5 minutes of honesty

For the past week or so, I’ve started my day off with five minutes of honesty.

I don’t really call it that. In my head, it’s just “my meditation.” But I realized that it’s actually a quick morning shot of self-honesty – less tasty but longer-lasting than an espresso.

My meditation is centered on the goal of stressing less. So I start by reflecting on the previous day: when and how much did I stress, and why? I feel proud or a little discouraged, which creates a positive or negative reinforcement.

Next, I anticipate the day ahead. What challenges will I face at work or at home? I find that preparing for adversity – big deadlines, annoying chores, possible failures – makes it easier to handle in the moment. Otherwise, I default to my automatic reactions: stress, frustration, worry.

And finally, I review the behaviors I want to practice for the day. It’s not a to-do list, but perhaps a to-be list: I want to be relaxed, peaceful, kind, and healthy. Usually, all that takes me just about five minutes; sometimes, I have about 30 seconds of silence and breathing at the end.

My five-minute meditation was inspired by the idea of “setting an intention” each time you do yoga.

“In a yoga class, for instance, an intention could be to accept where you are today without judgment. Or to appreciate all aspects of your body. Or it could be an intention to come back to your breath when your mind begins to wander.

“For others, an intention formed in class could be a dedication to a loved one, or to someone one needs to forgive, or understand, or want to ignore. It could be an intention to let go of old hurts or emotions,” explains Reach Yoga.

If you can set an intention for yoga, I figured, why not for a full day?

While you’re at it, I also try sitting in a “power pose” during the meditation. According to social psychologist Amy Cuddy, spending two minutes in these open, strength-exuding poses – like hands on your hips, or arms splayed above your head – can reduce levels of cortisol, the stress hormone.

Five minutes isn’t much, but that’s partly the point. There’s pretty much no excuse for skipping it, and I haven’t missed a day since I started.

If you did a five-minute meditation, what would be your intention for the day?

Photo by Flickr user sierragoddess

We’re hard-wired for hypocrisy: Interview with Dr. Robin Hanson

Dr. Robin Hanson, an economist and an expert in prediction markets, started digging into the idea of human hypocrisy when he stumbled upon some puzzles in the field of medicine.

During a post-doc, he discovered that (all else equal) more health care doesn’t make people healthier. Yet medicine – and its regulation – has a sacred place in political debates, and we absolutely venerate doctors and their opinions.

Hanson ultimately hypothesized that our special treatment of medicine is not about making people healthier, but showing that we care. People encourage their families to see the doctor, companies offer health insurance to their employees, governments provide health care to their citizens, and people support such measures to show their concern for the welfare of others.

Once this puzzle unraveled, he started seeing the same hypocritical dynamics in other fields, from education to charity to clothing to politics.

In the interview below, the George Mason University associate professor of economics talks about how deep-rooted our hypocrisy is, how it invades social institutions, and how it might apply to the Honesty Experiment.

Honesty Experiment: Why aren’t we aware of our hypocrisy? 

Robin Hanson: Chimpanzees and other primates that are very close to us famously have large brains. The standard theory about why they have these large brains is in order to manage their complex social world – most of the hostile environment they have to deal with is other primates. They have complicated Machiavellian politics where there is a large group and they form coalitions within that group, and the coalitions compete to dominate the group. They have complicated coalition politics where each person is trying to decide who who will stay loyal to them and who they can trust and which coalitions will win out. . . .

It’s more of a puzzle when you think about humans, because what we know about human foragers is that they have culture and language, and this allows them to have strong tools that allow them to hurt animals and each other much more effectively, and also allows them to express and enforce social norms of various sorts. The standard observation is that, within a forager community, they have relatively egalitarian norms wherein nobody is supposed to dominate the way a top chimp dominates or a top chimp coalition dominates. There’s not supposed to be subcoalitions of the group, there’s not supposed to be violence within the group, and there’s not even supposed to be bragging. And the group is supposed to decide as a whole its major decisions. And on the surface, all of this seems to actually be enforced. Language and tools allow this, but it doesn’t seem to require huge brains to manage all this. And they seem to get a lot less advantage from Machiavellian politics because of these egalitarian norms, yet humans have the biggest brains of all.

The resolution I propose is that we evolved the habits of on the surface appearing to follow and enforce the norms, whereas, just below the surface, we evade them and conspire to evade them with others in order to hypocritically gain Machiavellian political advantage. For the words we say that others can hear, we try to make sure those are consistent with the norms. But we use tone of voice and body language and direction of our eyes to say other things that our words don’t say, and those tend to be less in conformity with the official norms. We use that to try to coordinate with the people around us to see which norms we’re going to actually enforce vs. not, or let people slide. And we use those indirect ways to talk and do things in order to actually dominate and actually brag and actually form some coalitions, but all with the plausible deniability that we aren’t, should anybody challenge us.

So hypocrisy is sort of essential to human capacity; that is, if human brains are larger than chimp brains, it’s not just to be more social than chimps, but particularly to be more hypocritically social, to manage the difference between what we appear to be doing and what we are actually doing.

