Lying

00:00:13 hi good afternoon everyone welcome to the Fall 2009 Teen inauguration of the hillocks Center I'm glad everyone could be here on such a beautiful day my name is Jerry Horowitz I'm the associate director of the helix Center and today we have a roundtable on the topic of lying before I we commence I want to mention that on October 5th our second round tables on the

00:00:44 mechanization of math of mathematics so let me go on and introduce our esteemed panelists today first of all unfortunately Patricia Churchland who was scheduled to be on our panel fell ill and was on unable to make it today but we deal we do have a fill-in Martin Garbus if you would raise your hand so we know who you are is here he's an attorney and has taught at several prestigious law schools in the US dr. Anna Ballas if

00:01:16 you raise your hand his associate professor of clinical psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College and training and supervising analyst at the New York psychoanalytic Institute she's been in private adult and child psychiatric practice in Manhattan over 35 years and as a distinguished fellow of the American Psychiatric Association Neal Garrett is a Henry welcome research fellow in cognitive neuroscience at Oxford University his research centers around aversive

00:01:47 behavior and learning as part of this he has led a new line of inquiry examining the role of emotional adaptation and decision making and I think he's going to tell us more about that today Emma Edelman Levine is an assistant professor behavioral science and the Charles Merrill faculty scholar at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business she was recently recognized as a rising star of the assess the Asian of psychological science in 2019 EMA studies the psychology of

00:02:20 altruism trust and ethical dilemmas dr. Francis X Shen is the executive director of the Harvard Mass General Hospital Center for law brain and behavior and instructor in psychology at Harvard Medical School senior fellow in law and Applied neuroscience at the Harvard Law School Petrie Flom Center and an associate professor of law McKnight presidential fellow and faculty member in a graduate program on

00:02:51 neuroscience at the University of Minnesota Jonathan stray is a computational journalist at Columbia University where he teaches the dual master's degree in computer science and journalism and leads the development of workbench an integrated tool for data journalism he's contributed to the New York Times the Atlantic Wired foreign policy and Pro Publica and sitting one loss but sitting

00:03:23 on the panel is well to help moderate is our executive director a dinner session so thanks very much okay well I was thinking just to get the ball rolling about and not to have this start out necessarily in a political wino though I'm sure that's on several of the minds of our audience today that part of our

00:03:53 founding mythology includes of course the truth-telling traits of George Washington Abraham Lincoln and both known for their honesty of course and that also brought me brought back to my attention a wonderfully humorous television commercial several years ago where Honest Abe was sitting in his bedroom and Mary Todd Lincoln portrayed in that commercial I don't know what look like is being a little portly was

00:04:26 getting dressed in a in a dress and she turns to Abe and she says do I look fat and eight turns looks the camera like Oh Eve eh what am I gonna say so of course lying is something even even for George Washington Abraham link and everyone has engaged in at some point so I guess the question is why is lying a problem or wind is lying you become a problem so I'd like anyone to sort of jump in I can

00:05:00 think about your example a little bit not gonna quite answer your question and instead think about one line isn't a problem but maybe that creates the blurred line of kind of when it's not a problem when it is wait so if you ask most people like what should a person say when someone who can't change us how they look in the dress they'll say you should lie the right thing to do is to lie and if you ask people would you wanted to be lied to if you know you couldn't change if there is no time to institute feedback they'd say yes I want

00:05:30 to be lied to and so we actually have all these implicit rules that we think a lot of lies are ethical a lot of lies can build trust a lot of lives and we seek ourselves right at the end of the life when we're vulnerable when we can instead you change and so there is this whole category of lies that you know most people agree are good and then you know I think maybe other people can talk to this more it's a blurs the line of then well went right when how do we figure out when it's no longer good so a

00:06:05 framework that I sometimes use is to think of communication as persuasion right and so we have this idea in a democracy with a free press we should be able to persuade each other that we're right but we also have these ideas about what types of persuasion are legitimate so if you look at advertising if you look at politics all of these different fields have sort of developed norms and sometimes laws so for example you can't

00:06:35 pretend to be someone else right if you publish the same message and pretend to be a political candidate falsely if that candidate had said it it might have been perfectly fine it's generally frowned upon to try to use psychological manipulation of various sorts right so if you know something about the psychology of the person you're trying to persuade that they're perhaps not aware of then that's considered illegitimate and so there all these

00:07:05 categories beyond simply speaking an untruth and many of them are fairly well developed and consistent across a lot of fields and how we categorize them I think to some extent gets this question of you know who other and beneficiaries

00:07:38 of the lie and who are the ones that are harmed so like n is totally right like when kids start to lie we often some thing that's a good thing in certain circumstances like if they're given a present that's terrible we want them to say wow thank you what a fantastic present that was you know so that's the context what we think lying is a good thing but then there are other lies which are actually legal like if I go into somewhere and pretend I'm a police officer if I lie under oath thus there's a very clear signal of society that that is not okay because they have a law against and I think the reason for that is because you know people are harmed by that you can potentially frame an

00:08:10 innocent man and has all these sort of consequences whereas in the present example is actually benefiting most people and from the lie so you know in theory you could take each lie on a sort of case by cases that take a sort of utilitarian perspective and say you know who is getting harmed who is benefiting from this lie and use that as a sort of measure of wareness whether it's a good or a bad a bad thing with the creation of lies eyes people tell honest stories that I made up to

00:08:40 achieve a certain social justice end that I perceive and if faced with the issue of whether there should be a truthful answer or an answer that pursues my concept of justice the decision means an easy one and if you are part of a system of law which is a system of lying and you seek to achieve certain goal you first have to accept

00:09:13 that that's the structure of that system and then you decide what to do I just spent some time down on the border where immigrants were trying to get into the United States through the trunk regime and they will ask questions and the whole question of truth and how they answered them became very significant their lack of awareness of

00:09:45 truths for example if they had been raped a year ago then the government concluded they were damaged then and should not have waited a year to come into the United States if you looked at the damage you could say the damage was there a week ago so then if you're faced with a witness like that who's going to go before a judge you have to decide or somebody has to decide or there has to

00:10:15 be some input as to what that witnesses answer is the truth a year ago was the truth the damage is there today I'll do my best so several of the

00:10:50 answers have suggested that well there are certain times that it's a problem because the law says it's a problem for life but if you take a step back you have to ask yourself why has the law determined that certain instances it's problematic to be deceptive or to not tell the truth and other times we allow it whether in the name of national security or in the name of justice or in the name of something else that's one challenge the original question was when is it a problem to lie setting aside that bigger question which maybe we'll

00:11:21 get to it is the case that I'm ganna coming from the law if Honest Abe had to answer that question under oath he can say Oh a vay but he has a duty to do a certain thing whereas he may strategically decide I don't want to tell you the truth so once inside a courtroom or inside generally legal proceedings there are some added complexities that we have sort of socially determined should be there for one reason or another and we even use

