Quotes About Deception

The powerful and the strong are not always what they seem.

Among American slaves, the trickster was often the short-tailed Brer Rabbit.3 "De rabbit is de slickest o' all de animals de Lawd ever made

The deceptions of Ana Montes and Bernie Madoff, the confusion over Amanda Knox, the plights of Graham Spanier and Emily Doe are all evidence of the underlying problem we have in making sense of people we do not know. Default to truth is a crucially important strategy that occasionally and unavoidably leads us astray. Transparency is a seemingly commonsense assumption that turns out to be an illusion. Both, however, raise the same question: once we accept our shortcomings, what should we do?

Markopolos sees his mistake now, with the benefit of over a decade of hindsight. But in the midst of things, the same brilliant mind that was capable of unraveling Madoff's deceptions was incapable of getting people in positions of responsibility to take him seriously. That's the consequence of not defaulting to truth. If you don't begin in a state of trust, you can't have meaningful social encounters.

the trade-off between truth-default and the risk of deception is a great deal for us. What we get in exchange for being vulnerable to an occasional lie is efficient communication and social coordination. The benefits are huge and the costs are trivial in comparison. Sure, we get deceived once in a while. That is just the cost of doing business.

In reality, the very thing that gave the giant his size was also the source of his greatest weakness. There is an important lesson in that for battles with all kinds of giants. The powerful and the strong are not always what they seem.

Drug couriers often use air fresheners—particularly the kind shaped like little fir trees—to cover up the smell of drugs. (Tree air fresheners are known as the "felony forest.")

Levine's theories are laid out in his book, Duped: Truth-Default Theory and the Social Science of Lying and Deception (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2019). If you want to understand how deception works, there is no better

Here was the downside to Shirley Polykoff's world. You could get what you wanted by faking it, but then you would never know whether it was you or the bit of fakery that made the difference.

The powerful are not as powerful as they seem—nor the weak as weak.

human beings never developed sophisticated and accurate skills to detect deception as it was happening because there is no advantage to spending your time scrutinizing the words and behaviors of those around you. The advantage to human beings lies in assuming that strangers are truthful. As

The magician Ian Rowland, in his classic The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading

The blindness of Chamberlain and Halifax and Henderson is not at all like Puzzle Number One, from the previous chapter. That was about the inability of otherwise intelligent and dedicated people to understand when they are being deceived. This is a situation where some people were deceived by Hitler and others were not. And the puzzle is that the group who were deceived are the ones you'd expect not to be, while those who saw the truth are the ones you'd think would be deceived.

Some pretend to be rich, yet have nothing; others pretend to be poor, yet have great wealth. Proverbs 13:7

In those rare cases where trust ends in betrayal, those victimized by default to truth, deserve our sympathy, not censure.

First there is default to truth, which gives the con artist a head start. But when you add mismatch to that, it's not hard to understand why Madoff fooled so many for so long.

the least about him personally. The people who were wrong about Hitler were the ones who had talked with him for hours. This could all be a coincidence, of course. Perhaps Chamberlain and his cohort, for whatever private reason, were determined to see the Hitler they wanted to see, regardless of the evidence of their eyes and ears. Except that the same puzzling pattern crops up everywhere.

When a liar acts like an honest person, though, or when an honest person acts like a liar, we're flummoxed.

The issue with spies is not that there is something brilliant about them. It is that there is something wrong with us.

Those occasions when our trusting nature gets violated are tragic. But the alternative—to abandon trust as a defense against predation and deception—is worse.

The point of Levine's research was to try to answer one of the biggest puzzles in human psychology: why are we so bad at detecting lies? You'd think we'd be good at it. Logic says that it would be very useful for human beings to know when they are being deceived. Evolution, over many millions of years, should have favored people with the ability to pick up the subtle signs of deception. But it hasn't.

On average the people watching the videos correctly identified the lairs 56% of the time. Other sociologist have tried similar versions of the same experiment, the average for all of them? 54%. Just about everyone is terrible, police officers, judges, therapists even CIA officers running big spy networks. Everyone. Why? Tim Levine answer is called Truth-default theory.

We have no choice but to talk to strangers in our modern, borderless world. We aren't living in villages anymore. Police officers have to stop people they don't know. Intelligence officers have to deal with deception and uncertainty. Young people want to go to parties explicitly to meet strangers... Yet at this most necessary of tasks we are inept. We think we can transform the stranger, without cost or sacrifice, into the familiar and the known, and we can't (p. 342).

Black Flowers is the name of that song." Cervantes was about to beckon the man to come in. "It say:—I suffer, because your lips say only lies and they have death in a kiss.