How to Tell The Truth Like A Liar (Remembering Self Version)
The presentation delivered by Jason Schlossberg's "Remembering Self" at SXSW on March 12, 2018.
Hi, everyone. Seeing all of you here on Monday at 3:30 pm, it's very impressive. I'm sure it was touch and go for some of you for a while. But thank you so much for coming. My name is Jason Schlossberg. For the next 45 minutes or so, I'll try to teach you how to tell the truth like a liar. I hope it will be provocative, as I'm sure you won't agree with everything. But I also hope it will be pragmatic and provide you with tools you can apply in your work.
Full disclosure, I'm not a social psychologist or neuroscientist. I just pretend to be one at conferences. I know literally just enough information to be dangerous. But I've been immersing myself in this topic extensively since the last presidential election. Perhaps like many of you, I felt betrayed by the truth at that time. As someone who has spent the last 20 years helping organizations communicate, I didn't understand what happened. So I've spent the last year and a half really trying to dive in and understand how we think and receive information. This presentation summarizes those understandings.
But first, if you don't mind, let me take a quick picture to record this moment. The reason is that I want to have an accurate record of the audience size. If left to my own devices, when I look back on this experience, and more importantly when I talk about it, my “remembering self” will have a very different experience than my “experiencing self” is having at this very moment. My remembering self’s experience will be colored by many factors, most importantly how well my experiencing self thinks the presentation went. If it goes particularly well, perhaps my remembering self experiences 10 times more people in here - although I should say for the record that this is a great sized crowd - or perhaps it will experience a lot fewer people in here if it goes poorly…it’s ok, I will tell myself, no one was even there to hear it.
The Illusion of Truth: How Our Brains Process Reality.
This is because the truth is an illusion. When I say that, I don't mean that all things are true and there aren't false things, because, of course, there are. But our human brain has extreme difficulty differentiating between what is true and what feels true. In the mind, that process is exactly the same, which has led to many problems, but we'll get to that.
The reason is that simulation is the default mode for all mental activity. Our brains experience very little in real time. To navigate the world, our brains must function faster than real time, creating simulations of our reality before it happens. Moments, just microseconds, before something happens, our brain simulates, predicts, and guesses, what's likely happening around us. Our brain constructs a hypothesis, this simulation, and then compares it to the incredible amount of information arriving from our senses. This happens before we're even conscious of it.
[Shows screen with these letters: Yuo can raed tehse wrods, cna't yuo?]
Yes, you can read these words can’t you? What happened was that your brain, before you were conscious that the letters were in a nonsensical order, predicted what it said. Because you're smart and have read and been to many conferences, you assumed it said, "You can read these words, can't you?" This is how simulations let your brain impose meaning on all this noise.
Experts say we spend at least half our waking hours simulating rather than paying attention to the world around us. Our cognitive biases, which psychologists have identified close to 200 of, are essentially our simulation mode's best friend. Biases develop through our experiences, cultural influences, emotions, and biology. Many talk about how biases are unhelpful, but they allow our brains to work quickly and efficiently, helping us figure things out. Evolution wired our brains for efficient prediction, but efficiency doesn't always mean accuracy.
Thanks to our biases, we are predisposed to seeking, interpreting, preferring, and even recalling information that confirms our existing beliefs while rejecting information that contradicts it. This is useful when our well-being is at stake - it's better to be wrong than dead. When our ancestors on the African savanna heard a rustle, it was better to assume it was caused by a saber-toothed tiger and run than contemplate alternative explanations that might get them killed. The individuals who thought to themselves, “Well, maybe that was a tiger, but probably not because I haven't seen tigers here in a while and my cousin was here last week and there weren’t any tigers…” that person did not procreate. Those genes did not move on. Our ancestors were the ones that got the heck out of there as quickly as possible.
But today, biases have trouble navigating nuance, subtlety, and complexity. As a result, we don't perceive the world objectively, but through the lenses of our own biases, needs, goals, and prior experiences.
