Study Shows People In Power Make Better Liars

oDDmON oUT writes "MSNBC is reporting that a Columbia Business School study shows those who hold power over others make better liars. According to one of the study's coauthors, 'It just doesn't hurt them as much to do it.' For the average liar, she said, the act of lying elicits negative emotions, physiological stress and the fear of getting caught in a lie. As a result, she added, liars will often send out cues that they are lying by doing things like fidgeting in a chair or changing the rate of their speech. But for the powerful, the impact is very different: 'Power, it seems, enhances the same emotional, cognitive, and physiological systems that lie-telling depletes. People with power enjoy positive emotions, increases in cognitive function, and physiological resilience such as lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol. Thus, holding power over others might make it easier for people to tell lies.'"

Comments

Re:Correlation Causation

[DanTheStone]

RTFA. There's an actual experiment here, not just observations like the summary here implies.

Re:Umm... they spent money on this?

[Bodrius]

I'm guessing you're just being snarky, but taking your comment at face value: that's a hasty assumption to make; even if you assumed all politicians are liars (which isn't very scientific either) it doesn't follow that all leaders, or even most important leaders, are politicians. If you also consider all the differences between political processes in different countries and cultures, in terms of public exposure, accountability, and levels of direct and indirect power - there are a lot of variables that would account for the usual complaint.

The experiment design seems to reduce this to few enough variables, in a general enough context, to legitimately say "power makes people better at lying".

Note that from TFA this wasn't a survey among known leaders - they randomly assigned power relationships to equivalent populations in an experiment, and found a correlation. So this rules out many of the alternative arguments: self-selection ('better liars acquire power'), specialized populations ('publicly elected politicians need to be better liars'), or learned behavior ('people in power become desensitized to lying').