The Truth About Lies

So let's go ahead and take a look at the problem with lies and with deception in general. Because if a lie does meet the four criteria that we talked about in the previous lesson, then what's the big deal?

What's what's so bad about that? Other than, you know, the commandment that says Thou shalt not lie?

Well, let's talk about the dollars and the sense of it, because lying and deception cost companies $994,000,000,000 per year.

That is a big million with a B and that is about 7% of annual revenue. So this goes all the way down to people fudging their time cards or taking extra expenses on business trips, all the way on up through outright fraud and everything in between.

Maybe there's just an extra internal investigation that needs to take place to find out the nuts and bolts of the he said, she said shenanigans that are going on in the workplace. I'm sure anybody who is in HR is exactly what I'm talking about with that.

What else does lies cause?

?Well, I mean, one third of all resumes contain lies. So what does that mean? That means that you hire people that aren't right for the position. They want a job, they want to get paid, and they're going to put their quote unquote, best foot forward. And in doing so, it's not even their foot.

?According to a survey careerbuilder.com , there were some ridiculous things found in some resumes. For example, somebody put someone else's picture on the resume. I mean, jeez, when you show up for the job on the first day, I think they're going to know.

They have said reported that people have pretended to be members of the Kennedy family. They include examples of work that had actually been done by the person doing the interview.

So the person conducting the interview is like, you know what, actually I did that.

They also claimed military experience from a time before they were born. So looking for lies and resumes sometimes are glaringly obvious, as in those examples.

But the reality of the situation, most people are going to lie about their educational background, their work history, and all the things that you would suspect that they would lie about in order to better get the job. One in five employees is aware of fraud in the workplace.

So we are going to talk a little bit about how to create more honesty, integrity and integrity in the workplace. I mean, this class, this class is definitely primarily about how to detect deception, you know, and, and how to and how to find it.

But finding it in the workplace, I think, is a part of that.

So not just one to one, but also organizationally, how do you detect deception? 83% of college undergrads lie to get a job.

But here's the interesting part of this statistic. They don't care because they feel completely justified doing so because they know. And I'm doing finger quotes here that everybody's doing it.

So they feel no guilt, no shame. If they don't do it, they know that other people are going to do it and it's going to put them at a disadvantage.

So 83% is not everybody. There are still some honest folks out there, but that is a pretty shockingly high.

Number one, study found that 100% of negotiators lie. Now, in the majority of cases, these were lies of omission. Negotiation requires very often what they would consider gamesmanship.

Playing your cards close to your chest, not revealing certain pieces of information, and sometimes intentionally misleading the other person in order to walk away from the negotiation table with better terms.

Now let's find some of the other places other than a negotiation table where you might encounter some lies.

Well, number one, about every ten minutes you're going to hear a lie. Anytime you're speaking with someone, every ten minutes there's going to be some form of untruth that crosses your eardrums. So be very aware and cognizant that it is happening.

Do not be naive and believe that every human being is being 100% honest with you.

These facts are going to really illuminate the fact that people tend to tend to lie. 37% of phone calls contain deception. 27% of face to face meetings contain deception. And it isn't it interesting that the number actually goes down.

?And if I ask you, why do you suppose that is? Why does the number go down when it's from phone calls to face to face meetings? And it has a very interesting answer.

People believe that they are much more transparent than they really are. And you'll know this if you've ever given a speech and you were so nervous you felt like your hands were shaking and your voice was quivering.

But the truth of the matter is the audience didn't even notice. So we feel like we're much more transparent than we really are.

We feel like if we're feeling nervous or if we are feeling unconfident about a lie that is slipping past our lips, then we feel like it's going to show. We feel like people can read us like a book.

And that tendency to feel more transparent than we really are makes us want to lie less in person because we feel like people can spot those lies and call us out for the phonies that we are in those situations.

So that's why the face to face meetings contain fewer lies than phone calls. But what about emails? You're not in front of them. There's complete distance. Why?

Only 14% of emails contain deception. Why is that true?

Well, the answer is because if I were to ask you, I'm sure you would realize that it's because there's a paper trail, there's proof, there's evidence.

When you write something down, two things happen. Number one, it is on paper, or in this case, somewhere in the digital ether.

But it's provable and traceable and trackable and number two, it takes you a little bit longer to write an email than it does to speak something.

So lies that may just accidentally slip out are going to be a lot less likely to happen, because you can delete and reframe if it does happen to come out as you're typing the paragraph.

So the slower time that it takes to create an email gives your conscience a chance to step in, slam on the brakes and say, whoa, whoa, whoa, that ain't true. And interestingly, 75% to 82%, depending on the study that you look at, of lies go undetected, which makes you wonder about all of the previous statistics.?