Recently on my way home from work I've started reading Malcolm Gladwell's new book, "Talking to Strangers." Gladwell's books are interesting in themselves but also help me understand current events and some news stories or historical events that I didn't really delve into or care about. This particular book looked into the Jerry Sandusky (and Larry Nassar) child molestation cases, Bernie Madoff, and even episodes of Friends. It delves into human beings' interactions with strangers, and takes a fascinating look into the psychology of lying as well as trusting strangers and why people get deceived so easily by strangers like Madoff (hint: it has to do with our default settings of trusting others implicitly and thinking that we can judge people based on their facial expressions like we're conditioned to when watching Friends). The psychology using real-life examples is so well articulated that it kept me turning the pages faster than any mystery novel or sports autobiography (some of my favorite genres) ever could.
My first exposure to psychology was in high school, when I was trying desperately to get into the best college I could and take as many AP classes as possible, so I took AP Psychology in senior year hearing it was a relatively easy class, only to surprisingly actually like the class. Psychology was about human stories, about how one thinks and feels and interacts with others, and I liked all the theories and experiments in how practical they could be: someone does this to someone else, they react this way. It was a cross between science and social skills, and I being the nerdy kid at school but with aspirations of becoming popular and being friends with people, loved the class as a way to understand how most people think.
In college at University of Illinois, there were these experiments I signed up for to get extra credit or some very low monetary value......but I thought they were fun and was willing to be a test subject (after reading about the Stanley Milgram experiment of test subjects inflicting pain on others by supposedly sending electric shock waves, what could go wrong?) and signed up for various studies around campus. (Secretly it was kind of like signing up for blood donations, I went to a different place each time and was an excuse to go into buildings I'd never been in and have a new experience). I specifically remember in one experiment, I was asked to join a group of other test subjects in a room to discuss how to solve some problems around campus, like a student wanted to quit smoking, or a student wanted to avoid getting the freshman fifteen but didn't know how, and the 3 other students in my group and I were supposed to debate. The discussion was fine and we actually came up with some ideas, but at some point I did notice that one or more of the other test subjects seemed to dismiss my ideas the 2nd time around, or reject my idea just because it was my idea. I didn't think about it at the time, but now that I've read "Talking to Strangers" I suspect that one or more of the other participants were planted as part of the experiment to see how I would react to being shot down. As Gladwell notes, this often happens in psychology experiments where the objective of the study is not what is stated, but actually testing something else that isn't revealed until later, or never at all. Now I'm really curious about those experiments I participated in but also psychology in general.
Lying, according to Gladwell, is all about the psychology of the person being lied to, and their willingness to believe someone UNTIL there's a lot of factors that lead to a conclusion of this person's lying and going over the threshold of doubt. We want to believe other people, life is easier when things turn out to be true. But everybody lies at some point. And it's actually hard to tell lies, even for veteran police officers or counterintelligence officers trained to do this stuff. If someone's really good at lying, they can get away with it and prepare an answer for everything. On the flip side, for me at least lying is kind of hard. I'm always worried about if the interrogator will ask more questions, I feel like I will make a mistake........and honestly, it's hard to remember and keep track of all one's lies. It is really just easier to tell the truth.....if the truth isn't that bad. Anyway, if one wants to learn more about actual cases of lying, read the book, and the one piece of actionable advice I got from it was.......society should as a whole believe things to be true as a default, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try to verify if something isn't a lie, and don't be fooled by a stranger who doesn't seem to be lying.........you can't really tell.
By the way, if you really want to see if someone's lying, you can tell a lot about someone by where they are and tracking their location. The FindFriends app on your smartphone lets you do that, and that certainly cuts down on a large portion of lying, which is lying about where you are or what you are doing at the moment. Since MJ is almost always at home nowadays recovering from injury, I don't get any information about her whereabouts and what she is doing, but she gains all the information about me like where exactly in the world I am as well as if I'm "on the move. 'It's a tracking device that I can turn off if I turn off my phone, but that would raise even more suspicion. You really need to trust someone to share your location with them on FindFriends, and I wonder what would happen if that got into the wrong hands, and even what Apple is doing with knowing my location at all times........kind of scary. No lying to the machine I guess about where you are, it knows EVERYTHING.
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