People lie all the time! Is it really a bad thing though? Do we even want to know the truth half the time? I feel like most of the times that I have weaseled the truth out of someone I was much less satisfied than I should have been. The truth is good so much of the time as well though, we seek it out for more purposes than that we simply do not like being lied to. The truth can be enlightening, it can lift burdens off ourselves.
Yet, still how do we know if we are actually receiving the truth? We seem to be lied to on a daily basis, by the government, by our parents, by our friends, by the cafeteria workers even! I think finding out if someone is being truthful with you is a near impossible thing to do. How do you interrogate someone about whether they are lying to you without offending them? You almost cant, so I think there is no easy way to determine if someone is lying to you, it is just something you have to decide whether or not you really want to know the truth and at what cost it may come at.
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This makes me think of court cases and murder trials. How do we know when we are being lied to? Well, to connect that to a murder case, what if an eye witness' testimony is a lie? And then, what if that eye witness does not know if they are lying? What I mean is, there has been recent evidence/speculation/discussion about the accountability of human memory when one witnesses an event.
ReplyDeleteDoes the situation cause stress that then disrupts what one believes he or she is seeing? Are there other influencing factors like one's intoxication levels, the clarity of the weather...etc?
It would really be hard to conduct an investigation when one might have to consider the possibility of peoples' testimonies not being fully reliable: they might BELIEVE what they saw or heard as the truth, but there is now the possibility of distortion--so truth-sayers may actually be ultimately liars.
Hmmm...This may be grounds for placing value upon empirical evidence above all other factors in an investigation. That DNA thing...
If you want to find out through conversation, I think it is important not to become confrontational. Make the participant think you are genuinely interested, not that you are out to get them. I think observation is also a very good way of finding out whether someone is lying to you. If someone says something and does another, you are more inclined to believe what you saw, the action.
ReplyDeleteI usually trust actions more than words. People, unfortunately, can sometimes say anything. Heck, sometimes people just lie for fun. Most people in today's world need shrinks, seriously. It is never easy to figure out the truth, if ever. Take an ad, sometimes they lie just to get money. A lot of products say they do things and fail at producing results. There are all kinds of lies that surround today's society, and I don't think anyone can really trust anything now a days. For me, I don't trust people then I start ruling out reasons to why I might not trust them, then if I eventually rule out everything then I could possibly trust that person. All in all, I don't really believe that anyone can just know that a person is lying to him simply because we refuse to believe it to avoid getting hurt.
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