This is What Happens When You Lie.
21 years back, I spoke a small lie which changed my life.
Tiny Lies Won’t Hurt
This is what I had abided by until recently when I discovered the profound impact of lying.
In hindsight, there was one incident that actually changed me as a person.
Let me describe it.
The Lie (May 2003)
I completed my first checkpoint of education, which was tenth standard, in 2003.
I got 78.4%.
This was approximately 2% less than the magic number in my mind: 80%.
It was a number that, in my mind, would give me social acceptance.
It was a typical Indian middle-class 15-year-old millennial thought.
To cover up that delta percentage, I lied about my marks.
For the world, I got 84.6%.
I planned well, with all the numbers matching each other.
But a lie is bound to get caught, and my close friends got to know my real marks.
Thanks to the internet.
It spread across bigger groups. Friends of friends got to know about it.
My reputation was tarnished.
My relationship with my friends got bitter.
I became a stressed and under-confident being.
I lost my charm and personality.
A lie is much more powerful than we think.
Let’s understand what happens step by step when we lie.
Decision & Formulation of a Lie
While lying, most of us try to figure out if telling a lie or the truth will result in a more favourable outcome.
Once we decide that we need to lie (which is the most probable case), we justify the lie we are about to speak.
The justification mostly falls into these three buckets:
- Avoid some kind of punishment
- Gain an advantage
- Protect someone’s feelings
Even before we say the lie, our brain starts exerting extra cognitive pressure and puts a lot of effort into constructing the lie and remembering it.
Guilt and anxiety start to creep in, thinking that we are going to deceive someone.
We start thinking about what can go wrong, which increases our stress levels.
Delivery of a Lie & Immediate Aftermath
Now is the time when we implement our well-planned lie.
And here the Pinocchio effect comes into play.
Let us understand this effect.
Pinocchio Effect
Imagine a child named Sarah who broke a vase and decided to lie to her parents about it.
When her mother asks, “Did you break the vase?”
- Physiological Responses: As Sarah prepares to lie, her heart starts racing, and she begins to sweat slightly.
- Behavioral Cues: Sarah’s voice might become a bit higher-pitched when she says, “No, I didn’t break it.” She might avoid making direct eye contact with her mother.
- Micro-expressions: Brief flashes of guilt or fear might cross her face despite her efforts to look innocent.
The Pinocchio effect illustrates how lying can trigger a complex array of physiological and behavioural responses, often making it challenging to maintain a deception without detection.
Once the lie is delivered, the stage of immediate aftermath starts in which both the liar and the recipient start to process and respond to the lie.
We, as liars, experience the Pinocchio effect.
We also try to understand cues from the recipient about whether the lie is being believed or if it will be questioned.
Anxiety is at its peak.
Impact
There will be two outcomes of telling a lie:
- It’s believed
- It’s not believed
And in both cases, the impact is similar.
Allow me to explain.
When the Lie is Believed
If the recipient believes the lie, it’s a short-term success for the liar but a long-term maintenance task as well.
For that, we might fall into the trap of saying more lies to support the original lie.
We also need to make sure that we remember that lie forever, or else we will be exposed, which no one would want.
We will also get anxious if there is talk about that lie or anything closely related to that lie.
All this will result in being anti-social.
We would want to avoid meetings with the person to whom we have spoken the lie.
This is one major reason we do not meet our old buddies, because we might have spoken some kind of lie and we do not want to face it.
We ignore people, situations, or any other stimuli that might invoke the lie.
When the Lie is Not Believed
This is the case when the lie we spoke was caught at the same time we spoke it or later.
There is a profound impact and Pinocchio effect when the lie is caught.
Our relationship, reputation, and mental well-being are the ones that get most negatively impacted.
And like above, we become unsocial forcefully.
This was my case when I lied about my tenth-standard marks to my friends.
I haven’t faced them since that incident. But thinking about it creates the Pinocchio effect in me even today.
To Sum it Up
Lying is underestimated.
We speak lies every now and then thinking that a small lie won’t harm us.
A lie is always negative, even if it might bring short-term happiness or a smile to anyone’s face.
Unlearn to lie.
I am on the way to becoming 100% lie-free.
🤥
