Pathological lying.... or is it?

Great Debates
1

I wasn’t quite sure whether to put this one here or in IMHO, and decided it was more on the GD side of the fence. If the mods disagree, they may exercise their Powers Of Moderation and move it without bruising my fragile little feelings.

I can find precious little on the 'net on the subject of pathological lying - apparently there is not much in the way of research being done on the subject. The general consensus seems to be that it’s an impulse control disorder, whatever that means.

I’ve known a few people who I would consider to be pathological liars. The first PL that I met was my stepfather. I didn’t realze what a liar he was until my mother divorced him. But whille they were separated, he pretended to the outside world that he and my mother were still together, making comments like “My wife didn’t have dinner ready when I got home last night, if she doesn’t straighten up, I’m going to leave her”, claimed that the divorce was caused alternately because she was having an affaiir with one of the doctors at the medical clinic she worked for, or with her boyfriend whom she didn’t even meet until after the divorce was final. He also did things like tell people (falsely) that my mother and said BF were engaged, which lead to a lot of hurt feelings, because the rumor got back to the BF’s mother, who was upset that she “found out” third hand. He also claimed that he sold my mother’s condo for her, told a guy I had dated in high school that I was married (!?), and other lies too numerous to mention. The real reason for the divorce was a combination of him being physically and emotionally abuseve to my mother, and the fact that he was having a homosexual affair with a teenage boy.

Then there’s the dealer I worked with who, no matter what the subject of the dead game conversation was, had been there, done that, but had somehow misplaced the t-shirt. She claimed that she was a Mafia girlfriend ‘I had diamonds and furs, and a new car every year", yeah, right a stripper - well, I guess that even in the early seventies, there were strip clubs that would hire scrawny chicks with hooked noses, no breasts or ass, and the personality of burnt toast… Also claimed she had been the MIS manager for a fair to midsized office, business unspecified, a counsellor for Charter Hospital… you name it, she’ done it. One night, the pit boss and I were comparing notes, did the math and figured out that it was simply not possible for her to have done al she claimed and still have been a dealer for twenty-seven years (the one verifiable claim she made).

Then at my last job, there was The Rock Star. Claime to hve a Master’s in music (not likely, considering his age and the number of years he’s been dealing- doubtful that he even went to college), was a professional drummer-but nobody who hung out with him had ever heard him play, was the head chef at an upscale restaraunt, world’s greatest chess player (one of the boxmen had him checkmated in two moves) world’s greates pool player (have eyewitness evidence that he can’t even make the cue ball hit anything but the side of the table). After a while, I realized that he didn’t know any more about any given subject than you could learn from reading a couple of good artices, or spending an hour in a room with somebody who really knew their shit. Again, given the time frames and what we could verify he was doing, it simply would not have been possible for him to do all the things he claimed to have done during the time he claimed to have done it in.

OK, enough anecdotes. What I’m wondering is, is pathological lying a genuine disorder? In other words, is it possible that these people don’t even realize they are lying? Or is it just wishful thinking so intense that they can’t tell the difference between with/fantasy and reality? Or, do they just perceive themselves as such complete losers that they need to construct elaborate stories about themselves in order to impress people and gain their respect?

I’m really on the fence on this. The way they lie, it almost seems that they’ve convinced themselves on some level that what there saying is true.

So how about it? Are pathological liars actually suffering from an organic disorder, or are they just incredibly dishonest?

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um, mods, wanna fix my thread title? and i think they’re should be a… oh, forget it.

3

A very interesting post.

I have known a few pathological liars in my time, enough to know the symptoms anyway.

The key seems to be that they are profoundly dissatisfied with reality as it is, and so they want to make it more interesting. More, they end up creating a life for themselves so much better than reality that they come to believe in its truth. That far, we both agree.

Is it a genuine disorder? I have no idea. For what it is worth, here is my theory.

I think that everyone, to an extent, and even unconciously, “colours” reality a bit - over time, and constant retelling, people forget that part of the anecdote that actually happened, and that part which was added for flavour. Pathological liars do this, but to the utmost degree - they don’t just add a few inches to that really big Bass they caught one summer, but invent whole new bits of their lives - something ordinary people in general do not do.

What constantly astonishes me, is how long people will believe the outrageous things pathological liars say - the first one I met (in high school) had me believing for months that he was the illigitimate son of a Danish aristocrat, and that he had hung out with the Hell’s Angles and was involved in international crime. All this from a quite ordinary kid in grade 11 - and at the time, I did not think I was extraordinarilly gullible. :rolleyes:

The key seems to be that pathological liars lie for no obvious benefit to themselves - after all, why shouldn’t a kid in a Canadian high school be an illigitimate Danish aristocrat? What difference does it make? Moreover, they don’t care whether the lies they tell are positive or negative (I personally though being an international criminal was creepy and discreditable, not admirable). All they seem to care about is that they are more interesting and worldly than other people - the focus of attention, be it good or bad.

