Today’s a busy day moving so I’ll be keeping this a bit shorter than I’d like, though I’ll probably revisit the topic later.

As someone who is fascinated with truth, deception, emotions, micro-expressions, and social interactions in general, it should come as no surprise that I hold a lot of value to telling the truth, as truth is defined relative to me.

I don’t believe in absolute truth (or rather, that there is no such thing as an absolute lie) because I think the definition of lying is based on a social contract or a verbal agreement.

An example of this is the following: a friend of mine is in an open marriage and he admitted to me that he doesn’t have to tell his wife when he fancies or kisses another woman, only when he sleeps with her. In most relationships, even kissing, or thinking about kissing another woman and not telling your partner is considered lying. But, that’s not so in his case because that is what they agreed to.

If no explicit agreement has been made between you and another person, you can assume the basic “definition of lying” applies:

- misinformation/untruths;

- omission of pertinent information.

To take it a step further, I’ve further defined the second point to be something around the lines of “the omission of any information that would, if discovered/discussed later, cause a negative emotional response from either party, and/or cause resentment to build up (as in my case)”

That opens the doors to a lot of room for lying — lying if you don’t tell someone how you feel about something. Lying, if by not doing so, you lash out in a passive-aggressive way.

So — I plan on going into my beliefs on lying and the truth in a lot more detail in other posts. This post was where I wanted to discuss the importance of knowing the limits of your ability to lie. It is akin to knowing your own physical strength and ability to hurt someone in that fashion.

To be concrete — I am, objectively*, a fantastic liar. So, I just don’t lie. It is not easier to tell the truth, it is in fact, more difficult to hold yourself to that standard but I have moral objections to lying.

But, if it is of interest to you to learn to be a better liar, I will tell you how (including the obvious points).

1- Short and sweet, skip the details. This one’s called the “falsifiability heuristic” and can be translated simply to — why are they telling me so many details? But, the second part of this is that the more details you divulge, the higher the chance that one of them may be wrong. And, if one part of your story checks out as false, the likelihood of the rest being false increases. This is not reversible, if only one part of your story checks out as true, the likelihood of the rest being true does not increase. That’s human nature.

Here is an example: Your husband comes home from a late “day at work” and tells you that he was working on a project that ran late because of a tight deadline. The project was for Company X. The people that stayed late were your husband, his assistant (a woman), Paul and Joe. He ordered Chinese food from Restaurant X for dinner.

There are six facts that the husband shared. Six points that can be true or false and easily verified. So the next day you’re at the office bringing him something and you see Chinese food containers in the bin — that corroborates the story, but doesn’t necessarily mean he wasn’t there screwing around with his lady assistant. Then, you run into Joe and ask “how’d it work out, your deadline for Company X?” Unless his response perfectly corroborates what the hubby said, its enough to throw the entire story off.

Let’s say Joe says:

“Oh man, last night was brutal. We were here until midnight.” — Matches up perfectly.

“Yeah, it was a bit rough, we had to stay a few hours late but it wasn’t too bad.” — Red flag. What does a “few hours” mean?

“Company X? We haven’t worked with them in months!” — Doesn’t match up at all.

So my points are two things: the more details given means the more that have to line up. If someone is telling the truth, they can and may give as many details as possible (let’s say they like to tell their stories that way) and they won’t care, because it’s all true. The second point: not every part of a story weighs the same in terms of relative importance. What parts of the story above, if false, could still “allow” the rest of the story to be true? What parts couldn’t? On that same note, what parts, if true, allow the rest of the story to be false? (The restaurant boxes in the bin.)

On another tangent — this is something people often do. They give us only the information to verify the parts of a story that we want them to verify. Kind of like putting only certain references or work history on a CV. In the above scenario, say hubby came home and you were suspicious and so he says, “you know what, call Joe and ask him!” You should say, no, I want to call ____ or I want to see ____. When I hire people for any freelance jobs with a lot of risk, I ask for a list of three references. I always call the references starting with the one they list third, never the first one. It’s not to say any of them would lie to me, but one of two things happens when people list references on a CV: they list the best one first (the one they think will give them the best review) and, if they’re someone who may not have a lot of references, the 3rd one may be a kind of fluffy one, a friend or something. I like to hear what those people have to say.

2-Make it believable. There’s something called the “infrequency heuristic” — basically, what are the chances of what you’re saying happened actually happening? This can be a measure of actual probability or probability in relation to you personally. For example, if I said I was late because I was stuck in traffic because a taxi exploded in front of me (this actually happened once in FL, crazy) it’s less believable because how often do cars “explode?” (Note the word choice!) If I said I didn’t get your call because I broke my phone, anyone who knows me knows that my breaking my cell phone is an incredibly likely occurrence.

3-Choose your words. The best liars know how to lie because they’re also incredibly perceptive of others’ emotions. This makes them incredibly manipulative. Certain words elicit certain emotions and if you’re aware of the emotions someone considers favorable, you can modify your word choice to bring those emotions to the surface, thereby giving them a warm and fuzzy feeling.

I’m not going to go into any more detail for now but I will end with this:

I am not condoning lying. If you want to sharpen your tools, that’s fine, but just know that two people can get hurt in a knife fight.

*For more details, ask.