There is a rational, self-interested reason to choose a strategy, and establish a reputation, of non-lying. This idea been recently illustrated by the condemnation of Alex Murdaugh for the murder of his wife and son, and by Sergei Lavrov, the foreign minister of the Russian government during a conference in India.
The theory is that if one follows a strategy of non-lying and succeeds establishing his reputation for telling the truth, he is more likely to be believed in the future. And to be believed and trusted is useful in any social relation.
I have no special insight about the trial and condemnation of Alex Murdaugh, scion of a family of prosecutors and himself a former part-time prosecutor in South Carolina. And I have no reason to question the jury’s verdict. My point is that the jury had reasons to doubt Murdaugh’s testimony in his own defense if only because he repeatedly admitted that he had lied in several other occasions (see “Alex Murdaugh’s Trial Lasted Six Weeks. Two Days Mattered Most,” Wall Street Journal, March 3, 2022):
The jurors heard Mr. Murdaugh, turned toward them and in tears, say that he had lied to dozens of people, hundreds of times, but he would not lie to them about the brutal killing of Maggie and Paul, who were both fatally shot at close range.
He told jurors that he lied to law enforcement about his whereabouts the night of the shooting. …
One by one, [the local prosecutor] ticked off a series of dozens of names, asking Mr. Murdaugh if he had lied to that person’s face. With rare exception, Mr. Murdaugh said he had. He admitted to stealing money from friends and clients, including his close friend Barrett Boulware, who was nearly destitute and on his deathbed at the time, and Hakeem Pinckney, a deaf teenager who had been rendered a quadriplegic in a car crash.
As for Mr. Lavrov, as he was answering questions at a conference in Delhi after a G20 meeting, he mentioned that the war in Ukraine had been “launched against us.” The audience reacted with a short burst of laughter, which, for an instant, destabilized even a habitual liar like Lavrov. He is more used to be called “Excellency.” It is worth watching a video of the event—for example the one on the website of the BBC, or one of the many others available on YouTube. The Guardian reports (“Russian Minister’s Claim Ukraine War ‘Launched Against Us’ Met With Laughter,” March 4, 2023):
“The war, which we are trying to stop, which was launched against us using Ukrainian people, of course, influenced the policy of Russia, including energy policy,” he said, briefly stumbling over his words as people in the audience laughed.
If you become known as a liar, nobody will believe you. Lavrov, however, is hired by a state that requires that he lie. The penalty for not lying might be death or at least much discomfort, so his incentives are to try to square the circle: lie each time he is asked to, and try to maintain some credibility outside his den of liars.
Which brings me to my second general point: as game theory and ordinary economic reasoning suggest, the individual’s optimal strategy changes if a critical number of liars is reached in a society. At the limit, there is no reason to tell the truth because nobody will believe you anyway. This result has a bearing on the conditions, including possibly the moral conditions, for the maintenance of a free society. Both Friedrich Hayek and James Buchanan emphasized, from different viewpoints, the moral dimension.
READER COMMENTS
Craig
Mar 12 2023 at 1:54pm
“My point is that the jury had reasons to doubt Murdaugh’s testimony in his own defense”
To expound there, a defendant’s self-exculpatory statement also have little weight to begin with. Intuitively people understand that many speak/testify in their own interest.
“If you become known as a liar, nobody will believe you. Lavrov, however, is hired by a state that requires that he lie.”
During WW2 one of the reasons the Allies required unconditional surrender is that there simply wouldn’t have been any trust to make a treaty to end the war with Hitler/Ribbentrop. Ultimately if one feels the same about Russia then by all means demand the fundamental equivalent in the Ukraine, demand unconditional withdrawal, send the panzers in and physically oust the Russian army because from what I’ve seen the Russian army does not seem to be a conventional match for US/NATO supplied forces. In other words if you treat with them on the basis that they are lying one can’t actually trust any peace treaty, or any treaty for that matter. And then either the Russians will withdraw and abandon the ethnic Russians living there or they’ll escalate.
