The Honesty Connection
People are more likely to value and practice honesty when they see themselves tied personally to their communities.
-ALAN WOLFE
All community is continued by Truth.
-THOMAS BROWNE
In “Ambéli,” a pseudonymous Greek mountain village where she spent several years, anthropologist Juliet du Boulay found both a strict code of honesty and frequent attempts to violate this code. What made such attempts difficult, however, was the intimate familiarity Ambélians had with each other. “Villagers read the lives of others from signs and indications much as a hunter tracks an animal by its prints,” reported du Boulay. Their curiosity about each other (i.e., nosiness) made it hard for residents to conceal their violations of Ambéli’s moral code. Even cover-ups that seemed foolproof were invariably revealed, if the lie in question was of any consequence, and on a matter that interested enough townspeople. In the end, du Boulay concluded, it was the gossip of Ambélians more than any code of ethics that made their dishonesty “selflimiting.”
In our search for sources of an increasingly casual attitude toward honesty, we might look less to theology and more to sociology. Because it is so much bigger, more complex, and more mobile, postwar life facilitates guilt-free duplicity. The most basic sources of post-truthfulness are not moral breakdown but interstate highways, U-Haul vans, and For Sale signs on front lawns. Deceit’s rise is rooted less in the decline of ethics and more in the breakdown of community.
Community is the place where we feel known. Among those who know each other, dissembling is problematic. There is a limit to how many lies we can feed those whom we see on a regular basis. Routine deception requires a backdrop of people who aren’t familiar enough with deceivers to expose them, and who see no reason to search the Internet for evidence of their chicanery. Those who are well acquainted don’t need technological aids. Much gets conveyed between the lines. Longtime acquaintances who pay attention to each other—in the best and worst sense—are organic lie detectors. One woman noted that a relative would invariably raise a hand to her mouth and clear her throat before telling a big one. A friend of hers always rubbed his hands together while making things up. In Burundi, an elderly man observed by Ethel Albert usually telegraphed his intention to lie by swearing that he always told the truth (as was well known to his fellow tribesmen).
No lie detector can compare to people who know each other well. Those who interact regularly over time are well equipped to note, or even just to sense, when someone is not being truthful. Knowing so much about each other—their family, their ancestry,
their relationship with their spouse, their behavior patterns—also gives them a database with which to evaluate assertions.
Community has been defined as a place where residents cannot alter their age. It’s impossible to credibly add or subtract years in a setting where your birth was once announced. A Harvard degree is hard to claim when the local mail carrier never delivered any letters with Cambridge postmarks to your parents’ home. One can hardly brag about spurious combat heroics among those who didn’t see you march off to war.
Knowing how hard it is to peddle such fictions, community members are less likely to lie, more because they fear exposure than from any ethical rigor or love of their neighbors. It’s a misconception that those who enjoy a sense of community are honest because they care about each other so deeply. Often it’s just the opposite. Many can’t stand each other. Yet this doesn’t preclude a sense of caring. Members of small communities are intensely conscious of the ambivalence that characterizes the way they feel about many fellow members. As Juliet du Boulay discovered in Ambéli, “the villager can accommodate without difficulty a deep understanding of the reality of the commandment to love his neighbor with the fact that very often he hates him.”
Regardless of how community members feel about each other, there is no question that close, regular contact keeps them honest. We’re far less likely to lie to those we see often than those we see seldom. To test this hypothesis, Bella DePaulo compared frequency of lying with frequency of contact among University of Virginia students and residents of Charlottesville. The psychologist found that members of both groups told fewer lies per interaction to those with whom they had the most contact and—among the townspeople—those they had known longest.
If we were more honest in our dealings with each other in eras past, as I believe we were, it was not so much because we were more conscientious, but because so many of our interactions took place among familiar faces. Those who know each other well may be no less prone to tell lies than their disconnected cousins, but hesitate from fear of the consequences. There are two basic reasons to avoid lying: (1) because it’s wrong and (2) because we might get caught. Where there’s little consensus about what “wrong” refers to, fear of getting caught is the most compelling reason not to deceive others. Yet the likelihood of that happening has declined along with any clear sense of right and wrong. With less face-to-face contact among those who are well enough acquainted to spot a lie, external reasons to be honest decline along with internal ones.