For example, actors have to learn – in order to act realistically on stage – to send many of the voice and body signals that humans show each other all the time, which indicate dominance and submission and agreeability and disagreeability. And people who have studied body movements carefully agree that people are expressing dominance and submission all the time. But if you ask them overtly if that’s what you’re doing, most people will deny it strongly. . . .

Another example [in forager societies] would be the standard rule against violence: you’re not supposed to hit anybody or do something violent to them, but of course you’re allowed to retaliate if they did it first. So once foragers can introduce the idea of witchcraft and the idea that they did it first to you in a way that can’t be seen, then they can allow themselves to “retaliate” without violating the norms against violence.

Also, we do a lot of things to brag without overtly bragging. We show off in art and sport and conversation, and a lot of these things are quite plausibly ways we show off, but people will deny it if you ask them.

Honesty Experiment: What’s the upshot of this? Does this mean we can’t help but lie in these ways or just that we’re capable of it?

Hanson: You are an intricate, detailed machine full of details designed to be doing these things. No simple fix is going to change that. To the extent that you can resist these tendencies, it will have to be paying a lot of attention to a lot of details. If you don’t even doing what you’re doing and how you’re doing it, it’ll be much harder to stop doing it.

If you try to look at it in any one particular circumstance, your mind is intricately designed to turn your attention away from it or hide it from you. It’s not easy to simply look inside yourself and see your own hypocrisy. So of course, that’s a problem.

It’s a common human observation that many people are hypocritical – it’s not news. In fact, it’s a common way to put down your opponents or rivals. And, of course, such accusations ring plausible because most of us believe most people are like that most of the time. But we each think of ourselves and our immediate allies as exceptions.

Honesty Experiment: How do we solve this conundrum? 

Hanson: I think the first thing you’ll have to come to terms with is wondering why you think you want to be otherwise. We’re clearly built to be two-faced – we’re built to, on one level, sincerely want to and believe that we are following these standard norms – and at the other level, actually evading them whenever it’s in our interest to get away with it. And since we are built that way, you should expect to have a part of yourself that feels like it sincerely wants to follow the norms, and you should expect another part of you that consistently avoids having to do that.

And so, if you observe this part of yourself that wants to be good (according to the norms), that’s what you should expect to see. It’s not evidence that you’re different from everybody else. So a real hard question is: how different do you want to be, actually? How different are your desires to be different? . . . Overall, you should expect yourself to be roughly as hypocritical as everybody else.

Honesty Experiment: What institutional incentives can we put in place to promote honesty? 

Hanson: There are, of course, many that we could do. The observation is that we choose not to. So there are many ways in which our social institutions allow or even encourage hypocrisy.

For example, betting markets are a great way to get a more honest answer on things. When you set up a betting market, the market odds tend to give a more realistic assessment. But we tend to make them illegal, and even when they’re somewhat legal, we tend not to be interested in creating them – say, within organizations – because they would bring up uncomfortable truths. For example, if you have a project and a project deadline and there’s the discussion about whether we’re going to make the deadline, you could have a betting market. And those consistently have been more accurate in showing whether we’ll make the deadline. But often people don’t want that sort of uncomfortable, awkward truth about whether we’ll make the deadline.

We tend to think that we have police and that we are in charge of the police, and they are only doing what we tell them to do. But if we worry about police malfeasance and them doing wrong things, you would think  we would want a strong process that checked for  and punished it if it found it. So you would think we would want a strong internal affairs (organizations that look for police doing things wrong and punishing them), but we actually usually have the internal affairs department report to the same chief of police who would be embarrassed if something bad were to be found. You might think we would want the internal affairs to report to somebody else other than the chief of police, but we never do that. So it’s a form of social hypocrisy: we, in fact, don’t really want to uncover those kinds of police actions very eagerly, at least.

Blackmail is another example. There are things that people do that would be embarrassing and that we disapprove of. If blackmail were legal, those things would be discouraged more because friends and associates who discover them could blackmail the person and punish them financially for that behavior. But we make blackmail illegal, thereby cutting out one of the main ways that it would be discovered and enforced because apparently we don’t want such things to be so often uncovered and discouraged.

So it’s much less about how to be more honest than about knowing if you actually do want to be more honest.

Honesty Experiment: How does this apply to the Honesty Experiment?

Hanson: People will find that in the usual social equilibrium, where most people are hypocritical, being honest puts you at a disadvantage. So you’ll have to be in some unusual circumstance for honesty to be a net advantage to you. . . .

It’s certainly not clear to me that people want their romantic partners to be stark, directly honest all the time. An example I like to use is that we have many words that have many specific meanings that we distinguish, and we tend to use the word “love” even though we could have lots more specific words that meant lots more specific things. And in fact, there’s really a wide range of relationships that go under the word “love.” But I think we prefer to use the vague word love because it means I can say, “I love you and I’ve always loved you,” or “I’ve loved you for a long time” without having to acknowledge the change in the kind of relationship. So if I loved you once passionately and obsessively, and now I love you attachedly and comfortably, I don’t have to explicitly acknowledge that by using a different word later. So that’s another example where we choose not to say things to avoid uncomfortable truths.