Our brains are wired for delusion. It's through these predictions that we experience a world of our own creation.
Constructing Reality Through Stories.
I'm going to show you a famous film that was used in a seminal perception study by Heider and Simmel, in 1944. It's going to be riveting.
[shows the film]
Is anybody creating a story in their mind right now?
The overwhelming majority of people surveyed at the time created a story from the moving shapes. The triangles were often perceived as male characters, the circle as female. The bigger triangle was seen as a bully, while the smaller one was the hero. The rectangle was interpreted as a home or abode that they either happily or scarily ran away from.
However, the truth is that none of those narrative interpretations were happening. The shapes were simply pieces of cardboard being moved around and filmed using stop-motion animation techniques. No actual story or meaning was inherent.
But creating a story is what we're all wired to do, overwhelmingly. Our brains impose meaning and fictional narratives even onto abstract, meaningless patterns of motion, unable to perceive them as purely objective geometric shapes.
We are compelled to make sense of the world through the stories our minds generate.
Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel laureate and prolific social psychologist, says the way the mind often works is that we start from a decision or belief, and then the explanatory stories come to mind - conclusions come first, and rationalizations follow.
As communicators, that's the opposite of what we think - our job is to tell the story perfectly to our audience. But that's not how our brains work. Professor Lisa Feldman Barrett's book "How Emotions Are Made" provides a useful framework. She calls the totality of information we use to make predictions at any given moment our "affective niche" - because so much of what we experience as true is created largely by our feelings, also known as our affect, as extensive research shows. For example, there have been studies showing that parole judges are less likely to grant parole if they are making judgments when they are hungry.
Truth Niches: Our Personal Reality Filter
For our purposes, it's more accurate to think of this as our "truth niche." In addition to our affect and emotions, our truth niche encompasses the environment, culture, media consumption (both real and fake), personal histories, and more - everything combined that informs the filter through which we infer what feels true to us.
And I use the word infer quite intentionally because all the information processed by the brain is ultimately inferred or perceived. Most of the "facts" we debate are perceiver-dependent, not the rare perceiver-independent facts that can be categorically verified, like the number of pixels on a screen, or the atomic structure of this lectern.
Perceiver-dependent information includes pretty much everything that we talk about and everything that matters to us, on a day-to-day basis.
Am I doing well on this presentation? What were her true motives? What did he mean with that look? Is he being honest? Does this organization really have my interests at heart?
It's only out of this information pool, this truth niche, that we process reality. The exact same scenario can create completely alternate realities for different people based on their truth niche. It's not because some people are being manipulated or hallucinating. It’s how they are processing the information in front of them.
Take the "Take a Knee Movement" as an example. Is it a protest showing what's great about our country, or an insult to the flag and those who gave their lives? Are certain phrases assault or just "locker room talk"? Is a Corporate Board made up entirely of older white men, seasoned or out of touch?
I've been in many SXSW sessions this week where people say the other side's truth is wrong. Well, that's not technically accurate, because according to how they perceive the information, it is true to them. We're going to get into how we can deal with these differences in a moment. But for now, it’s important to understand that truth niches both bind and blind. I wish I could take credit for that expression, but I stole it. It comes from Jonathan Haight of NYU, who is one of the architects of moral foundations theory. And he uses it in the context of morality. He says, “morality, both binds and blinds.” But I believe the same can be said for truth niches
Consider this clip from The Daily Show to see an example of how a truth niche can lead to a hypocritical alternate reality in real-time:
An interviewer asks a woman at a rally: "So there's nothing Barack Obama could do to prove he was born here? If there were witnesses at his birth, like his mother, would you listen to her?"
The woman responds: "No, no, she has motivation to lie."
Interviewer: "Do you not trust Donald Trump's birth certificate either?"
Woman: "I do. Because he's been here forever."
Interviewer: "How do you know? What's your proof?"
Woman: "Well, his parents and whatnot."
Interviewer: "But they're biased.”
Woman: "Why would they be biased?"
