39
Mental Accounting
www.samharris.org
amount of work—all of which comes at the expense of authentic communica-
tion and free attention. The liar must weigh each new disclosure, whatever the
source, to see whether it might damage the facade that he has built. And all
these stresses accrue, whether or not anyone discovers that he has been lying.
Tell enough lies, however, and the effort required to keep your audience
in the dark quickly becomes unsustainable. While you might be spared a di-
rect accusation of dishonesty, many people will conclude, for reasons that they
might be unable to pinpoint, that they cannot trust you. You will begin to seem
like someone who is always dancing around the facts—because you most cer-
tainly are. Many of us have known people like this. No one ever quite confronts
them, but everyone begins to treat them like creatures of fiction. Such people
are often quietly shunned, for reasons they probably never understand.
In fact, suspicion often grows on
both
sides of a lie: Research indicates
that liars trust those they deceive less than they otherwise might—and the more
damaging their lies, the less they trust, or even like, their victims. It seems that in
protecting their egos, and interpreting their own behavior as justified, liars tend
to deprecate the people they lie to.
10