My colleague Tyler Cowen, he’s often remarked that most of us could get frank advice about ourselves if we simply asked around to our local colleagues and associates about our strengths and weaknesses and our problems, and few of us ever do that. It suggests that we don’t actually want that.

People also like to give the appearance of being honest and not actually be honest. So certainly many people will have the desire to appear to participate in the Honesty Experiment and appear to have been honest because that allows them to project the image of following social norms (and certainly honesty is one of our standard social norms).

Honesty Experiment: Do you have any closing thoughts?

Hanson: I would say that, in terms of a final resolution, I think the best you can hope for is some form of compromise. I think it would be simply inhuman to actually try to be consistently honest, because we’re so built for hypocrisy on so many levels. But what you can hope for is perhaps a better compromise between the parts of you that want to be honest and the parts of you that don’t. Think more in terms of: you have a limited budget of honesty, and where you should spend it. Not that you should try to be honest about everything, but you should try to figure out: what is it most important to be honest about?

Photo by Flick user (nz)dave

How to teach children to be honest: An interview with Dr. Kang Lee

In 1877, Charles Darwin wrote an amusing article based on careful observations of his young son, ranging from his responses to tickling to the first signs of shyness to his made-up words. At 2 years and 7.5 months, Darwin reports an instance of lying: his son had stained his pinafore with pickle juice, but hid the stain with his hands and insisted there was nothing there.

Over 130 years later, Dr. Kang Lee of the University of Toronto is trying to investigate how lying develops in children. As University Distinguished Professor at the Dr. Eric Jackman Institute of Child Study, Lee has studied well over 2,000 children and written around 60 papers on this topic. And what he’s learned may be surprising.

The first lies children tell come around ages two to three, and they are based on desire. Wanting to avoid punishment but not understanding their parents’ state of mind, kids might claim they didn’t eat the chocolate when the evidence is smeared across their face. But very quickly, around ages three to four, they realize their listener has a separate mind and understanding and start lying to manipulate it. This is when flattery emerges, like pretending to like a gift. The final stage of lying comes around ages seven to eight, when children are able to maintain lies over time – keeping the story consistent in follow-up statements. This is also when adults start to have trouble detecting children’s lies.

In the interview below, Lee shares some more insights on how children learn to lie, how to teach children to be honest, and what the cultural differences are around lying.

Honesty Experiment: How do children learn to lie?

Lee: Kids actually do not “learn” to lie. Typically, as we grow up, at first we don’t know the rules of society or the household. Sometimes it’s hard for us to control ourselves, so we violate the rules that are set up by others. And in some situations, you cannot help it but violate some of the rules, and what you need to do is get out of it. There are many ways for you to get out of a situation in which you have violated rules, but lying actually comes quite naturally to kids because it requires very little physical power or mental energy. By simply moving your lips, you actually are able to instill false beliefs into others’ minds.

For example, you could steal a cookie. Mom asks, “Did you steal the cookie?” You say, “No, I didn’t.” It’s very simple and straightforward. If you are good at this, then you can get away with it.

Honesty Experiment: How can we teach children to be more honest?

Lee: We would suggest that the courts, as well as parents – when they really want their kids to tell the truth – should ask them to promise [to tell the truth] first. Then ask the question, “Did you steal the cookie?” . . . On the other hand, if you talk to kids about, “Oh, it’s very important to tell the truth, it’s bad to tell a lie, if you tell a lie you will be punished, if you tell the truth I will be very happy about it,” it doesn’t really work. It doesn’t work with young kids, it doesn’t work with old kids. So talking about the morality does not work.

Modeling, to me, is very important. If parents model honesty, the kids are more likely to be honest. Sometimes we don’t do it often enough. Sometimes, in front of our kids, we lie for various reasons, such as white lies. We go to a party and say, “I love your food,” and then on the way back in the car you tell your family you hated the food, and that would really confuse the child. When a salesperson comes to your door, you say, “Tell the person I’m not at home.” And something like this we do naturally and out of the blue, but kids would get confused. Basically, you’re coaching the child to tell lies. So the parents need to explain to kids the differences between white lies and lies to harm others or for self-benefit.

There are also other situations we call parenting by lying. It’s a universal cultural phenomenon that we sometimes use to parent, to control our kids’ behaviors or to get kids to do certain things. For example, in Chinese cultures, we say, “If you don’t finish the rice in the rice bowl, tomorrow you’re going to have pimples all over your face.” Or, “You’re going to marry a man who has pimples all over his face.” Or “a boogeyman’s going to come get you if you don’t go to sleep now.” And, “I’m going to leave you outside if you don’t stop hitting the pet.” Or, “Oh, you’re such an artist,” even though the child’s painting is not that great.

That again could be a problem, because kids may discover you’re actually not telling the truth. Even though your intention’s good – you want to parent the child – this kind of modeling makes the child more suspicious of you and more inclined, possibly, to lie.

[Another way to model is] modeling through reading some books that have positive moral messages. But not punitive moral messages – so, for example, you read stories about George Washington, who chopped down the cherry tree and told the truth, and somehow that story has an honesty-promoting effect. On the other hand, if you tell the kids stories such as Pinnochio or The Boy Who Cried Wolf, it has no impact whatsoever. So you have to convey positive messages to the kids.