00:11:51 the word fact-finder for a judge or a jury and if for instance they have to figure out whether or not Mary Todd Lincoln was abuse or not they want to know you know all the information that they can and they rely on witnesses hopefully being at least purporting to be honest well it's interesting just to quickly jump back on the the issue of him having to answer that question under oath of course is another wrinkle to it which is he's the only one who knows whether she looked fat so even under oath you might

00:12:22 be able to you would I'm not just another wrinkle I mean you're right to point out that under oath people have are seen to be compelled to say the truth more but in certain instances like this one where it's a piece of private information that is not shared with anyone in this case whether or not she looked fat to him he could continue to lie even under up so that's another wrinkle to them to the whole issue of why she didn't look fat so we as

00:12:52 analysts are concerned with the subjectivity of people's perception and also when are they lying to themselves when are they lying to others and also with children what do we teach them and how do they learn to be truthful that's a whole other dimension we're very interested in both people's motivation

00:13:24 for being truthful or lying and also how that develops as they as they grow up so for instance when you ask that question about Honest Abe it made me think about the Hans Christian Andersen tale of the Emperor's New Clothes where everybody said oh these clothes are absolutely magnificent then it was a little child who said but he's naked so the little child hadn't he had learned to be an

00:13:55 obsequious courtier and in that sense he was truthful so that's a very interesting story about what we teach our little children and how do they grow up to be truthful or liars and also how do they grow up to be tactful versus ruthlessly brutal in their statements and there's a lot to be thought about on that confusing for children is one of

00:14:29 the things we tell them is if you don't have anything nice to say don't say anything at all right and there's this kind of comfort I think in the law to this distinction between omission and Commission right we can all go around not saying anything not saying anything to my wife changing the subject saying something you know your eyes are beautiful I've never seen you look happier right we can create these these statements that are technically true or technically non lies that still allow a person to be deceived and that's you know what makes it easier easy for us to

00:15:00 justify deception engage in deception without feeling too guilty but but something interesting that I've found is that targets of deception are really not sensitive to these differences so I go through great mental gymnastics to figure out how do I deceive this person without explicitly lying because somehow I know lying is bad but you've been deceived you don't really care how I did it right the victim of a deception and negotiations or the victim of even kind of false positive hope doesn't care that

00:15:32 you didn't explicitly say an untruth they care that your intention was to deceive the question of intention is really interesting when I teach this if I ask the students first thing well how would you define the line we get you know I'm sure if we went around the room fifty different answers and one of the big breaking points is whether or not intention is required and this gets to your your point if one subjectively truly honestly believes something but it is objectively false and there's wonderful research by a number of psychologists on this point I'm one from

00:16:03 Beth Loftus group many decades ago now she can implant certain cortical implant a memory of seeing Bugs Bunny at Disneyworld and you'd never see Bugs Bunny at Disneyworld because you know different companies and these participants in the research studies will swear up and down that they remembered seeing Bugs Bunny at Disneyworld same thing if I miss remember who the fifth President of the United States of am i lying I didn't intend to write intended to actually give the right answer how do we categorize that and I'm sure we all have different answers for that but of course

00:16:34 it gets to your question to begin with what is a lie yeah I think I also gets into the idea of this difference between deception and self-deception right and there is this theory that you know humans and animals and even you know viruses have evolved to self deceive and we think the reason for that is if I want to deceive someone I give off a lot of telltale signals you know my voice might contract my eyes will my pupils will dilate my fingers will start sweating so all these signals

00:17:05 can be read if I am I telling a lie with intention there but if I actually believe that lie myself you know if I actually believe that I'm fantastic you know that I've got all these amazing superpowers if I actually really believe that then those telltale signals that I give off aren't there anymore so if that intention isn't there then I'm better able to deceive others so there's this theory that actually we've evolved not to have that intention there in some cases so that we can and are better able to and sell better versions of ourselves to others around us and of course people

00:17:39 like actors are you know especially good at it I don't know how many of you remember Peter Sellers he was a very wonderful comedic actor and he died rather young of heart attack and when I read his obituary in Time magazine it was time or Newsweek it was saying how when he got into a role couldn't get out of it he had this kind of a little bit of a quality of as if what we call as if personality in our language he just

00:18:09 couldn't get out of it and he was superb you know at it you know also if you talk about young children they're so suggestible so this is kind of a tricky subject that also has connections with the law which is for instance young children who are molested and you know since I'm a psychiatrist psychoanalyst worked with kids the whole issue of

00:18:41 truth and falsehood in the area of trauma is something that's only a great interest to me so we have an old analyst Ferren see from a long time ago who wrote a paper about it's called confusion of tongues between adults and children and one of the things that he describes very eloquently is the way when children are molested let's say young child often the perpetrator is someone like an uncle or someone in the

00:19:11 family who knows the kid it says oh this will be our little secret don't tell anybody so not only does the child have a trauma but they also then have them burden of secrecy and kind of borrowing the guilt of the grown-up and having to collude with them and so it's it's it's really terrible and then because we're analysts when it comes up in the analytic situation it gets very complicated because these feelings gets revived in

00:19:42 the treatment and then they're not sure about well can I trust the analyst are they going to do bad things to me so the whole thing gets really recreated in that situation so anyway that's just it's a very complicated matter and a lot of people get caught up with trying to figure out well the there was a scandal for instance in the late 80s I think where all these nursery school teachers were accused of molesting little children and to this day we don't really

00:20:13 know whether that was true or not because the way that children were interviewed by the cops who were not terribly knowledgeable about child development was so suggestive that the kids comply then they said yes yes these things happened and we don't know yeah so so when it comes to just one other point about this when it comes to truthfulness I think that especially

00:20:43 children at Sandy in the age of five or six are very malleable about what not because they can't perceive the difference between truth and untruth but because there's so much at the mercy of the authorities either because of their wish for love or fear of punishment so it's always very problematic to put a young child on the witness stand or to rely on the testimony on a young child

00:21:13 unless you understand who it is that has kind of if you will brainwash them and then you if you extrapolate that to more suggestive malleable personalities then some grownups can be like that to people talk about PTSD Stockholm Syndrome you know people who as adults are very brainwashed to tell whatever they're supposed to tell and then over there of course other people who are much stronger and don't give in so so there

00:21:47 is a question of coercion when it comes to lying okay that's a whole topic mil well if there's let's say there's a tendency in terms of natural selection towards suggestibility or self-deception I would imagine it's not something well I believe it's not something that everyone has inherited equally that there are people more suggestible and less and there are people who are better

00:22:18 at suppressing or not having those feelings that often are associated with telling lies and in the extreme think of Psychopaths as being very you know not responding to lies and telling lies without any sort of physiological effect so what do you think about the idea that there may be different types of people that we could sort people in this regard mention a study that I've done there maybe speaks to this point to some

