Psych: Lie and Lie Numerous Amounts Essay

Submitted By jlvasiloff
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Born Liars- Ian Leslie Jenny Vasiloff This book provides an interesting exploration of the human mind. It explores why people lie, how they lie and the reasons why they lie. In the first few pages, it has us recognizing that we are the ones that are the truth-tellers. The liars are everyone around us. It is a known fact that everyone has told a lie, and it is even safe to say that everyone has told a lie numerous amounts of times (Leslie, 2011). Researchers see the ability to lie developing in extremely young children, beginning at the age of three! Some researches even say that children learn to start telling lies when they first start to learn a language. The reason those children lie is they want to cover up something they’ve done wrong, and to avoid getting in trouble and receiving a punishment. (Leslie, 2011) says that once children reach the age of four, they lie more convincingly and effectively. Instead of immediately confessing or saying “sorry”, the kids stick to their story and maintain a straight face throughout the lie. (Leslie, 2011) then elaborates about how a specialist uses a certain game called the peeking game. Children are tested and if they try and peek so they’ll know the right answer they are asked if they did peek. The children are recorded so it is known if they peek or do not peek. Many children peek to try and see the answer and then lie to try and cover it up. The interesting thing is, even the children that are strictly disciplined for cheating and lying still lie and they are better and more convincing at lying than most children their age. On the other hand, sometimes children get mixed messages from their parents (Leslie, 2011) The parents enforce that lying is bad but then when the child tells grandma the truth, that they didn’t like the sweater they received for Christmas, the parents are then telling the children to lie. Eventually, as they get older, the children realize there are certain places and times that are best for telling a small, little lie. It has been found that parents can prevent their children from being liars. When you know that they’ve done something wrong, it is easy to tell them that it is ok and help them fix the problem instead of making the child feel bad about them self and feel the need to lie so the parent won’t be mad. Lie detectors are commonly spoken of but little are they used to separate the liars from the truth tellers (Leslie, 2011). They science behind the lie detectors is still being understood but the main way of operation is this. It detects a raise in blood pressure, a change in breathing patterns and involuntary muscular movement. It worked for a college case where many of the girls reported stolen items and when attached to the lie detector the culprit showed an obvious spike in blood pressure and the next day, she broke down and confessed. The reason why lie detectors aren’t commonly used anymore is because they don’t work all the time. Plus, they don’t give valuable information. They can only tell sometimes that someone is lying and then again they don’t know what the truth is they just know a lie. If the person is a good liar or they refuse to tell the truth it is a virtually useless invention. It wasn’t used in Europe at all and eventually courts decided the evidence produced by the lie detector machine wasn’t accurate enough to be used in a case because it was not scientifically at the standards required. Now there is a new form of lie detecting called an fMRI (Leslie, 2011). It is basically a giant machine with a huge magnet that can measure certain parts of brain activity. It is a revolutionary tool and caused a huge breakthrough in neuroscience. Sometimes lying can be worse than ever imagined. It is common that people lie to themselves because they think what they’re doing is right and this self-deception can lead to many awful consequences. For example, suicide bombers think that they’re doing well by killing thousands of innocent
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