Honesty Experiment: When do kids start to understand the morality of lying?

Lee: We don’t know very much about two-year-olds, but even three-year olds – there seem to be some moral concerns. Because when we ask kids, “Would you promise to tell the truth?” they’re more likely to tell the truth. Three-year-olds, four-year-olds, five-year-olds, all the way up to teenagers. So when you ask them to promise to tell the truth, somehow that kind of brings about the moral obligation to tell the truth, which is very interesting. Because three-year-olds sometimes do not really know what a promise is – if you ask them what a promise is, they have no idea – but somehow they know this moral obligation to tell the truth.

Honesty Experiment: I know you’ve studied cultural differences with honesty. Can you talk about those? 

Lee: There are two kinds of lies, and I think they are very different. One kind of lie is to conceal transgressions that benefit the self. And these kinds of lies seem to not be “socialized”; we learn on the fly. . . . But there are other kinds of lies that are actually “socialized” – we are taught by our parents, our friends – for example, white lies.

But there are cross-cultural differences. In North American culture, for example, we tell white lies to avoid harm to your self-esteem, or harm to your feelings, etc. But in Eastern Asian societies, telling a white lie is not really to avoid harm, but it’s more about saving face. Face-saving is very important in these societies. But face-saving means that I protect your public persona; I may not tell you a white lie in private, but I will tell a white lie in public because I want to protect your public image…

Another kind of lie I would call group lies: lies to protect a group. And it’s more likely told by people in Eastern Asian societies because they are more collective. They sometimes would be willing to tell lies for the collective at the expense of themselves or a friend. But if you posed the same situation to North America kids and adults, they are more likely to lie for a friend than for a group.

There’s a third kind of lie that we don’t tell in North American societies, but very often in East Asia: modesty lies. You actually tell lies to conceal your own good deeds or your good grades, your personal achievements. Chinese or Japanese cultures do not encourage publicizing your personal merits because that would put you at a different level from all your group members. So in order to insure group harmony, you should minimize your personal achievements. You can achieve personally, but you do not talk about your achievement publicly. If you do not tell modesty lies, you would be considered arrogant, etc. So telling modesty lies actually can be good – morally good. This kind of concept is very difficult for Americans and Canadians to understand because it goes totally against what they are taught. Here, they are encouraging kids to publicize their personal achievements because that’s going to promote their self-esteem.

Honesty Experiment: Why is lying a sign of cognitive development?

Lee: So far we’ve found that IQ has nothing to do with lying. No matter if you have high IQ or low IQ, if you have development disorders or not (like autism), you all lie. I’m pretty sure kids with ADHD also tell lies.

However, lying and the ability to tell a good lie are related to two important cognitive abilities: “theory of mind” and executive functioning. Theory of mind is the ability to understand that people actually know things different from what you know. So that’s the basis and the premise of why we would tell lies – because I know you don’t know what I know; therefore, I can lie to you. If I think you know what I know, then there’s no point for me to tell you a lie, right? A kid actually starts to develop this theory of mind possibly in infancy, but by two they are just on the verge of getting to the point. And therefore, once they have this theory of mind ability, they can tell lies.

Another ingredient that is also important for telling lies is called inhibitory control, or executive functioning more broadly. That is the ability to inhibit certain things and come up with something different, and that’s called executive functioning, which is essential for humans’ everyday life. They’re inhibiting what they know, and telling something that’s different. For example, I have stolen the cookie, but when you ask me, “Did you steal the cookie?” I say, “No, I didn’t.” So I inhibit my statement saying, “Yes, I did,” and instead I come up with an alternative response.

And the two-year-olds are also on the verge of developing this ability. And because of these two ingredients, some of the smarter kids who have developed earlier than others start to tell lies. So we only see about 25 percent of two-year-olds telling lies at this age.

Honesty Experiment: What are you working on right now? What questions do you find most exciting in your research? 

Lee: Right now what I’m looking at are kids who have severe conduct problems. Everybody seems to tell lies at some point in development, but we do not develop into pathological liars or we do not lie regularly. We may lie occasionally, and mostly we lie for pro-social purposes. But why, then, are there kids who start normal and become abnormal – so they lie more frequently, they lie more for personal benefit? We do not know the answer yet, but we are trying to answer this question.

One of the hypotheses I have is they actually do not differentiate between pro-social lies and anti-social lies. They’re actually less inclined to tell pro-social lies because they don’t really have an empathetic understanding about this. They are more focused on themselves. So that’s our hypothesis, but we don’t know yet. This is one of the mysteries that needs to be solved.

Bassam Tarazi on How to Motivate Yourself to Make a Change [Interview]

“Your brain is like a lazy cat,” says Bassam Tarazi in the interview below. In other words, you can’t make it do what you want; you need to wake it up, only ask for so much at a time, and throw in a little catnip.

Tarazi saw this firsthand when he told himself – and others – that he wanted to be a writer, while proceeding to write very little. So he joined an eight-week writing class, and voila: he had written 24 sketches by the end of it. It wasn’t the money he paid or the teacher’s watchful eye that motivated him, he realized, but the opinion of his peers. He didn’t want to disappoint them each week, so he wrote and wrote.

