4 Common Things That Are Turning Us Into Horrible People

4

You Tell Dumb Lies To Fit In

Even if you're the world's best person, you've probably told a lie in the last few hours. Parents tell their kids that the goldfish is sleeping. A friend tells you that they think your short story has potential. The doctor tells you his hands aren't cold. Sometimes we just say shit to move the narrative along because it's easier. And sometimes we do it to take advantage, to defraud, to destroy, to all kinds of D words. And sometimes we're just dumb -- also a D word.

In one study, 46 percent of people are aged 18-49 admitted to lying about watching a TV show. That is arguably one of the most vacuous things a human could possibly lie about, ranking up there with lying about your favorite color or whether or not you pissed in a neighbor's mailbox. So why would anyone lie and say they watched Game Of Thrones when they hadn't? Fear of being ostracized. You want to fit in with a group, so if everyone loves Young Sheldon, you pretend the bile isn't simmering in the back of your throat .

For the most staggering case of completely unhinged lies that you'll ever see, we need only to travel to a steakhouse. Anyone who's ever enjoyed that sweet, nourishing flesh of the beast knows that you can typically order a steak cooked in about five different ways: rare, medium rare, medium, medium well, and well. Donald Trump famously got raked over those delicious steak-charring coals for liking his steak well-done and with ketchup. Fool, they said! Heretic of beef!

3

Groupthink Forces Us To Lie In Unison

We like to think that the average person, if given the choice, would not sneak poison into your coffee even if your nemesis offered them $500 to do it. But put that average person into a large corporation and give them the chance to secretly poison a community's groundwater in order to save a trivial amount on waste disposal, and suddenly all of those good people will combine to create a lying piece of shit hivemind.

This too turns up in experiments. Put an honest person in a group that seems to be a little unscrupulous, and they'll quickly fall prey to poop scruples, which is a term I plan to trademark. More bizarrely, honest people are willing to engage in dishonesty on behalf of others if they feel like there will be a payoff in a group setting, but will remain honest on an individual basis.

2

Lies Come Easier At Certain Times Of Day

I worked in an office for a while where the administrative assistant used to say "Don't talk to me before I've had my coffee!" almost every day. Every day, just twisting a knife deeper and deeper into a joke that has never once been funny, gutting it like a sacrificial cow and dancing upon its shredded and rotting innards right next to my desk. All because, as you can guess, she wasn't a "morning person." Well, not only is this a real thing, but the implications are kind of terrifying.

Science people have labelled those who work best in the mornings as "larks," and those who do best during the evening as "owls." And in fact, experiments indicate that morning people excel at being honest and moral in the morning. As the day progresses, they become less and less so. It works in reverse for owls -- they're more likely to get moral in the evening, but tell bitter lies in their cranky morning hours.

1

Yes, Power Turns You Into A Liar

The trite old saying goes "Absolute power corrupts absolutely" -- something most of us would have realized anyway after just observing the world for seven or eight minutes. But when we quote it, we're always thinking of other people -- politicians, CEOs, abusive cops. We never stop to ask how long it would take power to corrupt our own souls. Fortunately, science has looked into this too, and the answer is that it takes about the length of one experiment.

After using psychometric data to determine some basic personality traits (like honesty), a group of participants were allowed to play boss in a game. They had to decide how to pay out cash to workers, with the potential to give themselves a larger portion at the expense of everyone else, in the typical "The Universe is one giant blank check made out to me!" manner we associate with greedy assholes. People who scored as being more dishonest were dishonest right out of the gate, giving themselves more money than everyone else. But the more interesting part is that the honest people stayed true to themselves at first, then slowly degraded into Gollums of greed and assery over time, taking more than their fair shares.

And that's in a controlled experiment, with nothing really at stake! It seems like "power corrupts" doesn't require a throne or corner office to work -- just the slightest sense that you can give yourself an unfair share and get away with it.

If you're the type of unscrupulous person who just wants to be good at lying, you can actually just get your own lie detector test. Best of all, it comes in game form!

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For more check out 6 Things That Are Secretly Turning You Into A Bad Person and 5 Psychological Experiments That Prove Humanity is Doomed.

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