Lying, Cheating & Half Truths — The First Cut

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Grey Swan Guild

15 min readJul 5, 2023

Craft-Building Series #59 — A Gift, A Nuisance or the Peril of our Times

Come join us July 11th as we discuss as a Guild something we likely don’t care to admit as much — the importance, power, rising tide and consequences of “the lie”: LinkedIn Live

Authored by: Sean Moffitt, Grey Swan Guild Co-Founder, Head of Cygnus Ventures

“A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”— Mark Twain

The world is often in a tug-of-war between two worlds, and sometimes even the grey zone in between. It’s a battle between the people who lie, the people who stay honest and the majority of us who do a little bit of each side — and what it pays to do both.

The lie, the cheat, the in-between zone, the ambition to get ahead and the quest for truth has been a subject of interest of authors, business people, entrepreneurs, legal eagles, media mavens, military minds, movie makers, philosophers, playwrights, politicians, PR spinmeisters, psychologists, sociologists and theologians alike for centuries, if not millennia. In a polarized world, where many don’t just have dissenting opinions, they can’t even agree on the facts that lie underneath them, the subject of lying has taken on new interest and value.

These issues are hardly new. Humankind has been wrestling with them since the beginning of time. Wise Socrates believed that people were incapable of making important political decisions without prejudice or impulsiveness. The notion of “noble lies” or well told, not-exact truths were in Socates’ view required by leaders to command the obedience of the ruled and embue their loyalty. The lying means justified the citizen good ends. Thirty+years ago, Paul Gray in Time Magazine observed “Lies flourish in social uncertainty, when people no longer understand, or agree on, the rules governing their behavior toward one another.” His words were very prescient of the uncertain world we now operate in as of 2023 (so much so, we actually wrote a book on the subject).

We have no shortage of terms to describe the nuances between this pitted battle of lie versus truth:

In the lying camp, we have: Bluffing. Bribery. Cheating. Chicanery. Collusion. Conspiracy. Corruption. Cover-up. Deceit. Delusion. Disinformation. Duplicity. Evasion. Exaggeration. False flags. Falsehoods. Fabrication. Fibbing. Fraud. Gaslighting. Grifting. Hoaxes. Infidelity. Lying. Misdirection. Misinformation. Perjury. Plagiarism. Scapegoating. Truthiness. Plus many more.
…and in the other truth corner we have: Accuracy. Authenticity. Character. Conscience. Credibility. Decency. Ethics. Evidence. Forthrightness. Hard facts. Honesty. Honor. Indisputability. Integrity. Morality. Principles. Proof. Reality. Self-evidence. Sincerity. Standup. Trust. Virtue. Plus many more (but ironically 35% less than lies).

Who wins? Who cares? Who judges? Who values what? Who decides? Where are we headed? Let’s explore.

“I’m not upset that you lied to me, I’m upset that from now on I can’t believe you.”― Friedrich Nietzsche

A. Lexicon and Definitions

We could document a universe of 200+ subtly different terms to express the lie, we will focus on the key twelve here:

Lying — any communication that aims to deceive or cause receivers to adopt or persist in a false belief.
Cheating — actions designed to subvert rules in order to obtain unfair advantages.
Half-truths — deceptive statements which include some element of truth that because of combination or juxtaposition appears to be good reason or knowledge to be acted on or believed.
Deception — broader than merely lying, deception usually refers to statements, actions or lack of action or absence of statements, causing someone to believe something false as the truth.
Gaslighting — a form of psychological manipulation in which the abuser attempts to sow self-doubt and confusion in their victim’s mind.
Collusion — secret or illegal cooperation among parties and even rivals, frequently in business, especially in order to cheat, deceive others or restrict open competition.

