Pants on Fire

RNZ Originals
Pants on Fire

Lies pervade our lives. So why do we do it and why does it hurt so much?

Season 1

  1. EPISODE 1

    The Lies That Hurt

    Nothing stings like the discovery that we have been lied to. Betrayal hurts and some of the most painful lies are those around infidelity. where betrayal is compounded by a powerful sense of rejection. Nothing stings like the discovery that we have been lied to. Whether it's the sense someone is making a fool of you or the feeling of being deceived. Even the reality that someone has taken away your power of choice. Betrayal hurts and some of the most painful lies are those around infidelity where betrayal is compounded by a powerful sense of rejection. Professor Marc Wilson from the School of Psychology at Victoria University, Wellington says: "The reason people tell lies is because they are reinforced for doing so." Put simply, most of our lying behaviour is based on the expectation of getting something in return - a reward. For example, if someone is embarking on an affair the exchange is for excitement and intimacy that they feel they may not be getting in their current relationship. There's also the ego boost of being with a new partner who finds you attractive. When a relationship isn't functioning some people seek escape, and that can mean finding a connection with someone else, rather than facing up to, and dealing with, issues and problems in their current relationship. Dan was in his mid-thirties and married with two daughters when he became aware of his wife's infidelity. After a protracted, painful process the couple separated, sharing the care of their children. Over time this arrangement proved problematic. With the children caught in the crossfire of the break-up and tensions running high, Dan made a rash decision and presented his children with an ultimatum, which resulted in their leaving to live under sole care of their mother. Dan seldom sees his daughters now and feels an acute sense of loss and regret that he will never be close to them again. It's been a few years since the split and Dan has moved on, but the powerful impact of the lies and deceit he experienced has shaped his life. Katie was with her long-term partner when she became suspicious that he was cheating on her. Over the course of their relationship they had worked and studied in different cities and spent long periods apart. She was shocked when she discovered the extent of his lying. "He had been systematically cheating for a long time and my suspicions were entirely correct," she says. She was reluctant to believe that her husband would ever cheat on her with another woman. But before presenting him with evidence she wanted to give him the opportunity to confess. When she did, he denied everything… Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

    22 min

  2. EPISODE 2

    Natural-Born Fibbers

    We take a journey from the trainer-wheels fibs of toddlers through to our peak period of dishonesty - the teen years - with a child psychotherapist and a family counsellor. We take a journey from the trainer-wheels fibs of toddlers through to our peak period of dishonesty - the teen years - with a child psychotherapist and a family counsellor. Duncan Smith: As a child, I was a prodigious liar "We lie because we are reinforced for doing so" - Marc Wilson, Professor of Psychology, Victoria University As a child lying seemed to come easily, naturally. Whether my lies were told to impress gullible schoolmates or to deceive trusting parents, they sprang freely from my lips. I remember, aged seven and we shifted from Ranfurly, a small Central Otago village to the bustling metropolis of mid-sixties Hamilton. My reading level was very poor for my age and to remedy this I was put into primer one to get the basics skills under my belt. Being a 'big seven year' old placed in a class alongside all these 'little five year olds' I felt out of place and deeply humiliated. I was super motivated by the humiliation and worked like a Trojan to improve my reading. The first day of the next term I was put back into a class with kids my own age - a huge relief but also a major challenge. Most of my classmates knew each other well, many had been in kindergarten together. I felt like a real outsider. Having been blessed (or cursed) with a fertile imagination I soon found I could exploit their complete lack of knowledge about my past by filling it out with colourful anecdotes - lies. I told tall tales about living on a high country station, riding a palomino horse and mustering amongst the snow-capped mountains. I claimed expertise in trout fishing, duck shooting and deer stalking. And I was a crack shot with a 303! The truth, of course, was much more mundane. Did my classmates believe me and my tall (macho) tales? It's hard from this distance to gauge what they thought. Lying certainly helped me create an identity (albeit false) for myself and fed or at least comforted my ego, so bruised by the demotion to primer one. What strikes me about this now is how naturally I fell upon this lying behaviour to improve my lot. Our society is held together not just by a shared commitment to truth but also by the understanding that we all lie to each other. Lies get really bad press and sometimes of course lies and lying are hugely destructive and profoundly evil. There are times though when we really don't want to hear the truth, where a lie is the kindest, most helpful offering we can make. Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

