“I felt like, you know, this was a very big lie, and I want to make sure I got everyone on board, so that it feels like it’s a real thing,” he said. It was a deception that went beyond what he had done in the past, and he needed Maggie to back him up. This was a common observation among researchers who have spent time with prolific liars: That it was difficult to build functioning relationships.Īggrieved and raw, he reached for an old solution. “I had the impression,” she said, “that they were trying to avoid negative consequences.” Several approached her, but she could not get past a few sessions and was never convinced that they were ready to change. Those pangs of guilt, they go away.”īut she was never able to coach other compulsive liars through the process. “That is what makes it so relieving to stop. “You still have these internal mechanisms saying something is off,” said Ms. She looked for new ways to receive empathy, writing and performing poetry about traumatic experiences in her past. In her 20s, she stopped by imposing a rigid discipline on herself, meticulously correcting herself every time she told a lie. And as she developed deeper relationships, friends began calling her bluff. Over time, though, keeping track of the lies became stressful and complicated. She started lying as a teenager, a “chubby immigrant girl who spoke with an accent,” hoping to win sympathy with over-the-top stories of a drive-by shooting or a fall from a roof. This misidentification, the authors argue, has led to a lack of research into treatments and a general pessimism that habitual liars are capable of change.įor Vironika Wilde, 34, a writer whose first-person account is referenced in the book, it was possible to stop. This profile did not line up with the usual psychiatric view of liars, who are often diagnosed with Antisocial Personality Disorder, a group seen as manipulative and calculating. “I know my lying is toxic, and I am trying to get help,” one said.
On the contrary, many were plagued by guilt and remorse. One thing they did not have, for the most part, was criminal history or legal problems. When their lies were discovered, they lost friends or jobs, which was painful. These liars were, as a whole, needy and eager for social approval. Hart put it - they pieced together a psychological profile. From this group - found “in mundane, everyday corners of life,” as Dr. Unlike earlier researchers, who had gathered data from a criminal population, the two psychologists set about finding liars in the general public, recruiting from online mental health forums. But others lied in a way that had no clear rationale. Some were in professions, like retail or politics, that compelled them to lie. This “small group of prolific liars,” as the researchers termed it, constituted around 5.3 percent of the population but told half the reported lies, an average of 15 per day. But the overall average was 1.65 because, it turned out, a small group of people lied a lot. Sixty percent of respondents reported telling no lies at all in the preceding 24 hours another 24 percent reported telling one or two. “That really was the turning point for me, when I had an understanding of it as an illness.” “He’s not just a liar, he has no control over this,” said his wife, Maggie, 37, who admitted that, at several points, she had considered filing for divorce. For many of the people close to him, a diagnosis made all the difference. Massimine checked into a psychiatric hospital, where he was diagnosed with a cluster B personality disorder, a syndrome which can feature deception and attention-seeking. Just before his fabrications were exposed, Mr. Rather than “dark, exploitative, calculating monsters,” they argue, pathological liars are “often suffering from their own behavior and unable to change on their own.” These liars, the psychologists argue, could benefit from behavioral therapies that have worked with stuttering, nail-biting and trichotillomania, a hair-pulling disorder. Psychiatry, they argue, has long misidentified this subset of patients.
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Hart, who propose adding a new diagnosis, Pathological Lying, to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. That argument is advanced in a new book by the psychologists Drew A.
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