Telling the truth – instinct or not?

People in certain types of job or profession have a reputation for not telling the truth or at least disguising the truth by keeping quiet about key aspects.  The most common examples are politicians and used car salespeople.  But in fact, a tendency not to tell the truth is much more widespread than that.  Despite that, we generally believe that other people are telling the truth until it is evident they are not, or they have a known history of not telling the truth or a clear motive to lie.

Even politicians as open and as genuine as Jacinda Ardern are not immune from the problem, as witnessed by her various comments on the Derek Handley affair and the distinct difference between what she said in response to questioning and the message given by the emails and texts released by Handley himself.  Fortunately for Ardern the discrepancies are not sufficient to cause her a serious political problem.

And it is quite true that our ability to accurately recollect what we said or wrote in the past is deeply flawed. the well- worn excuse of “I have no recollection of that” or “that is not the way I remember it” used often by politicians may often be quite genuine.  Winston Peters, in particular, has got out of many a tight corner by using that type of excuse.

Again, this seems to be in large part genetically wired in our brains. It is now well recognised that very few people have the ability to reliably and accurately remember and describe past events or conversations. It’s not that our memories are bad – because humans have an incredible ability to remember past events – but we have an instinctive editing mechanism in our brains. There are lots of reasons we may forget or misremember something, for example, we weren’t paying enough attention or made assumptions about what happened. If we hear another person’s account of what happened, we can come to believe we actually experienced it – and sometimes, we just forget.

Although I digress slightly, in the political arena it is almost accepted that politicians will go out of their way to present information in the way that most benefits them, without necessarily having too much regard for the truth.  And so long as the conversation is verbal and it is not in obvious conflict with reality, this behaviour is largely accepted.  Indeed, in politics, the cardinal sin is not that of telling lies, but that of being caught out telling lies using incontrovertible written evidence such as texts or emails.  Emails can cause particular problems and it is a source of amazement that people who should know better engage freely in email traffic on the most sensitive subjects with little or no regard for issues such as security.

It turns out that we are genetically wired to tell the story we feel should be told rather than necessarily just revealing the barefaced truth. In other words, we can’t help ourselves!  The reasons for that are largely social.  Very early in their evolution, humans discovered that it made sense to band together to enable individuals in the group to share skills and knowledge and combat what was back then a very hostile environment.  Living in social groups required some “give and take” on lots of things if the group was to be cohesive and effective, and that included being careful about the content of what we said to each other.  If individuals had been “exposed” over minor and insignificant transgressions, the groups would have soon broken down or even broken apart.

Although we face a very different environment today, the same behaviours still apply.  We routinely “massage” what we say to family members or friends, or colleagues to avoid giving offence for no good reason, or to withhold what could be very upsetting information, or to encourage good behaviours.  Most of this falls into what you might call the “white lie” territory, ie not telling the truth or all the truth for positive reasons, not for personal gain.  We all do this – often subconsciously.

The paradox in all of this is that – as indicated above – we tend to accept what we are told a truthful unless there are good reasons to suppose otherwise, even though we know that “gilding the lily” is a common behaviour.  I think the reasons for that are again largely social.  There is, if you like, an unwritten understanding that even if the truth has been massaged in a conversation, the motives were positive and it is in our interests to accept what we are told.  Of course, very often the truth eventually comes out, and if the “teller of the story” has used bad judgement or has evidently spoken with malicious intent, the reaction can be very intense and negative.  In a sense, an important social contract has been broken and the instinct is to make this clear so that it is unlikely to happen again.  This is for example reflected in our law which provides for people to be taken to court for slander and potentially landed with hefty fines and damages.

Does this mean that every conversation we are part of should be treated with suspicion?  I think attitudes to that vary, depending partly on the characteristics of the individual and partly on the context.    For example, it would be a very naïve politician who believed every word of answers given during Question Time in Parliament.  But for most of us, I think the instinct is to keep the social contract whole by believing what we are told – even if there is an instinct to do some background checking in some cases.

By Bas Walker

This is another of Bas Walker’s posts on GrownUps.  Please look out for his articles, containing his Beachside Ponderings.