Truth

Two Lies and One Truth

Normally I create and write these posts after reading a certain book – taking the overarching theme of said book and then researching my own examples in attempts to hammer in the point I am trying to convey. This time I am going to use an example directly from the book I read this week titled, “Talking to Strangers – Malcolm Gladwell”, as I found it fascinating and important to the post. I’m going to give a very rudimentary run down of this, as to not give a mimeographed version of someone else’s work and research. 

 

During 1938 we were on the cusp of World War II as Hitler began to make talks about invading Czechoslovakia. This potential war for Germany in itself would not have sparked direct retaliation from other allied nations across the globe. However, it was the possibility of him using it to invade Poland afterwards that frightened everyone. During this time, Hitler was in his emo-boy phase in life so there was not much direct communication with him from other nations. 

The British Prime Minister at the time, Neville Chamberlain, being concerned with the threats to Europe, began to set in motion plans to meet with Hitler in an attempt to keep things under control. Neville was looked at as a confident and well spoken man, and praised for his ability to to effectively communicate in a thought out manner. He sent in a request to meet privately with Hitler to discuss several possible resolutions pertaining to de-escalation of the overzealous ambitions of the dictator. The request was granted and both Neville and Adolf spoke for multiple hours. The conclusion that Neville came to in regards to Hitlers’ character went something along the lines of, “Yea dude is kinda nuts and all, but he seems reasonable and accommodating and I can trust him”. Upon his return to Britain, he relayed his conclusions to the populace, basically saying that he has found hope in a peaceful resolution. 

 

Shortly after, Neville sent one of his viceroys to also speak with Adolf. Unlike Neville, this man was much more direct and to the point. He was described as stern, commanding, and forthright with a slight short temper. Now, why you would appoint someone like that as one of your viceroys, especially to someone as bonkers as Adolf Hitler is baffling to me but beyond the point. Their meeting went quite differently. The viceroy described Hitler basically as a strong armed bully and an asshole, yet was very intelligent and sound of mind. He went back to Britain and reported his encounter to the Prime Minister. 

 

After that, another diplomat from Britain went to go see for himself what Hitler was up to. Only this time, this diplomat did not speak to him directly. Instead, while in Germany he attended his rallies, spoke to people under Hitlers’ command, and listened closely to what he was saying without having a formal conversation with the man himself. He then also came to a wildly different conclusion about Hitlers’ character and possible motives. He reported back to Neville and described Hitler as an absolute lunatic that cannot be reasoned with or trusted. 

 

Neville Chamberlain now has three nearly radically different opinions about Adolf and his character and motives. Being the Prime Minister, it is now up to his discretion on how to proceed with this. Ultimately, Neville decided to stick to his own best judgment and make one last meeting with Hitler. Since he came to his own conclusion that Hitler is reasonable and can be trusted, he asked him to sign a document called, “The Munich Agreement”. The purpose of the treaty would be to get a signed agreement that would state that Germany take Czechoslovakia and nothing else. Hitler went, “oh yeah for sure! Totally bro. I gotchu. No Poland! Definitely not!”. Satisfied with the answer, Neville again returned to Britain and said to his people in a speech:

My good friends, for the second time in our history, a British Prime Minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honor. I believe it is peace for our time. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts. Go home and get a nice quiet sleep.”

Hitler then invaded Czechoslovakia within 6 months and then he totally did not invade Poland invaded Poland shortly after, sparking World War II. 

 

Point is, how is it that three people came to wildly different conclusions about Hitler? How is it that the diplomat that did not speak to him directly, drew up the most accurate conclusion on him and his motives?

 

When speaking to people, we tend to create judgments based on our own personality, experiences, and thought processes. Chamberlain, being praised by many in his ability to articulate, went into the meeting with confidence, and left with confidence. The first viceroy went into the meeting with his rash personality, and came to the conclusion that Hitler was just a sensible asshole. Both of these people carried something with them and formed educated guesses based on what they were told. The two of them gave themselves the opportunity to hear effective lies, and since they could not formulate enough doubt, believed they were right. It was the person who merely watched and listened, and had already been skeptical, that was the most spot on in his analysis because he did not give the chance to be manipulated and lied to.

Deception

This effect can be seen very commonly in what people like to call, “Honeymoon Stages”. Two people come together and form a connection. Most of the time this connection is based under false pretenses, as both people are actively trying to put themselves in the most attractive light in order to impress the other. Blinded by attraction and a deficit of self awareness, this lack of perspective leads both people to believe they are meant for each other, without the understanding that they don’t really know each other yet, but instead the person the other party is actively trying to portray. No real truth begins to show until the effect of this unspoken initial connection fades, and a sense of comfort gets created that allows both people to speak and act on their true selves.