Although I don’t believe that we have an instinct to be honest any more than we have one to be dishonest, I do believe that we have a will to gather in community. Communities are fertilized by truthfulness. Members remind each other regularly—in deeds more than words—that honesty has value.
While conducting interviews in eight American settings of various sizes, sociologist Alan Wolfe found the greatest emphasis on personal integrity among the 3,155 residents of Tipton, Iowa. Although this emphasis was expressed in moral terms, a little probing revealed that its real basis was more pragmatic. To Tiptonites, honesty was tied intimately to reputation. A good reputation depended on being known as an honest person. Without such a reputation, life could get awfully sticky in a town like Tipton—particularly for those in business. “People catch on right away if you’re not a straight shooter,” one resident told Wolfe. “When you look someone in the face, it’s harder to lie,” said another.
This doesn’t mean that community members are slavish truth
tellers. The point is not that members of closely knit communities don’t try to deceive each other. They do, all the time, but usually in ways that are considered socially acceptable. Most cultures condone some form of put-on lying. Like the Saami and the Samoans, many indigenous people delight in trying to pull each other’s legs. Some even designate “tricksters,” who have license to lie. But such in-community lying usually happens in ways that everyone understands. Those who belong to communities usually have an inbred sense of when it’s okay to lie, and who is likely to do so. “Everyone knows the rules,” said Ethel Albert of the frequent falsehoods exchanged among Burundians. “Everyone plays the game of matching wits through verbal parry and thrust.” This is a far cry from the post-truth society, in which anything goes and it’s each man and woman for him- or herself when trying to determine what’s a lie and who’s a liar.
My friend George characterized the memories of townspeople in his rural Kentucky hometown as “longer than a credit card record. The community knew everyone who lied, drank, or slept with a neighbor.” After moving to Manhattan, George continued to deal with others as he had back home: assuming their honesty could be counted on because of social scrutiny. When he tried to buy a co-op apartment from an affluent young executive whom I’ll call Woodruff, however, this man proved to be unscrupulous in nearly every aspect of their negotiation. George mentioned his experience to colleagues of Mr. Woodruff whom he knew, at the corporation where he worked. They expressed surprise. On the job, Woodruff was known for his integrity. For him, his office was comparable to George’s hometown: the place where he was known. To be caught lying there would have been devastating. Selling property
to a stranger was another matter. Mr. Woodruff wasn’t altogether dishonest. He just had different standards of honesty for different settings.
Think of this as situational dishonesty. It is practiced by those who are known partially in many places but fully in none. That allows them to convey varying amounts of truth, depending on whom they’re dealing with. Belonging to a wide range of communities makes it possible to have a wide range of ethics. In the absence of a strong connection with others who share common values, our ethical standards are determined in settings where we do feel a sense of belonging: raves, say, chat groups, or as vicarious members of talk shows and soap operas. Members of place-based communities are permitted only one set of ethics. In such gatherings a single standard of honesty is reinforced by family, school, church, and the Lions Club. When a sense of common purpose and common values erodes, as it has in our time for so many of us, agreed-upon standards of conduct are replaced by 57 varieties. This is ethical segmentation. We can have one set of ethics at home, another with friends, a third for colleagues, perhaps one for church, or at a support group, yet another online, and, finally, one for rank strangers.
This doesn’t mean that in the absence a strong sense of community we will take every opportunity to deceive others. Nonetheless, feeling disconnected certainly reduces inhibitions about being deceitful when we’re so inclined. This notion is not necessarily unappealing. One reason so many of us can’t wait to leave the suffocating embrace of our respective Gopher Prairies is to enhance our capacity to be many things to many people. That wish needn’t be unhealthy, but can become so. Those suffering from pathological psychiatric syndromes are more likely to be found in the isolation of urban settings than in suburbs, which in turn have more members
of this population than towns do. One study of those suffering from “antisocial personality”—of which lying is a prominent symptom—found nearly 6 percent of an inner-city group fit that profile, compared with just over 3 percent of those in an inner suburb and 2.5 percent of small town residents.
