Stealing from Yourself

There once was a thief, a man named Emanuel Ninger. The year is 1887. The scene is a small neighborhood grocery store. Mr. Ninger is buying some turnip greens. He gives the clerk a $20 bill. As the clerk begins to put the money in the cash drawer to give Nr. Ninger his change, she notices some of the ink from the $20 bill is coming off on her fingers which are damp from the turnip greens. She looks at Mr. Ninger, a man she has known for years. She looks at the smudged bill. This man is a trusted friend; she has known him all her life; he can't be a counterfeiter. She gives Mr. Ninger his change, and he leaves the store.     

But $20 is a lot of money in 1887, and eventually the clerk calls the police. They verify the bill as counterfeit and get a search warrant to look through Mr. Ninger's home. In the attic they find where he is reproducing money. He is a master artist and is painting $20 bills with brushes and paint! But also in the attic they find three portraits Ninger had painted. They seized these and eventually sold them at auction for $16,000 (in 1887 currency, remember) or a little more than $5,000 per painting. The irony is that it took Ninger almost as long to paint a $20 bill as it did for him to paint a $5,000 portrait! It's true that Emmanuel Ninger was a thief, but the person from whom he stole the most was himself. He was another in the endless list of thieves who steal from themselves when they try to steal from others. 

Zig Ziglar

Spotting Liars

We’re bad at accurately interpreting behavior and speech patterns, said James Alcock, professor of psychology at Canada’s York University. Learning is based on getting regular feedback, he told me. Try to add 2 + 2 and someone will tell you whether you got it right or wrong. Over time, that feedback allows you to know when you’re right. But there’s no systematic un-blinding to tell you when you correctly guessed whether you were being lied to. The feedback we get on this is spotty. Often there is none. Sometimes the feedback itself is incorrect. There’s never a chance to really learn and get better, Alcock said. “So why should we be good at it?”

Take people whose job it is to professionally detect lies — judges, police officers, customs agents. Studies show they believe themselves to be better than chance at spotting liars. But the same studies show they aren’t, Alcock said. And that makes sense, he told me, because the feedback they get misleads them. Customs agents, for instance, correctly pull aside smugglers for searches just often enough to reinforce their sense of their own accuracy. But “they have no idea about the ones they didn’t search who got away,” Alcock said.

Maggie Koerth-baker, writing in fivethirtyeight

a Well-Meaning Lie?

When caught lying (paternalistically or otherwise), people often defend themselves by saying they lied to protect the other person. But before lying to protect someone’s interests or feelings, ask yourself not only whether you are lying to protect them, but also whether that person would believe your lie was well-intended if they found out. In several studies, we found that people were not likely to believe paternalistic lies were well-intended, and reacted poorly to these lies even when the liar communicated good intentions. However, people were more likely to believe that paternalistic lies were well-intended when they were told by people who knew them well or had reputations as helpful, kind people.  

Even though paternalistic lies are often well-intentioned, if uncovered, they will usually backfire. Lying may be helpful when there is no ambiguity about the resulting benefits for those on the receiving end. But in most other circumstances, honesty is the best policy.    

Adam Eric Greenberg, Emma E. Levine, Matthew Lupoli writing in the Harvard Business Review 

As many followers as possible

Noelle Moseley, who consults for technology companies told me that she had recently interviewed heavy users of Instagram: young women who cultivated different personas on different social networks. Their aim was to get as many followers as possible – that was their definition of success.

Every new follow and every comment delivered an emotional hit. But a life spent chasing hits didn’t feel good. Moseley’s respondents spent all their hours thinking about how to organise their lives in order to take pictures they could post to each persona, which meant they weren’t able to enjoy whatever they were doing, which made them stressed and unhappy.

Ian Leslie writing in 1843 magazine

Fooling Ourselves

The psychologist Ray Hyman has spent most of his life studying the art of deception. Before he entered the halls of science, he worked as a magician and then moved on to mentalism after discovering he could make more money reading palms than performing card tricks. The crazy thing about Hyman’s career as a palm reader is, like many psychics, over time he began to believe he actually did have psychic powers. The people who came to him were so satisfied, so bowled over, he thought he must have a real gift. Subjective validation cuts both ways.

Hyman was using a technique called cold reading where you start with the wide-angle lens of generalities and watch the other person for cues so you can constrict the iris down to what seems like a powerful insight into the other person’s soul. It works because people tend to ignore the little misses and focus on the hits. As he worked his way through college, another mentalist, Stanley Jaks, took Hyman aside and saved him from delusion by asking him to try something new – tell people the opposite of what he believed their palms revealed. The result? They were just as flabbergasted by his abilities, if not more so. Cold reading was powerful, but tossing it aside he was still able to amaze. Hyman realized what he said didn’t matter as long as his presentation was good. The other person was doing all the work, tricking themselves, seeing the general as the specific.

Mediums and palm readers, those who speak for the dead or see into the beyond for cash, depend on subjective validation. Remember, your capacity to fool yourself is greater than the abilities of any conjurer, and conjurers come in many guises. You are a creature impelled to hope. As you attempt to make sense of the world you focus on what falls into place and neglect that which doesn’t fit, and there is so much in life that does not fit.

David McRaney, You are Not so Smart

Here are the Rules

When someone gives you rules for your relationship whether explicitly or implied (“We can only talk about these subjects and not those subjects over there” or “We will only go to these places together” or “Only contact me in this particular way”) you have to decide whether this comes out of a legitimate concern to keep the relationship in a healthy place or whether it’s an attempt to control you-prompted by insecurity and fear. In other words, is this a request that you become co-conspirators in hiding from painful truths about the person making the request?

Stephen Goforth

Creativity can lead to dishonesty

Creative people who can “think out of the box” are prized in the business world, the arts, and science. But a new study has found that creative thinkers are also more likely to cheat to get ahead, and to rationalize away less-than-ethical behavior.

Harvard Business School researchers gave personality quizzes to hundreds of study participants and then asked them to perform quick games or other tasks for cash. Participants who scored high on a creativity test were more likely to falsify their results so they could earn more prize money. People who were merely high in intelligence, however, were not more dishonest. It appears that the same “divergent thinking” and “cognitive flexibility” that enable creative people to come up with innovative ways of looking at things also equip them to circumvent ethical norms—and to justify their cheating to themselves.

“When you’re a creative person, you can use that creativity to come up with reasons for why unethical behaviors may be okay,” researcher Francesca Gino tells The Boston Globe. These “self-serving rationalizations,” she said, can include deciding that “other people would cheat under the same circumstances or that a little cheating will not hurt anyone.”

The Week magazine

The Ethical Task

Self-actualization is not merely a good to be desired, but rather a task, something human persons have been assigned to do and which they will be held responsible for achieving or failing to achieve.

Of course, not everyone is aware of this ethical task. (Kierkegaard) says that a great many people drift through life, “managing with custom and tradition” in their respective cities. Such people live their lives in a way similar to the way children who have not been taught table manners might get by at a fancy party: “Watch the other polite children and behave as they do.” Someone who lives life this way lacks… “authenticity” or “originality.” Such a person “would never do anything first and would never have any opinion unless he first knew that other had it.

C. Steven Evans, Kierkegaard: An Introduction