We Did Not Know What Was Coming Series: UCL Study — The Brain Adapts to Dishonesty

PREFACE: To say the last seven years have been a journey of growth for me and this country is an understatement. To help me process and cope with the roller-coaster of emotions I have felt these years, I started writing on Medium right after the 2016 election. My last series ended December 31, 2020, after Biden won the presidential election.

Recently I realized I missed writing “in my journal” and decided to go back to the very beginning and re-read my essays. I wanted to see where I started out on November 9, 2016, and where I am now. I decided to re-post my favorite blogs with a short present-day commentary and continue onto current times.

I hope a few of you will join me on this journey of recollection, reflection, and learning. Little did we know what we were headed into.

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UCL Study — The Brain Adapts to Dishonesty: November 28, 2016

In my very first post I wrote three things: I was a Hillary Clinton supporter; I was proud to be an American and I was a psychotherapist by profession. I also said my point of view shifted a bit based on what hat I was wearing. Today I am writing from the proud to be an American point of view, but I am not feeling so proud.

There is a sad joke floating around that asks, “How can you tell if a politician is lying?” The answer? “They are moving their lips.” As I reflect on the last eighteen months of the presidential campaign it seems the politicians are not the only people who tell lies. The number of untruths that have filled the airwaves, Tweeter feeds, Facebook pages, web pages, printed pages and social media of all kinds is beyond calculation. This distresses me so.

I was so distressed I went on-line to see what research says about the current state of lying in this country. Well there are hundreds of studies out there that basically say we all lie all the time. We lie to ourselves; we lie to others. We tell little white lies and huge blatant lies. We lie defensively so not to get in trouble; we lie offensively to make ourselves look good. We lie to get our needs met. We lie to meet our family/friend’s needs. There are lies of omission where we remain silent. There are lies we shout from the rooftops. There are individual lies; there are institutional lies. These lies are found in our private lives, in business, the church, academia at all levels, and scientific research — truly all areas where humans are part of the equation.

I want to cite one more study because it really got to me. In October 2016, Nature Neuroscience published a study titled “The Brain Adapts to Dishonesty” by Dr. Neil Garrett and fellow researchers from The Department of Experimental Psychology, University of College London: http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nn.4426.htmlthat

Bottom line the researchers used MRI’s to measure the activity of the brain’s amygdala when participants in the study lied to further their own benefit. The amygdala is the part of the brain which signals the rate of aversion to immoral acts. In layman terms the firing of the amygdala makes us feel bad when we do bad things.

Senior author, Dr. Talli Sharot explains, “When we lie for personal gain, our amygdala produces a negative feeling that limits the extent to which we are prepared to lie. However this response fades as we continue to lie, and the more it fades the bigger our lies become.” Fellow researcher Dr. Neil Garrett states, “This may lead to a “slippery slope” where small acts of dishonesty escalate into more significant lies with a reduced emotional response to these acts. Each individual lie desensitizes the brain just a little bit more to the guilt-inducing effects of dishonesty. “

Wow I wonder what the amygdala activity looks like for all the major players of this election. Pretty scary stuff. It is probably why I have been having trouble sleeping since election night. I woke up on the morning of the 21st at 2:00am and turned on the computer to check the early morning news. A number of news outlets were reporting on a meeting between Trump and several top media executives. I am quoting from The New York Post to give you their take on what went on.

President-elect Donald Trump on Monday reportedly lashed out at several top media executives and their outlets in a high-profile meeting, according to The New York Post (11.21.2016).

Prominent journalists and executives from CNN, NBC, CBS, and Fox were among those in attendance at the meeting at Trump Tower.

“Trump kept saying, ‘We’re in a room of liars, the deceitful dishonest media who got it all wrong.’ He addressed everyone in the room calling the media dishonest, deceitful liars. He called out Jeff Zucker by name and said everyone at CNN was a liar, and CNN was [a] network of liars,” a source told the Post.

Earlier, Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s senior adviser who ran his presidential campaign, called the meeting “excellent” and “unprecedented,” praising the fact that it was arranged in two days.

Conway later denied that Trump lashed out at the media during the meeting.

