Social Research articles from September 1996

Social Research archives from September 1996

Truth, politics, and self-deception.(Truth-Telling, Lying, and Self-Deception)
September 22, 1996... The Truth: Virtues and Methods THERE are social practices and virtues which, if we are to characterize them, require us to mention the truth. This is not the same as mentioning what other people hold true (their beliefs), or just...

Professional liars.(Truth-Telling, Lying and Self-Deception)
September 22, 1996... Preamble: What Is the Subject? MY title is a come-on, but it suggests the issues the paper embraces. The notion of a professional liar suggests someone who tells lies for a living, perhaps someone who tells lies well, with conviction...

The shadow of a lie: poetry, lying, and the truth of fictions.(Truth-Telling, Lying and Self-Deception)
September 22, 1996... PLATO has it that poets are liars. Conscious of this, a great Renaissance defense of poetry propounded a canonical formulation of the relation of fiction to literal falsehood from which any discussion of the question might well start. The poet,...

Sex, lies, and tall tales.(Truth-Telling, Lying and Self-Deception)
September 22, 1996... Sexual Truth PEOPLE all over the world tell this story about sexual lying: you go to bed with someone you think you know, and when you wake up you discover that it was someone else--another man, or another woman, or a man instead of a...

Holding up the mirror: deception as revelation in the theater.(Truth-Telling, Lying and Self-Deception)
September 22, 1996... Mirrors of Deception THE "purpose of playing," said Hamlet, is "to hold as 'twere the mirror up to nature" (III, ii, 17-19). Today that formula may strike us as rather naive, for we know that the "mirror" of drama, capable of so many...

On making a virtue out of telling lies.(Truth-Telling, Lying and Self-Deception)
September 22, 1996... TALK about the telling of lies is ordinarily made of stern stuff, full of "thou shall nots" and cautionary tales about the corrosive consequences of the bearing of false witness. At the same time, however, there are few among us who do not...

Babies' cries: who's listening? Who's being fooled?(Truth-Telling, Lying and Self-Deception)
September 22, 1996... The misfortune, I gather, was one of timing. Israel chose the wrong time to cry. A sentry had just come down to report the presence of a rather large force of Germans on Mila Street, and apparently the clatter of preparations together with the...

On the psychology of self-deception.(Truth-Telling, Lying and Self-Deception)
September 22, 1996... IT is easy to lose one's way in the subject of self-deception, so I will stay close to actual events as much as possible. To begin with, an example, in which it seems that knowing something is not as simple and unambiguous a condition as...

Why don't we catch liars?(Truth-Telling, Lying and Self-Deception)
September 22, 1996... OUR research (Ekman and O'Sullivan, 1990; Frank and Ekman, forthcoming; Ekman, Frank, and O'Sullivan, forthcoming) suggests that most people cannot tell from demeanor whether someone is lying or telling the truth. Such poor performance is not...

The psychology of human deception.(Truth-Telling, Lying and Self-Deception)
September 22, 1996... A proposition constructs a world with the help of a logical scaffolding, so that one can actually see from the proposition how everything stands logically if it is true. One can draw inferences from a false proposition Wittgenstein [1921] 1971,...

The historical significance of lying and dissimilation.(Truth-Telling, Lying and Self-Deception)
September 22, 1996... MONTAIGNE whose essays reflected upon lying as they did on so many other things in human life, once observed that "the opposite of truth hath many-many shapes and an undefinite field" (1910, Vol. 1, p. 47). This remark is borne out by the...

Some questions about truthfulness and lying.(Truth-Telling, Lying and Self-Deception)
September 22, 1996... Is truthfulness a moral virtue? Does it belong up there on the marquee with wisdom, courage, and temperance? Most of us would say that it does, or that was my first thought anyway. I want to be open with my friends and expect the same from them;...

My grandfather's walking stick, or the pink lie.(Truth-Telling, Lying and Self-Deception)
September 22, 1996... WHEN Pandora had upended her box of calamities over the earth, there fell out, so says the story, a last straggler: hope. Hope pities us and lies. It pities our terrors and invites us to tell ourselves that the things we fear happen to...