Dan Erwin

Most People Are Bad at Spotting Liars

It never seems to go away. You know. The colleague you're never sure you can trust. Or the one who regularly promises but rarely fulfills. And most of us are bad about spotting liars and deception. But there are a few things we know for certain about that tough subject. And for business folk, there's one reality about deception that always rings true.

Powerful people are better liars and more difficult to spot. And Dana Carney of Columbia University as proved that. Those of us with a background in rhetoric and nonverbal research have believed this for years, but we're glad to see that someone has at last validated our well-educated hunches. 

Carney's subjects were not politicians, at least not governmental politicians, but business bosses and employees.  The bosses, with larger offices and more power were tasked to do such things as assign employee salaries.  Half of all the research subjects were instructed by a computer to steal $100, and, if they could convince an interviewer that they didn't take it, they could keep it.  The other subjects were also questioned in the interviews.  The interviewers were trained to identify deception.  (Although the article didn't say so, it reflects the work of Paul Ekman, the expert in deception, who I referred to in a previous blog:  Reflections on BSing.)

The subjects were measured on five variables that indicate lying, variables that can't be easily measured in any other context. 

What the research shows is that "if you give people power, they're more comfortable lying, and it will be harder to tell they're doing it."...

Just Get On With It

One thing better managers understand is that they get rewarded for what they do. Not what they plan. The Hungarian Nobel Laureate Albert Szen-Gyorti made this point in one of the greatest--and most hilarious--stories of the 20^th century.

The experience happened during military maneuvers early in the 20^th century. The young lieutenant of a small Hungarian detachment in the Alps sent a reconnaissance unit into the icy wilderness. It began to snow immediately, snowed for 2 days, and the unit did not return. The lieutenant suffered, fearing that he had dispatched his own people to death. But on the third day the unit came back. Where had they been? How had they made their way? Yes, they said, we considered ourselves lost and waited for the end. And then ...

Do We Really Need Government?

Milton Friedman once said that “If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there’d be a shortage of sand.” The initial driver of this blog is a statement of similar ilk by a resident of my apartment who said that we don’t really need government--and we’d be better off without it. That’s what we’re hearing now from those of extreme Libertarian bent in Silicon Valley.

But in this blog I have three objectives that both include and go beyond those simplistic and stupid responses. I intend to suggest by historical data that government is one of our most precious human possessions. It’s the Chinese, today, who realize that government is what has made the West successful. Second, I want to show that the despairing and cynical belief that government is never going to change is utter nonsense. Finally, I want to point to the fact that the public and our politicians need to revisit the American experiment of government in today’s context, a task that few, thus far, are prepared to do.

A recent analysis on the state of the state by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, writing in Foreign Affairs, addresses one historical and intensely relevant question: What is the state for? ...