Thursday, August 16, 2007

“There are lies…”

Lies

Tell an untruth; pretend with intent to deceive. A popular television series, which I like to watch when I can, House, MD, has a lead character—Dr. Gregory House—who believes that everyone lies. Why do people lie to one another? Wikipedia, home to the collaborative intellectual knowledge of the masses, states that lies are told because people have the “intention to deceive, maintain a secret or reputation, or to avoid punishment. As a whole, people want to be perceived in a certain way: Strong, powerful, helpful, kind, etc. They also want to keep portions of their life that they intentionally keep hidden from the world in that persistent state. Lastly, people generally seek pleasure and avoid pain. While punishment runs the gamut from the type of discipline that a parent gives to a child, it could also mean the shame given to a person from a societal perspective for doing things that are against the norm or outside other acceptable boundaries.

With the exception of psychopathic personality types, however, most people aren’t serial liars. Any poker player will tell you that each person has their “tells.” Any individual that is familiar with the operation of a lie detector understands the mechanics of the human body when they tell something that they know to be a mistruth. People who deal with other people enough has the experience to tell you what to look for in what a person says and does in regards to truths and lies.

Damned Lies

The thing to look out for here is the individual who doesn’t know that they are lying. While lying is mostly a matter of intent, it could also be considered a tool of the manipulative in order to gain control over the situation. In this respect, serial liars can take advantage situations by not being able to tell the difference between what a factual reality is and what things are fabricated. They will not have the “tells” of a person who feels guilty for their actions because they do not have the capacity to feel guilt for their transgressions.

Statistics

Believe it or not, everyone has an agenda. Some might be simple enough: Get through my day and get home so I can relax. Others might be more insidious: Take over the world. Most fall in between. At any rate anyone may use statistics to get their point across, draw someone to action, and control their environment towards the outcome which they desire. Take, for instance, this insurance scenario:

Suppose that a zealous insurance CEO asks his statistician if drivers with two or more tickets in a three-year period were more likely to have an accident.[1] He would soon report back that drivers with two or more tickets have almost twice [2] the chance of having an accident.

Wow! Twice the accident rate! What fools! The CEO might think that by hitting these guys with higher premiums, he might make them think about their careless driving habits. Maybe it will teach them a lesson. The company can make quite a bit more profit, as other insurers are not going to try and steal the worst drivers away. Furthermore, the state motor vehicle departments start thinking about taking away these driver's licenses. Everybody thinks that these guys have to be gotten off the road before they kill themselves or someone else. Unfortunately, they aren't careless drivers. According to the assumptions, they are equally good at driving as everybody else. The statistics lied. The difference in mileage exposure alone is enough to produce a strong correlation between tickets and accidents.

While tickets isn’t, in and of itself, a contributable factor inasmuch as it indicates the entire risk that any one client is going to be for an insurance company if this were something that were correlated to the distance that a person drives in any given year, it may then gain more credibility. All things being equal, consider the case between the younger man and the older woman. Maybe the younger man doesn’t want to put down that he drives twice the norm in a given year—30,000 miles—while the older lady decides that she doesn’t want to let the insurance company know that she only drives a couple thousand miles each year. Either way, these individuals are likely to let the insurance company know something different about their driving habits either through inflating or deflating their numbers, respectively.

And the Truth…

In the end it is a good idea to remember that the human instinct is correct a good majority of the time, at least for those things within our own purview. Experts may be able to pull out statistics and serial liars may be able to influence your actions with their finely-honed skills, and everyday people might baffle you will bull…but in the end just make sure to do your research and trust your own gut.

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