Google Trends (2004–2023) — Lying (iup) , Cheating (up), Ethics (down)

Truthiness (Merriam-Webster’s 2006 word of the year) — a belief or assertion that a particular statement is true based on the intuition or perceptions of some individual or individuals, without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts. Here is the backgrounder.
White Lies — lies, perhaps trivial or unimportant, told in order to be polite or to stop someone from being upset by the truth.
Spin — frequently used in PR, marketing or journalism, spin is the selective assembly of fact and the shaping of nuance to support a particular view of a story as a form of propaganda; to communicate in a way that changes the way people are likely to perceive it.
Misinformation/Disinformation — misinformation is incorrect or misleading information — it differs from disinformation, which is deliberately deceptive and propagated information.
Conspiracy — a plot, secret plan or agreement between people for an unlawful or harmful purpose, especially with political motivation, while keeping their agreement secret from the public or from other people affected by it.
Post-truth (Oxford Dictionary’s 2016 word of the year) — frequently used to describe modern politics, relating to a situation in which people are more likely to accept an argument based on their emotions and beliefs, rather than one based on facts.

“Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”― Fyodor Dostoevsky

B. The Importance of the Topic of Lying/Cheating

Here are ten reasons we thought about tackling this topic in a 2023 context:

In business, fortunes and wealth can be won and lost on the pivot of a lie. Think about Elizabeth Holmes and her company Theranos and the multibillion dollar big lie perpetrated on investors, or the $4 billion lost equity of digital curremcy Ethereum based on a car crash death hoax of its founder Vitalik Buterin, or the frequent thousands of episodes of insider trading and frauds uncovered every year, and the millions of daily operations inside companies of falsehoods and white lies to ensure things aren’t discovered, brands and people look better, or others are blamed. How can be make business be ethical?
In politics, consider the “alternative facts” utterance by Trump Counsellor Kellyanne Conway in 2017 — and her boss’ former United States President Donald Trump bringing lying en vogue by famously making more than 30,000 false or misleading claims during his term, that when diagnosed, having very little change on voter intention, combined with the current malaise of ideological polarization where citizens can’t agree on the starting notion of a truth. How can we vote in our nobler, more virtuous citizens into office?
In sociology and media, where lies travel further and wider than fact, are clicked in with more frequency than the truth in digital circles, and the disinformation that has been thrust on the human hive over the last two decades, aided by its modern bullhorn — social media, creating mental health issues for unattainable aspirations and untrue claims, and our lessened inability to discern biases that exist in traditional media. How to spot B.S. quicker, stop it and eliminate the incentive to spin altogether?
In conflict, legal, crime and military, where the impetus or defence of action is frequently based on specious claims, leading to distrust in regimes, systems and institutions overall. How do we create transparency where the figurehead and positional lie is no merely accepted by a populace?
In education, an institution in which we have dumbed down standards where a grade might not be a grade anymore, influenced the decreasing inability to critically think through issues, now wrestle with the increasing use of AI tools to plagiarize or lean on for school assignments, and the rampant politicization of education from K-to-12 and higher education. How do we make our schools hothouses of critical thinking and authentic learning again?
Societally, fake news preys on some of our most base and deepest human instincts for success and power — which fuels further degradation of our shared information environment. Manipulative forces, aided by digital tools and intelligence take advantage of humans’ inbred preference for comfort and convenience and their craving for the answers they find in reinforcing echo chambers or news fatigue given increasing distrust of the source. How do you combat them?
Technologically, cyberfraud, disonformation and deep fakes are being driven by the speed of technological change. The future information landscape will have so many widespread information scams and mass manipulations it may cause otherwise informed participants to give up on civic life altogether. How do we not let the black hats win?
In leadership and psychology, where lying has an inconvenient truth of both lying to yourself and self-confidently believing your own hype, and lying to others has profit in it, for the state of the bottom line, career advancement or statecraft. Frequently, this type of leadership having blatant disregard for advocates and adversaries alike. How do we promote better truth telling leaders?
In science, research and discovery, that the real affects and state of the world is being corrupted by mere consensus of the time, expeditious explanations or value-affirming results. Climate change, theory of evolution, absence of reason, public health and vaccines have all been subject to threats, cancellation, simplicity, superstition and disinformation in this truth world. How does genuine science, breakthrough and discovery get listened to?
In the marketplace and workplace, deceptive communication leads to the art of spin doctoring, propaganda, astroturfing, sensationalism, exaggeration and reputation & crisis management versus simple honesty and truth telling. Consider the unfair practices of doping scandals in sport, collusion across industry leaders, outright lying in corporate crises, and the dubious state of plagiarism in the music industry, as just a sliver of the ethical challenges in pursuit of profit and eyeballs. How do we clean up an industry that has lost its mroal comp[ass?
As an occasional poker player and social participant in games of chance, I am personally fascinated with the insights around how players bluff, get away with bluffs, spot bluffs and what we can learn about human behaviour and game theory in the process. How do we spot the bluff, use a well crafted lie for gamesmanship and diplomacy?

