Quotes About Truth

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?

The truth is that we are drawn to the Niederhoffers of this world because we are all, at heart, like Niederhoffer: we associate the willingness to risk great failure — and the ability to climb back from catastrophe — with courage. But in this we are wrong.

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.

What happens to true believers when their convictions are confronted by reality?

We could start by no longer penalizing one another for defaulting to truth. If you are a parent whose child was abused by a stranger—even if you were in the room—that does not make you a bad parent. And if you are a university president and you do not jump to the worst-case scenario when given a murky report about one of your employees, that doesn't make you a criminal. To assume the best about another is the trait that has created modern society.

Aplicamos el sesgo de veracidad —aun cuando esa decisión acarrea riesgos terribles— porque no tenemos elección. La sociedad no puede funcionar de otra manera. Y en esos casos raros en los que la confianza termina en traición, aquellos que son victimizados por el sesgo de veracidad merecen nuestra simpatía, no nuestra censura.

The transparency problem ends up in the same place as the default-to-truth problem. Our strategies for dealing with strangers are deeply flawed, but they are also socially necessary.

The thing we want to learn about a stranger is fragile. If we tread carelessly, it will crumple under our feet. In front that falls a second cautionary note: we need to accept that the search to understand the stranger has real limits. We will never know the whole truth. We have to be satisfied with something short of that. The right way to talk to strangers's with caution and humility.

Gates without mentioning the computer at Lakeside is false, or accounting for Asian math prowess without going back to the rice paddies is false. It leaves out my mother's many opportunities and the importance of her cultural legacy.

The world - much as we want it to - does not accord with our intuition.

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.

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

When the screen created a pure Blink moment, a small miracle happened, the kind of small miracle that is always possible when we take charge of the first two seconds: they saw her for who she truly was.

But the truth is that for the most important decisions, there can be no certainty

I believed in you always until I couldn't anymore. Isn't that an almost perfect statement of default to truth?

The right question is: were there enough red flags to push you over the threshold of belief? If there weren't, then by defaulting to truth you were only being human.

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.

We were able to establish guilt," Giobbi said, "by closely observing the suspect's psychological and behavioral reaction during the interrogation. We don't need to rely on other kinds of investigation.

We accept the fact that being a parent requires a fundamental level of trust in the community of people around your child. If every coach is assumed to be a podophile, then no parent would ever let their child leave the house. And no sane person would ever volunteer to be a coach. We default to truth even when that decision carries terrible risks because we have no choice. Society cannot function otherwise.

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

We need a trigger to snap out of the default to truth, but the threshold for triggers is high.

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 "Truth-Default Theory," or TDT.