564. Foolish Lies

564.  Foolish Lies

Trust in a close, bonded and committed relationship requires sincerity and honesty without exceptions.   But with strangers and unrelated people, there can be situations, in which lies are a necessity of self-protection.
 

Independent of any moral consideration of the possible harm done by lies, there are rational and irrational lies.   Rational are those with a high probability of getting away with.  Irrational and foolish lies are those, which are determined to be discovered.    In the latter case, being caught with the lies often does more damage than the truth would have done.

Lies in profiles on matchmaking sites are extremely foolish by any person using such a site for its real purpose.   During real life encounters, many of these lies will be discovered immediately.  

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/13/fashion/online-dating-as-scientific-research.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

"about 81 percent of people misrepresent their height, weight or age in their profiles,"

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/exagger_dating_7N5Irwi6wBf636XjbJjV3O

"Men are on average 2 inches shorter than they say in their profiles, while women are an inch shorter. About 50 percent of daters fib about their weight. Almost everyone exaggerates their income by 20 percent,

"*24.3% of men and 13.1% of women lie about their age
* Men are on average 2 inches shorter than they say in their online profiles, women are 1 inch shorter
* 59% of women lie about their weight, 55% of men lie about their weight
* People tend to inflate their salaries by 20%
* It rises with age: 20-year-old men and women inflate by 5%; jumps to around 35% for men and women at 50 years old."

The choice to either lie or to be correct about facts and to apply the cautious preference of understatements in the case of attributes with only fuzzy self-evaluation allows some conclusions about the person's motivation and goals.   

It is the choice between disappointing and surprising.  

The preference to risk disappointing is the attempt to manipulate someone to meet once.  
If the disappointing person is a man, he probably is convinced to be such an irresistible guy, that he can seduce the woman for a night, even though his lies have forfeited any trust in him.  
If the disappointing person is a woman, she probably just wants to take advantage of a man paying for an expensive dinner.   

The preference for hoping to be a pleasant surprise is the method to find someone for a long term relationship.    When correct information and understatements are already sufficient to be acceptable for a meeting, then a pleasant surprised adds to attraction and eligibility.      

534. The Pseudo-Evidence Fallacy

534.   The Pseudo-Evidence Fallacy

Whenever someone bases the decision, how to treat another person, on a belief, which is so strong, that it impedes and overrides the rational perception and comprehension of evidence and reality, there are more or less fatal consequences for at least the misjudged person, often for both. 

Examples:

1. A very drastic example was the alleged proof of who is a witch by throwing the unfortunate victim into the water to see if she floated or drowned.    Men believed in this cruel irrationality, even though their brain had nevertheless enabled them to become fluent in Latin.   
2. In some cultures, parents not only decide, whom to marry their children to, but they choose an alleged match following an astrologer's advice.   This has certainly caused millions of people to suffer from being tied for a lifetime to a mismatch, the worst fate being that of women being abused by a man, whom they would not have chosen.  
3. Today people are less prone to fall for very blatant irrationality.  But the more the irrational claims and beliefs mimic science, the more people are gullible to mistake pseudo-science for science.   
   NLP is a good example.   In entry 177 (The Jerks' Fascination with NLP) I already elaborated, why NLP is a belief system, and why this blend of some elements from scientific psychology with irrational and unscientific claims make this so attractive to people with a distorted self-concept as if being rational.  

In these as also in many more examples, there is a pattern of a specific fallacy:  

The person

• bases a rational decision process upon incorrect or insufficient information acquired by absurd, weird, preposterous or insane methods.   
• is unperceptive, mindblind, immune to or otherwise not impacted by any information coming directly from the target of the behavior.   The target has no influence upon what information is used to determine, how s/he is treated.
• imposes the decision upon the target or attempts to, feeling entitled and justified to do so. 

This fallacy impedes trust and as a consequence it impedes a relationship from becoming a safe haven, which is impossible without trust justified by trustworthiness.   
Trustworthiness can only be assessed by the rational method of evaluating evidence.  This method compares all of someone's verbal and non-verbal expressions and behaviors at any moment with all of this at any another time, and also with external independent sources.   
The more often this comparison is consistent, congruent and without contradictions, the more the person's overall trustworthiness can be estimated as probable.   Never discovering a lie is a part of this.

Any other method, which relies on unverified and unverifiable clues, is a hazard and misleading.   Earning trust depends not only on the own trustworthy behavior, it also depends upon the partner's ability to recognize trustworthy behavior as such by the correct perception of evidence.    Trust cannot be earned from a person using unsuitable methods.  

