A narcissist like Trump must constantly inflate and exaggerate in order to keep the supply trains running. He has to brag about how, 'I have a very high IQ' or concoct stories about people agreeing with him.
Lying in the political sphere has gotten out of hand, and because people tend to dismiss things that challenge their preconceived notions of the world, fact checkers can only play a small part in remedying the problem.
Honest people remember stories in the order of emotional prominence, but liars will recount a story in chronological order. Memory rarely works that way.
Research indicates that a pause tends to be a signal that a cluster of deceptive cues is on its way. This is a key reason why voters routinely associate Trump with authenticity: He rarely pauses.
By the time we enter this work world and we're breadwinners, we enter a world that's just cluttered with spam, fake, digital friends, partisan media, ingenious identity thieves, world-class Ponzi schemers - a deception epidemic.
We lie more to strangers than we lie to co-workers. Extroverts lie more than introverts. Men lie eight times more about themselves than they do other people. Women lie more to protect other people.
One-year-olds learn concealment. Five-year-olds lie outright: they manipulate via flattery. Nine-year-olds - masters of the cover-up. By the time you enter college, you're going to lie to your mom in one out of every five interactions.
Lying is a cooperative act. Think about it. A lie has no power whatsoever by its mere utterance. Its power emerges when someone else agrees to believe the lie.
High-stakes lying is out of control. And it's costing us big bucks in one way or another. It's not simply a matter of quantifying losses in dollars. It's costing us emotionally and psychologically as well.
One immutable trait of the gullible is that they are credulous to a fault. Though no-doubt well-meaning, the naive are Trump's base.
Nothing is certain in life but death and taxes. And in Donald Trump's case, lies.
While it can feel unfair to have to make a career decision because of a morally deficient boss, doing so can sometimes lead you in the right direction, if a bit faster than you otherwise would have preferred.
Studies by several different researchers have shown that the number of lies we're told each day is anywhere from 20 - 200. To many, that will seem shockingly high. Yet it isn't, in light of humans being ill-suited to detect lies. The average human can detect a lie only 54% of the time.
A good lie detector doesn't jump to conclusions but tries to understand the person across the table, her personality, and her motivations. Your goal as a lie spotter isn't to point the finger and say, 'You're lying' - your goal is to get to the truth.
Deception can cost billions. Think Enron, Madoff, the mortgage crisis. Or in the case of double agents and traitors, like Robert Hanssen or Aldrich Ames, lies can betray our country. They can compromise our security. They can undermine democracy. They can cause the deaths of those that defend us.
Trump is a master obfuscator. Like an octopus escaping a predator, he releases a cloud of ink when called to the carpet on one of his many lies. His strategy? Obfuscate, then reference others. 'Millions agree,' 'everyone knows,' 'many have done it.'
The 'problem lies' are the half-dozen or so falsehoods we hear every day that can lead us down the wrong path in our careers, change how we do business, or dramatically influence our personal lives.
Pummeling an answer out of someone never works. You cannot intimidate someone with aggressive language and think they'll be more forthcoming... that's a caricature of interrogation, part of the TV culture of what it looks like.
Con men look for human frailty to exploit. This is most often greed. Trump found a different vice: anger. The emotional are always the most susceptible to manipulation.
Pay attention to science and not myths: We think liars won't look you in the eyes, but it turns out an honest person will only look you in the eyes about 60 percent of the time.