And he realized that the same motivation could apply to more than writing, so he developed Colipera. It’s a four-week program based on the idea that groups can inspire us to be more accountable for a goal. You find a group of three to six people, set a goal for the month, and meet for one hour every week for updates and feedback. In fact, Tarazi wrote a book during a Colipera month: The Accountability Effect: The Book Your Excuses Don’t Want You to Read. 

Below, Tarazi muses about why it helps to tell other people our goals, our lazy-cat brain, and advice for people doing the Honesty Experiment.

Honesty Experiment: What happens in the Colipera meetings that is so powerful? 

Bassam Tarazi: What’s fun is for the second week, you’re excited to see what this person has done, because now you’re part of their story. . . . I think the psychology is I’m now part of your solution. So, Kira, say you’re launching your website in 30 days, but you have a lot of things to work on, and I’m part of the group that helps you go through those things. Each week, I’m excited coming to the meeting because I go, “Oh, I wonder where Kira is with her website, I wonder if she got the design done for her header, I wonder if she was able to figure out the newsletter thing.” We become part of the solution and we get excited about that, and we all want to be useful, so that part becomes really, really fun.

The other good thing is as each week goes by, you can be more honest in your vulnerability and honest in your feedback. So by weeks three or four, you can kind of – not poke and ridicule somebody, obviously – but if somebody had been giving the same kind of excuse for every week, you can be like, “Come on, come on, you said that two weeks ago,” and the other person’ll probably laugh because they know that they’re using the same excuse. . . .

It is nice to know that you weren’t the only one who is struggling with something or trying to discover something, and that’s really fun.

Honesty Experiment: Why did you choose a month-long program? 

Tarazi: 30 days – from my research of one-off groups and habits and all that stuff – was a happy point for people. Our month is around 30 days, it’s something that people can work on. There are other 90-day programs, but 90 days is hard – that’s a real big commitment for people. One week – obviously, you can’t really change in one week.

Honesty Experiment: Why is it important to share your goals with others? 

Tarazi: Again, the #1 thing we want is the respect of our peers. I joked with a friend once: “We don’t want to accomplish our goals, we just want to continue being liked by our friends.” And sure that might sound cynical, but even you chuckled because it’s kind of true sometimes. . . . When you make your goal public to a new group of people, you want those people to like you. You don’t want the people across the table from you to in their heads be like, “Man, this person’s really a loser,” right? Because they’re judging you on all they see, and all they see is how you’re working on your project. . . .

If we just have ourselves to be accountable to, we always rationalize stuff with ourselves about why we couldn’t finish – oh, well, I was tired, and oh, I had a long day at work. When we go to bed at night, we don’t put our head down and think, “God, Bassam, you’re a real idiot.” No, I put my head down at night and go, “Well, you know, I did everything I needed to do today, and I did this and this because I was tired, but that was because this,” and we rationalize anything to get along with ourselves. But when you make your goal public, when you’re on the hook to somebody other than yourself, you can’t rationalize your way out of it.

Honesty Experiment: What mistakes do people make when setting goals? 

Tarazi: The two biggest reasons I think goals fail is a) they’re too far-fetched, or b) they don’t know the motivation, which I call the why’s. [See Start with Why by Simon Sinek.] It’s really knowing why you’re doing whatever you’re doing. Losing weight is an easy example to comprehend for everybody. If, say, I’m a little overweight, and I know I should be working out – that word “should” is dangerous – I should be working out, I don’t know, I should lose weight, blah, blah, blah. Then all of a sudden a friend of mine gets really motivated and they sign up for the gym and they’re going to the gym and they’re doing classes and I’m like, “Oh. Yeah. I’m going to do that, too. You’re going? I’m going to go.”

So my friend’s motivation might be, well, their father just had a heart attack and his cholesterol was really high, and he now is genetically disposed to high cholesterol – so that’s his motivation. His motivation is “Crap, I need to be healthy.” But if I just go because he’s going, then that’s not my motivation. So at 5:00 when my alarm clock goes off to go to the gym, I’m not motivated by high cholesterol. I’m tired and I don’t want to go. So I haven’t figured out why I want to go to the gym.

The other one is too far-fetched. It’s the number one reason why New Year’s resolutions fail – because it’s this far-fetched goal. “I’m going to run a marathon this year.” It’s like, “Well, why don’t you just try to run a mile this week?” But people don’t like that because it’s not sexy. I’m not saying not to have the long-term goal, but it’s quickly changing it to: how do I get there?

Another hurdle for people is they try to undertake too much change all at once. Like “I’m going to run a marathon this year, I’m going to lose 15 pounds, I’m going to write a book,” it’s like whoa, whoa, whoa. You’re brain’s like, “Dude, calm down.” Your brain is like a lazy cat, I tell people. You can’t just take your cat out and go, “Let’s go walk 10 miles.” Your cat’s like, “Go f*** yourself.” If you say, “Hey, let’s go take a walk around the block, there’s some tuna on the other end,” your cat’s like, “Oh, okay, okay, I can do that.” And that’s really your brain.