Interviewer: “I'm just using your logic against you."
It's easy to laugh at an example that extreme. But I'm not throwing stones, because I know I'm just as capable of being hypocritical within the same sentence. Perhaps some of you are too. What it truly reveals is that our view of the world says much more about how we view ourselves than the actual world we live in. Our perceived reality is shaped by personal biases.
Sentiment today is less about facts and much more about tribal affiliations. But there is hope because truth niches can be challenged and ultimately expanded when we're exposed to dissenting views and experiences through the phenomenal concept of neuroplasticity. Our brains literally rewire themselves through new experiences and information. The more diverse experiences you have, the more you create different pathways in your brain. By expanding your realm of possibilities, you're able to expand your truth niche and have more associative material in your brain to create simulations, make decisions, and experience the world.
Great ways to enhance neuroplasticity include travel, learning a language or new vocabulary words, and reading. Conversely, our biases are nourished when we exist in what experts call "information cocoons.” Perhaps I spoke a little too soon when I said there was hope a few moments ago because several trends are exacerbating these truth niche "information cocoons.” Geographic bubbles and content filter bubbles are increasing polarization between groups. There is also massive mistrust of the media, with over half of Americans saying most news media members are not honest.
We also have this problem of what I used to call fake news, but now I have to clarify it. I'm talking about real fake news, not fake fake news, right? BuzzFeed found that 75% of American adults who were familiar with a fake news headline viewed that story as accurate. Research from Oxford University said in the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election, the majority of news that was posted on Twitter was fake news.
And just late last week, the journal Science published a study showing that fake news travels faster than real news on Twitter and that it took the truth about six times as long as a falsehood to reach about 1500 people. They determined that falsehoods diffuse significantly further, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information
All of these trends are leading to the calcification of our truth niches, making it nearly impossible to remain neutral on political, social, cultural, or moral topics. We essentially exist in an ‘Age of Rage,’ and brands are not immune, no matter their positions.
We saw boycotts of Nike, Starbucks, Keurig, and many more over various perceived stances. When Delta posted a tweet ending a discount for NRA members after the Parkland tragedy, despite only 13 people ever using that discount, the lieutenant governor of Georgia killed tax legislation benefiting Delta worth $40 million because "corporations cannot attack conservatives.” Clearly, the stakes are very high
The question now is how to persuade sentiment today, when we constantly see both sides digging in and arguing from entirely different core values and worldviews.
Moral Foundations: The Bedrock of Our Truth Niches.
A lot of the ideas I'm going to talk about now have been inspired by many smart people, particularly professors, Rob Miller of Stanford and Matthew Feinberg of the University of Toronto, they've done a lot of work around a powerful concept called moral reframing. The key is to find authentic ways to reduce the perceptual gap between your viewpoint and your audience's beliefs and values. It entails reframing your argument in a way that is consistent or aligned with your audience's worldview. You want to make an argument that not only is true but feels true to your audience by finding legitimate areas of overlap that allow your stance to fit within their ingrained truth niche. Rather than instantly being perceived as an intrusive outside view requiring effort to believe or even understand, you want them to find your arguments already living within their truth niches, not forced in but invited. It seems very obvious but at the same time, this approach is not intuitive to most people.
Our goal shouldn't be to win an argument or beat an adversary into submission. Our goal should be to meaningfully connect or synchronize, to vibe essentially, with individuals or groups to drive action.
The best way to achieve synchrony is to tell the truth like a liar. The reason for this is that liars are simply very effective. Their sole purpose is to convince you that something is true, they don’t care how or what they have to say to accomplish the task. They are mercenaries in their approach.
But non-liars tend to make arguments in terms of their own set of values, trying to convince you their view is correct and yours is wrong. As a result, we share the arguments that make sense to us. But when the person doesn't share the same worldview, it falls on deaf ears because you're asking them to reject much more than just this one belief - you are asking them to reject their core being.
