Name: Born Liars
Rating: 4.2 (73 reviews)
Author: Ian Leslie

What’s in it for me? Learn why everybody lies – and why it’s not necessarily a bad thing.

It begins when we’re very young. Our parents, and all other authority figures, tell us not to lie. Indeed, truthfulness is ingrained in our culture. The Ten Commandments instruct us not to bear false witness – an imperative that is repeated by secular institutions as well. And yet most of us lie anyway. Sometimes we do it cunningly; other times, to spare a friend’s feelings. Often, we lie without even knowing it ourselves. It’s almost as if falsehood were part of our DNA.

And perhaps it is. We are literally born liars. We learn to twist the truth early on, a skill that helps us survive in human society. As we get older, we continue to deceive ourselves and each other – not out of spite but, perhaps, out of habit and necessity. So let’s take a closer look at lying and learn why our brains make us do it, even when we don’t want to.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

That even a nine-month-old baby can tell a lie;
how lies can sometimes benefit our health; and
that most of your memories are built on lies.

Lying is an essential part of who we are.

Even if you consider yourself an honest person, you probably tell a lie every now and then. Or, to be more precise, you utter a falsehood with intent to deceive. These lies may not be malicious. Indeed, they often aren’t. Lying is simply something we’re hardwired to do.

We lie for a number of reasons, most of which stem from our social nature.

It isn’t easy being a social species. You have to keep track of dozens of relationships, predict how your actions will affect others and how best to react to the actions and reactions of those around you. Just thinking about it is exhausting!

When our ancestors started becoming more social, they began developing bigger brains to cope with these proliferating interpersonal demands. Bigger brains helped them make better decisions, which in turn reinforced their developing intelligence. This narrative is the basis of the “social intelligence” hypothesis proposed in 1976 by the academic Nicholas Humphrey.

Relatively speaking, it wasn’t long before we discovered that deceit is an invaluable tool in society. Say a certain caveman needed more food. It wasn’t long before he realized that he could hide what he’d received from the others and then say he’d never been given his share in the first place.

Society always presents us with rivals and competition, difficulties that we learned to brush aside with a few apposite untruths.

In the 1980s, primatologists Richard Byrne and Andrew Whiten discovered that primates also lie to get ahead.

Two young chimpanzees were once observed digging for food. When they noticed an older chimp approaching, they quickly sat back, scratched their heads, relaxed and began pretending like nothing was going on. Once the older chimp was out of sight, they immediately got back to digging.

This kind of deceit requires intelligence.

To be able to convince that older chimp, the two youngsters had to have good timing and needed to pick the right gestures and posture to make it believable.

According to Byrne and Whiten, human intelligence directly evolved from these scenarios of successful deception.

In other words, lying is an essential part of how we came to be.

As we grow older, we learn when to lie.

Oddly enough, we don’t even need to be taught how to lie; it’s just something that starts happening. Unless you were an only child, you probably recall cooking up some story about your brother or sister and telling it to your parents – just to get your sibling in trouble.

But we actually begin to lie when we’re infants. Initially, it’s innocent enough. For instance, a nine-month old baby may fake laughter in order to be part of the fun that other giggling babies are having.

It’s hard to spot a liar, and we can get away with lying more often than we think.

Some people grow up to be better liars than others. When lying, some people are shifty and anxious, while others are smooth, confident and persuasive. As a result, there’s no foolproof way to spot a liar, though there are signs to look out for.

One way to spot a fib is to pay attention to facial expressions, which usually signal someone’s true emotions and are generally hard to control.

Some lies save lives; others help sell things.

So lies serve a lot of purposes and are a central part of our lives. But did you know that they’re powerful enough to help heal the human body?

In 1944, Henry Beecher was a Harvard Professor and a doctor helping Allied troops in Anzio, Italy. One day an injured soldier arrived needing an urgent operation, but Beecher was all out of morphine.

Key ideas in Born Liars

What is Born Liars about?

Born Liars (2011) uncovers the truth about lying and the important role it plays in our lives. Far from being some undesirable glitch in the human system, lying has not only made us smarter but saved many lives and become an essential ingredient to our overall well-being. In these blinks, you’ll learn all about the history and neuroscience of fibbing, why it might be impossible to detect every lie and how central mendacity truly is to being human.