Apparently, people can become accustomed to lying. The pangs of conscience that they feel when they first tell a lie diminish gradually as they tell additional lies (caveat: sss; also, the study participants knew they were only harming the person they were “cheating” hypothetically):
In our experiment, which was funded by the Wellcome Trust and the Center for Advanced Hindsight, we gave a group of 80 individuals the opportunity to lie again and again in a financial task in order to gain money at another person’s expense. We found that the volunteers started with relatively small lies, cheating by only a few cents, but slowly over the course of the experiment lied more and more. While they were doing so we recorded their brain activity using a brain imaging scanner. We found that the emotional network in the brain responded less with each additional lie. The greater the drop in the brain’s sensitivity to dishonesty, the more people lied the next time they had a chance.
Repeated dishonesty is a bit like a perfume you apply over and over. At first you easily detect the powerful scent of a new perfume. But over time and with more applications you can hardly sense its presence, so you apply more liberally. This happens because neurons in your olfactory bulb desensitize to the smell of the perfume. Similarly, it appears that our response to our own acts of dishonesty is strong at first, but over time decreases. Like students taking beta-blockers, your capacity for being dishonest increases.
(emphasis added)
I guess that’s how some people can lie during lie detector tests and pass the test anyway. Even worse, people get used to being lied to:
The picture becomes more alarming when we consider that individuals adapt not only to their own dishonesty but also to that of others. Research Harvard professors Francesca Gino and Max Bazerman shows that people are less likely to criticize the unethical actions of others when such behavior increases gradually over time. Politically speaking, this suggests that voters (and perhaps even the president’s own advisors) may desensitize to the president’s falsehoods in the same way that they do to overused perfume, making them less likely to act to correct this pattern of behavior. The absence of sanctions could in turn be interpreted as a “green light” by the president.
Indeed, in a recent study of 2,500 U.S. citizens, the psychologist Birony Swire-Thompson found that Trump supporters’ intentions to vote for him were not affected by learning that the president had provided false information. And a recent Gallup poll showed that while the percentage of Americans who believe the president is “honest and trustworthy” has decreased from 46 percent in February to 36 percent in April, his approval ratings remained relatively stable. Indeed, in the past few months his approval rating continues to rise.
What this means politically is obvious – “It is thus likely that we will observe a continuing increase in the number of falsehoods emanating from the Oval Office, accompanied by less and less outrage from the public.”
But project this forward societally. We’re becoming inured to being lied to by our government. Those who already mistrusted government are being prodded – by the government! – to mistrust it even further. And those who consider the government relatively benign may be nudged into the “mistrust” column as they see not only that their government repeatedly lies to them, but watch their fellow citizens placidly accept that being lied to by our government is normal.
T H I S I S N O T N O R M A L !
Steve Bannon’s wet dream of “deconstructing the administrative state” is coming true in many ways. Apparently, we’re supposed to accept not only that our government exists to serve well-heeled “customers” at the expense of everyday citizens, but that our government lies to us as a matter of course 😠