Telling the truth like a liar begins with radical empathy. Radical empathy reduces the us-versus-them bias and allows you to occupy dual perspectives. No easy feat. Even in obvious cases, we lack the empathy to understand perspectives beyond our own truth niche. I was here on Saturday listening to Daniel Pink speak about his new book, which is called When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing. He shared an insightful anecdote:
People were surveyed about whether, when delivering both good and bad news, it's better to give the good news or bad news first. Resoundingly, those giving the news said you should deliver the good news first, before the bad - to ease into it and build the recipient up. However, when those same people were asked about receiving good and bad news together, they overwhelmingly preferred to get the bad news first, followed by the good news.
Even in such a low-stakes scenario where we all think similarly, most speakers lack the empathy to make the communications decision for others that they would prefer for themselves. We fail to adopt the perspective we'd want others to have toward us. But overcoming this lapse in empathy is crucial to bridging truth niche divides.
The first question you have to ask yourself is: Do you understand your audience's truth niche? If not, you cannot possibly reframe your argument to resonate with them. It takes a lot of research to develop this full picture - you metaphorically have to become them rationally and emotionally. The key is diligently studying your audience's specific belief hierarchies shaping their worldview. To illustrate my point, I’m going to share some differences in the truth niches/worldviews of liberals and conservatives because there has been a lot of research on the topic. Much of what I will share comes from Moral Foundation Theory. Robert Sapolsky, in his book Behave, The Biology of Humans At Our Best and Worst provides a great summary.
According to Moral Foundations Theory some specific core values determine where an individual sits on the liberal-conservative spectrum. Liberals tend to highly prioritize three primary values: equality, fairness, and protecting the vulnerable. Conservatives, meanwhile, place greater emphasis on loyalty, authority/obedience, patriotism, and sanctity/purity.
Diving a bit deeper and zeroing in on the conservative side of the spectrum. Conservatives are more likely to experience anxiety with ambiguity, have a stronger need for order and closure, and dislike novelty. They find greater comfort in a clear structure, hierarchy, and authority figures. Conservatives more often perceive circumstances as potential threats and experience feelings of disgust more intensely. There is also a tendency to believe society's best days are behind us.
When you analyze how so many of our most contentious, culture-based, issues play out, it becomes clear the two sides are often operating from entirely different realities. On immigration, the liberal argument promotes equality - that America is a nation built by immigrants, reinforcing ideals like "Give us your tired and huddled masses." The conservative view prioritizes securing borders for safety/security and protecting the perceived purity of American culture - an argument grounded in sanctity.
The same dichotomy arises around DACA and protections for children of illegal immigrants. Liberals frame it as a matter of basic fairness and protecting the vulnerable. The Conservative stance is more about respect for legal authority and properly instituted laws.
Bridging Divides with Moral Reframing.
In both cases, each side is having a different argument, making it very hard to reach a consensus. And then if you think through so many of the contentious issues that we are facing as a society today, you see this playing out again and again.
Finding shared beliefs that resonate within someone's truth niche is key to getting them to reclassify your position into a more accepted category. Research shows this reframing can be effective, though difficult. For instance, conservatives have been influenced to support environmental protection efforts they traditionally rallied against when the arguments emphasized the importance of keeping the American forests, drinking water sources, and skies pure and unblemished. By reframing climate initiatives through the lens of the conservative value placed on sanctity and preserving an idealized version of the homeland, it invited that audience to update their stance.
Similarly, liberals more accustomed to seeing military spending as perpetuating unnecessary conflicts have been persuaded to back defense budget increases when the military's role was repositioned as providing disadvantaged Americans a reliable path to a good salary and job skills. Appealing to the liberal priorities of equality and protecting the vulnerable helped reclassify the nature of military appropriations.
In both cases, the facts and policies didn't fundamentally change - only the contextual framing was adjusted to map onto the existing values within each audience's respective truth niches. No longer perceived as an attacking outsider perspective, these arguments were able to be welcomed in, from a perspective of commonality.
Ease the Mind: Strategies for Reducing Cognitive Strain.