    23 min

  3. EPISODE 3

    Sweet-Talking Ernest Dickens and the Spanish Prisoner

    Sweetheart scams and the booming cyber-fraud industry are fueled by the human drive to trust people. Sweetheart scams and the booming cyber-fraud industry are fueled by the human drive to trust people. With cyber-fraud predicted to be the big growth area for criminal activity in the coming decade, it's a good idea to be wary of who you trust online. Imagine finding yourself fit, active but very much alone in your sixties or seventies. Perhaps your partner has died, or there has been a divorce or separation. You can look forward to another twenty years or more of active life and, as time passes, loneliness sets in. You want someone special in your life again. But how do you even go about finding that someone? Many people in this situation end up looking online to seek a prospective mate. This is where the trouble can start, according to Detective Inspector Iain Chapman National Manager - Assets Recovery Units Financial Crime Group. “[There are] three types of victims: the first kind can lose a little bit of money [and] they’re too embarrassed to come forward; the second kind [have] lost quite a bit of money and it’s life changing; the third type don’t even realise that they are a victim…" Chapman says the typical victim of a romance fraud is a widow or single woman in her sixties or seventies who is looking to meet a new partner. They're likely to live alone and tend to be new to computer technology which means they're not aware of safe practices online. Online relationships can blossom quickly and deliver a sense of intimacy and trust alongside a powerful feeling of attachment. For the lonely hearts these instant feelings of trust and intimacy feed the notion that a genuinely loving relationship is forming. It is these empathetic feelings that make people vulnerable and give the scammer opportunities to exploit them. "Con artists and scammers wouldn't be able to ply their trade if there wasn't a certain base-level of trust," says Professor Marc Wilson from the school of psychology at Victoria University. Wilson says a fraudster's modus operandi will vary, but confidence tricksters all operate by gaining our trust and confidence. This is crucial to their achieving their goals. They also know that all humans seem to be hardwired to believe that what people tell them is probably the truth. This is especially true of those who really want to believe in the person delivering the message. "Some of the cyber fraudsters are willing to play the long game, seeing it as an investment with big returns," Detective Inspector Iain Chapman says… Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

    28 min

  4. EPISODE 4

    The Truth About Lies in Fiction

    In the arts there is much made of the notion of truth: writers search for the truth in a story; visual artists, no matter what form they work in, are all aiming to reveal or discover some form of the truth; scriptwriters want their work to resonate and to ring true; actors want to be true to their characters. How does all that sit within our concept of lying? For the most part society sees creating fiction as a positive activity whereas telling lies is held to be a negative activity. Fiction has a capacity to enrich and redeem, to foster insight and empathy. So where and how does the creative activity of visual, written, performed fiction - aimed at revealing a truth - cross over and meld with the real world idea of truth and lies? When we are creating tales of people who do not exist in places that never were (we need to) understand that 'truth' is not what (actually) happens, but what it tells us about who we are. Fiction is the lies that tell the truth,after all. - Neil Gaiman If lies can be measured on the same continuum as other creative acts do our lies say anything about us? Are lies simply another expression of our infinite capacity to respond creatively to the world we live in? Advertising requires huge amounts of creativity. It's basically the same creative drive which produces great novels and art, but it's harnessed in the production of eye-catching /ear catching imagery and sound. And while advertising might be informative, engaging and entertaining, it can also carry less obvious and more sinister messages. It often presents an idealised world where the sun is always shining, the people are young, beautiful and slim and families are whole and happy. We can become conditioned to this as some sort of normal view of the world and so our actual day-to-day life can come to feel very dull and dumpy by comparison. And there's the whole question around issues like eating disorders. While there are many factors that might feed negative perceptions of how we think we look, it's pretty well accepted that a major contributing factor is likely to be the prevalence of idealised body images to which we are constantly exposed in advertising. Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

    25 min

  5. EPISODE 5

    The Tangled Web

    Do our politicians lie to us? What are the lies that really matter in politics? Should we be worried, or do we just like to think all politicians lie? