Our awareness of the world and of ourselves in it is maintained and refined by an endless stream of incoming information, which we perceive through all our senses and process mostly unconsciously and partly consciously.
No report is without emotional charge; remember that astonishment is one of the six basic emotions. The same report can have, and usually does have, different emotional charge depending on belonging to a social group—from a pair of people to a nation. When “our side” won 4:2, then “their” side won 2:4, and those others will derive less pleasure from it than we do. Joy is more pleasant than sadness. If this was expected, emotions on both sides will be lower in intensity than when it was not expected.
The concept of emotion comes from the Latin e-motio, which means movement. We can capture this on three axes: arousal — inhibition, approach — withdrawal, cooperation — competition. When our side won, we would be aroused, come together, and cooperate in celebrations, while fans of the opponent would be downhearted, would not be inclined to gather together (unless the tragedy was so great that it brought them together in a crowd), and in terms of mutual activity it would be near the freeze point, since sadness is a time of restraint, rumination, and searching.
Technically speaking, a lie is intentionally incorrect information, unlike an error, where this intention is absent. When it reaches a recipient, it is compared with varying intensity to their existing knowledge and experience and evaluated as true, suspicious, or incorrect. Here it depends both on the recipient’s experience and the context in which the information arrives. A report about a cow impaled on a utility pole sounds unlikely only to those who have never heard of a tornado. People living in a particular group know local conditions and know how things work there. They sometimes share truths too.
What is conformity in this context? It was already studied in the 1930s by Muzaref Sherif. He sent people into a dark room where, in the distance, he placed a point of light. Such a point of light flickers in the same way that our eyeballs constantly flicker. In the same way, stars shimmer in the sky. The point was placed at a distance that, in a healthy population, allowed estimates of its deviation in the range of five to fifteen centimeters.
The test persons entered one by one, and when they left, they reported their estimate as 5, 10, or 15 cm. Then Sherif inserted several confederates and sent the test persons in again. This time, however, the confederates, who knew the estimate of whoever entered, intentionally and aloud gave a different value of oscillation. The overwhelming majority of the test persons, when they came out, adjusted their estimate according to their report. They gave the manipulated estimate in conflict with their first observation. Why?
Morton Deutsch and Harold Gerard believe that two major pressures lead to this: the pressure of social conformity and the pressure of informational conformity. The first one causes the need not to differ too much (or at all) from the group, because people who differ are somehow punished: from ridicule to ostracism. Here, for example, we find victims of bullying. The second comes from relying on the presumably true opinion of the majority, even if it is completely off the mark; it gives greater certainty as well as a stronger sense of belonging.
From this it follows that being wrong with the majority is safer for many people than being right and lacking agreement with those whose IQ is distributed according to the Gaussian curve. A tendency to follow a strong leader can be expected in that weaker segment, because those with higher IQ can occasionally afford the luxury of independent thinking. Sometimes they cannot, as shown by further Sherif experiments focused on group cohesion and morality.
In summer camps placed in the protected natural area of Loupežnických jeskyní, he selected two groups of 11-12-year-old boys; he deliberately chose the prepubertal age so that male and female hormones were not yet mixed into behavior. Both groups were separated by a week and were creating their own dynamics. After a week, Sherif placed them in one space and set them against each other in a competitive, increasingly aggressive way. Soon hostility between the two groups reached such intensity that the boys refused to eat in one dining room. Attempts at targeted reconciliation or shared activities (attending a football match, participating in July 4 celebrations) did not reduce the ill will. Everything improved only when both groups worked together on one task (pushing a supposedly broken truck, digging a water conduit).
A group like this can paradoxically be united by a shared lie that everyone knows is out of touch with reality. American psychologists called it a “blue lie.” Blue is supposedly derived from the color of a police uniform. A blue lie is primitive, easy to detect, and transparent; it resembles the first lies made when a child still lacks enough experience, but on the other hand the child already knows that parents are not omniscient and that it is possible to present them with something other than the truth. Unlike more sophisticated “white lies” of older children aimed more toward gain, blue lies represent a tendency to exculpate oneself and shift the blame onto others: the cat knocked it over, he hit me first, father ate it.
The term resurfaced in connection with the outrageous statements of President Trump, which, oddly enough, his supporters believe, or at least behave as if they do. Kang Lee of the University of Toronto explains that these lies do have as their primary purpose bringing the liar an advantage, but at the same time they also unite the group to which they belong. This cannot be said about “black lies,” which are intended to benefit the liar at everyone else’s expense. A blue lie, for instance, is the shared claim by fans that the hand never touched the ball and that the goal was called offside unfairly.
A lie, like violence, is a weapon used against an opponent. From the time of Sisyphus and Odysseus, who became immortal through this art, through Machiavelli to the recent Albanian dictator Hodža, who convinced an entire nation that the world was preparing war against him. Wherever a group has no opponents, they need to create them, whether it is the Jewish community, non-existent refugees, or a Prague café. A tense, dramatic atmosphere then arises, leading to an exalted unifying cry: Those who are not with us are against us. A diverse yet organized community can then easily turn into a crowd.
Then there are noble lies, not only pia fraus, which conceals a bad state of affairs, but also a part of the process commonly called the placebo effect. It is worth mentioning one story from its rich history. A study designed as a double trick with excellent results. (Citation: Gracely RH, et al.: Clinicians' expectations influence placebo analgesia. Lancet. 1985, Jan 5;1(8419):43). In the 1980s, among pain-relieving drugs there appeared a real miracle: fentanyl, acting on the opioid system. Then on a dental clinic the authors arrived with an offer for a clinical trial examining its effects. Not only that, but against placebo; and because the designers were apparently somewhat sadistic, naloxone was to be included in the program as a third preparation. Naloxone does not help against pain at all; on the contrary, it blocks opioid receptors and thus prevents the analgesic effect of some drugs as well as endogenous opioids.
The dentists had to administer, in a blinded study (no one knew which preparation—placebo, naloxone, or fentanyl—was in the vial), one of them to patients after wisdom tooth extraction, which is usually more complicated and therefore painful. Patients were asked to indicate on a 0–10 scale how their pain increased or decreased after extraction, and after one hour. Before the study could get started, the organizers came with a complaint that the ministry had not authorized such free and careless handling of a drug class of strictly controlled opiates and that unfortunately fentanyl had to be removed from the study.
So the study began, the dentists pulled out the wisdom teeth, and the patients recorded pain intensity after the administered powder. This continued for two months, and then the cheerful organizers came back saying they had obtained permission to include fentanyl, and the study ran for another two months. The results are shown in the graph published by the authors of the cited work:
The upper curve, marked as Placebo (PN), shows how pain increased in the first part of the study, while the lower curve, marked as Placebo (PNF), shows the decline in pain after extraction during the second phase, when the “wonderful fentanyl” was included in the experiment.
And that prank? What a shock! Fentanyl was never actually included in the study, a fact unknown to the doctors, let alone the patients! To this day it remains a question of how the doctors conveyed to the patients that noble lie that among the painkillers they are giving them is the most effective one they could receive. Is such a lie unethical, or is it not?
MUDr. Radkin Honzák psychiatrist Blog autora: http://blog.aktualne.cz/blogy/radkin-honzak.php