Just as mushrooms grow best in dark basements, dishonesty flourishes in anonymous settings. We’re far more likely to try to put one over on a Wal-Mart clerk than on Wally of Wally’s Market. “Liars feel less guilty when their targets are impersonal or totally anonymous …,” observes psychologist Paul Ekman in Telling Lies. “It is easier to indulge the guilt-reducing fantasy that the target is not really hurt, doesn’t really care, won’t even notice the lie, or even deserves or wants to be misled, if the target is anonymous.”
When it comes to post-truthfulness, the fraying of human connections is both cause and effect. Not feeling connected to others makes it easier to lie, which in turn makes it harder to reconnect. Eroded communities foster dishonesty. Dishonesty contributes to the further erosion of communities. As communal bonds wither, unfettered self-interest is unleashed. Truth trimming feels more permissible, or at least less reprehensible. This isn’t to say that members of small communities aren’t motivated by self-interest; only that this motivation is tempered by a sense of obligation to other members.
From the perspective of English ethicist Jennifer Jackson, the “wrongness” of lying has less to do with the harm it inflicts on a lie’s target and more to do with the damage inflicted on human communities. Our oldest motivation to be honest was not taboos so much as an awareness that the best way to get others to honor their obligations to us was to honor our obligations to them (e.g., not tell them lies). Reciprocal obligations were a far stronger source of ethical behavior than conscience. Anthropologist
Charles Cooley believed that an emphasis on truth telling among our most distant ancestors resulted less from a need to be accurate than from “a sense of the unfairness of deceiving people of our own sort, and of the shame of being detected in so doing.” To feel shame when caught telling a lie, one must be part of a group whose eyes could judge us. Most people for most of time belonged to such a group: tribe, clan, community.
If the best guarantor of honesty is living among familiar faces, next best is a set of ethics that promote truth telling among those who aren’t so well acquainted. The ideal is to combine a strong sense of connectedness with a robust sense of right and wrong. We have the worst of both worlds: a declining sense of community and eroding ethics. This means we must live among semistrangers, with little assurance of their verisimilitude, and with no reliable way to detect their lies.
In large, complex societies, honesty takes on added weight because so many transactions take place between strangers. At the same time, we’re descended from those who felt little need to tell the truth to those they didn’t recognize. As we saw in the last chapter, for most of human history, lying to outsiders was not only condoned but sanctioned. Integrity helped us deal with our own, duplicity with outsiders. As a result, the will to deceive unfamiliar human beings may be one of our genetic memories. Paradoxically, a will to be honest may also be an inherited trait. Darwin himself believed that because it strengthened communal bonds, truthfulness had survival value. Members of tribes that emphasized honesty were most likely to have heirs. Us. From our distant ancestors we have inherited complementary urges to be honest and dishonest. Depending on the context, both tendencies helped us survive:
honesty for our own kind, deception for everyone else. Just as dealing with familiar faces promotes a tendency to tell the truth to this very day, so may contact with a stranger trigger an ancient impulse to lie. This bifurcated heritage is reflected in the variable ethical standards that are still commonplace. Subjects in one of Bella DePaulo’s studies said they lied during 28 percent of their conversations with friends, 48 percent with acquaintances, and 77 percent with strangers. Even in Tipton, Iowa, Alan Wolfe found an insider-outsider ethical dichotomy alive and well. The strong emphasis residents placed on being honest with each other weakened when questions arose about telling the truth to those who lived elsewhere, or to large corporations, or the IRS. “The moral instinct of Tiptonites is to value honesty more when the recipient of one’s honesty is a close neighbor or friend,” Wolfe discovered, “than when it is a stranger.”
If it is true that dealing with people we don’t know, or don’t know well, triggers a tendency to deceive inherited from our ancestors on the savanna, then as more and more of us deal with a rising numbers of strangers (or those who feel like strangers), an urge to tell lies is increasingly unleashed. At the very least our inhibitions about being dishonest are lowered. On the receiving end, anyone we meet could be lying at any time about anything, and we would have no way to know. (As we’ll see in a later chapter, the human capacity to detect lies is quite limited.) Paul Ekman—who has devoted his career to studying deception—believes it is unwise to trust one’s assessment of another person’s honesty without having some knowledge about that person. One proven enhancer of lie-detection accuracy is knowing how a suspected liar has behaved in two or more situations.
