Informed Speculation

I once dated a girl who insisted that she didn’t lie.  When I told her that she did, in fact, lie, and that her statement that she didn’t lie was, in fact, also a lie, she wasn’t amused (but I was right…I’m single again, but I was right).

That story comes to mind when I read this little puff piece in the Washington Post that approaches the Libby trial from an entirely different angle:

The perjury trial of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby goes to the jury this week. The case speaks to several issues — how the Bush administration deals with critics of the war in Iraq, and the games that Washington’s reporters and politicians play with each other. As far as the jury is concerned, however, the case is about only one thing: lying.

One particularly well-qualified witness on this subject was not called by either the prosecution or the defense, so today we cross-examine Robert Feldman ourselves. Feldman is a social psychologist at the University of Massachusetts who studies lying in everyday life, and his findings are just the kind of thing that Libby’s lawyers could have pounced on.

Feldman’s experiments show that stern-faced judicial proceedings about perjury are as remote from the realities of human behavior as President Bush is from the Nobel Peace Prize. For one thing, lying plays a more complex role in human relationships than the black-and-white legal view recognizes. It is also so commonplace in everyday life that putting people on trial for lying is somewhat like putting them on trial for breathing.

Experiments have found that ordinary people tell about two lies every 10 minutes, with some people getting in as many as a dozen falsehoods in that period. More interestingly — and Libby might see this as the silver lining if he is found guilty — Feldman also found that liars tend to be more popular than honest people. (Ever notice how popular politicians somehow change their minds on controversial issues such as the war in Iraq at the exact moment that public opinion on those issues changes?)

A similar ratio holds for politicians, only it’s ten lies every two minutes – provided they are asleep at the time…