“There are three types of lies — lies, damn lies, and statistics.”
― Benjamin Disraeli

C. Stats about Lying, Cheating and Half Truths

Here are 21 stats that frame up what might be an otherwise fun subject matter diversion into one of the big challenges of our times that need to be wrestled to the ground:

Omnipresent, day-to-day frequency — we can lie up to two or three times in ten minute conversations (Source: Robert Feldman)

Deciphering fact from opinion — only 31% of American can correctly categorize factual statements from opinion in news statements (Source: Pew Internet)

The rising cost of external lying: cybercrime could cost the world $10.5 trillion annually by 2025 (Source: Cybercrime Magazine — high side estimate)

The cost of internal lying — U.S. businesses will lose an average of 5% of their gross revenues to fraud (Source: The Association of Certified Fraud Examiners).

New media induced lies — from 2017 to 2021, there was an 18x rise in scams originally perpetrated on social media (Source: FTC); research on Twitter has found that false news is about 70% more likely to be shared than true news, and it takes true news 6 times longer than false stories to reach 1,500 people (Source: Vosoughi, S. et al. The spread of true and false news online. Science)

Humans are really bad at spotting lies — humans detect lies with only 54% accuracy, the vaunted Secret Service has performed no better (Source: Paul Ekman and Maureen O’Sullivan).

Nuance — people mainly tell little white lies. 88.6% of reported lies were described as “little white lies,” and 11.4 % were characterized as “big lies” (Sopurce: University of Wisconsin/Lacrosse).

Disproportionate lying — most people commit less than two lies per day, 6% of people commit six lies per day, 1% commit 15+ lies per day (Source: UAB).

Conspiracy untethered, non-normative and disruptive thinking are not a simple niche — 12% of Americans believe the Moon landings were faked, 10% believe the Earth is flat and 9% believe COVID vaccines implant microchips (Source: POLES 2011) — a majority believe these anti-science, anti-social beliefs are on the rise (Source: Quinnipiac University Poll)

Trust is at all time lows — 70% of Americans believe that fake news is a big problem today (Source: Deloitte); more people globally distrust their governments and media vs. trust them as reliable sources of info (Source: Edelman Trust Barometer).

Our variety and acceptance of professional lies: so many professional oppportunities to lie and so much post-rationalization of lying:

Boss lying as an impediment — your pet project, time allocation and being rewarded for your work might be hampered by your leaders and mangers lying:

It starts early — 95% of high school students and 60% of university students freely admit to cheating (Source: ICAI).

Sometimes we prefer the lie — more than half of people (56%) say there have been moments in their lives when they would have preferred to be told a lie instead of the truth; the number rises to 63% among 18-yo-34 year olds (Source: Research Co.)

Incentives in the C-Suite Might Be To Lie — CEOs with ‘integrity’ are less competitive and profitable — negatively impacting innovativeness, proactiveness and risk-taking.(Source: Prachi Gala, Saim Kashmiri)

First impression, professional lying —81% of job applicants lie, expressing 2.19 lies in a 15 minute job interview (Source: Brent Weiss and Robert S. Feldman of the University of Massachusetts).

