What makes people liars?

My daughter Kaveri came to me the other day and asked me why her little friend lies so much. I asked her the usual questions a mother puts her child through - "How do you know she's not telling the truth?" and "Maybe she was scared of telling the truth because other children may laugh at her?" "Did you cross-check with anybody if what she was saying was a lie", "Maybe it did happen but nobody else saw it", et al.

But Kaveri gave me a lucid explanation: "No mama. She lies for everything and to everybody. Her brother doesn't tell lies then why does she? She even swears on her Mamma that she is not lying when even her Mamma keeps telling her not to lie. It's just a habit with her." 

Trying not to take a patronising and moralistic stand, I found myself telling her that some people's brains are wired differently and that makes them lie, and while she did not have to condone or believe her friend's lies, she needn't be angry with her for telling them either.

I too have encountered some liars in my life. Sure, everyone tell lies sometimes - who doesn't? Big lies, small lies, white lies and black lies. There are many reasons why people lie. A lot of it is circumstantial, a lot of it is fear-based, and a lot of it is a feeling of alienation from the self that they try to realign. Then there are those who lie for survival, ambition, convenience, or not wanting to hurt another person's feelings; from a lack of self worth, et al.

Studies have shown that higher the intelligence in a life form, the more prone they are to lying. Creatures with lesser intelligence are less concerned with acquisition of power, success, territory and therefore, less prone to such behaviour.

So what separates the normal person, who lies sometimes, from the habitual liar?

Very often, the habitual liar is very convincing - not only to the outside world, but also, alarmingly, to themselves. They brainwash themselves into believing their own lies with such fierce conviction that it becomes easy to drag the outside world into their deceitful mesh. The habitual liar is most prone to use the words "I am honest".

As a young girl in a very affluent school, where my classmates were constantly sharing details of their trips to foreign locations like Disneyland and south of France, I hated being left behind. I would make up lies about my vacations abroad too - but I never had any photographs or goodies to show, and got caught soon enough. On one occasion, I had even lied that I was about to catch a plane to Switzerland with my parents - but we reached the airport late and in spite of running behind the aircraft as it took off, we had to miss out on a exotic vacation! After many an occasion of being booed with the chant "Liar Liar, your bum is on fire" I was shamed and forced to concede that I had lied.

Like this filmmaker friend of mine who used to tell his mother everytime she asked him why he would lie so much, "I am not telling a lie mother. I am merely telling a story." He has gone on to become one of the greatest storytellers in the world - so I guess his brain was programmed for it from a very young age.

Or like this lady I have known almost half my life - she claims to have a severe life threatening spinal disease. Even medical experts she lied to about it were baffled and sympathetic - the terminology she used to describe the condition was so scientifically accurate. In all these years, she went from being an environmentalist to a socio-economist to a doctor to a neuropsychiatrist! She is extremely intelligent, well read, articulate - her knowledge has had experts in various fields flummoxed. Her lies are interspersed with just enough truths to leave you confused. She disappears for months on end and no one has been able to verify the various universities she claims to have got her degrees from. She remembers all her lies and can backtrack to the smallest detail. There was never a slip-up from her side - except when her truth was revealed in a chance encounter by her family, whom she had hidden from the outside world with great care in the fear of being caught. I then discovered that she had no chalets in France or mansions in California, nor the life-threatening illness she had claimed to suffer from, for many many years.

The disease was never in her body - only in her mind.

Another case in point is a young lady I know, who was repeatedly abused by an older family member for many years. She had blocked out the memory throughout her teens till it surfaced in her 20s. Her abuser was sympathetic, paid for her counselling and even agreed to see her psychiatrist to help her overcome her demons. During the visit to the doctor, he made her leave the room and then proceeded to tell the psychiatrist that she was a compulsive liar since birth and that none of the things she had said to the doctor were true; she was hell bent on maligning him. That destroyed her soul even more than the actual abuse and she made her peace with her circumstances only after he passed away a few years ago. She realised the only lie was the one she had been telling herself all these years - that in spite of all the trauma he had inflicted on her in her younger years, the abuser meant well. She had been repeatedly lying to herself because of her inability to accept the truth.

There is no grade or metre that defines a lie. It's certainly difficult to put a label on it - except in cases where there are serious life-altering or threatening repercussions. I have often wondered why lying per se is not considered a disease or a crime - except when you have taken an oath in the court of law or your area of work.

It's complicated. Medical science has not been able to put a finger on it. There is nothing that can measure or scan a person's brain and diagnose if they are prone to lying. The truth about lying is therefore still hard to diagnose and decipher...

We will never know why some people lie while others don't. There is no brain map to point us in the right direction. No firing of neurons that determines a person's propensity to lie. No law is applicable here, except the divine. The law of our individual conscience.

Yes, we were taught "Moral Science" at the Girls Convent school - but to tell you the truth, after a few classes on telling the truth and living an honest life with integrity, the teacher invariably broke out into a tirade about us girls not becoming prone to "sexually inviting" behaviour. She would proceed to rant about not inviting boys' attention by wearing short skirts and on how we should NEVER let a boy kiss us!

The only girl who protested saying that she had already been kissed by a boy was punished and made to stand outside in every Moral Science class thereafter, until she apologised and was made to tell the class that she had lied about the incident just to be different. So much for moral science and how truthful it makes us.

I never listened to a word the teacher said after that. I always lied that I had a headache and napped during the class.