“No, that’s not true at all. I sat right to his left. He did not explode in anger,” Conway said during an appearance on Bloomberg’s “With All Due Respect.”

This is just a simple little example but I am really curious about the state of the amygdala in that room. Why? Because if our president-elect and the people he surrounds himself with have no more amygdala activity, we are in big trouble. We are also in big trouble if the people in the media outlets are suffering from the same brain atrophy. In this moment though I am betting they told the truth.

A friend asked me a long time ago how I could tell if a client was lying to me. I thought that was a great question and took some time to think about it. The simple answer is that I look for consistency over time. I see folks for a least a year if not more as they sort through their lives. That is a long time to keep stories and details straight if the person choses to lie. Consistency comes easily though if truth is spoken. I also have to listen very closely to see if that consistency is there.

So who was lying about the meeting between trump and the media executives? I do not have the answer. To what degree does Donald Trump lie in general? Sadly I actually think he lies a lot. It is less than three weeks after the election and he has backtracked on building a wall between Mexico and the United States saying maybe part wall and a fence. He already he has gone back on his promise to repeal Obamacare saying parts of it are good. He sent out a message he would not prosecute Hillary for the email server. He also promised to keep an “open mind” about whether to withdraw from the Paris climate accord, saying there was “some connectivity” between human activity and rising global temperatures, even though he once dismissed climate change as a hoax advanced by China.

Personally I am happy to hear all this but he has flat out lied to his supporters reversing promises he made over and over and over again during the eighteen months of the campaign — all done mere days after his election and without any remorse or regret. If I were his supporters, I would be asking for an MRI.

To deepen my sense of sadness I just read that today trump tweeted, “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” What? Who voted illegally? What proof does he have? The truth is Hillary still leads by more than 2 million popular votes. He lied. The truth is trump is upset Jill Stein is asking for a vote recount in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. You would think he would be pleased to have the recount which might support his claim.

What I know for sure is if a person repeatedly lies to others over time they are revealed to be untrustworthy. Eventually you do not know if the words they are saying are true or not; it feels like you are on shifting sands with them, not the bedrock of truth. When that happens the person is no longer safe to be in relationship with and if that person happens to be the president-elect we are in a whole lot of trouble.

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Commentary: November 1, 2023

Little did we know in November 2016 the depth and breadth of trump’s pathological compulsive lying. The Washington Post had an inkling though. Very early into his time in office, the Washington Post started The Fact Checker. The name is self-explanatory. They wanted to know if trump was telling the truth when he opened his mouth.

The folks at the Post sought to be rigorous in their evaluation of trump’s statements as to which were facts vs lies. The Fact Checker is a verified signatory to the International Fact-Checking Network code of principles. In October 2020, The Trump claims database was nominated by the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University for inclusion in a list of the Top Ten Works of Journalism of the Decade. The nomination stated, “The project is a sterling example of what journalists should do — holding the powerful accountable by using reporting and fact.”

In total The Fact Checker counted a total of 30,573 false or misleading claims trump made during his White House tenure. By the way, it was not until the January 6th insurrection, did mainstream media begin using the word “lies” when referring to trump. Up until that point he was accused of making false or misleading claims.

Here’s what they learned: when The Washington Post Fact Checker team first started cataloguing “President Donald Trump’s false or misleading claims”, they recorded 492 suspect claims in the first 100 days of his presidency. On November 2nd alone, the day before the 2020 vote, trump made 503 false or misleading claims as he barnstormed across the country in a desperate effort to win reelection.

This astonishing jump in falsehoods is the story of trump’s tumultuous reign. By the end of his term, trump had accumulated 30,573 lies during his presidency — averaging about 21 lies a day.

What is especially striking is how the tsunami of untruths not only kept rising the longer he served as president but became increasingly unmoored from the truth.

Trump averaged about 6 claims a day in his first year as president, 16 claims day in his second year, 22 claims day in this third year — and 39 claims a day in his final year. Put another way, it took him 27 months to reach 10,000 claims and an additional 14 months to reach 20,000. He then exceeded the 30,000 mark less than five months later.

Clearly trump’s amygdala atrophied long long ago. What I am thinking about this morning though is that the enormity of his lies grew to such a degree that he came close to overturning the 2020 election by inciting a failed insurrection in an attempt to seize power.