00:22:48 extent so I'm a cognitive neuroscientist so we run a lot of experiments in the lab and where we actually can see and how willing people are to be dishonest to someone else and what we've looked at is how this changes over time and how it varies with people's emotional reaction when they choose to be dishonest so we're able to measure their emotional reaction by using one of these machines called an fMRI scanner so that can show you in brain regions associated with

00:23:19 emotion what your emotional reaction is when you choose to be dishonest and what we found in our study was quite interesting we found that first of all and people started being dishonest by a small amount and when they're being dishonest by a small amount in those early days and they had a really strong emotional reaction in brain areas like the amygdala for example which we know is important for emotional processing but as we gave people more and more opportunities to be dishonest we saw that the emotional response decreased and we saw that

00:23:49 they're lying subsequently increased as a consequence and that's consistent with other I do studies that have shown that emotions really important for sort of governing how dishonest were willing to be so for example if you give students beta blockers which is a type of pill which lowers your emotional response cheating will increase on it on a test that you give those students because when our emotions not they're sort of restricting people's dishonesty seems that people more willing to be dishonest as a result so we think emotions really

00:24:22 important for and governing how dishonest people are willing to be and that really speaks to this point of individual differences you know maybe some people whether it's by nature or by nurture you know just have stronger emotional responses and other people and that allows some to be more dishonest than others but one of these I suppose alarming points of our study is that this emotional response seems to decrease in everyone through process which we know a brain process called adaptation it's a certain process we know that happens with lots of sensory

00:24:53 information for example so with smells you know if you buy a new perfume for example you might initially put a couple of drops on and you'll smell it really really strongly okay but after a few days you won't smell it as much so you need to put a put a bit more on right emotions do the same thing so when we start off being dishonest we have a really strong emotional response but through this act of repetition this emotional response will automatically adapt it will decrease and as a result we can be more dishonest as a consequence I'll suggest if you just put people in a context where you give them

00:25:24 lots and lots of opportunities to be dishonest even if they initially have a very strong emotional reaction to to that and that will sort of stop them being very dishonest in that situation by giving them lots and lots of opportunities this process of emotional adaptation would take place and there's a good chance that they're dishonest we will increase as a consequence of that sorry love exactly yes yes it feels to me that we are sort of inevitably

00:25:54 circling around the idea of truth and so I wanted to maybe say a couple things about that there's this idea of an epistemic virtue that is virtues or rules of thumb or moral Commandments that deal with knowledge so the most concise statement of this is I only want to believe those things which are true but then we have the problem of wool okay how do we determine whether something is true and

00:26:24 as the flyer for this event pointed out we mostly rely on secondhand knowledge I and my colleagues are in the business of producing this sort of secondhand knowledge and it's kind of a complicated process right there are standards for reporting there are so I do a lot of work with statistics and data there are all sorts of issues about the validity of statistics and the sorts of analyses that you do there's the issue of

00:26:57 reputation so you know part of why you should believe what I write is because it was right last time or maybe because you haven't heard of me being wrong which is not quite the same thing and then there's transparency part of how I can build trust with you hopefully is to let you in on my process what are my reasons for believing this is true so you know in the in the era of the Internet this has actually gotten a lot easier I can do something like a link to

00:27:27 the core filings that I'm basing my story on I could maybe include an audio recording of an interview if the source will consent to that but a lot of the time it sort of has to come down to reputation because it's difficult to put that whole process in a story if you're doing a complicated statistical analysis most people aren't going to be technically equipped to go that line-by-line anyway and there are

00:27:59 many important stories that can only be got by anonymous sourcing all right so people won't tell you certain things unless you can guarantee keep their name out of it and I think every field has some complicated construction of truth right you know why should we believe what a lawyer argues at trial why should we believe what you say in your paper but the processes by which we actually produce these truths remain opaque and

00:28:34 this is almost a definition of truth for me rather than asking about in some abstract way is this true or not I I try to ask what is the process by which this community decides what is true and so that's one way of getting at it and you know that can go wrong in a lot of ways right there's there's self-deception in every field what about bias I knew you were gonna ask me this eventually yeah yeah one of

00:29:07 the challenges with the whole topic of media bias is that there isn't really a ground truth of course articles can have factual errors but as anyone who's gotten into this fight knows there are a number of problems with trying to distinguish fact from opinion and there are a number of problems with deciding which facts are relevant so you know to take a sort of really glaring example

00:29:37 right you might be talking with someone who says you know Trump is terribly racist okay well what has he done that's racist and you will get a list of things that he's done or said and then you'll just get into an argument about whether those things are racist or not so you're not really contesting the facts at that point so media bias suffers from this problem of you it's very difficult to establish a ground truth of sort of what objective journalism looks like having said that what you can do

00:30:08 is you can do analyses of political leaning all right so does this story talk about a subject in a way that left-wing person would talk about it or does it talk about it in the way that a right-wing person would and you can do this in various ways such as for example frame analysis right so if you have a story about paulus poverty to generalize greatly on the Left it's considered to be a societal problem or the fault of

00:30:39 the environment in which the person grew up on the right it's more commonly considered to be you know they're lazy or they weren't educated enough or so on so you can do these types of things and when you do them you find the results are very unsurprising right you find that in the New York Times is slightly left of center and you know Fox's is farther to the right and you know MSNBC is farther to the left and it's it's not really a shock so I think we can all perceive these political biases already

00:31:10 I'm beginning to wonder if maybe we're asking the wrong questions about media bias I mean beyond the sort of straightforward factual issues which admittedly sometimes is a problem I wonder if we are a lot of the conversation around media bias is sort of a proxy for the hope that media figures will wage our political battles for us which depending on your theory of journalism either is or is not their job

00:31:46 so maybe I can sort of ask a provocative question relates to that is that do you think truth is under threat because you know used to have these select media heavyweights you know that had that reputation attached to them you know these certain papers certain TV channels are provided news but now the barriers to entry of entering this world I'd like plummeted right with the internet so there's just so many sources out there like the reputation things that have dissolves to some extent and do you

00:32:17 think that's a problem I think we are at a very interesting moment for authority and Trust and so I'm I'm interested to hear about your trust research so I can take a couple things so trust in journalism is at a historic low he started decreasing before the transformation of the internet so the 1970s and no one really is quite sure why of course there's various theories trust in American institutions in

00:32:49 general is at historic lows at this point so maybe just piggy backs off that for a long time one of the classic critiques of media is that it's just a few powerful people and they're not really representative so we wanted to tear down the gatekeepers and we did and now we're I think relearning the role of gatekeeper and what sort of value they provided I I'm optimistic actually I think a lot of people are pessimistic

00:33:20 about the concept of truth I'm more optimistic than that and I think in part that's because I have a certain amount of professional visibility into the institutional processes that are springing up to try to combat this so for example The Wall Street Journal has a twenty one person team to deal with AI generated fake imagery right they don't do this every day but they have their their community of experts and they have their policies and standards so I I have

00:33:50 a very privileged position in some way and that I get to see the way that various types of media and technology institutions are gearing up to deal with these problems and I don't know it's hard to say if that will be successful or what even success would look like but I can tell you that there is a response right it's something it has become a field of endeavor just thinking about this idea of trust I think it's it's complicated because many of us think