Ekman has an interesting theory about why most of us can’t detect lies very well. In our ancestral environment, he speculates,
there was not much opportunity to deceive one another. We lived cheek by jowl in groups where consequences for being deceitful were severe. As a result, there was little incentive to be dishonest, or opportunity to unmask those who were. Lies would not have been told often enough for lie catchers to hone their skills. In such a context the adaptive value of a lie-telling talent or a complementary ability to catch liars would be low. The context in which most of us now live is just the opposite. Opportunities to lie are constant today, the means to disguise lies plentiful, and the penalties for being caught meager. At worst, those revealed as liars can simply move on—to another place, a different spouse, new friends, who have no idea that they are known liars.
One could hypothesize that the looser human ties are in any social context, the more likely it is that those who live there will deceive and be deceived. And even if we aren’t being hoodwinked in such settings, it is easy to suspect that we are, because we just don’t know.
An attractive woman I’ll call Tammy, whom I met in San Diego, told me she was a former model who had written articles for Glamour , published short stories in literary magazines, and recently signed a book contract with Random House. I never saw Tammy’s byline anywhere, however. When I asked mutual friends who had known her longer about the discrepancy, they laughed. “Tammy didn’t do any of those things,” they explained. “She just tells people whatever she thinks will impress them.”
Among strangers and semistrangers, what sociologists call impression management kicks in. Deception is an integral part of that effort. According to students of dishonesty, one of the leading motivations to tell lies, especially about ourselves, is wanting to “make
a good impression.” This isn’t necessarily malevolent (though it can be). Unlike sociopaths who lie compulsively, or Machiavellian personalities who lie to manipulate others, those who are overly concerned with how they’re coming across tell lies so they can appear to be whom they think other people want them to be. “Image is everything,” they’re prone to say. “Whatever it takes” is another popular saying. Fusing the two justifies creating a deceptive image based on manipulated evidence.
In the absence of personal knowledge about each other, symbols of rectitude take on added importance. When dealing with strangers or near strangers, appearances do matter. We search for signs of veracity among those we don’t know but want to trust. Psychologists talk of the “assessment signals” we transmit and measure in others: our clothing, our accoutrements, our resume. This can be problematic. One may feel a sense of kinship with someone whose cap says he shares a commitment to the New York Knicks or whose tote bag indicates she’s a fellow NPR listener, but this hardly constitutes evidence of rectitude. Those signals are easy to manipulate. Good con artists know what articles of clothing inspire trust among which marks. They are artistes of impression management. One grifter said he always carried a can of dog food in grocery stores to inspire confidence in any potential dupe he might bump into in the aisles.
The less we actually know about each other, the more we depend on clothing labels, shoe style, purse brand, handshake, and eye contact to tell us whom to trust. Most such assessment signals are ethically useless. Accomplished liars tend to be firm handshakers who gaze steadily into other people’s eyes. They know better than anyone how much others rely upon such signals as evidence of trustworthiness. A former Soviet spy said one thing he learned in espionage school was how to lock his eyes on those of anyone he
wanted to deceive. Studies consistently find that liars make better eye contact than truth tellers. Many of those who were lied to by Bill Clinton cited his steady gaze as the reason they believed him. When Clinton told the Reverend Robert Schuller that he’d never had sex with Monica Lewinsky, Schuller later recalled, “he did it with such passion, and with his eyes locked on me.”
If it’s true that we’re more likely to deceive and be deceived by strangers (or those who feel strangerlike), then the United States of America is unusually fertile ground for deception of all kinds. Americans seldom know each other well enough to sense when wool is being pulled over their eyes. Too many of its citizens are professional outsiders—A Nation of Strangers, in the memorable title of Vance Packard’s book. This is important to consider not only in its own right, but because American culture provides the template for so many other cultures around the world.