I’m Not Lieing, I’m Telling a Future Truth. Really

5-9-2008 Global:

Some tales are so tall that they trip over their own improbable feats, narrative cracks and melodrama. That one-on-one playground victory over Kobe Bryant back in the day; the 34 hours in labor without painkillers; the former girlfriend or boyfriend who spoke eight languages and was a secret agent besides.

Yes, uh-huh, really. Is it closing time yet?

Yet in milder doses, self-serving exaggeration can be nearly impossible to detect, experts say, and there are several explanations.

A series of recent studies, focusing on students who inflate their grade-point average, suggests that such exaggeration is very different psychologically from other forms of truth twisting. Touching up scenes or past performances induces none of the anxiety that lying or keeping secrets does, these studies find; and embroiderers often work to live up to the enhanced self-images they project. The findings imply that some kinds of deception are aimed more at the deceiver than at the audience, and they may help in distinguishing braggarts and posers from those who are expressing personal aspirations, however clumsily.

“It’s important to emphasize that the motives driving academic exaggeration seem to be personal and ‘intrapsychic’ rather than public or interpersonal,” said Richard H. Gramzow, a psychologist at the University of Southampton in England who has led much of the research. “Basically, exaggeration here reflects positive goals for the future, and we have found that those goals tend to be realized.”

Psychologists have studied deception from all sides and have found that it usually puts a psychological or physical strain on the person doing the dissembling. People with guilty knowledge — of a detail from a crime scene, for example — tend to show signs of stress, as measured by heart and skin sensors, under pointed questioning.

Trying to hold onto an inflammatory secret is mentally exhausting, studies have found, and the act of suppressing the information can cause thoughts of it to flood the consciousness. When telling outright lies, people tend to look and sound tenser than usual.

“Specifically, people are especially more tense when lying, compared to telling the truth, when they are highly motivated to get away with their lies and when they are lying about a transgression,” said Bella DePaulo, a visiting professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

But a study published in February in the journal Emotion found that exactly the opposite was true for students who exaggerated their grades. The researchers had 62 Northeastern University students fill out a computerized form asking, among other things, for cumulative grade point average. The students were then interviewed while hooked up to an array of sensitive electrodes measuring nervous system activation. The scripted interview covered academic history, goals and grades.

The researchers then pulled the students’ records, with permission, and found that almost half had exaggerated their average by as much as six-tenths of a point. Yet the electrode readings showed that oddly enough, the exaggerators became significantly more relaxed while discussing their grades.

“It was a robust effect, the sort of readings you see when people are engaged in a positive social encounter, or when they’re meditating,” said Wendy Berry Mendes, an associate professor of psychology at Harvard and senior author of the study. Dr. Gramzow and Greg Willard, then at Northeastern and now at Harvard, were co-authors.

The researchers videotaped the interviews, and independent observers rated how students looked and behaved. “The ones who exaggerated the most appeared the most calm and confident” on the ratings, Dr. Mendes said.

The grade inflation was less an attempt to deceive, the authors concluded, than a reflection of healthy overconfidence and a statement of aspirations. “It’s basically an exercise in projecting the self toward one’s goals,” Dr. Gramzow said.

In earlier studies, Dr. Gramzow and Dr. Willard found that students who bumped up their averages in interviews subsequently improved their grades — often by the very amount they had exaggerated.

The findings provide another lens through which to view claims, from Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s story of sniper fire in Bosnia to exaggerations of income, charitable contributions and SAT scores. As much as these are embroideries, they are also expressions of yearning, and for reachable goals.

In that sense, fibs can reflect something close to the opposite of the frustration, insecurity and secretiveness that often fuel big lies. That may be why they can come so easily, add up so fast and for some people — especially around closing time — become indistinguishable from the truth. ..more.. by BENEDICT CAREY