The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty

The moral of this story? We may not always know exactly why we do what we do, choose what we choose, or feel what we feel. But the obscurity of our real motivations doesn’t stop us from creating perfectly logical-sounding reasons for our actions, decisions, and feelings.

YOU CAN THANK (or perhaps blame) the left side of your brain for this incredible ability to confabulate stories. As the cognitive neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga (a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara) puts it, our left brain is “the interpreter,” the half that spins a narrative from our experiences.

Gazzaniga came to this conclusion after many years of research with split-brain patients, a rare group whose corpora callosa—the largest bundle of nerves connecting our brain’s two hemispheres—had been cut (usually as a way to reduce epileptic seizures). Interestingly, this brain abnormality means that these individuals can be presented with a stimulus to one half of the brain without the other half having any awareness of it.

Working with a female patient who had a severed corpus callosum, Gazzaniga wanted to find out what happens when you ask the right side of the brain to do something and then ask the left side (which has no information about what is going on in the right side) to provide a reason for that action. Using a device that showed written instructions to the patient’s right hemisphere, Gazzaniga instructed the right side of the patient’s brain to make her laugh by flashing the word “laugh.” As soon as the woman complied, he asked her why she had laughed. The woman had no idea why she laughed, but rather than responding with “I don’t know,” she made up a story. “You guys come up and test us every month. What a way to make a living!” she said. Apparently she had decided that cognitive neuroscientists were pretty amusing.

This anecdote illustrates an extreme case of a tendency we all have. We want explanations for why we behave as we do and for the ways the world around us functions. Even when our feeble explanations have little to do with reality. We’re storytelling creatures by nature, and we tell ourselves story after story until we come up with an explanation that we like and that sounds reasonable enough to believe. And when the story portrays us in a more glowing and positive light, so much the better.

Cheating Myself

In a commencement speech at Cal Tech in 1974, the physicist Richard Feynman told graduates, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.” As we have seen so far, we human beings are torn by a fundamental conflict—our deeply ingrained propensity to lie to ourselves and to others, and the desire to think of ourselves as good and honest people. So we justify our dishonesty by telling ourselves stories about why our actions are acceptable and sometimes even admirable. Indeed, we’re pretty skilled at pulling the wool over our own eyes.

Before we examine in more detail what makes us so good at weaving self-glorifying tales, allow me to tell you a little story about how I once (very happily) cheated myself. Quite a few years ago (when I was thirty), I decided that I needed to trade in my motorcycle for a car. I was trying to decide which car would be the perfect one for me. The Internet was just starting to boom with what I’ll politely call “decision aids,” and to my delight I found a website that provided advice for purchasing cars. The website was based on an interview procedure, and it presented me with a lot of questions that ranged from preferences for price and safety to what kind of headlights and brakes I wanted.

It took about twenty minutes to answer all the questions. Each time I completed a page of answers, I could see the progress bar indicating that I was that much closer to discovering my personalized dream car. I finished the final page of questions and eagerly clicked the “Submit” button. In just a few seconds I got my answer. What was the perfect car for me? According to this finely tuned website, the car for me was … drum roll, please … a Ford Taurus!

I confess that I did not know much about cars. In fact, I know very little about cars. But I certainly knew that I did not want a Ford Taurus.^*

I’m not sure what you would do in such a situation, but I did what any creative person might do: I went back into the program and “fixed” my previous answers. From time to time I checked to see how different answers translated into different car recommendations. I kept this up until the program was kind enough to recommend a small convertible—surely the right car for me. I followed that sage advice, and that’s how I became the proud owner of a convertible (which, by the way, has served me loyally for many years).