Lying to Others, or Lying to Yourself?
The effects of lying on you and your memories.
What do you do when you get up in the morning? For many people, they get out of their bed, shower, eat breakfast, brush their hair, brush their teeth, and then get on with another one of the many routines that they do daily. But where does lying fit into people’s everyday routines? Some people lie so often and so casually, that it becomes a habit that the hardly ever notice, and sometimes even a reality. In Po Bronson’s article, “Learning to Lie” he pointed out that 98% of teens lie to their parents. Plus, when asked about common topics that teens lie about, the average teen said that they lied about one third of those topics. If teenagers are lying that often, there is a good chance the lies will continue as they get older. But what many liars don’t know, is that lying can have a much worse effect on themselves than it does on the people that they lie to.
Even simple little lies like exaggerating a story to enhance its appeal, or pretending that you don’t like a band just because your friend doesn't like that band can have a huge effect on the person telling these little lies. Once people start to tell little lies, their brains can start to accept that lie as a reality. Then after the same lie gets told over and over again it gets more and more exaggerated and before you know it, your brain thinks that you climbed a fence that was twelve feet tall when it was really just three. This then affects your memory to such an extent, that you might not even realize that you are lying anymore.
This can happen especially when small lies spiral into bigger lies. In Bronson’s article, a boy named Nick was asked to identify different objects behind his back just by listening to the noises it made so that he could win cool prizes. One of the objects was a stuffed soccer ball that was placed on top of a greeting card that played music. When the women running the test, Cindy Arruda, opened the card, it played Beethoven’s Für Elise. This confused Nick very much. Then, when Arruda left the room, Nick turned around and discovered what the object was. When Arruda came back he told her that it was a soccer ball. When asked if he peaked while she was gone he assured her that he didn't. Instead of arguing with the boy, Arruda decided to ask him how he knew that it was a soccer ball. Nick thought for a moment, then lied again by saying things such as, “The music had sounded like a ball,” and “The ball sounded black and white.” Bronan then went on to explain more of Nicks lies. He said, “Nick added that the music sounded like the soccer balls he played with at school: They squeaked. And the music sounded like the squeak that he heard when he kicked the ball. To emphasize this, his winning point, he brushed his hand against the side of the toy ball.”
As Nick realized that one lie was successful, he began to try more and more lies. When the lies went on, he also got better and better at telling them, even demonstrating the sound he heard the ball make by brushing it with his hand at the end. If Nick goes home and tells his family about the cool prizes he won from winning that game, he will probably lie about cheating again. Then, if he tells his friends about it, he will probably lie about cheating again. If Nick tells that story enough times, he might forget about the cheating all together. He might actually begin to think that he was able to tell that there was a soccer ball behind him because he heard a Beethoven song.
That isn’t even the worst of it. Lies can hurt many other things besides memories, they can change your perception of everyday things. What if that little boy, Nick, goes on to think about soccer balls every time he hears Beethoven, or hear Beethoven’s music whenever he plays soccer? This might be a little extreme, but if it happens with other lies that he tells, it could cause a big problem for his young, growing mind.
It is not hard to tell a lie like this one, even if it is by accident. Sometimes you don’t realize you’re lying because your brain has processed the lie so many times that it accepts it as the truth. I once told the same lie for about eights years without even realizing that it had been a lie in the first place. Being that it started when I was only in kindergarten, it may not have intentionally been a lie, but some exaggeration that came deep down from the depths of my childish imagination. Even so, I still believed it up until I was in seventh grade and someone re-told the story to me the way it actually happened.
But, who knows? Maybe the “real” version of the story that I know today is wrong. Maybe it was all an exaggeration as well.