 

Often during this Honeymoon Stage there are glances at “red flags‘  and concerning behavior, but they will be ignored since there isn’t enough concrete evidence that will dissuade the subconscious doubt and skepticism between the two. This process can easily be subverted with honesty, and enough self confidence to drop the act early on as to save both parties a lot of time and potential heartbreak – but more often than not that is not the case. This will then lead to 3 possible outcomes: 

 

  • A loss of attraction and mutual end to a relationship once each party’s real truth shows. 
  • An unhealthy/toxic/abusive relationship forms as both individuals in the relationship come to discover that they are too incompatible, yet stay in it because they long for that sense of connection at the start during the Honeymoon Phase. 
  • Optimally, both people in the relationship have adequately expressed each other’s flaws, and decide that they are comfortable enough with each other to not need to hide anymore, therefore creating a healthy relationship with an understanding of differences.

Yet the best evidence that people can rely on is always going to be that of the person who didn’t talk to the potential partner you are about to invest in, but instead has heard objective details about the character of the individual based on events that have taken place. This confidant will be able to form a conclusion without bias and without ever having the opportunity to be dissuaded by the illusion the potential partner is trying to convey to the other. However, this is only effective if you are telling honest and objective truths. If you only tell your friend negatives, and ignore all the positives, you are going to portray this potential partner as negative and vice-versa. In order to get an accurate analysis from an unbiased source, you have to make sure that you don’t include your own biases in your depiction of events and characterizations in order to avoid creating an echo chamber of your own beliefs. This is unfortunately hard for a lot of people to do, as most people only want to hear the things they think are true. This well then create a “flying monkey” effect from the Wizard of Oz. Confiding your personal truth to another person will lead to unconditional support built on preconceived biased notions. In order to effectively communicate this, you must be sure to include your own pitfalls in this new dynamic.   

 

Let’s say you decide to bring a friend who is in a relationship out to a double date with you and this new partner. Your friend will look at your new partner and notice that they are charismatic and well put together. In this short amount of time of personable interaction, a bias forms that they know more than enough to come to the conclusion that you both are a great fit, and that they seem like a good enough person. What they most likely will ignore is the possible fact that this is exactly what the stranger intends for your friend to feel. Nobody wants to come across like an asshole and expose their own flaws. Had you never met on the double date, and instead confided in your friend and said, “I like her and she is really sweet, but she told me that one time she slashed her ex boyfriends tires because he didn’t text her back quick enough”, the friend would have the opportunity to tell you that this is a red flag that’s being ignored. Whereas if all they saw was the kind, charming, and beautiful lady sitting at the dinner table, that notion wouldn’t seem as glaringly important, or that they have possibly changed since then because the interaction seemed fine enough. 

 

This same opportunity for bias can swing the other way around as well. For example, they might perceive your new partner’s social anxiety at dinner as a reflection of being weird and intentionally unsociable. This in turn leads to the quick judgment that there is a lack of chemistry between the two, and that this person is being rude. So when you go and tell your friend, “what do you think?”, they will give a response based on a short windowed interaction with a lack of context or understanding that this isn’t usual behavior. This disapproval from your friend will now plant a seed of doubt in your own mind that isn’t founded on any reasonable basis.

 

When the Prime Minister and the Diplomat went to speak with Hitler, he was trying to convey a sense of reasonability and trust. They both didn’t know that he was actually just a lunatic on crystal meth that can’t be trusted for jack shit. Having the interaction with him reinforced a bias for a hope in peaceful resolution, without acknowledging how this man acts behind closed doors, or the words he was telling his own German populace. This is because they gave themselves the opportunity to be deceived. In order to amass enough evidence to uncover truth from lies, there has to be a proportional amount of events or evidence that make the feeling of doubt sufficiently obvious to form a rational conclusion. People are more likely inclined to believe what someone is telling you is true, rather than not (Default Truth Theory). When speaking to somebody you don’t know, it is human nature that they actively try to cover as much doubt about the negatives of their personality as possible. They aren’t going to come out the gates swinging and letting you know that they have severe anger issues and bipolar tendencies, you will have to find that out later. This is the basis for deception, and why it is so hard to formulate an accurate depiction of people you speak to.

Doubt

Why do we doubt ourselves even when the truth seems to be so readily apparent? The book brings an example of an experiment done by a psychologist Tim Levine. University students are told to do simple trivia, and for every question they get right they will be paid in cash. The student is partnered up with someone, and is sat at a table with a proctor who is asking the trivia questions. Halfway through the questioning, the proctor gets up and leaves momentarily to “use the restroom”. The partner that is with the student, is in on the experiment, and eggs the student on to look in the envelope the proctor happened to have left on the table containing answers. Around 40% of students give in and take a peek at the answers.