00:34:22 about trust and truths as intrinsically linked but for lots of people they're not so I can trust you and want to affiliate with you because you make me feel good you give me contents that I want to hear that supports my worldview even if I recognize it might not be truthful so right so we can choose friends and engage in partner selection around kind of beliefs about loyalty and emotion and benevolence like whether this person supports us that have nothing to do with truth and so I think that's you know

00:34:52 relevant to how we think about media and how we think about choice of leaders to is right there might be a recognition that maybe this isn't truthful but what I look for you know I think it's hard for many to believe like in news but you know leader is not necessarily truth it's it's other things that are important to kind of living the life that I want to live and that can drive trust Trust nearly as much sometimes more than kind of a belief in honesty we can all in a very interesting piece of literature that dresses these concerns

00:35:25 that's worth revisiting is 1984 which I read and sometime within the last couple of years and it's fascinating because the protagonist you know it's it's a sort of negative utopia there they're trying to hide the truth rather than but they do it in a very systematic propaganda way and he's trying to figure out who he can trust in this place of profound mistrust and the person who he

00:35:57 thinks maybe has a common thinking with him ends up being the person who's trying to get him to betray himself to and then eventually gets brainwashed I mean it is a pretty gory story but it's kind of a real illustration of how desperately people want to have that sense of someone they can look up to and connection and how that can then be misused and exploited they're just I

00:36:29 know it was written a long time ago but I think it's it's pertinent perhaps not so much to our place but just to think that such things exist and I don't really know what's going on in I know for instance and how much is it still the way they try to block things to have one official message and everything else gets forcefully suppressed and so forth don't you think

00:36:59 people still can make a distinction between someone they might like they might like or want to affiliate with or who's perhaps minor lies they can abide by with someone that they can recognize and in distinction to that people who are really truth tellers like that they're like for example I can recognize what I like to think and recognize when a story's fair and unbalanced and balanced rather and I can recognize when I think it's biased and I think people make those distinctions I'm not so sure

00:37:30 the public is concerned to make those distinctions at large trust versus truthfulness said I said a really key distinction that's made in a book that's come out recently by Steve Martin and Joe marks and they talked about the u.s. president you know and like among his supporters he's not seen as someone who's very truthful but they really feel that they can trust him because he in a lot of ways he has delivered on what he

00:38:01 said he would you know he has tried to build a wall he has lowered taxes he has made it difficult for people from Muslim countries to get in here so they in a way they don't mind his dishonesty I think if it's serving their cause and I think that's true in general of dishonesty it's not how we judge it is depending on what it's sort of doing for us I think that was probably two of media bias as well like you know there's a whole field of motivated reasoning you know in some ways we probably quite enjoy reading media that we think is biased if it's biased in the direction

00:38:32 that suits our yeah you know you know suit suits are a view of the world that we want to believe and buy into audience metrics supports that view yeah I mean this is this is part of what's happened is that the lower lowering of the barriers to entry have made it possible for media to specialize and so if you just had you know if you have three cable news networks if you have to decide whether ABC goes left or right you lose half your audience but now you can be the left-wing outlet or

00:39:02 you can be the railing outlet or you can be the like Housewives of Arkansas outlet right we're in an era of niche media which has led to a proliferation of choice in terms of political orientation you know it's interesting from the law side so our Center for law brain and behavior thinks a lot about the role of new science and technology in helping potentially to achieve more truthful and just outcomes I think one of the success stories in law is the introduction of DNA evidence over the last 15 to 20 years and the precursor to

00:39:36 that is to say that unlike some other fields where there is I think a sense that the goal is if it goes into print it's as best you can do the truth I suspect right we take an adversarial model in the law and we teach our students to write a persuasive set of facts and sure when you're in front Marty you tell facts and the other side tells facts and they're honest and yet listening to them it sounds like two completely different things happen and we actually embrace that and the idea is

00:40:06 that we'll have it out for seat with these procedural rules in the courtroom and that the fact-finder will have to sift between the two it'd be the equivalent of saying you have to sit for an hour and watch Fox News an hour and watch MSNBC and then you make your decision one other interesting thing about law is think about it when you're mentioning anonymous sourcing it's the true the opposite in law and especially in a criminal case where there's something called a front confrontation clause a right to confront your accuser and look at your user in the eyes that's one of the problems when a witness dies the key witness dies you often can't go

00:40:38 forward with the case because that person has to appear in the courtroom it's a really interesting way to to get at truth I'll just leave you with this quote it comes from a Supreme Court case on the issue that had to do with whether or not we should introduce the polygraph into court proceedings the polygraph either used is you it by the way is used routinely in police investigations but it's not typically admissible in the courtroom and Justice Thomas said the jury is the lie-detector it's an interesting thing to think about the jury is the lie-detector that's that's right

00:41:08 that what I do is I try jury it so I let's say tried hundreds of them and one of the most interesting explorations is speaking to a jewelry after you've tried a case and seeing what they heard and what they valuated and it's a place in the country where the people are relatively responsible for their own lives within government and they can make important decisions about their lives and they are entrusted with the

00:41:38 responsibility of making response making decisions to throughout the lives or deaths of people who before them so you have this creation of a truth seeking system which is as good as anything else and the extent to which it's perverted or supportive is fascinating and the ways in which you learn to support it or pervert it is fascinating how much of

00:42:17 the social networks how much influence does that have um I'll be biased and asking the question this way be perverting that effort to establish the truth widely but juries come in with extraordinary biases your job as a lawyer is to find to have those people whose biases are yours the ones you want job as a lawyer is to find out which people you can influence

00:42:48 either by being truthful or untruthful so the effect of the media is in there every second of every court day I try to case recently in Miami involving Cubans and the politics in Miami so we had to and I represented someone in New York years ago from Kakadu Dean which was a

00:43:20 murder case yes which was a murder case years ago and the question of trying to rid the jury of biases a fascinating thing I'll just tell you one story there was a case of Harrisburg and it happened to be something called the beragon case which has tried a long time ago it was priests who had blood on weapons of war and they were being

00:43:51 prosecuted and one of the jurors was a woman who was whose son had been jailed because she believed sons believed as the defendants in this case that the war was horrible and there are certain things you should do with respect to it so she was the perfect juror for us and we did everything we could to keep her on and they did everything they could to

00:44:21 knock her off at the end of the case the defendants were convicted in large part because of this one and we then sat down with her and she was gracious enough to allow us to have her examined by psychologists psychiatrists and what really happened is that she was furious at these defendants because her son was in jail I

00:44:55 think coming back to your question about social media I think one's a problematic aspect of it is it just is making spreading dishonesty easier right like in lots of different ways so coming back to this idea of emotion you know if I'm actually being dishonest to person to someone in person I'm going to probably feel quite bad about that but if I can do it through a click of a button it's sort of much more indirect it's much further removed and the one of the other interesting things is that often dishonest information seems to spread

