The Liar’s Brain: Is it different?
Here is an older study, but a quite fascinating one that says skilled liars actually have more brain matter to help them lie.
What do you think? Do you think liars have a biological edge?
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The study talks about pathological liars who contradict themselves in an interview. I wouldn’t consider them to be skilled, just persistent. Also, they have less grey matter in the brain. Brain structure is more important than raw size.
Different brains, different “wiring” is the proven cause of many “disease states”, so why not the cause or tendency to be a pathological liar? I do not necessarily think this gives them an “edge”, at least not with people that are paying attention, really listening, or able to pick up on their lies more intuitively, it only gives them an edge that they do not feel remorse when they take advantage of people that fall for their lies. I see it as more of a disability as they end up surrounding themselves with people in total denial about what a fake they are, so they don’t ever get to what I would call a real relationship with anyone.
Well if they’ve gained an edge in one area, it seems they have also lost an edge in the moral domain.
They definitely have an edge if you can’t recognize they are lying. But if you can then what is their advantage? They might still be able to mislead others.
I think the negative attitude toward people who lie isn’t helpful towards discerning the truth. A clinical approach is much better.
fMRI is a very unspecific tool. It basically says “stuff is going on here” which is about as insightful as a 10-year old making note that there is a lot of cars in rush hour. Science is so utterly ignorant at this point in time and fMRI is not only weak, there is (was, I haven’t kept up) a lot of grant money in this recent fad, that’s why it’s promoted in research so much. When scientists want funding they scream of the importance, utility, potential, etc. and pump up their research. It’s just human beings being human at a systemic level.
I don’t think liars have an edge.
An interesting point:
A lot of good manipulation (can include lying) doesn’t convince people like Eyes. Most people use flawed ways to understand human nature and good manipulators tap into the flawed ways in which others perceive the world. Eyes works on another level and and uses accurate means of perceiving by relying on many things (paralleling, intuition, listening to that intuition, critical thinking, behavioural analysis, etc.). Good manipulators aren’t thinking how to convince someone like Eyes, they are thinking of how to get the results they want by making use of how others think in the wrong way. That is always going to involve low hanging fruit and opportunism.
Mark.
“Good manipulators…are thinking of how to get the results they want by making use of how others think in the wrong way. That is always going to involve low hanging fruit and opportunism.”
That’s a pretty interesting thought, Mark. I’ll have to sit with it for a while.
I think this might be one example of what you’re saying Mark. I saw a documentary about con men, german documentary I think, all interviewed were in jail. One con man used to say to people ‘You don’t look well’. Then the person would say something along the lines of ‘Really, well this is why…..’. So he was connecting to people’s bad feelings about their life. He used this method to gather information.
I would have to see a lot more studies on this subject, before I accepted it. A lot of chronic liars also have other character weaknesses, such as stealing and over indulging themselves in many ways. I would like to see a study that includes these weaknesses along with chronic lying..
One thing has always puzzled me, and that is the idea, that some people, actually, convince themselves that they are innocent of committing a horrible crime.This is so foreign to the way I feel, and I have a hard time believing it. If this report is true, this could go along with chronic liars getting their own stories mixed up.
The brain is plastic. Thus, if by “skilled” you actually mean “habitual” then, no, I don’t find it at all surprising that a liar’s brain will be more “developed” in areas that aid the liar in their deception. The scientific literature is full of research on the brain and the parts we use are naturally more developed than the parts we don’t use.
This is not a chicken-or-egg scenario. In this case, the lying clearly causes the brain’s transformation.