The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty

One day, Frank Rich (the former theater critic and op-ed columnist of The New York Times) was having dinner in a London restaurant with his wife and another couple. As it happened, the Kubrick imitator was sitting at a nearby table with a knighted MP and a few other young men, regaling them with stories of his moviemaking marvels. When the imposter saw Rich at the next table, he walked over to him and told the critic that he was inclined to sue the Times for having called him “creatively dormant.” Rich, excited to meet the reclusive “Kubrick,” asked for an interview. Conway told Rich to call him, gave Rich his home phone number, and … disappeared.

Very shortly after this encounter, things began to unravel for Conway as it dawned on Rich and others that they’d been conned. Eventually the truth came out when Conway began selling his story to journalists. He claimed to be a recovering victim of a mental disorder (“It was uncanny. Kubrick just took me over. I really did believe I was him!”). In the end Conway died a penniless alcoholic, just four months before Kubrick.^*

Although this story is rather extreme, Conway may well have believed that he was Kubrick when he was parading around in disguise, which raises the question of whether some of us are more prone to believe our own fibs than others. To examine this possibility, we set up an experiment that repeated the basic self-deception task, but this time we also measured participants’ general tendency to turn a blind eye to their own failures. To measure this tendency, we asked participants to agree or disagree with a few statements, such as “My first impressions of people are usually right” and “I never cover up my mistakes.” We wanted to see whether people who answered “yes” to more of these questions also had a higher tendency for self-deception in our experiment.

Just as before, we saw that those in the answer-key condition cheated and got higher scores. Again, they predicted that they would correctly answer more questions in the following test. And once more, they lost money because they exaggerated their scores and overpredicted their ability. And what about those who answered “yes” to more of the statements about their own propensities? There were many of them, and they were the ones who predicted that they would do best on our second-phase test.

HEROIC VETERANS?

In 1959, America’s “last surviving Civil War veteran,” Walter Williams, died. He was given a princely funeral, including a parade that tens of thousands gathered to see, and an official week of mourning. Many years later, however, a journalist named William Marvel discovered that Williams had been only five years old when the war began, which meant he wouldn’t have been old enough at any point to serve in the military in any capacity. It gets worse, though. The title that Walter Williams bore falsely to the grave had been passed to him from a man named John Salling, who, as Marvel discovered, had also falsely called himself the oldest Civil War veteran. In fact, Marvel claims that the last dozen of so-called oldest Civil War veterans were all phony.