00:45:25 quicker than true information I think part of the reason for that is often it's awesome it's more sensational it's more novel so you know propagates through things like Twitter much faster than true information so many instances sort of justice seems to trump what's true about something let's say where people are motivated by thinking that they're following some path of justice and that sort of means biasing or telling a little falsehood it may not be

00:45:56 so bad after all a little story again in anatomy of murder of film some of you may remember the man walks in to see the lawyer and he says I killed so-and-so and the lawyer then says to him like my wife I told my girlfriend so the lawyer then says okay so the lawyer then says to him well listen if you come in and say yeah you picked up a gun and you

00:46:27 were angry and you killed this woman your wife your girlfriend you will be convicted and sentenced to die if you come in and tell us that you're upset you would totally any sense of Saturday that one you tried to fly to the roof and you tell us that story and it meant you will be found not guilty by reason of insanity so the lawyer then says come in tomorrow 10:00

00:46:59 and tell me what happened talking about truth in the legal system and the different ways you deal with but you're trying cases right you are in the service of defendant or and your legal duty is to help them win their case whatever what about the judge in this what's their duty to in cases legal duty to truth is a legal duty to be in a

00:47:30 legal system that values truth easily is it my duty to participate in a system that underlines truth and the question is what are the values it's not merely it can't merely be to get people off or can it be so I think that's an interesting issue my friend he mentioned Elizabeth Loftus Elizabeth Loftus spent

00:48:02 years trying to determine how people saw truth and you know what she said and it's a it's a Bible in the law is they see it as they want or as their influence would happen see if you have a legal system which chooses fundamentally irrelevant that's a dark thought to me I put it on the tables but you would agree

00:48:35 that the judge has a different responsibility than the lawyer who's representing a client no judge doesn't have a system of bias no judge in other words the the concept of the United States Supreme four years ago is that these were people who had of the law and they made their judgments based on the law free from bias a most people no longer believe that if they believe the long-ago if you look at the

00:49:06 law back in 1810 1850 and you look at the Constitution which says this or that about slavery you no longer believe that anybody is making judgments free of bias now I was a law professor who had written eloquently about justice and truth in the law a very respected he taught at Oxford for NYU after Bush against Gore came out he threw it all

00:49:37 away against war he threw it all away he became persuaded the truth was not the issue that there were other things determining that decision well so what that means there's no way to determine whether someone's biased very biased a little biased or hardly biased I mean in

00:50:08 other words there are degrees of bias and the dark characters who demonstrate their equanimity before the true eye in the illusion I think that we've given up and great relates the question you were talking about the pressure us is a judge's free advice and he's committed to the law nonsense I would like to stay on the subject but change it slightly in the question of being free of bias and

00:50:40 impartial and how do you assess things I have done a lot of work with children of divorce where it's a pretty acrimonious situation and there you are trying to be witness jury judge sort of because each the parents is gives you very brainwashed version of their side

00:51:11 because I'm talking about not in my peaceful divorces I'm talking about situations where the kids are really caught in the middle of World War three and so you as the advocate of the child and I've never gone to court this is not about going to court it's about helping and protecting in the best interest of the child you'll get two different versions of the truth and if it's highly intelligent high functioning people they can be extraordinary convincing and persuasive you find out the worst

00:51:41 possible things about each other and it's perplexing because when you talk to one parent they convince you of their point of view and you're saying oh okay then you talk to the other parent they convince you of their point of view you're single that wait a minute now which is the truth and then you say ah this is what life is like for this poor child all the time they're being torn back and forth how does a child like this develop a cohesive sense of integrity of values of knowing right

00:52:15 from wrong of figuring out who to trust and what to trust if the two people in their life that they love and would like to trust are at war and telling such terrible things about each other with such conviction and it could go down the line whether it's about visitation about how much the kids should be studying how strict or loose how much time they should get on the media you name it it's war and so it's a very interesting

00:52:47 window in a way a painful one to see what you know the divorce rate is like 50 percent what so many children grow up with and then how do they figure out their values now of course it depends on how old the kid was when the war started but the war often started long before the divorce it continues afterward etc so I have to tell you that even as a grown-up it's very difficult but it's certainly super stressful for the kids

00:53:19 so this whole question about how do people develop into good judges with good values and try to figure out what authorities to trust all of that gets formed through one's development and and I think we have such a breakdown in a way of cohesive standards not only in journalism but in so many different

00:53:51 settings starting with childhood so this is kind of a plea for peaceful divorces if I could just interject as well and you know you'd be raised the question I think the stomach's in it gets that can you ever really discern the truth or you just have to throw your hands up and I do want to make clear that there are a lot of efforts in from the clinical side and on the legal side to gather additional information rigorously and systematically with which to evaluate claims and this is say on the clinical

00:54:23 side if you're treating someone you actually want to know how many times did this happen we've typically relied on self-report well the future is digital phenotyping collecting that data and the situation you ask you've got to you know different stories well you go out and get a bunch of extra evidence in your world right you get additional sources you get and in law we're trying to systematize that and specifically about judges it's not just that they're biased but they're biased and based on empirical evidence in knowable and predictable ways and if you know that

00:54:53 systematically you can then suggest interventions that won't take care of every single case but will and the same thing in a corporate world right where you can begin to recognize what your systemic biases are and adjust and I'd say on the hopeful side I think there's some slow progress there it doesn't solve sort of the underlying human nature you've brought up several times but it begins based on the collective research to say okay we know at broad level here are some things that are happening at a system level can we put in some safeguards that will for

00:55:24 instance and the judge stop and think we have an emotional response should we require that you don't give your opinion now but you deliberate for now as example and there are others it seems to me in a way in law you most of the time or deciding or not deciding but the law is supposed to be deciding is this person telling the truth about having not having stolen something or not having embezzled something or not having killed somebody but in human relations

00:55:56 it's different because what you are in a way doing you are constantly having to interpret and your interpretation may be wrong so you may think in a couple who are fighting that my husband is a lawyer but in fact he isn't it just how you interpret his behavior and vice versa so there's a it creates such a lack of clarity about especially in in in psychology and human relations what lying and truth is about I have a

00:56:32 question for everybody what about people who lie for sport hmm kind of confabulate errs like to make up stories would you like to address that subject a little bit can you give an example oh think of one okay I'm joking really obvious one creating an impression or

00:57:12 because it's pleasurable to deceive it's pleasure but fool people's also have certain mental illness as well as sometimes cause that's what yeah deterioration of the brain where the person keeps inventing things which confabulation correct what person keeps inventing them to create a narrative some people lying or borderline lying in

00:57:44 order to create a narrative for themselves about their lives their past their aims their goals etc so I think it's a very important topic because it addresses the question of motivation I mean before we were talking about legal matters okay someone's fighting for their life but what about people who just routinely confabulate and make things up and exaggerate and so forth and so on and sometimes people like that actually go to seek help because because

