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What if I tell you have never lied before, would you believe me?
Wait a minute, I just lied by saying that have never lied before.
But before I tell you about lying, let me first of all confess to lying.
Have lied about being already on my way while still at home getting dressed. Have lied about my grade in school. Have made promise to someone before and failed to live up to expectation. Have lied about everything. Have lied to myself before and refused to tell myself the bitter truth.
Meanwhile, Ariely had said something about lying to self.
He said, “essentially, we cheat up to the level that allows us to retain our self-image as reasonably honest individuals.”
In his book, The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone — Especially Ourselves, Dan Ariely attempts to answer the question: “is dishonesty largely restricted to a few bad apples or is it a more widespread problem?”
He concludes that we’re mostly honest as long as the conditions are right:
To drive home the point here, let me give you a typical scenario that played out recently with someone I know.
This person sells fish in the market but have her freezer — where she preserve unsold fishes — located at her place of residence because there is no secure place in the market to put it.
This she has been doing for a very long time up to the point where she no longer feel the need to lock her freezer again thinking nobody will steal fish at home.
Then the locksmith analogy set in. Someone broke in and ran away with kilos of fishes.
This got me thinking. What could have fuel such unexpected action.
Two things came to mind: one the padlock was not locked. Two the house was very quiet that day such that it was easy for the thief to sneak in without anyone knowing. In short, the condition was not right.
The idea here is that most of us are like this thief. We will only tell the truth when the condition is right and struggle to tell the truth when the condition is not.
To this end, we are natural liars and by extension, natural thieves — 98% of us are potential liars according to the locksmith theory.
Another interesting dimension to look at the locksmith analogy is from the perspective of corruption in Nigeria.
Nigeria is rated one of the most corrupt countries in the world today not because other countries are not as corrupt, but because the current socio-political structure encourages the tendency to be corrupt — there are no independent institutions, fair dispensation of justice, resilient civil society organizations and a well coherent, articulated national values and ethos designed to filter out bad eggs out of the society.
However, our interest in this article is on how we lie to ourselves. Because people will not believe our lies except we believe them.
The process of lying to ourselves starts with the ability to rationalize our actions, decisions, beliefs, opinions, attitudes, characters etc. in such a way that our self esteem is not sacrificed even when all evidence seem to points to the contrary.
Its more like justifying a wrong notion or idea without necessarily feeling remorseful about it. After all, we are rational beings.
Ariely also said something about rationalisation:
We usually justify our actions by concluding that it won’t have major impact on others.
For instance, it is easy for the thief to tell himself that the owner of the fish he stole won’t run out of business and yet benefit from it.
Ariely continued:
Let me conclude with this: as rational beings one thing we are very good at is our ability to successfully create logical sounding explanation to justify our actions, decisions and feelings. Though if channeled rightly, it could be a great strength for us, however, there are attendant side effects that could portend great danger. Rationalizing bad habits could, for instance, be dangerous or even life threatening.
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