Don’t trust Lavrov, but the Russians shouldn’t trust the US either.
Speaking of ‘game theory’; play stupid games, don’t be surprised if you win stupid prizes.
nobody.really
Mar 12 2023 at 2:45pm
If lying were not an adaptive strategy in at least some circumstances, I would expect that it would have died out. Rephrased, the fact that lying has not died out leads me to suspect that lying is an adaptive strategy in at least some circumstances.
I suspect that we might influence people’s inclination to lie by changing the sanctions on people who are found guilty of lying. Yet game theory models indicate that the optimal strategy in cooperation games is Tit for Tat–that is, responding punitively to transgressions, but with some measure of forgiveness. This suggests that we would not want to structure society to maximize punishment for lying. Rephrased, the optimal amount of lying may not be zero. (Consider the film The Invention of Lying, where a society that was previously unexposed to lying found itself utterly defenseless against the slightest infestation.)
This is a personal topic for me ‘cuz, as Lemieux observes, I’m famously gullible:
Pierre Lemieux
Mar 13 2023 at 11:17am
Nobody: Interesting remarks, which actually confirm what I was arguing (if I understand correctly what you are saying). I have two light rejoinders, though. Your argument generally applies to cooperation, of which non-lying is only one (substitutable) aspect. The bottom line is that an ethics of cooperation or reciprocity as Buchanan would say is in everybody’s interest, but it can also be exploited by defectors, up to a certain point where there is probabilistically no cooperator to defect from (which is the object of my last paragraph). Defection or parasitism is not selected out if it remains relatively marginal. Can we say that defectors help find new social institutions, like devil’s advocates play a useful role on EconLog or in conversation in general? About your last paragraph, there is always a last sucker and, like you (if I understand you well), I am often, or have often been, a candidate.
Ahmed Fares
Mar 12 2023 at 5:54pm
“The liar’s punishment is, not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else.” — George Bernard Shaw
nobody.really
Mar 13 2023 at 3:20am
“It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know you would lie, were you in his place.” — H.L. Mencken
Pierre Lemieux
Mar 13 2023 at 11:25am
Nobody: Notwithstanding Mencken’s wit and often correct diagnoses, it’s not because one’s immediate self-interest is to lie that one lies for sure. He might want to establish his reputation for telling the truth as his exchange partner might want to do.
Pierre Lemieux
Mar 13 2023 at 11:19am
Ahmed: Right, but only when the number of liars have reached a critical point.
BC
Mar 13 2023 at 4:02am
Another topical example of the usefulness of non-lying is the Fed and inflation. In this case, not lying about one’s future actions to tame inflation is more often called “maintaining credibility”. Some people advocate that the Fed not work too hard to bring inflation back to its target of 2%, even resetting the target to something higher if hitting 2% proves too difficult. Effectively, that would turn the Fed’s past promises of a 2% target into a lie and the resulting loss of credibility would make it even harder for the Fed to achieve whatever target it chose going forward.
Pierre Lemieux
Mar 13 2023 at 10:51am
BC: You make interesting links, but some distinctions may be useful. Not lying is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition to maintain one’s credibility. Other necessary conditions include to know what one is talking about (central banks and other central planners are intrinsically not very good at that) and not swerving in chicken games (difficult in a democratic political system).
Monte
Mar 14 2023 at 4:06am
Lying is fine art in politics and a highly sought-after skill. There are rarely, if any, consequences. Quite the opposite. In politics, with which it is synonymous, lying is a low risk, high reward enterprise. One simply has to be creative. Hannah Arendt, in her 1971 essay titled “Lying in Politics” expressed it beautifully:
Scientific American tells us that “Lying is among the most sophisticated and demanding accomplishments of the human brain.” Books have been written about its benefits. As Sergei Lavrov demonstrated, it can bring laughter. To Mark Twain lying was “a noble art”:
Quid est veritas? Qui curat?
Is politics nothing other than the art of deliberately lying? – Voltaire
Comments are closed.