, potential suspects from their enquiries .... even though there is no scientific evidence that they are actually effective. This, especially as questions can be badly phrased and be open ended, thus evoking false positives or negatives e.g. “Have you ever betrayed anyone who trusted you?” ..... You, I, and 99 per cent of the population, would have trouble with that one!!
Its a fact that lie detecting machines have been described as an “American obsession,” particularly as they are rarely, if ever, used outside of that country. However that doesn't mean that others don't flirt with the idea. In Turkey a team of researchers recently created a polygraph 'customised' to Turkish culture, since, as professor Nevzat Tarhan told the Hurriyet Daily News, “That which can be considered a ‘lie’ by regular polygraphs used in the West, may not be considered a lie by Turkish people.” So, Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak's assertion that there are different perceptions of lying in the Arab/Muslim world, has received some validation from the Turks.
In 2006, the 'Global Deception Research Team' survey, asked people in 58 countries, “How can you tell when people are lying?” They found a remarkable degree of agreement in the main. Most people asked (Sixty-five percent of the study respondents), agreed with the premise that people look like they are lying when they don’t look you in the eye, when they don’t move a lot, and when they contradict themselves. In 51 of 58 countries, they found that looking away was “more prevalent than any other belief about lying". .... but the 65 per cent of people who believe that, are wrong. Other studies have confirmed that there is no scientific evidence to suggest that eye behaviour, or gaze aversion, can gauge truthfulness reliably.
 |
| Signs Of Deceit Are Not Always As Obvious As People Think .... |
In fact most of the behavioural cues that we often associate with lying, are simply signs of stress, and that the indicators of lying in some cultures, are often indicators of truth in other cultures, and even what counts as a lie, differs markedly from place to place. American polygraph operators have reported that using them in other countries elicits odd results. For instance “the Russians value truth among their fellow citizens, but will unhesitatingly lie if they perceived doing so as a duty to the state,” and that “lying to prevent problems between people is acceptable in Arab culture” ....
So the little white lies that smooth social situations in some cultures are not to be considered lies at all, and wont register as such on polygraphs. It seems that lying is just as difficult to detect as ever, and that there is no truth in machine testing.
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