Interesting Book about how lying is the great of modern society and how lying is actually important to keep peace and harmony.   In this way, quite applicable to Chinese culture, where harmony preservation is more important than truth.   I saw a movie (forget what it was called) where everyone in the movie always told the truth.  One character tried to tell a lie,and was successful at it.   The movie was a comedy, but I could not help that it was based on this book.

 

Another interesting thing was that a LOT of people lie on their resumes, their interviews and their achievements.   Its because of this book, I was not surprised when a recent interview had exaggerated her/his current role and salary.   Reading this book prepares you for people lying – and in a way – prepares you to accept that lying is not always a horrible sin and has its virtues.

 

 

 

 

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The Liar in Your Life: The Way to Truthful Relationships (Robert Feldman)
– Highlight Loc. 237 | Added on Sunday, November 29, 2009, 03:13 PM

No relationship has been found to be immune to dishonesty.
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The Liar in Your Life: The Way to Truthful Relationships (Robert Feldman)
– Highlight Loc. 274-76 | Added on Sunday, November 29, 2009, 03:16 PM

Most people shy away from conflict and disagreement. They build relationships with others based on fundamental things they have in common. In order to form a relationship with another person, then, one would want to avoid the areas of dissonance and emphasize the commonalities.
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The Liar in Your Life: The Way to Truthful Relationships (Robert Feldman)
– Highlight Loc. 279-82 | Added on Sunday, November 29, 2009, 03:17 PM

but also that mirroring of opinion to avoid disagreement and demonstrate similarity is widely considered to be normal. If you later tell a friend that you liked your date but spent your dinner with her arguing over politics and expressing disinterest in her hobbies, he might give you credit for honesty, but he would also think you were a complete social moron. Deception is such a common technique for ingratiation that its lack strikes us as aberrant.
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The Liar in Your Life: The Way to Truthful Relationships (Robert Feldman)
– Highlight Loc. 320-21 | Added on Sunday, November 29, 2009, 04:14 PM

Without a doubt, every lie, by definition, involves deceit and implicit manipulation—but that does not mean that every lie is employed in the service of deception and manipulation.
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The Liar in Your Life: The Way to Truthful Relationships (Robert Feldman)
– Highlight Loc. 334-35 | Added on Sunday, November 29, 2009, 04:15 PM

As we will discuss more fully in future chapters, psychologists have found an association between socially successful people and skill at deception.
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The Liar in Your Life: The Way to Truthful Relationships (Robert Feldman)
– Highlight Loc. 337-39 | Added on Sunday, November 29, 2009, 04:16 PM

Consider whether you would really want to form a relationship with someone who pointed out every area of disagreement or could not convince you of his feigned interest in your hobbies. In many ways, deception is not so different from tact; indeed, one could make a case that sometimes they are actually one and the same.
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The Liar in Your Life: The Way to Truthful Relationships (Robert Feldman)
– Highlight Loc. 362-64 | Added on Sunday, November 29, 2009, 04:18 PM

Bella DePaulo, a researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and her students have found repeated and consistent evidence that lying—even “white” lying—takes a toll on the teller of the lie. Lying can cause a “twinge of distress,” in DePaulo’s words, making liars feel a little worse than they did before they told a lie.
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The Liar in Your Life: The Way to Truthful Relationships (Robert Feldman)
– Highlight Loc. 659-60 | Added on Sunday, November 29, 2009, 04:42 PM

This gives us an idea of the truth bias’s unexpected strength. It is not something we can switch on and off, even when logic would suggest we should. The truth bias is like any unconscious bias—it affects our behavior in ways we don’t expect and can’t easily control.
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The Liar in Your Life: The Way to Truthful Relationships (Robert Feldman)
– Highlight Loc. 677 | Added on Sunday, November 29, 2009, 04:43 PM