00:58:19 it's compulsive and they can't stop themselves and they run into trouble but of course it's very challenging to treat people like that as a clinician because they put you in a situation where you never know if they're lying or not for you or they tell you stories about I fool this one and I told that one that and so forth and so on so it puts you then in a position of either you are like the moralist in which case you become the enemy or how are you going to help them figure it all

00:58:51 out about why they're doing it or how to stop it etc it's it's a it's an interesting kind of question so I was just curious what your experience is with any of that I mean I have encountered such people it took me quite a few months the first time I encountered such a person to understand that that's what they were and that's such a thing existed I like to believe I've gotten faster at it I feel like one of those things those

00:59:22 experiences have taught me is how little consistency is actually required to be convincing you know we have this idea that you know one of the drawbacks of lying is then you've got to keep your story straight which is true but it's actually not that hard to just oh I thought I said something out or gaslighting no that's not what I said at all or that's not what I meant or that's no that's not a relevant fact because even though you saw me steal this thing what was actually happening is that I was pressured into it because you know when you deal with these people you see these incredible often very charismatic

00:59:59 manipulative it's hard to do it justice but to me what the existence of such people and then the their ability to operate says is that where we actually are relatively poor at enforcing epistemic norms rightly we're actually pretty bad at making people be self-consistent although we often have a sense right we often know something is wrong and I think the process of encountering these people multiple times is is to develop that sense and to learn

01:00:29 to trust it remember that lay six degrees of separation mmm-hmm was this this guy who was insinuating himself into all kinds of situations and got away with it for the longest time oh I'm fascinated by con men it's such a crazy topic so okay so that's an extreme case but then we have situations of people who just a beloved con man II and and and what's that like we don't see them too often in the consulting room but occasionally we do

01:01:00 and then it's really scary I feel like the especially tricky case is when someone with that personality bent is telling you about an injustice that was done to them and then you're the challenging position of trying to understand to what extent do you believe their version of this story which I'm sure you must have encountered it kind of goes back to the the question we

01:01:30 started with right so most people think right what distinguishes a good or a bad lie in terms of the moral sense as if it helps or harms others and a lot of the the fitting the impression management the fooling is not directly harming an identified person it's very easy to right to believe this is in sport and right people with a normal psychological profile really care about harm what we care about is harming others and so in the absence of Evan that I'm directly harming someone it's quite easy to believe that I'm not

01:02:02 actually doing anything wrong and you guys both brought up this interesting example right like a con man I think something that makes it more complicated as we do actually have this admirable narrative of people who are really good at deception and right as kids again right we read stories of the wily coyote right like these characters who are able to do great things through deceiving others in clever ways the trickster right and so there's right there's this other part of deception

01:02:33 going through everyone's head that is like there's good stuff here if I'm not if I can't see the harm and that probably makes it right easy to keep going yeah I think that's just to relate maybe to learning as well we know that you know a powerful mechanism for learning is you know what's the consequence you know if I just go out and steal something I'm gonna get punished there and there so it's pretty clear that I shouldn't do that but with the sort of cases you're telling about where it's sort of you know ongoing little lies here little lies there you can't instantly see what the consequences on that person and that

01:03:03 consequence might come quite far down the line as well so it's quite hard to sort of tie it to your action so maybe that lack of lack of learning is what allows it to to continue perhaps well or learning that it works rolled out as well yeah also good getting like positive reinforcement from it maybe as well yeah you know one of the interesting things developmentally is that very little kids let's say by were under more or less they think that their parents practically read their minds they think

01:03:34 that the parents know everything that's going on so if they do something they shouldn't and they get caught they're not surprised because they kind of assume that the moment that kind of knew in the first place there's this fantasy of parents being so omnipotent and it's kind of a major developmental staff in the in a sort of separation and be developing one's identity to know that in fact if you say something that's not true maybe they don't know and oh you kind of

01:04:08 left your own devices or your own but you can do that so then how do people decide after all that they should be truthful it has something to do with what we call super-ego formation in other words people feel like they want to be loved and they want to be just like their parents upright citizens if they come from that kind of a family so this whole story about that about who your models are and that and that it's a it's you're going to love yourself if

01:04:40 you're being kind of truthful and and honest to yourself and you're going to feel ashamed and and guilty and not like yourself if you lie it's at a very basic stuff but it's something that develops gradually and then what we call you know sort of beginning of latency at the age or and all cultures people go to school and so on they get very clear rules of what are the rules of that culture and then they have a sense of belonging to the community if they obey the rules so

01:05:10 there's a lot of incentive for socialization both from the family and rural community to be a good citizen but but there were often situations where that development is faulty because let's say the parents are doing something deceitful like one of the parents is having an affair and says I don't tell that or whatever and then the kid doesn't know what to think anymore and so that this this what should be a very

01:05:42 solid sense of right and wrong it's bent and twisted and the rest is history as to what what what that happens with that so in our work as as analysts we try to go back and understand something about the origins of some of these lesions in one sense of integrity which are many 'full I think keeping comments most of us can seem to be able to appreciate

01:06:13 pretty well I guess because we've all lied to some degree what their incentives are to telling a falsehood and that it may be adaptive in certain instance it may be con men for example and they do unfortunately tend to be men more often than women not exclusively there's Elizabeth Holmes but men seem to lead the pack when it comes to that anyway there's a new idea I believe the anthropologist name is Richard Wrangham his last name is rang him who's written about the self domestication of the human you know humans even race I guess

01:06:44 and in it he said that there was a sort of a movement towards trying to get rid of the more aggressive violent but also lying and cheating members of the of the group of the tribe and this was a way of pushing back against that type that may be selected to a degree the con men type calm man tight who may have been selected so again I'm going back to my feeling about being unbiased there are

01:07:14 some pressures and incentives towards being unbiased and I think that's sort of what Wrangham was trying to bring out and is in this new book about self domestication so I wonder is that in this sort of skepticism of this for the general pessimism about bias don't we believe it are our incentives you mentioned and trying to live up to the ideal of your parents assuming your parents are honest people aren't their incentives to being fair and honest even when it's a challenge to you personally

01:07:45 I mean certainly there are such incentives invented in the professional structure of journalism which I think actually surprises many people journalism turned out to be more idealistic than I thought it would be actually and that there are both internal incentives in terms of norms and standards and you know I sometimes think of Columbia Journalism school as

01:08:16 the this Cathedral of journalism right it's this big old building and there's plaques on the walls and it's got the Pulitzer Prizes right it's a very it functions as a Cathedral it's like this sort of awe-inspiring symbol but there's also just reputation right if you're wrong too many times you have trashed your credibility unfortunately side of that is that it means also as a public information source or a public figure you are subject to political attacks so I mean that's part of what is

01:08:49 happening now is there are enormous political tax on the press which is you know certainly not new in a world historical sense but is relatively new in this country I mean you could make a case for dishonesty being good in some cases as well right you know in World War two Churchill would lie about how well we were doing you know in the war and that was to you know really encourage us to keep going and that's true with individual case of optimism as well you know it's quite good if you get

01:09:20 rejected from a job interview or asking someone out for a day you know to really believe that next time you know it's going to be successful so you know so delusion at different levels can be can be a good thing in certain cases I think psychoanalyst like I am if you go to a party and there's a patient of yours there you are not going to shake the hands and tell everybody oh here's my patient you're going to keep quiet about that you may not even acknowledge the

01:09:52 patient in order not to create any problems with issues of confidentiality so you are being deceitful you are not actively lying but but you have to and there are many situations where one has in a way there is no other way but so I realized that there's this whole moral component and there's this whole area of terrible to lie but there's also a usefulness the question is how does one

01:10:24 really distinguish between days and is it only based on the outcome on the motivation what what makes the difference and then they're also all degrees of lying for example we all enjoy being deceived by a magician we know he's deceiving men Oh yet we have tremendous enjoyment from it so there are all these complex that is having to do with neuroscience which I think perhaps we don't fully understand that have to do with this phenomena we

01:10:55 call lying culturally bound so in the u.s. we we believe in autonomy we believe in knowledge right obviously there's some variance in that from person to person and different personality traits and political leanings but mostly were a country that believes in autonomy or the culture here so I should have knowledge for self-governance and that's part of the reason that honesty is so important but that's not true everywhere right so in eastern Asian culture is right dignity

01:11:26 and authority are more important than necessarily self knowledge so right there there's an it's not as if the whole world is living in this debate that tonight should we be telling the truth in a lot of other cultures they're saying no we shouldn't always be telling the truth right so medicines and examples I've done studies in oncology units and in the u.s. actually a lot of patients want more false hope than their doctors are willing to give them but in China it's very it's very common to get false hope

01:11:57 and that's part of the expectation we could argue whether that's normatively good or normatively bad but there's certainly lots of different beliefs you know aside from the belief that truthfulness is what should be guiding most of our trade yeah about difference between China how that's handled the truth about medical prognosis is handled in China versus aus it does raise a question about how much we want to know

01:12:27 about ourselves there's both the medical question one specific example is increasingly were able through brain and blood biomarkers and genetic information to determine ones probabilistic likelihood of developing Alzheimer's and other dementia and the country and other populations roughly split 50/50 50 percent of people say I want to know as I want plan so forth the other 50% say given that we don't have a cure right now don't tell me but there's a deeper way in which we have to ask ourselves do we really want to know who we are and this

01:12:59 is in part when we say you've got to go to some constantly why because you're not seeing who you are how angry you are on our statistic or you know you're not seeing what you are as a parent and that's a really challenging question do we want to know how much of the whole truth I was very difficult for myself certainly I think for many of us but it gets said I think at this clinic and this was a medical one is almost easier sometimes to compartmentalize you know what about me as a husband as a father you know as a friend of the colleague how well did I actually do there it's

01:13:30 it's challenging to confront that maybe more challenging than what we do in law okay all right great thank you everyone I think it's time we could have a few of the audience members ask questions if you line up back here I'm sure our panelists would be happy to respond to [Music]

01:14:02 [Music] the question for everyone on the panel one of the time that each one of you lied and reflecting back on that would have will tell that lie again we look kind of similar so much so that when we go out and we recently celebrated our joint 40th birthday he's 39 I'm 41 it said this is the year for both 40 and a lot of people said ah that's great we

01:14:34 drink we wore the same clothes these elephants costumes are you two are you twins yeah we're twins it's Harper and we said that all night and after why we're like let's say you know let's see what can we add to the story you know from we're not from Hawaii we're from Hawaii and Papas kind of stuff would I do it again if I turn 40 again absolutely it was great get out of it you know I don't go into your question I don't think anyone was a referee harmed yeah I don't know how it we were intentional about it it was not

01:15:08 we'll just go for one bin I created a system of lies at the border I do it again I created the system of lies at the border representing immigrants trying to come into the country and I would do it again one I told although

01:15:51 I'm sure I have but I can recall like circumstance in the winter which I was grateful being lied to so I was planning my wedding the first year of graduate school when I was preparing for my qualifying exam my my grandfather wanted to invite all of his friends to my wedding which we didn't have space for like totally wasn't feasible we didn't even have enough invitations for them my mother said don't worry like you study I got this we're not gonna invite them I found out like the day before my wedding that she had photocopied my

01:16:23 wedding invitations and sent them to all of my grandfather's friends who she knew wouldn't come right she knew that like this is gonna be the easiest thing she I'm not gonna be harmed I'm going to be able to live in my bubble and not stressed about my wedding and I'm great like I'm very grateful that she pulled pulled it up so my comments slash question is more about as a physician and sort of the sense of knowing

01:16:53 sometimes when the patient is not telling the truth and the search for the truth to prove that the patient's not telling to like patients with pseudo seizures or factitious disorder malingering and how sometimes just the sense that as humans sometimes we feel that sense and we're not being told the truth even when we could even have clinical evidence I mean like partitions disorder that it's not true and we search for some sort of inconsistency or

01:17:24 sometimes we really can't find it so I often think of that because we really trust that what the patient's telling us is true I'm also a part-time a neuropsychiatrist so that's a joke I am an oral psychiatrist but full-time and I've treated people with pseudo seizures and fictitious illness and I think the answer is very simple it's just that I think that as a physician you have to not feel offended and angry that the person's been deceiving you often they don't know

01:17:55 they're even or why they're deceiving you and so being disarmed not feeling angry or with the patient it seems to me to be pretty easy just to say well you're you're not having real epilepsy you don't have real epilepsy and where this isn't Marilia illness and and patients respond incredibly well to that I find I I haven't had patients who've come to me with those sorts of problems leave because I said you know I don't believe I don't believe this is a real the diagnosis you think it may be just

01:18:25 being honest lawyers or the legal people that is the amytal interview ever used in legal cases truth serum as it's called is truth serum ever used not in the United States it has been used in the last few years in India in some cases there have been two cases of brain based MRI based lie detection where the in that was proffered in both the State case in Maryland and the federal case in Tennessee it was excluded and there are some other types of technologies that are being

01:18:56 proffered they're not yet ready for another day there's a discussion about if and we have this panel in 20 years if some of those technologies have come into court his polygraph still used in us : the polygraph is used extensively in the investigation phase but is not it's not typically allowed it's typically excluded in the guilt phase in the courtroom phase it's also used sometimes in some probate information and burl considerations for instance with sex offenders if they're determine if they're ready to go back to society it's

01:19:29 partly common but the question first I would like to say let's be honest the route is not very entertaining what about literature what about art what about creativity it's all established on unwise what's the question it's a question I'm saying that it's partly a question partly common and [Music]

01:20:03 and in American society when I came here 25 years ago I start to learn that deception for example advertising advertising it it's probably most but you know most obvious than probably in any other societies you have to you on deception if what we right now see in our white house we see that guy who obviously lying and it's kind of very entertaining for both sides here it is not that