 

When the trivia is over, students are then questioned if they cheated or not. Obviously, most deny it and try to convince Tim that they just knew the answers. When it is revealed that the whole thing was recorded, and that they were in fact lying, they were asked questions pertaining as to how obvious it was that the whole thing was a setup. Being that the proctor just happens to leave to use the restroom and leaves the answers on the table. Or the random partner now cheering them on to cheat to get the money. Surprisingly, most students admit that they had a fair amount of doubt that the experiment was legit, and that they were in fact aware that they were most likely being set up. Yet they still did it. They continued to do it because even though there was doubt, there was not sufficient evidence that would deter them from their own default truth. Nearly 70% of the students who cheated admitted that they had this feeling of doubt.

Now what if I told you that I pulled all of these numbers straight out my ass? Because that’s exactly what I did. I didn’t feel like actually going back into the book and finding the exact statistics of the experiment, nor the details, it was all from memory. In fact what I found when I did go back to look at it, I accidentally combined two completely separate experiments from the book and pooled them into one. If you doubted the legitimacy of what I was saying, why didn’t you Google it to fact check it? If you didn’t, why did you implicitly believe some random internet blog? Okay, admittedly, this isn’t a fair shake considering most people wouldn’t care to check this as there are no real stakes here. And even though I completely skewed the actual experiments, the results still would convey the same point if I did go through the effort of going back and rewriting it correctly, as the premise of both experiments remain the same regardless of exact circumstances or figures, as I was close enough. 

 

Well it’s the same reason I was explaining before with the honeymoon phase analogy. People are naturally inclined to believe what they are being told as truth unless it is impossible to feel otherwise. When you feel attraction to somebody, you want to believe that they are going to be this way forever, and that you already know who they are. When you are in class you don’t question the legitimacy of your professor’s lecture because the teacher did their research. To take it a step further, a lot of rape cases get unreported because people want to believe that there is no way your friend you knew for so long can possibly do something so horrid, so you believe when they tell you the rumors are false. This is doubt, and the dangers of looking away. 

 

I faced the consequences of ignoring doubt pretty recently. I noticed for a period of over a month or two someone I was dating was getting really distant with me. Something was off but I didn’t question it too much. I believed my own truth that maybe it was because of her new job that was causing it. When I tried to get some late night movies in with her, she would tell me she didn’t want to because she had work early. Makes sense, I didn’t question it. Yet she was still distant for a while. One day we are walking into a bar to watch the soccer game, and as we walk I put my arm around her waist. She shoed my arm away and told me that she just didn’t like how it would tickle her side sometimes. A bit strange but I believed it. But again, she was still distant. When I asked about it again some time later, I was told it was because I was looking like a bum with my wild hair and beard that I haven’t bothered to keep trimmed for a while. I believed what I was told, agreed to go to the barber, and figured everything would be great now even though I had doubts that was the real reason. But she was still a little off. One day we were out and I questioned it again, I said “hey are you mad at me or something?”. She laughed and smiled and told me, “no! Why?!”. I had a lot of doubt then that she was telling me the truth, but felt I did not gather enough evidence to really think otherwise because of the things I was being told. The next day she broke up with me and told me she was feeling this way for a long time and just didn’t want to hurt me. 

 

I chose to go along with this fairytale in my head that everything was great. That if I was not getting the direct communication that everything wasn’t, that my doubts weren’t justified no matter how much evidence I had to the contrary. That I believed what she was telling me was the truth because I didn’t have enough evidence to believe otherwise even if in hindsight I did. Had I chosen to acknowledge my own doubt, and pursue a more direct confrontation to the truth that was being hidden, maybe I could have done something differently before it was too late. The evidence that things weren’t going so great from her end was there, but I chose to believe in a misguided fact that she would always love me, and that since she wasn’t being completely direct about how she was feeling, I had nothing to fear. So why would I believe that knowing damn well that something just wasn’t right? 

 

This goes back to The Four Agreements, and the third agreement being:

Do Not Make Assumptions

Neville Chamberlain assumed that Hitler was going to hold up his end of the bargain despite one of his diplomats telling him he can’t be trusted. The university students assumed that they could make some quick cash by cheating, despite doubting the legitimacy of the test. I assumed my ex still loved me when she didn’t, despite me doubting the legitimacy of her reasoning behind being distant and her obvious attempts to slowly withdraw from me. Your doubts are your mind’s way of telling you something is wrong, and that you should make an attempt to be proactive about the situation you are currently in. Listen to your doubts, pursue honest truths, do not make assumptions, and most importantly be open and honest to others, so they also don’t make their own assumptions and doubt about you. Doubt is a double edged sword. It can be born from a place of low self worth, and in turn creates irrational fears that are the most dangerous forms of it. Doubting yourself in your ability to accomplish a goal is not healthy. On the other hand, doubt can be born of a place of objective truths. Creating piles of evidence in your mind that planted the seeds of the doubt that you actively try to sweep under the rug. These doubts should never be overlooked. These doubts will bring you truth in the face of deception. 

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Inspired By: Talking To Strangers - Malcolm Gladwell