While we’re often curious and engaged by the world, we’re also careful with how we spend our mental energy.
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The Liar in Your Life: The Way to Truthful Relationships (Robert Feldman)
– Highlight Loc. 1068-69 | Added on Sunday, December 20, 2009, 09:34 AM

For adults, good liars also tend to be good at forming friendships, to be more empathetic, to have greater social insight.
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The Liar in Your Life: The Way to Truthful Relationships (Robert Feldman)
– Highlight Loc. 1282-84 | Added on Sunday, December 20, 2009, 10:12 AM

The awareness of the minds of others and how they operate is a crucial asset in our ability to manipulate one another. We can assess what we know other people think, as well as how they think, in order to fool them.
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The Liar in Your Life: The Way to Truthful Relationships (Robert Feldman)
– Highlight Loc. 1370-71 | Added on Sunday, December 20, 2009, 10:23 AM

Also, mathematical simulations modeling the growth of intelligence show that competition can spark an explosion in cognitive capacity.
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The Liar in Your Life: The Way to Truthful Relationships (Robert Feldman)
– Highlight Loc. 1400-1404 | Added on Sunday, December 20, 2009, 10:25 AM

“Everybody plays the fool.” Sooner or later, all of us will fall victim to emotional betrayal in some form. Loved ones may break their promises; we may catch them in a pattern of calculated deceit; spouses or lovers may cheat. The feelings accompanying the revelation of such betrayals are often devastating. It can seem as if all the positive feelings associated with love and trust have been pulled inside out, transformed into their own inverses: hurt, humiliation, fear, and loneliness, to name just a few.
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The Liar in Your Life: The Way to Truthful Relationships (Robert Feldman)
– Highlight Loc. 1480-83 | Added on Sunday, December 20, 2009, 10:35 AM

“I hold women accountable,” she was quoted as saying, “for tossing out perfectly good men by not treating them with the love and kindness and respect and attention they need.” And while this is an extreme position (Dr. Laura is a syndicated radio host, after all), virtually all the men and women I’ve known who have been stung by betrayal have looked inward at some point, questioning whether they might have done something that caused the offense.
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The Liar in Your Life: The Way to Truthful Relationships (Robert Feldman)
– Highlight Loc. 1509-13 | Added on Sunday, December 20, 2009, 10:37 AM

If, on the other hand, a person’s commitment to the relationship is strong, he or she has a definite interest in its continued success and will work toward this goal. Breaking down the idea of commitment further, the investment model holds that commitment is influenced primarily by three factors: satisfaction, which refers to a person’s happiness in a relationship; alternative quality, a person’s judgment about how happy they would be with someone else; and investments, the things a person stands to lose (financial security, for example) if the relationship fails.
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The Liar in Your Life: The Way to Truthful Relationships (Robert Feldman)
– Highlight Loc. 1553-55 | Added on Sunday, December 20, 2009, 10:42 AM

When we are stabbed in the back, we can at least spare ourselves the certainty that it is necessarily somehow our fault. There is no evidence that a victim always plays a role in his or her victimization. Sometimes, we are just unlucky in the people we form relationships with or in the people we are bound to by blood.
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The Liar in Your Life: The Way to Truthful Relationships (Robert Feldman)
– Highlight Loc. 1842-44 | Added on Sunday, December 20, 2009, 11:07 AM

We’ve already examined how the mind responds to cognitive dissonance. When we hold two competing, contradictory ideas, we change one of them, consciously or unconsciously.
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The Liar in Your Life: The Way to Truthful Relationships (Robert Feldman)
– Highlight Loc. 1851-53 | Added on Sunday, December 20, 2009, 11:08 AM

Psychologists and researchers have found this need to protect one’s self-image to be an extremely powerful force in shaping our perceptions of the world. On one level, it can even create a kind of filter that blocks out information that could be challenging to our self-image.
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The Liar in Your Life: The Way to Truthful Relationships (Robert Feldman)
– Highlight Loc. 1876-78 | Added on Sunday, December 20, 2009, 11:10 AM

