June 19, 2023 by Donald Gorassini, howinfluenceworks.com
In this blog, I address the role of lying in social influence. Lying is a tactic all too commonly used to change minds. It can be effective.
There might be an aversion to study lying because the act reflects the dark side of humanity and is fraught with unpleasantness. Although some people lie, no one likes to be exposed for having lied. No one likes being lied to. Victims might make accusations of, seek revenge on, or withdraw from their relationship with the perpetrator. For their parts, perpetrators might respond to charges of lying with denial, recrimination, or withdrawal from their relationship with the accuser. Lying is the 500 pound gorilla in the room of social influence. It is an unpleasant reality that does not seem to be going away. As a matter of study, lying should not be ignored if our goal is to understand social influence in all of its forms.
I address three questions in this blog. What is a lie? Why can lying, as a social influence tactic, be effective? How can we as the recipients of social influence spot a lie?
My writing of this blog is in no way an endorsement of lying as a social influence tactic. I am against lying. Lying violates the good advising standard of ethics. There are edge cases in which lying is justified, as in war, but these are aberrant situations.
What is a Lie?
Webster’s Dictionary offers two closely related meanings of lying. The first is “to make an untrue statement with intent to deceive.” Here, someone says or perhaps writes something, such as “This car is a great buy. It has low mileage. It had as its sole owner an elderly couple in Tillsonburg” despite the truth being that the car was a taxi driven 500,000 miles in Toronto. The second meaning is “to create a false or misleading impression.” This covers behaviour besides speech or writing. An example here would be a used car dealership setting an automobile odometer back from 500,000 miles to 50,000 miles. I will use these example lies for purposes of illustration in the present blog. In an episode, a vendor uses the indicated false statements and odometer manipulation in an effort to sell the used taxi. (Whatever resemblance the examples have to actual events is coincidental.)
Lying, when used, is most commonly for a social influence purpose. Indeed, it would be a rare event when lying was not used for this reason. Pathological lying, or lying for its own sake, perhaps due to habit or compulsion, would be an exception. In this blog, I am concerned with lying for the sake of influence.
Why Does Lying Work?
In its social influence role, lying is performed to create an overly optimistic prediction of gain. In any episode of social influence, whether it involves lying or not, the source predicts that performing a particular course of action will result in a gain for the doer. The recipient who adopts the depiction becomes prone to act in order to reap the expected benefit. Lying can make the gain seem more attractive than it actually is and hence improve the chances of the recipient acting as suggested. (The role of predicted gain in social influence is discussed in this website’s tutorial in Lesson 2, What is the key to influence success?)
Lies can be about scenarios, facts, or both. “This car is a great buy” is a scenario, an abstraction that ties together some facts and excludes others. Sole ownership by an elderly couple and low mileage would be facts that support scenario validity.
A purported scenario and apparent facts will have no effect without engaging the recipient (see Tutorial, Lesson 4: Are you engaging the recipient?). Engagement means three things happen. The recipient attends to, learns, and evaluates the message. The vendor in the used car example would contribute to each process.
With respect to attention, exposure would be arranged. The vendor would communicate the scenario, display supportive evidence (the statement about low mileage and the sight of odometer), and not display contradictory evidence (maintenance records).
With respect to learning, the vendor would attach intended meanings to the scenario and its supporting facts. The sales pitch would be in the language of the listener, stated clearly, and perhaps repeated.
With respect to evaluation, the idea would be to confine the recipient’s thinking to the promoted scenario and its supporting facts because these suggest purchasing the car. This is why all the lying was done in the first place! The source would also try to prevent the recipient from further evaluating the promoted scenario because this could reveal contradictions. Favourite tactics here are to reduce the recipient’s time and ability to think and to emphasize the costs of hesitancy. Placing time pressure on a decision would mean less chance of seeing flaws in the promoted depiction of gain. Framing non-action as bringing loss biases the recipient toward action. Not seeing anything obviously wrong with the deal, and under time pressure, the recipient would be prone to compliance.
How Can We Spot a Lie?
Lie detection, if it is to occur, takes place at the evaluation phase of engagement. Once the message is attended to and learned, there is much a recipient can do to determine if the promise of gain made by the source is indeed accurate.
First, state the source position in your own words. This means articulating the promoted scenario and purported supporting facts. This does several things. First, it might stop you from hasty compliance due to factors irrelevant to the decision. You might be in a good mood because its a beautiful day, you might have an initial liking of the vendor, or you might not want to appear naive. Any of these could lead to a rash decision. Second, you might realize that you have not fully comprehended the source’s depiction of gain. This would mean that any inclination you had to comply was premature. You could then get the source to clarify. Third, message comprehension can sensitize you to new facts. If low in mileage, why does the car seem in such bad shape? Fourth, you need to understand what the source is proposing so that you can advance to the next lie detection step, which is to generate the opposite of the source depiction of gain.
As a second step, make the effort to spell out the opposites of the source’s purported scenario and facts. The auto purchase was said to be a great buy; so, you propose that it not a great buy. The vehicle was said to have low mileage; so, you propose it has high mileage. The vehicle was said to be exclusively owned by an elderly couple; so, you propose it was not owned an elderly couple, solely a not. And so on.
In a third step, make the effort to generate a list of facts that would be easily observable if the alternate depiction you produced in Step 2 were true. For example, if the car is high mileage, it should show signs of ample use. Your examination could result in a few pertinent observations. Why is there so much wear in the back seat, especially in view of the fact the two owners would have occupied only the front seat? Why are there so many scratches? Why are the tires bald? Now you have found several facts that support your scenario and contradict that of the source. Notice, without the effort of defining an alternative scenario and looking for specific facts, you might never have made these discoveries. You need not stop your investigation at easy-to-find observations.
In a fourth step, you could dig deeper in an attempt to reveal hidden material. For example, you could request a look at the automobile’s maintenance records. The documents would indicate owner, mileage, and other pertinent data. Perhaps the vendor does not produce the records, which would itself be informative.
As you go through the above steps, you could improve your chances of lie detection with help. Enlist the aid of someone, whether this be a relative, friend, or expert.
The source has an interest in keeping you from evaluating their promoted depiction of gain. Does the source try to prevent you from conducting your evaluation? Interference could manifest itself in many ways. As noted above, a near deadline and framing inaction as risky are two common tactics. There might be some excuse for not producing the maintenance records. The use of interference tactics is itself a sign that the source might be trying to protect a lie.
A fifth step occurs after your decision but can be valuable. Assess the results of your decision over days, months and years. If you bought the car, what did you discover? If you didn’t buy the car what did you discover? Any data revealed in the fullness of time might be helpful to subsequent decisions.
Summary
In this short blog, I have addressed the role played by lying in social influence. Lying is used to change minds because users anticipate the tactic will work, and it can work. A lie will be effective when a promoted depiction of gain is adopted by the recipient as an action plan. We can substantially reduce the chances of being fooled by a lie by stating the source depiction in our own words, making the effort to generate an opposite depiction, and looking for facts, surface and deep, that the new scenario predicts we should find. Effort is demanded and often rewarded.
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