Weekly goals or monthly goals are more tangible – you know what May 1 feels like. I don’t know what December 1 feels like because it’s too far away. But May 1, I’m like, “Ooo, It’s going to be spring, it’s 30 days away, that’s four weeks,” you can picture all those things. . . .

It works incrementally, and you don’t even feel the change while you’re going through it. So the thing is how do you motivate yourself through the incremental change? And that’s the hardest thing to do.

Honesty Experiment: How do you motivate yourself to make incremental change? 

Tarazi: At the end of every day, I write down what did I enjoy, what did I improve, and what did I learn. And, okay, some days are better than others, but I always learn something, I always improve something, I always enjoy something. I sometimes have to search for those, but it just allows me to button up my days and realize I progressed today. I moved forward. I moved forward towards something. And that’s giving ourself checkpoints in life.

In school, checkpoints were made for us – it was the SATs, it was AP classes, it was getting into college, and college was graduate with this many credits, get a job, get a degree. Everything is set up for you. Then you graduate and life starts, and I always joke it’s like the Utah Salt Flats for the rest of your life. No one’s telling you where to go, and there’s no checkpoints out there for you, but you create them.

So we’re used to creating these four-year, five-year things, so we say, “In five years I want to be this.” But that’s not really smart because no one’s pushing you with classes and semesters to get there. It’s like you have to create your checkpoints with yourself, weekly or monthly or daily or whatever it is. But that’s hard. People don’t want to do that. They don’t want to work at those things. They’re waiting for the external kind of push, be it a job or whether they get fired or get a raise or get a bonus. . . . It’s not easy. It does take a lot of work to stay accountable to yourself. . . .

To be honest, the biggest problem I’m realizing people have [is] everyone is so hard on themselves. We are horrible to ourselves. I hear people talk about themselves: “I’m an idiot, I should be able to do this more, why can’t I get this done?” I’m like, “Hold on a second. You’re filling out a patent application. And you’re three-quarters of the way done.” I go, “How many people have filled out a patent application, like seven? Give yourself credit for this long, long process and, yeah, okay, maybe you could have been done a while ago but you’re also a parent and you have a full-time job,” and sometimes we forget all those things.

It’s funny, we either lie to ourselves through our teeth – we rationalize anything – or we’re extremely hard on ourselves. And I think it’s hard to find the balance.

Honesty Experiment: Do you have any particular advice for people doing the Honesty Experiment? 

Tarazi: If they are doing this Honesty Experiment and they’re really jumping into it with a full heart and really giving it their best, if they find themselves being dishonest at times, that they aren’t failing. It’s not that they’re horrible people – they’re humans. And we all slip. But I think the key thing is just being mindful of the slip and why the slip happened, and those are the greatest points of growth in our lives.

Like some days when I react in a weird way or if I’m like a 15-year-old and I’m like, “What am I doing?” I don’t run from that thought. I really go and dig and be like, “Why did I do that? Was I hungry? Was I tired? Was I in a bad mood for another reason? Was I taking it out on somebody?” So don’t be mad at yourself if you trip up along the way, but just dig for, okay, why did that happen? Why was I dishonest in this moment when I thought I wanted to be honest? What was I hiding?

I think they really need to – as foofy as this might sound – be proud of themselves for diving into a 30-day challenge and being vulnerable to other people. It’s really not easy. So sometimes we do need a pat on the back for something that’s uncomfortable and that’s new and that’s change.

Liespotting: 13 ways to detect lies, from Pamela Meyer

No one wants to meet Pamela Meyer in person, she says. They always prefer email. Why? Because she wrote an entire book called Liespotting: Proven Techniques to Detect Deception.

In a TED talk from 2011, she identifies many of those techniques. We need them, apparently, because we as a species lie all the time – to strangers, our spouses, and everyone in between. Here are 13 things liars do to give themselves away.

• Use distancing language: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman”
• Use formal speech: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman”
• Use qualifying language: “In all honesty,” “in fact”
• Repeat questions in their entirety when answering
• Give too much irrelevant detail
• Are unable to tell a story backwards
• Have stiff body language
• Give a little too much eye contact
• Do contradictory gestures: for example, shaking their head no when they say something affirmative
• Point their feet toward the exit
• Put a barrier object between themselves and the questioner
• Use lower vocal tone
• Show “duping delight”: occasional smiles that escape liars who think they’re fooling you

Here’s the full talk. I definitely look forward to reading the book and sharing more of Meyer’s insights.

Dr. Brad Blanton: Learning to be honest can reduce stress [interview]

To explore the connection between lying and unhappiness, I (figuratively) sat down with Dr. Brad Blanton, a psychotherapist and the author of Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth. With over 30 years in private practice, he’s seen the effects of dishonesty firsthand – and they’re not pretty.

Blanton also happens to be in the middle of an Indiegogo campaign (closing Friday) to raise funds for his “Completion Course,” designed to help people heal their relationships with honesty. The course, which has already raised over $8,000, will include six to eight weeks of videos, individual coaching, and exercises.