Obviously, almost any success can be ascribed to a combination of luck, circumstance, and individual traits. Yet our interpretations tend to highlight the importance of the last one at the expense of the former two.
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The Liar in Your Life: The Way to Truthful Relationships (Robert Feldman)
– Highlight Loc. 1904-6 | Added on Sunday, December 20, 2009, 11:12 AM

Powerful people can have difficulty reconciling their faith in their abilities with the fact of their errors. In order to resolve this dissonance, the fact of their errors can become subject to interpretation.
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The Liar in Your Life: The Way to Truthful Relationships (Robert Feldman)
– Highlight Loc. 1920-21 | Added on Sunday, December 20, 2009, 11:13 AM

Although we may recognize that we can’t all be above average—indeed, that it’s a logical impossibility—we still tend to think of ourselves this way.
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The Liar in Your Life: The Way to Truthful Relationships (Robert Feldman)
– Highlight Loc. 1930-34 | Added on Sunday, December 20, 2009, 11:14 AM

Researchers studying depression have found that clinically depressed people often have surprisingly accurate views of themselves—a phenomenon known as depressive realism. People suffering from depression make better assessments than nonde-pressed people about their control over events, their role in effecting positive outcomes, their good qualities, and their shortcomings. Their perceptions are not irrationally pessimistic. On the contrary, they are unusually clear-eyed.
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The Liar in Your Life: The Way to Truthful Relationships (Robert Feldman)
– Highlight Loc. 1948-51 | Added on Sunday, December 20, 2009, 11:15 AM

Numerous studies over the years have found that thinking you will succeed helps you succeed, in a variety of contexts. For this reason, deceiving yourself about your intelligence when taking a test or about your competence during a job interview can have tangible benefits. Whether you are above average or not, thinking you are can assist you in achieving above-average results.
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The Liar in Your Life: The Way to Truthful Relationships (Robert Feldman)
– Highlight Loc. 1956-59 | Added on Sunday, December 20, 2009, 11:16 AM

Self-deception can also help one attain more grandiose goals than improved grades. If we honestly assess the odds against opening a successful business or making a radical career change later in life, we might, perfectly rationally, decide not to attempt such an endeavor. But if we offer ourselves an unreasonably optimistic appraisal of the challenges ahead, it can be easier to find the motivation to strive
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The Liar in Your Life: The Way to Truthful Relationships (Robert Feldman)
– Highlight Loc. 2229-32 | Added on Sunday, December 20, 2009, 11:46 AM

A wealth of psychological theory and research, not to mention common sense, tells us what such comparisons can do to our egos. When we engage in an upward comparison, our self-esteem faces damage. No one likes to be reminded that there are people out there who are more successful in their careers, more attractive, more clever. Reflexively, we look for ways to shield ourselves from the threat such comparisons present to our pride.
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The Liar in Your Life: The Way to Truthful Relationships (Robert Feldman)
– Highlight Loc. 2381-82 | Added on Monday, December 21, 2009, 02:27 AM

The fact is that some people don’t get anxious when they lie. Good liars remain remarkably calm, and can exhibit virtually no physiological response that might betray their deceit.
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The Liar in Your Life: The Way to Truthful Relationships (Robert Feldman)
– Highlight Loc. 2394-97 | Added on Monday, December 21, 2009, 02:29 AM

We’ve probably all had occasion to bluff, perhaps literally, during a card game or, more figuratively, during a negotiation in our business or private life. For most of us, there is an undeniable thrill in (emptily) threatening to walk away unless the broker shaves a few thousand more off the asking price or, more quaintly, unless the woman at the tag sale takes off another dollar. Whatever the stakes, such deceptive power plays are exciting to make, and exciting to pull off. And a successful bluff is really only a step away from a lie with intent.
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The Liar in Your Life: The Way to Truthful Relationships (Robert Feldman)
– Highlight Loc. 2400-2402 | Added on Monday, December 21, 2009, 02:29 AM