The less you like your job, the more you lie — bad cultures make unsatisfied workers lie more

Lying in relationships — 30 to 60 percent of married couples will cheat at least once in the marriage; 74 percent of men and 68 percent of women admit they’d cheat if it was guaranteed they’d never get caught (Source: LA Detective Agency).

A silver lining — altruism in lying — in 25% of cases, lies are told for someone else’s benefit (Source: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology)

Back to Poker — frequently good modern Texas Hold-’em Players are bluffing half the time (or essentially lying in card parlance) (Source: Applications of No-limit Hold’em)

The problem is expected to worsen — 35% of people believe fake news will worsen vs. 22% believe it will get better in the next five years (Source: Statista).

People Believe Fake News will Rise over the Next Five Years (Source: Statista)

“Who lies for you will lie against you.” — John Locke

D. Perspectives Throughout the Centuries

Plato believed that rulers might need to make “noble lies” to create social harmony but it was very much based on context
St. Augustine/Thomas Aquinas believed lying was impermissable in nearly all counts but occasionally avoiding telling truth was sometimes allowable
Hugo Grotius believed that if the right of another is not violated, then there is no lie.
Immanuel Kant believed that no lie was ever permissable or morally acceptable
John Stuart Mill believed morally obligatory acts were defined as creating the greatest happiness for the greatness number of people, so we might have a moral obligation to tell generally beneficial lies
Friedrich Nietzsche suggested that those who refrain from lying may do so only because of the difficulty involved in maintaining lies, suggesting some people tell the truth only out of weakness.
Ayn Rand and her brand of egoism is that a lie should be avoided if it has a high probability of negatively impacting our own personal happiness or interests if discovered.
Willam David Ross believed we had interweaving prima facia duties that were more important than outcomes on whether to contextually lie or not. Ross initially identifies seven distinct prima facie duties: Fidelity, Reparation, Gratitude, Non-injury, Beneficence, Self-improvement & Justice.

Ethics, Lies and Deception — Actions, Being and Consequences (Source: Leadership & Ethiocs)

“If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.”
― Walter Langer

E. Criteria for Lying and Cheating

As we have seen through different philosophical schools, psychological branches and the sometimes conflicting pursuit of virtue and ethics, there is no universal definition for lying, cheating or seeding half-truths but usually certain criteria hold true with most explanations:

lying and cheating are known by the sender or perpetrator to be false or against the rules (even in cases where it turns out to be true or within bounds in actuality)
lying/cheating causes the person to whom it is directed toward to believe them to be true or within the rules
even though a statement/act may contain the truth or much of the truth, it is said/acted with an irony or enough of a lie that can veer the recipient away from the truth
lies and cheats can also be acts of omission or exaggeration where something is not said or not done, refraining from doing something, or facts and practices are embellished to the point of untruth
there is disagreement on whether a true lie is one that needs to be at the expense of somebody/some group (narrow), includes the advancement of one’s own standing at no/few others’ expense (broader) or regardless of benefit or target, is a falsehood or a cheat (broadest)

“Honesty pays, but it doesn’t seem to pay enough to suit some people.”-
Kin Hubbard

Five Articles in the Lying, Cheating & Half-Truth Series:

The First Cut — Lexicon/Terms, Historical Perspectives, Importance, Stats and Criteria to Define a Lie/Cheat

The Second Cut — Motives, Types, Degrees of Lies and Cheats, Gift, Traits of Character Flaw, Quiz

The Third Cut — How to Spot a Liar/Cheater, Physiology of Lying, Myths, Technology, Types of People and Lying - Effects of Gender, Age & Culture

The Fourth Cut — Professions and Lying, How We Get Better and Key Questions We Should Be Asking

The Fifth Cut — Debrief from our Craft Building Event #59 — Lying, Cheating and Half-truths

The Craft Building Series #59 Event — Lying, Cheating and Half-Truths

Come join us Tuesday July 11th, 2023 at 5pm ET/9pm UTC on LinkedIn Live as we debate the value, consequences, motives, trends and future of untruth.

Join our event: https://www.linkedin.com/events/lying-cheating-halftruths7074375669601759233/theater/

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