Below, Blanton explains why lying adds stress to our lives and how honesty can help relieve it.

Joy of Honesty: Why is lying stressful? 

Brad Blanton: The most pernicious form of lying is called withholding; it’s when you don’t tell people what you’re actually thinking or what you feel or what you’ve done. And so you’re working completely on trying to control your image in their mind based on what you imagine they’re thinking. And so your mind is all preoccupied with “performance.”

We’ve been taught all of our lives that who we are is our performance – the grades we make and what the teacher thinks of us and what our peers think of us. How well we manage our reputation is considered to be the most important thing. I work with people to teach them (to get over anxiety and stress) that who they are is a present-tense, noticing being. If you shift that so performance becomes of secondary importance – and what is of primary importance is your noticing, present-tense being – the quality of your life changes.

Joy of Honesty: What does that process of getting to the truth look like? 

Blanton: I teach them that the whole awareness continuum can be divided into three parts: you can notice what’s going on right now in front of you; you can notice what’s going on now in your body, within the confines of your own skin; and you can notice what’s going on right now through your mind; and that’s it. There isn’t anymore.

Radical honesty is simply reporting what you notice, without filtering. You say, “I noticed this in my body, I noticed this about you, I noticed this going through my mind right now. How about you?”

… All of the sudden people get happier: their life works better, they get a raise at work, they’re getting laid more – everything works better just because they’re not being “sophisticated” in the way you’re supposed to be in this society – which is basically you’re supposed to get your promotions according to how good a liar you are. But the people who really make it are the ones who take the risk of telling the truth.

Joy of Honesty: How is lying damaging to relationships?  

Blanton: Intimacy only occurs between people who are conscious of each other as beings. They have to notice each other; they have to actually pay attention to what’s being communicated in both words as well as how the person looks and responds.

You can’t do that – you can’t pay attention to how the person responds and all the things they’re communicating to you – if you’re focused only on your imagining of what they’re imagining about you, if in your mind you’re focused on what you think they might think if you say something, or how they might interpret something you’ve already said, or how you should think about everything you say out loud and rehearse it in your mind before you speak to them [editor’s note: whew, sounds exhausting]. And you’re sort of trapped and running around in circles in your own mind about how well am I performing? How well am I managing my impression in their mind? And what have I forgotten? And what else should I do to make a better impression? And things like that. You can barely listen to what they’re saying, no less pay attention to what they’re really communicating.

Particularly in face-to-face relationships, most communication is not about the words that are spoken. It’s about the way people are reacting, the changes in how they look and what they pay attention to. They’re paying attention to how fast you speak, and you’re paying attention to their tone of voice, and changes in rate of speech, and whether they move or gesture, and how much they laugh, and what they do that’s appealing to you, and what they do that’s not appealing to you, and so forth. You can be available to the wider range of communication if you’re not all preoccupied and trapped in the jail of your own mind.

Joy of Honesty: What about lying in a business or work context?

Blanton: What people don’t dare risk and therefore find out the value of is that they need to be able to tell each other the truth when their feelings are hurt by each other, when they’re angry at each other, when they’re attracted to each other, when they’re overjoyed with each other – anything that seems to be beyond what’s appropriate according to the social mores of the time. If you constrain yourself to merely attempting to be appropriate all of your life, you end up living a life where you’re trying to not get in trouble until you can get to the grave. And that’s not much of a life.

And there’s a better life. It has to do with let’s go out here and see what we can discover about each other and with each other. How can we get to where we can depend on each other because we know that we’re not lying to each other? How can we be “co-heartedly co-intelligent”? Co-intelligence is always greater than individual intelligence. And when people get together that’s possible, even though what most often happens when groups of people get together is something called co-stupidity. It doesn’t mean that it has to be that way. If they’re really honest, they can be powerfully creative.

Joy of Honesty: Telling the truth can cause unhappiness, too. Why should we still do it? Why does telling the truth make us happier? 

Blanton: You get a choice between short-term pain and unhappiness and long-term pain and unhappiness. I was in private practice for 30+ years as a psychotherapist in Washington, DC, and basically that’s the best place to become an expert on lying in the world. [laughs]

I found that people who are depressed and who are anxious and have trouble sleeping and have trouble having sex and have trouble at work and so forth, that when I coached them to start telling the truth, they had short-term trouble. But in a very short period of time (as these things go), they were no longer depressed. They were no longer anxious, and they were no longer unable to sleep, and they were able to have sex again. They worked out relationships with people that they had been secretly holding as enemies, when they started telling the truth about what they resented about them.

Joy of Honesty: And you believe that telling the truth is easier than people think?

Blanton: Well, it’s not easy to tell the truth because you’ve been taught all your life that what you want to do is anything other than that – that who you are is your performance; it’s a threat to your identity. So it’s hard to do. Although when you do it and you practice it, it becomes surprisingly less hard than you imagined it would be before you tried it. It takes courage to do it the first half a dozen times. But after you get the rewards of that – after you’re no longer depressed, after you’re no longer anxious, and after you’re no longer miserably going to work … you give up on the escape attempt and you start being willing to be there.