Once bitten, twice shy - when my wife started talking about a woman at work who, although a mousy looking clerk by day, said she was secretly a plainclothes police woman by night, and had affairs with crime bosses - I knew instantly what was up. My wife was quite taken aback by my instant pronouncement that this woman was a pathological liar. “How can you say that, when you have never even met the person?”. My wife had never seen this phenominon before, and was totally fooled - for a couple of days. Once I had planted the seed of doubt in her mind, she very quickly figured it out on her own.

4

Whether PL is in the DSM or not, they are out there. I dated one once.

5

Moderator’s Note: Typos in thread title fixed.

(I’d have gotten to it sooner, but I was in Baghdad and didn’t dare patch in to the 'Net for fear of giving away my position to the Mukhabarat.)

6

Cecil speaks.

To summarize, PL consists of three elements:

  • The person says something that is not true.
  • The person could readily verifiy the statement.
  • The person has no reason to lie.

Is PL a genuine disorder? As of Cecil’s column, there’s no definite conclusion.

The OP notes three subjects that, I think, have some reason to lie. The first subject was noted as being emotionally abusive, and the untruths would be consistent with that abuse. The other two subjects seem to have been desperate for attention. Not that this excuses their lies. If someone has no integrity, it doesn’t matter whether it’s a psychological disorder, a plea for attention, a calculated effort to cause hurt, or whatnot.

7

Aren’t all these people in the above anecdotes lying to try to change someone’s perception of them? Isn’t that a reason for lying?

“Ohhhhh, I see, the divorce was HER fault…”

“Ohhhh, you’re not JUST a dealer, you are a well-travelled jack of all trades…”

“Wowwwww, you must be pretty cool to hang out with the Hell’s Angels…”
The definition of PL given above seems to me to be different than the anecdotes given above. It’s like if you asked me what I had for lunch, and I lied about that. Not trying to cover anything up, or make you like me more, just lying for no reason.

8

23skiddoo, what would my stepfather have to gain by telling people my mother was engaged to her then-boyfriend?
Or that I was married? OK, claiming my mother was having an affair, or that he left because she wasn’t “keeping the homefires burning” would be to cover up that he was at fault for the divorce, but all the other stuff? Plus, he and my mother were largely in touch with the same network of people, so things would get back to my mother, or me, who could refute the lies, and so he was easily exposed as a liar, which would tend to diminish people’s opinions of him, and yet, even after being caught in a number of lies, he continued to lie.

And the two dealers both are generally assholes who go out of their way to make other people’s lives (and jobs) miserable. Seems to me they would have more to gain from being nice to people than they would by “padding their resumes” with outlandish lies. The woman in particular, it just seemed that her lies were built around whatever the subject of conversation was at the moment. There was no rhyme nor reason to them, except that she wanted to be involved in the conversation.

And in all the cases listed above, it seems that if the person’s mouth was moving and sound was coming out, they were lying. Also, in all the cases, it would be fairly easy for people to find out, or figure out, that the person was lying. But it doesn’t seem to occur to any of them that they might be caught in their lies.

9

I guess the difference is, as I see it, that the pathological liar does so purely to make him or herself more interesting, not to obtain a material advantage (as in fraud).

The pathological liar is likely to claim things both credible and dis-credible. I have heard that some are likely to confess to (in)famous crimes, for example.

Also, the claims made are so extreme that even the most gullible person is bound to eventually figure out that they are untrue - a fact which probably restrains most ordinary people from lying in this manner (even if they felt the urge to) to people they are going to see frequently, like co-workers.

Whether or not this condition is the same as the one described in the link, there is no doubt in my mind that it is a descreet condition, or pathology, or personality type.

10

Yeah, these lies seem kind of pathological.

That’s a reason to lie, isn’t it? It may not be a very good one, or very effective, but there is a reason behind it.

11

OK, **23skidoo[/b[ let’s put a different spin on this-

How about using the phrase “compulsive liar”- in other words, someone just feels the need to lie about anything or everything; there may be a reason for it, but, well, it’s a piss poor reason, and anything the liar would stand to gain from the lie would be completely overshadowed by the loss of respect that would come from being caught in the lie. And go a step further, to continue to tell whoppers after you’ve been caught in a lie, or several lies, when any normal person would realize that “Well, since everyone found out that I’m not really fourth in line to become the Sultan of Brunei, don’t really hold the controlling interest in Rolls Royce Corporation, and am not really involved in a homosexual relationship with James Marsters, people are probably taking everything I say with a fifty pound bag of rock salt, and all this lying is accomplishing is to erode what little respect people may have had for me before I made with the lies.”

D’ya think that such a person truly cannot help themselves? That they suffer from some organic brain disorder that compels them to tell tall tales as though they were giving out factual information? Or perhaps are unable to distinguish between fantasy and reality, and thus don’t even realize that they are, in fact, lying?

Or, are they just, well, lying sacks of shit?