Lying

Introduction

Psychologically, lying can have several consequences, but they depend heavily on why the lie is told, how consequential it is, whether the person believes it is justified, whether it must be maintained, and whether it conflicts with their self-concept.

One immediate consequence is cognitive load. A truthful account can usually be retrieved from memory; a lie may require the person to inhibit the true account, construct an alternative, monitor what the listener knows, remember what has already been said, and keep later statements consistent with it. The more elaborate or sustained the deception, the greater that monitoring burden can become.

A second consequence is internal conflict. If someone sees themselves as truthful, fair, competent or trustworthy, knowingly lying can create a discrepancy between behaviour and self-concept. Psychology often discusses this kind of tension through concepts such as cognitive dissonance, guilt, shame and self-justification. One way of reducing that discomfort is to admit the deception. Another is to change the interpretation of what happened: it was necessary; they deserved it; it wasn’t really a lie; I had no choice. That does not mean every explanation after a lie is rationalisation, but deception can create a motive to reinterpret events in ways that protect the person’s view of themselves.

That is particularly relevant to the idea of incongruence. A person can simultaneously possess information such as:

“I know statement A is false”

and a self-representation such as:

“I am a reliable person who gives accurate information.”

Those states conflict. Maintaining both may encourage additional psychological work—avoidance, selective attention, rationalisation, minimisation, blame-shifting or eventually modification of the remembered narrative. The lie can therefore become more than a false statement; it can create a regulatory problem for the person’s self-model.

There can also be an emotional consequence. Depending on circumstances, deception may produce anxiety about discovery, guilt about harm, shame about what the behaviour implies about oneself, vigilance about inconsistencies, or fear concerning its consequences. But these are not universal. A lie regarded as harmless, justified, socially expected or protective may create little distress. Individual differences also matter.

Repeated deception introduces another interesting possibility: the original lie can generate subsequent lies. Once another person has acted upon the false information, telling the truth later may become increasingly costly. The person may therefore have to protect the earlier statement with further omissions, explanations or fabrications. The psychological task changes from:

produce one false statement

to:

maintain a coherent alternative history.

That can increase both cognitive and emotional costs.

Memory can be affected as well. Repeatedly rehearsing an invented account can make the boundary between what was originally experienced and what was subsequently constructed less clear, particularly over time. This should not be exaggerated into “liars eventually believe every lie”; human memory is reconstructive generally, and the effect varies. But repeated imagination and rehearsal can modify later recollection and confidence.

There is also a relational cost. Once deception is discovered, the injured party does not merely update the particular fact that was false. They may have to update their estimate of the speaker as an information source. Consequently, one lie can produce uncertainty about previously accepted statements. The damage to trust can therefore be much larger than the informational content of the lie itself.

Interestingly, lying can sometimes have short-term psychological benefits. A person may lie to avoid punishment, preserve belonging, appease someone dangerous, maintain privacy, protect another person, or avoid an intolerable confrontation. In those circumstances the lie may successfully regulate an immediate threat. The longer-term consequences can nevertheless differ from the immediate ones.

That distinction fits particularly well with the territory we have just been exploring:

a behaviour can be locally protective while producing longer-term internal or relational costs.

And there is one further distinction I think would matter to your question. Lying and being wrong are psychologically very different. A mistake requires a false statement. A lie normally requires some degree of knowledge or belief that the statement is false plus an intention to cause another person to accept it as true. Confabulation, faulty memory, self-deception, motivated reasoning and ordinary error can all produce false statements without having the same psychological architecture as deliberate deception.

So, in systems terms, an intentional lie can create at least three coupled problems:

• External incongruence — the communicated model differs from the speaker’s privately represented model;
• Internal incongruence — the behaviour may conflict with the speaker’s values or self-concept;
• Historical incongruence — subsequent behaviour must remain compatible with both what really occurred and what has already been represented to others.

That last one is potentially very interesting for the theory we have been developing, because a deliberate deception can force the organism to maintain two partially incompatible state histories at once: the privately retained history and the socially asserted history. The psychological consequences may then arise partly from the continuing work required to keep those histories from colliding.