Reducing cognitive strain is critically important when delivering your reframed message. Information that feels true maintains a sense of cognitive ease within the brain, not upsetting the simulation system that shapes our perceptions. But information that doesn't align with someone's truth niche causes cognitive strain - it falls outside of the familiar patterns their brain expects, risking rejection no matter how factual it may be. So you must construct your narrative in a way that ushers your audience seamlessly through their reinforced mental models and associations.
What feels true? The familiar does. Familiarity reduces strain immensely. The more times you hear something the more willing you are to believe it’s true. Think about some of the nonsensical things that were said and then propagated by the media countless times of late, like "crooked Hillary," "fake media," "little Marco," "release the memo," and going back, "if it doesn't fit, you must acquit." All of these statements sort of start to feel true, the more we hear them. There is even research that shows simply refuting these types of statements, just saying, "Don't call her crooked Hillary," or, "We're not the fake media," ironically has the opposite effect on the minds of the people who are already predisposed to thinking that way. All you're doing is just making it even more familiar.
The simple feels much more true than the than the complicated. The same for the concrete. We often choose to use abstract terms, but if your brain can't immediately imagine what someone is talking about and easily create a simulation of it, it's much more likely that it will be rejected. The memorable. There's a lot of research that shows that things that are in rhyme or verse are automatically seen as more insightful or felt as more insightful. Emotionally loaded words, quickly attract attention. Our brains are captivated by words loaded with feeling, while neutral phrasing is easily ignored.
Our brains have an inherent pattern-seeking tendency to map events into story arcs with clear beginning/middle/end sequences and reasonable chains of cause and effect. Satisfying that pattern appetite fosters cognitive ease. Even if you leave out a lot of information people still expect your narrative to have an internal coherence. What else? Details are important, but only the right amount to project an appearance of truth without descending into overwhelming complexity. Too few feels empty and unsubstantiated; too granular causes our attention to wane and our brains to fatigue.
There always has to be some factual basis to your message for people to feel that it's true, but the way that you position those facts and details is important. I worked with an auto manufacturer, and at one trade show, their spokesperson said that “probably 10 percent of the population will be perfect for electric cars”. Everyone said that it was wonderful how bullish the company was about electric cars. Then they were at another conference, and their spokesperson was a little tired and said without thinking, "Well, you know, electric cars are not right for 90 percent of people." Technically the spokesperson said the same thing as before, but there was a big outcry, “Oh, no, they don't support electric vehicles anymore,” because the negative perspective looked much larger numerically than the positive perspective.
The intentional sounds more true than the unintentional. People are innately drawn to stories that feature purpose and determination, where actions are deliberate and lead to triumphant outcomes. This preference is rooted in our desire for coherent and understandable narratives, where intentional actions leading to success align with our expectations of how cause and effect should operate. We are less swayed by the nuances or elements of surprise that accompany luck or accidental success.
Finally, confidence and certainty radiate truthfulness. Declarative statements are often easier to accept with minimal scrutiny, while hesitation often breeds suspicion.
A recent CNN commercial embodies many of the cognitive easing techniques I just described. There's no moral reframing here, but it is still very illustrative for our purposes. The ad is their response to accusations of being "fake news":
The ad shows an apple and states: "This is an apple. Some people might try to tell you that it's a banana. They might scream 'banana, banana, banana' over and over and over again. You might put banana in all caps. You might even start to believe that this is a banana. But it's not. This is an apple."
The ad is brilliantly simple and concrete - everyone knows what an apple and banana are, removing any ambiguity. It's memorable by presenting the core truth in a back-and-forth pattern. Emotionally, it carries the calm confidence of someone simply stating facts without getting flustered or needing to yell. There's no moral lecturing or insistence that the other side is wrong, just a reasserted truth. The narrative is coherent - it sets up the potential for misinformation, follows through on that scenario logically, and then course-corrects with the definitive truth as a resolution. And notably, it never even engages with or repeats the phrase "fake news" directly, denying that additional familiarity foothold.