01:20:36 entertaining at all and from one side is like I'm outraged from other side I am it she said what I was thinking for a long time so it's kind of we have these entertainment and it's and he probably won't because of his that he is good in lying and Hillary is not Hillary is not good in likely everybody agree so could you please say that what about all these

01:21:09 areas like into ties mint literature arts in general well we should put them there what day they are all in our society I would make a very big distinction between art and literature in advertisement because because advertisement is - I mean unless you say that art and literature is to sell its own product but it's considered

01:21:40 fabrication or fiction where's advertisement is trying to sell something and to embellish it for purpose of selling it but I think the whole question of lying and fabrications and art is a very interesting spectrum because a really good impersonator or one of these people who's a practiced liar it's kind of an artist they are they

01:22:14 have the finesse and ability to create illusion and so forth so there's a kinship with artists and Thomas - somebody who was very very interested in this issue and he's written some interesting things about it one of them is a novel called Felix cruel the adventures of Felix cruel and it's based on the memoirs of somebody who was a very famous of all things Romanian swindler and I'm saying of all

01:22:46 things because I'm from Romania and he he was fascinated by this the name of the swindler was different but in the Thomas Mann story he wrote he worked on this novel on and off for many years till the end of his life and I don't think he even finished it because this guy was able to impersonate so many people and robbed hotels and so forth he was quite a swindler there's another story by Thomas Mann

01:23:16 called Tonio Kroger it's a short story in which the main character is kind of torn between being a businessman and artist because his father was a businessman his mother was artistic and he could never quite find his footing anywhere but he's mostly an artist and in it he's fascinated by the whole question of what does it take to be an artist compared to kind of ask where conventional superstrate type of guy and how come he couldn't find his place in a super straight world and maybe to be an

01:23:48 artist you have to be a little outside of things an outsider to be able to describe things and therefore already not adhering to the rules of the community so I don't know if this is this addresses what you're asking but I've thought about it in the context of this preparing for the roundtable so on that subject of deception and versus an honest person why is it that in literature and in theater the most fascinating characters are the bad guys

01:24:19 absolutely okay characteristics yes is yes I won't go into the others yes you asked about whether it's the lawn I said yes I think it's related to the issue white mice wire it seems because I think the the final research Ernest is

01:24:51 not clear but it looks as though falsehoods as we were wrenching earlier spreads faster than truth and it's it's more sensational so I that's a simple version of why I think these these stories and also I think there's a certain tension when someone's telling a lie and typically as part of some work of literature or stage production you're aware there's this tension as an audience and that creates tension in you and then you're how what's gonna happen next right so I think that sort of

01:25:22 generates a lot of interest in in in lying yeah ya know I like that I like that explanation that it creates attention because actually the essence of theater is conflict so if it's everybody agree yeah yeah we all agree we're it's not interesting the fact that you disagree the fact that there's it's not so simple the complexity I think is what draws us to the facets actually that fascinated

01:25:56 with people that are purely evil what we really like is people that are sort of essentially good but a bit flawed and that might because that's basic like us right like we want to be seen as these good people but we do have these sort of witnesses you know we do lie like most days to some some degree so maybe it resonates with us those types of characters I don't know when when you had spoken about adultery and and children of in conflicted families I I immediately was thinking of all these fabulous characters like Madame Bovary and just the literature really is not

01:26:28 it's not made up of goody-goody housewives it's the ones that you know are peeking through the blinds and and your explanation of you know the why we're more interested because it creates a tension I think you really hit on something thank you so many things occur to me I really was thinking about sort

01:27:00 of the demise of religion and these kind of strong values systems and maybe the rise and acceptance of the lying and you know that that was one thing that occurred to me but on a bigger scale I'm wondering whether the fact that there seemed to be no long no repercussions and no punishment for lying on sort of a

01:27:31 governmental scale on corporate scale whether you think of cover-ups or whether you think of our president sort of being able to lie with kind of know nothing's been done about it I mean he hasn't been impeached he hasn't you know there's no punishment and what you see you know I think of the clergy and all those cover-ups and sort of the lack of punishment for lying what you see as a long-term outlook for our democracy

01:28:04 you know we're lying is just kind of accepted on a leadership level that it's supposed to be a little lot of this imeem that's I would I would say that there have been consequences maybe not the consequences there should have been or the consequences you would have preferred but so I'll take a very

01:28:34 concrete specific one which is that Facebook collaborates with a number of fact-checking organizations and if a fact-checking organization rates an article as substantially false they will reduce the distribution of it on Facebook and apparently Facebook says you lose 80 percent of your reach if a fact-checker tags you as false so that's a very concrete economic hit for being

01:29:07 labeled as a lie they could do more though right as well I think you could have some rating of information like potentially oh yeah like yeah let's let's do this for another 90 minutes into I mean we I thought I was actually going to be asked to talk about all the disinformation world I think we're a little late for a long explanation but suffice it to say that all of the major social media platforms are deep in this

01:29:39 issue and it's a it's a difficult issue in part because it is an issue of who gets to decide so it's inextricably political it's an extra key legal as well because if you have a global company whose standards do you use or do you show different people in different countries different things which has its own implications and problems so it's not at all a simple question and then there's the actual how

01:30:09 do you decide if something is a lie and the platforms have mostly fallen back on essentially journalistic fact-checking organizations which use a essentially open-ended variety of methods to try to verify things you know you'll do interview sources you'll compare pictures you'll do technical analyses of the sources of a piece of information I mean it's it's it's research in the broadest sense and it and anything is

01:30:41 fair game and the idea is to try to produce these consequences right and in the sort of immediate sense as in this article is false and in the broader sense as in you know we did this investigation and we concluded that you know somebody is embezzling money or I think the the sex scandals in the Catholic Church are actually a prime example of the role of journalism in the democracy right there's there's a movie about this yes I understand it you're

01:31:14 pessimistic but I don't think it's fair to say that there are no consequences well I want to thank everyone for their contribution today and and that's how it will be one more question I know a guy really wanted a job so he applies does the interview and he tells the interviewer I I can't work on the

01:31:45 Sabbath the interviewer says okay you're hired what he doesn't say and I said to him why didn't you tell the interviewer that you also don't want to work on the religious holidays which will come in six months and then he said well they won't give me the job okay he had already been fired and sued

01:32:17 on a different job that he had before because he sprung this on that company I can't work on the Jewish holidays and he was fired from that job so he had some experience with this then I said well what would happen if they hired you on this job you're now applying for oh by the way on that first job you won

01:32:49 $20,000 in court for religious intolerance so he would he said to me I would sue them and I said you know Yura excuse me a lawyer and I throw it out to you I don't know I don't know the outcome of its your relative the answer to that is yes I

01:33:27 could I could actually I could actually embellish that but I won't I'll just say as you say I think you told the truth thank you everybody thank you yeah

01:34:38 [Applause]