An honest person never lying is nevertheless not trusted by a partner using flawed methods to evaluate honesty.   The delusion of being able to rely upon firmly believed pseudo-clues makes him oblivious of reality.      
Fools believing in NLP derive the pseudo-evaluation of alleged honesty or lack thereof from the target's eye movements.   This is a hazardous fallacy, as the study quoted below clearly shows.    Eye movements can be caused, influenced and diverted by many triggers.  During any conversation, people's attention can be easily caught momentarily by events at the periphery of their vision.   
The haphazard location of such events suffices to determine the erroneous attribution of an alleged trait towards one of two errors:      
Accidental eye movements of a honest person can forfeit the chance to be trusted.  
The blind believer in NLP can also easily be mislead to trust by a liar's accidental eye movements.  

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/07/120711205943.htm

"For decades many NLP practitioners have claimed that when a person looks up to their right they are likely to be lying, whilst a glance up to their left is indicative of telling the truth."

"Professor Richard Wiseman (University of Hertfordshire, UK) and Dr Caroline Watt (University of Edinburgh, UK) tested this idea by filming volunteers as they either lied or told the truth, and then carefully coded their eye movements.  In a second study another group of participants was asked to watch the films and attempt to detect the lies on the basis of the volunteers' eye movements.

"The results of the first study revealed no relationship between lying and eye movements, and the second showed that telling people about the claims made by NLP practitioners did not improve their lie detection skills,” noted Wiseman. "

The pseudo-evidence fallacy and commodification share the common defective acquisition of information.    In both situations, the target is excluded from being considered as a possible source when choosing, which information is used for the decision how to behave.  Both situations indicate depreciation and disrespect of the target, but it works differently.

In the case of commodification, the target is mistaken for a passive utility in a onesided relationship and therefore not considered as able to be a proactive source supplying any information.  
The pseudo evidence fallacy disregards, devalues and rejects the information input coming directly from the target.   The real information is noticed but replaced by the false beliefs.   The target is considered as a proactive source of irrelevant or worthless information.  

384. Predictability And Pseudo-Compatibility

Predictability And Pseudo-Compatibility

A relationship as a safe haven needs to be reliable and predictable based upon the justifiable trust, that the other will not commit transgressions and will not do harm or hurtful things.   

Predictability means to be able to make a realistic prognosis of future behaviors by the estimation of probability.   In entry 95, I already mentioned the importance of calculating probabilities of the occurrence of behavior in the future.  In entry 173 I elaborated this by including the importance of considering the attitudes, which are causing or modifying behaviors.   

But the matter is even more complicated.  

Estimating the partner's future behavior implies:

1. It is important to listening to what he declares himself as his attitudes.  
2. His behavior needs to be compared with his expressed attitudes, if it is congruent or if there are contradictions.   Sometimes people are not aware of subconscious attitudes, that are nevertheless strong determinants of their behavior.   Subconscious attitudes can be incongruent with expressed attitudes, when the latter are superficially learned or imitated and not connected to innate tendencies.  Then behavior is congruent with the true hidden attitudes but contradictory to the expressed attitudes.       
3. Observable specific behaviors are indicators of attitudes, but attitudes determine usually a wider variety of correlated behaviors, that can be predicted only when knowing the attitude.
4. Observable proactive behavior allows to estimate probable future behavior.    The absence of proactive behavior is not as much a reliable source of information, because it is not the same as a decision to refrain from a behavior.  

I will use lying as an example.
 
If a woman catches her partner lying to her, she can predict, that he will lie again.   The more frequent his past lies, the more frequently he will lie in the future.  
His lying is a clear indication, that his attitude towards her is not suitable for treating her as a close and bonded partner deserving sincerity and honesty.   This faulty attitudes makes it probable to expect also other sly, manipulative, deceptive behaviors.   

But if the woman never catches her partner telling her a lie, this does not allow equally good predictions, because this by itself is not an indication of his general attitude towards her.   

Her lack of experiencing a lie from him can be due to

1. She did not catch him lying because of her unjustified trust.
2. He had so far no reason or occasion to lie but would otherwise not hesitate
3. He has a reason or attitude to actively refrain from lying. 
   
   These reasons are

• in his person  
  
  • He is someone, who always blurs out what he thinks, no matter to whom, even with unrelated persons, when it has detrimental consequences for him.
  • His self-esteem requires moral behavior and this includes special rules how to treat closely related persons, like not lying to them and not hurting them. 
• his attitude concerning her significance for him.   He values and appreciates her enough to enclose her in the ingroup of people, whom he honors with sincerity and honesty.   
• consideration of the consequences.  
  
  • He fears to be punished for lying by losing her
  • He wants to avoid the disapproval or other punishment by other significant persons like his family 
  • He fears being punished or wants to be rewarded by a deity due to some religious delusion.

Therefore not catching someone lying can either indicate true compatibility with someone, who is sincere and honest and who values her person in a relationship, or it can indicate pseudo-compatibility, when not having experienced someone's lying yet just does not allow predictions for the future.