Lies may come in all shapes and sizes and sometimes have a plethora
of reasons behind them, from avoiding personal harm, wishing to avoid
hurting someone or to protect them, to actively seeking to get some form
of gain from someone (material, social, or emotional). The ethical
nature of lying is not the subject of this article; rather, this article
is about the steps taken once you've hurdled your personal moral,
faith, or trust issues with lying, and have made a decision to go ahead
and lie.
Steps
Make peace with your decision to lie. Good lying
means you've already crossed any moral or ethical hurdles, and justified
to yourself that the lie in question is now a necessity. A poor liar
often trips up through continuing to struggle with the morality or faith
issues behind the decision to lie. Regardless of the reasons, if you
want to lie successfully, you need to reach a place of internal
equilibrium where the lie is adequately justified in your own mind. At the same time, remember the following:
Lying is despised because it has a tendency to hurt, cause disruption, and comes with major costs sometimes including loss of social or financial status. And lying violates trust at both personal and societal levels, when most of us would still like to keep striving toward being able to trust one another. Yet, it is arguable that sometimes a lie has a place, to protect a reputation, to prevent hurt to someone else, to ease tension, and so on, but it will always depend on the context and extent of the lie, as well as the legality/morality of what is being lied about.
Some people, such as sociopaths, find lying to be a breeze. Those kind of liars are completely self-centered and without remorse, and are unlikely to ever be considerate of another human. For most people, lies aimed at manipulating another person will always come at great cost to you when they're uncovered.
Some people find lying almost impossible. Whether it's because they're inflexibly ethical, have Asperger's syndrome or they've just never understood why honesty isn't always the best policy, lying is probably never going to be something that works for such a person. Such a person may tend to confess or even put their foot in things. However, believing in total honesty can sometimes lose sight of the subtleties and nuances required in relationships and situations in which you're in real danger (physical or emotional) or likely to hurt someone with the truth, so passing a general judgment on lying should be done with great care.
Lying now and then is a personal decision. However, be realistic with yourself; using lies to avoid responsibility every time something goes wrong in your life can lead to compulsive lying and inability to tell the difference between the need for honesty and the need for safety - a state of mind that can ruin your life. Under what circumstances are you willing to risk damaging relationships, reputation, and future opportunities? Do the benefits of telling the lie outweigh the risks? People end up in jail for lying, and worse.
Consider the probability of being detected. Before
launching into your lie, ask yourself what the chances are of being
caught. Only you can answer the question of how likely it is you'll be
found out and the worthiness of lying about the matter. Things to
consider include:
Have I done this before and been caught out by the people I'm trying it on now? If so, they're not likely to believe me now.
Were there witnesses? If you're going to tell your partner you weren't snogging a total stranger in the corner of a party, you're running the risk that someone your partner knows was there, too.
Do you feel confident about revising events to make a whole new story?
What are the likely reprisals if caught? Is the person likely to be forgiving or likely to feel totally betrayed? Is it a tiny lie the person can get over, or is it something that goes to the heart of trust in your relationship that, once broken, is unlikely to be mended?
Get your revision of events straight. Once you've
made the decision you're going to lie, you will need to come up with
your plausible alternative to the facts. As part of this, you need to
figure out what you're going to say and what sorts of questions are
likely to be asked, so that you can have answers to those questions
already sorted out in your head.
Think of some specific true thing (place, person, event, story) that your lie will fit into and use those details if you are questioned. This gives you a bank of specific details to draw on so you don't have to keep making things up as you go along.
Keep it simple. The more things you have to lie about to support your original lie, the more likely you are to be tripped up. Lying is a bit like chess – you must always be thinking a few moves ahead. Anticipate what the person you're lying to is going to ask, and be prepared with a response. Make sure you've thought about who you're lying to. What do they already know? What is acceptable or otherwise to them?
Writing out the lie can help. The act of writing can enhance your memory of it, and also helps you to sort out the sequence.
Use your imagination and envision the lie. In your
mind, enact the lie as it "actually happened". This will create the
event in your mind for you and you'll be "remembering" it when you begin
to retell it to others. In a way, you are convincing yourself of the
revision of reality and when you retell it, it begins to sound as you're
telling the truth.
- An example of this might be, "Did I wreck the car? Well, I drove it
into a wall. So, the wall wrecked the car. I just moved it!" In the
immortal words of George Costanza, "It's not a lie if you believe it's
true." This works well when your situation is quite ersatz.
- Alternatively, try imagining that you weren't the person.
You're somebody else, a whole new person who didn't wreck the car.
Pretend to be that person. Convince yourself that you're the person that
didn't wreck the car.