Overall, the ad exemplifies many of the cognitive ease principles I just described - using simplicity, concreteness, memorability, confidence, and narrative cohesion to reduce cognitive strain. The ad is part of CNN’s “Facts First” campaign, which is also cognitively “easy,” although technically not true according to Daniel Kahneman. But it is simple. You can easily remember it. It’s fun to say, and it sounds like the words go together. It's a great alliteration.
Your physical presence can also increase or decrease cognitive strain quite a bit. It's not just what you say, it's how you say it. When we meet someone, we always ask ourselves two things: Can I trust this person? And can I respect this person? In the world of social psychology, these dimensions are called warmth and competence. We're constantly measuring people's warmth and competence.
The problem is that we don't value these two traits equally. We judge warmth first. In fact, we process words related to warmth faster (friendly, honest, etc.) than competence (creative, skillful, etc.) This goes back to our ancestors when it was more important to trust somebody than to know if they were competent because if they're not going to kill you and your family or steal from you, you can have them around, even if they aren’t very competent.
So we are automatically geared towards the warmth aspect first. But most of think it's more important to try and convey respect over trust. You've heard the phrase: "I'm not here to make friends." But the truth is that you are here to make friends. The reason is that trust is ultimately the conduit of influence. When we trust somebody, it reduces cognitive strain. We want to believe them, because we trust them. Therefore, trustworthy people are more influential.
Influential individuals initiate handshakes, make longer eye contact, initiate speech more, talk more overall but slowly with pauses, feeling entitled to the time. They lean forward, orient their body toward others, use broad gestures, have an erect and open posture, and say "I" less often. The more you say, “I” the less sure of yourself you appear to others. Someone with influence will look out on the world. While people who lack influence are so focused on themselves, they want all of the credit.
Posture is a stronger signal of status than credentials. People with a command presence are viewed as being more truthful. Conveying yourself in a confident, powerful way is therefore crucial. There has been a lot of discussion around "power posing" and whether it truly works. While power posing is often analyzed through the lens of how it makes the individual feel and embodied cognition, it's clear that holding an expansive, powerful posture at the very least signifies to others that you are powerful, even if it's unproven to actually make you feel that way internally.
It's important to always embody a more powerful presence, but blatant attempts at non-verbal expressions of power often backfire and turn people off. At the same time, you must avoid body language cues that signal powerlessness and lack of confidence. For example, when people cover their neck while speaking, it's an unconscious gesture reminiscent of protecting oneself from a threat, signaling insecurity. Folding inward or protectively covering yourself likewise communicates that your words should not necessarily be trusted.
As a bonus and because we're getting close to the end of my presentation, I’d like to share with you the secret power move of world leaders. It's called the steeple. I don't know if you've seen it before, but if you type steepling into the Internet, you'll see pretty much every world leader doing it. Angela Merkel, is particularly adroit at it. Steepling is a hand position where the hands are brought together in a peaked, steepled, prayer-like shape. The fingertips are touching while the bodies of the hands remain separated, forming a triangular shape.
According to former FBI body language expert Joe Navarro, "Steepling communicates that we are one with our thoughts. We are not wavering or vacillating. At that precise moment, we are communicating universally that we are confident in our thoughts and beliefs, sure in our affirmation, trusting of ourselves." Hopefully, you will get to try it and see what happens.
In summary, before I open this up to questions and you can tell me whether you think that I’ve spoken truthfully, telling the truth like a liar requires that you:
Recognize that the truth is tribal. There isn't one truth for most of the things that we talk about as true.
Seek synchrony with your audience, not change, which is a losing battle.
Occupy dual perspectives by embracing radical empathy. Once we’ve occupied another perspective, our job is to identify the shared or overlapping beliefs that serve as common ground.
Then make it easy for them to understand those shared beliefs through techniques that reduce cognitive strain.
And finally, reinforce through repetition. We need to repeat, we need to repeat, and we need to repeat.
Thank you very much. I'd love to chat if anyone has any questions.