I had a friend in college who did this, lying frequently about even inconsequential things. I asked him about it, and he said that he rarely lied to get an obvious direct advantage over someone like we imagine. Rather, he mostly just enjoyed knowing that other people were operating under false info, very much like dramatic irony except in real life.<p>It was weird, and I don't think it served him well in the long run. However, his girlfriends were consistently more beautiful than you'd expect for his looks/personality/wealth.
As an Aspie, (almost) every neurotypical person seems to be a pathological liar, not able to make a small talk without committing a few lies.<p>Examples: "I am fine, thanks", "You look great!", "It is a wonderful idea!", "You are our best client", "For our company privacy is a priority", etc, etc.
Dear parents: never let your kids lie, at any age. It might be cute when they're 3 or 4 or 5, but if you don't gently tell them that "we don't tell lies, we always tell the truth" it will become a habit they will carry into adulthood.
Don’t take the following too seriously, but studies might preselect for liars.<p>You usually need to meet certain criteria to be eligible and participants may fudge their answers to participate. I’ve done food testing on and off through the years and you always need to answer some questions beforehand to determine eligibility. If you gave a “wrong” answer, the survey-asker would say something like “Are you sure?”, prompting you to pick the other choice that made you eligible for the study. Or even without prompting, if I’m trying to get paid to taste bubblegum and they ask how often you have bubblegum, I’m more likely to inflate my reported frequency compared to my actual frequency of gum chewing.
Obvious to many:<p>After working for 13+ years at wildly successful silicon valley companies and seeing who climbs the latter, it is those who are good at lying. There is a spectrum ranging from blatant lying to manipulative, selective withholding of information.
My first wife was a pathological liar. I'm bad at reading people and tend to think the best of people, so I remained naive (or willfully blind) to it for a long time. It came to a head when a sweet, mutual friend of ours asked an innocent question about what we were doing later in the day, and my (now ex-) wife gave a completely made up answer. It wasn't a white lie to get out of something, or a deflection to keep privacy, it was simply a pointless falsehood clearly produced on reflex.<p>She was good at keeping track of who she told what lie, so this was the first time I'd been the 3rd party observer to something I could definitively know she was lying about. I confronted her about it later privately, "<name> is our friend, why would you lie to her for no reason?" and she gave a dismissive non-answer.<p>That was the first loose thread that unraveled the whole sweater. It turned out she'd been lying to me and everyone close to her, about things big and small, for many years.<p>It's difficult for me to understand the psychology behind it, but I think it comes down to she feels alternately safer and superior when she knows some truth that someone else doesn't know. Her parents are estranged but stayed together, constantly low-key gas lighting each other. Maybe growing up in that environment is why she reflexively lies. Or maybe it's heritable and the lying leads to that kind of relationship. Either way, I wasn't going to live the same way and peaced out.
I am a pathological liar. From the small scale (What did you do yesterday? Completed a videogame) to the large scale (lying about my job) to the extreme (multi-year affairs).<p>How does one stop?
I've made a conscious effort to stop lying after reading
<a href="https://samharris.org/books/lying/" rel="nofollow">https://samharris.org/books/lying/</a><p>Can recommend, it feels great.
I can imagine there are professions where the threshold for lies to count as pathological would be higher than others.<p>If you barely talk, if the few things you say are all lies, that's pretty serious. But for people who talk a lot, like politicians, salesmen, managers, etc, 10 lies per day doesn't sound very high at all.
I worked with a co-worker who couldn't stop lying about even the smallest stuff. I took it as a weird personality quirk and it never felt malicious to me because the lies felt like they were created to entertain others
<i>The researchers recruited them in 2019 from various mental health forums, social media, and a university.</i><p>This seems like a classic reflexive problem: why would we expect liars to produce reliable data regarding their lying?
<i>"The study found the pathological liars were more likely to experience distress and impaired functioning, especially in social relationships."</i><p>I am quite interested in the behavior of Trump. As far as we know he tells a lot of lies but it seems the above quote does not apply to him.<p>Could it be that distress and impaired functioning only apply to people who are able to experience negative consequences of their lies?<p>Meaning two things:<p>* There are negative consequences, so they experience them.<p>* They see the consequences as negative.