Okay, I have to write this. I am overflowing with a protest feeling. It’s strange how everything* just comes together at same time sometimes and one is forced to make generalizations.
I have discovered a new psychological trait in people now-a-days. Those who cannot lie on one side of a lie-scale. Their strategy is a very strange medium strategy – that of pretense and fake words. So if you don’t care for a person, why the pretense? I am okay with people not caring about others, but I get real disutility from people who feign to care. I am just trying to put the issue in perspective. Please don’t mistake the box below for a game box. I have used it to lend some clarity to my thoughts. There is only one player – your friend who can have different feelings. ‘Inside’ refers to what she has in her heart, and ‘outside’ refers to what she portrays to you. And those are not payoffs, just convenient labels for the grids. I describe the payoffs in words below.
People in the grids 1 and 4 are honest people – you see on their faces what is there in the heart.
However it is grid 2 and 3 which is the pretense sort of people. These people are alluded to in Sri Guru Granth Sahib as ‘Jin man hor, mukh hor’ – (Those who are somebody at their face and somebody else inside)
3 can occur very rarely, may be as a momentary emotional blackmail wherein an individual pretends that he hardly cares while in reality he cares a lot, this deceitful façade may be to teach the other person a lesson. I can’t think why this can be a permanent strategy for somebody.
My problem however stems from people in grid 2. I have been reading a bit of psychology and about lying behavior recently. So, the theory goes that there are some perceptible indicators which can be detected in the facial expressions/body language of a person – for instance, shallow smiles not reaching the eyes using only the muscles around the mouth, propensity to lean backward as if trying to run away or talking in an unusually exaggerated manner.
Pretense comes in varying degrees. I used to have a silly landlady at my PG in the first year – she would lie wildly, you could tell at her face and worse, she would have flawless justifications for all the castles in the air she would build up. However her pretense would soothe me sometimes, probably she could lie so flawlessly sometimes that it would appear as if she really cared. Haha!
And then there are people who are bad in their pretense. You don’t have to be exceptionally clairvoyant to decipher the pretense. So sometimes, logically contradictory statements or incomplete arguments might spew out from their mouths. Their eyes would be busy watching someone or somebody at a distance, while a standard compliment or word of concern would come out of their mouths, as if after a lot of hesitation. Sometimes, lying can occur even when the person is maintaining eye contact – unusual blinking or excessive shaking /nodding of head can occur. The worse thing is when you know this fact already and are able to make out. The realization is even worse that of (Don’t care, Don’t care). When suddenly you get up one morning and find out that your apparent well-wisher is using a (Don’t care, Care) strategy, the result can be heart- breaking.
It’s a little thing really, but that surely teaches me something. Assuming my friend and I are alike in our feelings, meaning that we get similar payoffs, then reasoning symmetrically, I should always refrain from 2 if I really consider her as a friend and would not like to cause her grief. Its okay, if she doesn’t adopt the same strategy out of common knowledge assumptions – but at least I get exonerated from the guilt causing hurt to someone.
Ah! I feel nice now – probably Waheguru did this to bring me to the above conclusion, channelizing my gripe to a logical lesson. :)
I have discovered a new psychological trait in people now-a-days. Those who cannot lie on one side of a lie-scale. Their strategy is a very strange medium strategy – that of pretense and fake words. So if you don’t care for a person, why the pretense? I am okay with people not caring about others, but I get real disutility from people who feign to care. I am just trying to put the issue in perspective. Please don’t mistake the box below for a game box. I have used it to lend some clarity to my thoughts. There is only one player – your friend who can have different feelings. ‘Inside’ refers to what she has in her heart, and ‘outside’ refers to what she portrays to you. And those are not payoffs, just convenient labels for the grids. I describe the payoffs in words below.
OUTSIDE
|
CARE
|
DON’T CARE
|
|
CARE
|
1
|
3
|
|
DON’T CARE
|
2
|
4
|
However it is grid 2 and 3 which is the pretense sort of people. These people are alluded to in Sri Guru Granth Sahib as ‘Jin man hor, mukh hor’ – (Those who are somebody at their face and somebody else inside)
3 can occur very rarely, may be as a momentary emotional blackmail wherein an individual pretends that he hardly cares while in reality he cares a lot, this deceitful façade may be to teach the other person a lesson. I can’t think why this can be a permanent strategy for somebody.
My problem however stems from people in grid 2. I have been reading a bit of psychology and about lying behavior recently. So, the theory goes that there are some perceptible indicators which can be detected in the facial expressions/body language of a person – for instance, shallow smiles not reaching the eyes using only the muscles around the mouth, propensity to lean backward as if trying to run away or talking in an unusually exaggerated manner.
Pretense comes in varying degrees. I used to have a silly landlady at my PG in the first year – she would lie wildly, you could tell at her face and worse, she would have flawless justifications for all the castles in the air she would build up. However her pretense would soothe me sometimes, probably she could lie so flawlessly sometimes that it would appear as if she really cared. Haha!
And then there are people who are bad in their pretense. You don’t have to be exceptionally clairvoyant to decipher the pretense. So sometimes, logically contradictory statements or incomplete arguments might spew out from their mouths. Their eyes would be busy watching someone or somebody at a distance, while a standard compliment or word of concern would come out of their mouths, as if after a lot of hesitation. Sometimes, lying can occur even when the person is maintaining eye contact – unusual blinking or excessive shaking /nodding of head can occur. The worse thing is when you know this fact already and are able to make out. The realization is even worse that of (Don’t care, Don’t care). When suddenly you get up one morning and find out that your apparent well-wisher is using a (Don’t care, Care) strategy, the result can be heart- breaking.
It’s a little thing really, but that surely teaches me something. Assuming my friend and I are alike in our feelings, meaning that we get similar payoffs, then reasoning symmetrically, I should always refrain from 2 if I really consider her as a friend and would not like to cause her grief. Its okay, if she doesn’t adopt the same strategy out of common knowledge assumptions – but at least I get exonerated from the guilt causing hurt to someone.
Ah! I feel nice now – probably Waheguru did this to bring me to the above conclusion, channelizing my gripe to a logical lesson. :)
*Subhashish's insightful blog post, Aleesha's recent theory (both found here: http://dyspepsia-now.blogspot.in/2013/02/skeletons-in-cupboard.html ) and most importantly, a casual remark by someone this afternoon were the triggers.
For reading more about lies and how to detect them : read http://www.wikihow.com/Detect-Lies
For reading more about lies and how to detect them : read http://www.wikihow.com/Detect-Lies
