Emotionally Intelligent People Are More Gullible: On Lying
“When we see such universality in moral rules, we know that they combat a tendency for people to do otherwise, and serve an important human need. The pancultural condemnation of lying is clear evidence that all humans are tempted to lie, and that lying is a threat to group cohesiveness and coordination everywhere.” — William Von Hippel, The Social Leap
People lie.
As a society, we seem to have become hyper-aware of lying over the last year. Perhaps we’re apprehensive of the ever-polarising mainstream media. Maybe it’s partly due to the rapid pace of the world since late 2019: When the media, politicians and other public figures make a statement about what will happen regarding Covid, for example, we can usually see if they were right or honest within a few weeks.
As some have pointed out, this is not usually the case. Typically, the world isn’t moving so quickly that a statement, policy or decision’s impact or accuracy is demonstrated in a short time frame. Normally, by the time we see the consequences of a political decision, the topic has long left the forefront of collective minds. Not now. In the last 12 months, we’ve seen in real-time when politicians have made smart decisions and when they’ve gotten it wrong because the impact of those decisions has played out right in front of us. We’ve noticed (and Twitter has enthusiastically called out) when politicians and officials flip flop on their statements and witnessed when inconsistencies have led to confusion, distrust or disaster.
And that’s before we touch on social media, which in the last decade has seen the likes of influencers pretending to have cancer, schemes selling courses and diet plans that never get delivered, filters and faux vulnerability and cons that would make Ponzi proud. It’s not everyone, of course. But we’re more likely to hear about the lies, because they’re interesting.
The point is that we appear to have been more attuned to possible deception around us recently. I suppose it makes sense considering the year we’ve all had. It also perhaps explains why we have a sudden upshoot of conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories are, after all, borne out of distrust and a sceptical suspicion of deceit.
But lying did not emerge with social media or a coronavirus pandemic.
The evolution of lying
Evolutionary theorists suggest lying in humans probably began shortly after we started communicating using language.
This is unfortunate, as I always like to think of it emerging like in the Ricky Gervais film The Invention of Lying, where one person just figured out how to lie one day and fooled everyone around him. Alas, lying is probably about as old as communication itself. And deception is even older than that.
The general consensus is that children learn to lie from a young age when they acquire what’s known as ‘theory of mind’. That is, the understanding that the world isn’t black and white — my knowledge and beliefs about the world can differ from yours. It’s really the moment a kid realises that their parents don’t have a telepathic laser beam that can scour their mind and determine everything in it.
At some stage, as a child, you grasp that just because you know you were the one who drew on the furniture, doesn’t mean your parents know it was you. Which opens you up to put forward other potential suspects. The dog, perhaps?
(Through that lens, the story of Pinocchio might be an attempted antidote to acquiring the theory of mind.)
It’s common in the animal kingdom to have features of deceit for the sake of survival — from camouflage to the ability to mimic other animal sounds to sea animals that look like coral.
Why do humans deceive through lying? A plethora of evolutionary reasons come to mind: In particular, self-preservation, gaining a competitive advantage, or maintaining one’s position in a group. Bearing in mind humans are wired towards belonging and connection, the latter makes sense even though it sounds counter-intuitive. Consider, for example, making up an excuse not to go out with friends instead of telling them you don’t feel like seeing them. This is the kind of lie that maintains group cohesion but still serves the liar’s self-interest.
As William von Hippel states in the quote from the start of this piece, the fact that communities universally work hard to condemn lying indicates that humans can be tempted to do it in the first place. (As an aside, the Social Leap is a fantastic book, it explains many things touched on here and I can’t recommend it enough.) On the other hand, it also means that lying is a threat to cohesion. For example, if your friends find out you weren’t really ill, and in fact you went out with a different group of friends instead, it’s going to cause more drama than if you were honest in the first place.
Lies and social media
Contextually, social media creates a fascinating platform to study deception. Perhaps there are fewer perceived consequences and more perceived advantages of lying on the internet.
One study in 2016 found that only 16–32% of participants self-reported that they were and always intended to be completely honest while using social media, online dating sites, anonymous chat rooms and sexual websites. Even worse, 0–2% of participants believed that other people would always be truthful on the platforms. (Nev from Catfish has done his job in making us all wary of everyone else, I’d say).
This study also found a critical characteristic that would predict lying behaviour was the perception of others’ behaviour on the same platform — in other words, if we suspect everyone else lies on a platform, we’re more likely to do so ourselves.
When I’ve conducted training sessions on negotiations, I’ve seen this play out a lot in role plays and activities. Suppose two groups are negotiating, and one goes a little overboard with dramatic backstories and embellished details (it is a role play, after all). In that case, the other will usually counter with an equally creative, beyond-the-scope-of-their-outline approach.
It seems that if you feel like someone is trying to swindle you, the temptation to swindle back can sometimes outweigh the moral imperative towards honesty.
Emotional intelligence and deceit perception
Emotionally Intelligent people have been found to be more easily duped in one study from 2014. In this study, participants were shown videos of people pleading for their loved ones to be brought home — loved ones who had been kidnapped or suspiciously went missing. Participants had to determine which videos were honest and which were deceitful. In some, the person making the plea was actually linked to the kidnapping or murder.
Counterintuitively, high EI participants were not only overconfident in their assessments but also more gullible; the study suggesting that high EI patterns have a negative association to spotting emotional lies.
Those with high emotional intelligence demonstrated high levels of sympathy for the person making the plea. The researchers assert this led to a higher level of gullibility and the compassion potentially took up mental energy that took away from their decision-making. So, even though high EI is connected to reading others, the mediating factor of a sympathetic response to deceptive pleaders kind of highjacked their thought process here.
They conclude,
“The present findings suggest that a reliance on erroneous information about deception, combined with unfounded sympathy for deceptive pleaders leads to a highly confident, but incorrect assessment that crocodile tears are a reflection of genuine distress.”
Emotional intelligence, then, seems like a double-edged sword in this arena. Even though you’re more connected to people, your empathy could disrupt your ability to separate honesty from deception.
In sum
Honesty is always the best policy. We’re taught this from childhood, and we see in adulthood how lies and deception can ruin relationships, businesses, reputations, self-esteem, and a plethora of other things.
The landscape we’re in — between technology and the whole ‘living through history’ thing — provides a fascinating space to explore deception. I’d like to hope that perhaps one day we’ll live in a utopic world of radical honesty. But that’s not realistic, and even if it were, the very conception of that world would be very far away. If anything, it seems like deception is becoming more commonplace, and not less; at least in the spheres of politics and social media. When the state of the world is underlined by volatility, it makes sense that self-preservation and survival becomes a higher priority, which I’d assert could lend itself towards more deceit.
Alas, in sum: People lie, they always have, it’s not necessarily with bad intentions, and if you’re emotionally intelligent, you’re more likely to buy into said lies.
Would love to hear your thoughts on lying and deception in the modern world. Feel free to let me know!
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