There have been heroes who stepped up to hold trump and his followers accountable for the criminal acts spurred on by his lies. One of the greatest is Ms. Fani Willis, Attorney General for Fulton County, Georgia, who has indicted Trump and eighteen co-conspirators for his efforts to overturn the 2020 elections.

The indictment, handed up August 14, 2023, by a grand jury in Fulton County, Georgia, is a kind of prosecutorial fact check of the former president’s relentless campaign of election-related dishonesty. Listed below are the lies attributed to trump himself along with the page number in the indictment. If you read the indictment, verified facts are listed under each charge countering trump’s lie. I think it is really important to list these lies.

1. Trump’s lie that he was the real winner of the 2020 election. (Page 20 of the indictment)

2. Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was “corrupt.” (Page 45)

3. Trump’s lie that he won Georgia in 2020. (Pages 44 and 52)

4. Trump’s lie that he “also won the other Swing States” in 2020. (Page 46)

5. Trump’s lie that there was “massive VOTER FRAUD” in Georgia. (Page 48)

6. Trump’s lie that “the number of false and/or irregular votes is far greater than needed to change the Georgia election result.” (Page 68)

7. Trump’s lie about a supposedly mysterious drop of Georgia ballots. (Page 51)

8. Trump’s lie about ballots being “dumped” into Fulton County and an adjacent county. (Page 88)

9. Trump’s lie that “close to 5,000” Georgia ballots were cast in the names of deceased people. (Pages 9 and 88)

10. Trump’s lie that “about 4,502” people voted in Georgia even though they weren’t on the voter registration list. (Page 51) Raffensperger wrote in his 2021 book that “our investigation confirmed all voters were registered” and that no evidence was ever presented to support this claim Trump made on the call.

11. Trump’s lie that a Fulton County elections worker stuffed the ballot box. (Page 88)

12. Trump’s lie that Freeman is a “professional vote scammer.” (Page 88)

13. Trump’s lie that that there were “thousands and thousands” of people in Georgia who were told at voting places on Election Day that they couldn’t vote because a ballot had already been cast in their name. (Page 88)

14. Trump’s lie that, during the phone call, Raffensperger “was unwilling, or unable,” to address Trump’s claims about a “‘ballots under table’ scam, ballot destruction, out of state ‘voters’, dead voters, and more.” (Page 52)

15. Trump’s lie that “as many as 2,560 felons with an uncompleted sentence” were permitted to vote in Georgia. (Page 86)

16. Trump’s lie that Georgia had “at least 66,247” underage voters. (Page 49)

17. Trump’s lies about people voting in Georgia while registered with only a post office box. (Pages 49 and 88)

18. Trump’s lie that states knew their certified vote totals were “based on irregularities and fraud.” (Page 63)

19. Trump’s lie that Pence had the power to reject Biden’s electoral votes. (Pages 57, 60–62)

20. Trump’s lie that Pence agreed with him about the vice president’s powers. (Page 61)

21. Trump’s lie that “in Detroit, we had, I think it was, 139% of the people voted.” (Page 88)

22. Trump’s lie that “in Pennsylvania, they had well over 200,000 more votes than they had people voting.” (Page 88)

23. Trump’s broader lies about the election in Pennsylvania. (Page 21)

24. Trump’s lies about the election in Arizona. (Page 23)

25. Trump’s lie that thousands of dead people voted in Michigan. (Page 51)

26. Trump’s broader lies about supposed election fraud in Michigan. (Page 21)

27. Trump’s lie that phony pro-Trump electors were real electors. (Page 76 and others)

I am on-my-knees grateful that Ms. Willis’s amygdala is strong and healthy and I look forward to her prosecution of trump and his gang of thugs. What really worries me though are the brains of those individuals who voted for trump in 2020 after four years of incessant lies. 74,222,958 people voted for him; that is 46.8 percent of the votes cast in the 2020 election.

To make matters even more dire, is the fact that trump appears to be the Republican front runner for the 2024presidential election. I shudder to think what the brain MRIs of his supporters look like — especially their amygdalas.