Summary of Dan Ariely’s ‘The (Honest) Truth about Dishonesty’

Don’t have time to read? Here’s a summary of Dan Ariely’s “The (Honest) Truth about Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone – Especially Ourselves

Who should read this: Anyone interested in becoming more honest, which starts with understanding the reasons we lie. Even I, considering myself incredibly honest, found myself wondering at how sneakily dishonesty can creep in.

Elevator pitch: Ariely explains why and when we cheat, supported by his experiments on real, live humans.

Author: Dan Ariely is a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University, with a PhD in cognitive psychology and a PhD in business administration. He’s also the author of Predictably Irrational and The Upside of Irrationality.

Paradox

Dishonesty may seem rampant, but it’s less so than your average economist might predict. Assuming that we make decisions based on a rational calculation of risks and rewards, we should be cheating way more often – stealing every unlocked bike on an empty street, and doing much less work at work. But experiments actually show that people don’t cheat more as the probability of getting caught gets lower or the payout gets higher. Something else is going on.

The Fudge Factor

Small amounts of cheating – what Ariely calls the “fudge factor” – are quite common. This suggests that our desire to gain by cheating is limited by our desire to be good people. “We cheat up to the level that allows us to retain our self-image as reasonable honest individuals,” Ariely concludes.

I came up with an equation to express this:

(Amount of cheating) = (Desire for gain) – (desire to be honest)

How does rationalization fit in? Perhaps rationalizations decrease our desire to be good, by hiding our dishonesty from us or giving us reasons why we deserve to be dishonest. So we can introduce a rationalization coefficient r (which gets smaller as our rationalization gets bigger).

(Amount of cheating) = (Desire for gain) – r(desire to be honest)

The greater the rationalization, the smaller r becomes; the smaller r becomes, the more cheating we perform.

Tinkering with the equation

To affect our level of cheating, then, we have to change our rationalization, our desire to be honest, or our desire for gain.

Things that increase our rationalization: Feeling distanced from the action or its consequences (like stealing tokens, not money). Being recognized for past (false) achievements: this helps us believe that we deserve the rewards. Being a creative person: this allows us to come up with more ingenious, convoluted rationalizaions. Benefitting others with our lies, an altruistic motive.

Things that increase our desire to be honest: Reminders of morality or honor codes.

Things that decrease our desire to be honest: Being tired or “ego depleted”: in these cases, our rational desire to be honest is too weak to override our emotional desire for gain. Wearing fake fashion: after some threshold amount of cheating, we see ourselves as dishonest and no longer feel we can be honest. Seeing others in our in-group cheat: this reinforces the notion that it’s socially acceptable to be dishonest.

Things that increase our desire for gain: This one’s a bit complicated, because experiments show that the size of the reward doesn’t really affect the amount we cheat. Whenever the size of the reward increases our desire for gain, we can say that it also increases our desire to be honest, because honesty is even more honorable in the face of big temptation. So, relatively speaking, there’s not much you can do to increase desire for gain.

Overall Grade: A

Through easy-to-understand experiments, Ariely makes quite clear the factors that shape our honest and dishonest behaviors. And his explanations are peppered with more wit than you’d expect from an academic.

More importantly, he doesn’t fall into the trap of believing that we are helpless to combat the forces of dishonesty. Instead, his recommendations at the end of the book provide some very rough guidelines to shape a more honest life and society. Namely, we should engage in more “purifying” rituals like religious confession, New Year’s resolutions, and oaths of honesty. These not only remind us of morality but, if we’re starting to view ourselves as dishonest, help us “reset” our self-image.

The evolutionary reason why we lie to ourselves

Are you a bad liar?

Unless you’ve mastered the James Bond stonyfaced stare, it’s hard to be a good liar. Our bodies are constantly conspiring to give away our secret. We get nervous, and for good reason: being labeled a liar is socially detrimental, which was even more crucial to our evolutionary ancestors. And, studies show, dealing with the mental load of the truth and the lie – and making sure not to mix them up – can be challenging. We make pauses or short sentences that seem a bit off to our listeners.

On top of that, while trying to channel James Bond, our lies could end up rigid or awkward. And evolutionary forces have also gifted our interlocutors with skilled lie detectors – after all, calling someone’s bluff could mean the difference between losing your dinner or your life, or sending the shady stranger on his way.

These considerations led professors William von Hippel and Robert Trivers to propose [PDF] that self-deception developed as a way to make us better liars to others. If we deceive ourselves into believing the lie, we won’t exhibit all the detectable signs of a dishonest homo sapiens. And we can do that in various ways: ignoring evidence for the truth, misinterpreting the evidence, or even misremembering.

Not only does self-deception make us better liars, they argue, but it lessens the punishment that would otherwise fall upon our heads when the truth is discovered. “But we had no idea!” we can cry earnestly. And so our ancestors lived another day, forgiven for their ignorance – the evolutionary equivalent of a thumbs up.

But self-deception does come with its own risks. We might trick ourselves into thinking we’re happy, when we’re actually not. We might trick ourselves into thinking we love our job and want a promotion, when we actually don’t – and the unconscious mind has its own ways of asserting itself and sabotaging our conscious goals. But that’s a story for another post.