Practice lying in front of a mirror or video camera. Observe your facial expressions. Try making your eyes go big and letting your mouth hang open a little for an innocent or believably shocked look. Also, practice looking like you're holding back tears. When you smile, show your teeth a little and crinkle up your eyes and cheeks. This is a "sincere" smile, an ear-to-ear one that covers your whole face.
Think about the details. Details can make a lot of
difference between a believable lie and an obvious load of verbal trash.
Add in extra details that help to embellish the event and make it
appear more real in the retelling. For example, "I was outside Burger
King having a Whopper with John and Mary" is more believable than simply
"I was outside Burger King." (Naturally, if John and Mary aren't in on
your lie, you'd need to fill them in to cover for you.)
Do the opposite of what liars do. Entire books exist on how to spot a liar. Get hold of one, read it, and aim to do the opposite. People in the act of telling lies tend to do things in the extremes – either they try to avoid eye contact as much as possible or they never break eye contact. In a normal conversation your eyes will move and you will look away to think, but otherwise you will maintain eye contact. In all likelihood, there will always be some subtleties that a good liar spotter will notice (in the realm of criminal law enforcement, police and lie detectors are trained to detect differences in behavior, so learning what they're looking for can help you) but the average person can probably be hoodwinked with careful attention to avoiding some of the following giveaways:
Maintain eye contact. Liars tend to look away. Appear earnest but not too eager when looking the other person in the eye. Don't look around, but don't stare either. In a normal conversation people do avert their glance from the other person's eyes naturally.
Relax. Don't fidget, pick at your clothing, or shuffle your feet. Again, these are signs of someone trying to deflect the conversation away.
Keep your hands under control. When people are lying, their hands tend to head towards their faces to cover their mouths or fiddle with parts of the face or clothing. Keep your hands relaxed. Don't touch your head with your hand, or hold your palms up. Keep your palms at your side, and leave them there.
Don't use big words unless you usually do. On the same note, if you usually speak in contractions (or don't), keep up your usual habits. Anything unusual about your language or tone will suggest something shifty is up.
Keep the smiling to a normal minimum. Think about smarmy people who smile too much when wanting to get something from you; that kind of smiling alerts you to something being up, so avoid overdoing the smiles. Definitely don't laugh or chuckle.
Unless you're known for stuttering, don't stutter and definitely don't get flustered. Some people blush or begin to stutter, because in some cases, the subconscious panics. Keep calm and collected.
Bring the lie up first before you're questioned about the matter. It's better to lie to the person in advance than to have another person question you later on the same topic. If the victim discovers your misdeed before you explain yourself, they'll have time to deduce what has happened with a reasonable degree of certainty before they ever even question you, making it much harder to convince them of your innocence in the matter.
For example: Justin's roommate Zander walks in the front door. Justin,
looking up from the computer screen, is told by Zander that the dog ate
his pasta, even though Zander actually did. Justin walks into the
kitchen, discovers the pasta is gone and shrugs. However, if Zander
never said anything, Justin would have come out of the kitchen angry and
assumed Zander ate his delicious mid-morning snack, which in turn makes
him angry and less receptive to anything Zander has to say in his own
defense.
Make a truthful admission. If you sense that someone
else suspects you of lying, admit or make them suspect you of something
small or untrue. They will take the bait and think that that is all you
were lying about.
Play dumb. Coming off as too stupid to lie is a great
defense. Lie as badly as you can about something small, but never
actually admit to doing it. You will be free to lie about much bigger
things and never be suspected.
Avoid elaborate stories that involve the need for corroboration.
The more people needed to back up your tale, the more likely a hole
will open up as soon as one person stuffs it up or forgets their "role"
in it. Equally, if something you've said can be confirmed, such as a
doctor testing for temperature, checking dates and occurrences in
records, checking your credit card transactions, etc., then you are
going to find it difficult to wriggle out of facts that are there in
black and white.
Appear indifferent. Another way to wriggle your way out of an uncomfortable situation is to act indifferent and to avoid responding defensively. Keep your voice tone steady and don't protest too much. Act like you don't care whether or not the person believes you. If you're really good at this, you can even make it seem that you're disappointed by their lack of faith in you but that you're willing to be forgiving of their lack of faith in you.
Follow through. One of the real reasons why lying doesn't pay and isn't a good means for getting through life is that you have to remember it, in all of its glory, possibly for the rest of your life. You cannot forget about your lie, its details, etc., and you will have to go on treating it like it actually happened. Depending on the context of the lie, staying silent about it might arouse suspicion, especially in retrospect, so you may need to keep mentioning it in conversations the way you would if it had been true. This step might be the one that gives you great pause.