The act of telling the lie itself brings a kind of profit: an adrenaline rush, a feeling of superiority, a sense of accomplishment. Studies of confidence men, for example, have shown that their interest is less in the money they earn—which they burn through quickly anyway—than in the rush of the con itself. The income is nice; the process of getting it is what really motivates them.
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The Liar in Your Life: The Way to Truthful Relationships (Robert Feldman)
– Highlight Loc. 2990-91 | Added on Tuesday, December 22, 2009, 12:30 PM

CEOs, with their positions of power and their track records of achievement, often have outsized egos. Yet an inflated ego often comes with inflated feelings of anxiety and vulnerability, as well.
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The Liar in Your Life: The Way to Truthful Relationships (Robert Feldman)
– Highlight Loc. 3012-15 | Added on Tuesday, December 22, 2009, 12:32 PM

The collapse of a business does more than bruise the ego of its leaders. It throws into some degree of turmoil the professional lives of every person the business employs. A CEO who cares about his company, or who just cares about people in general, might find the prospect of every person who works under him losing their job extremely troubling. If the alternative to duplicity is bankruptcy, a CEO might resort to business lies out of something akin to compassion.
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The Liar in Your Life: The Way to Truthful Relationships (Robert Feldman)
– Highlight Loc. 3038-41 | Added on Tuesday, December 22, 2009, 12:34 PM

He describes how when Jeffrey Skilling came to Enron in 1996, he instituted a policy that became known as “Rank and Yank.” Under this system, every employee was ranked by his or her peers on a scale of 1 to 5. Any employee who got a 5 was fired. Results of the review were posted on the Enron Web page, along with employee photographs. Rank and Yank meant that every six months, between 10 and 20 percent of Enron employees lost their jobs.
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The Liar in Your Life: The Way to Truthful Relationships (Robert Feldman)
– Highlight Loc. 3058-61 | Added on Tuesday, December 22, 2009, 12:36 PM

Researchers into business deceit have found that stressful work environments are conducive to deception. This makes intuitive sense. Constant pressure to meet difficult goals can erode a commitment to honesty if deception presents itself as a way to alleviate that pressure. Lying can be a way simply to keep one’s head above water.
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The Liar in Your Life: The Way to Truthful Relationships (Robert Feldman)
– Highlight Loc. 3070-72 | Added on Tuesday, December 22, 2009, 12:37 PM

But cut-throat evaluation systems and hard-driving managers can also appeal to individuals with less rigorous ethics, those more interested in profit and career success than strict honesty. It’s almost as if bad barrels can draw in bad apples.
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The Liar in Your Life: The Way to Truthful Relationships (Robert Feldman)
– Bookmark Loc. 3268 | Added on Saturday, December 26, 2009, 11:19 AM

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The Liar in Your Life: The Way to Truthful Relationships (Robert Feldman)
– Highlight Loc. 3431-34 | Added on Saturday, December 26, 2009, 11:31 AM

To put it simply, the liars in our lives are everyone in our lives. The notion that deception is rare, something that stands out in our minds because it is so unpleasant, is actually a comforting one. It reassures us that the lies we encounter are to some degree compartmentalized.
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The Liar in Your Life: The Way to Truthful Relationships (Robert Feldman)
– Highlight Loc. 3541-43 | Added on Saturday, December 26, 2009, 11:38 AM

Instead, maintain an awareness that everything you are told could be a lie. Rather than just passively trusting, try to enact a process of verification. This active scrutiny will help you counteract the workings of the truth bias.
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The Liar in Your Life: The Way to Truthful Relationships (Robert Feldman)
– Highlight Loc. 3610-11 | Added on Saturday, December 26, 2009, 11:43 AM

The essential thing to realize is that betrayal is not a life sentence.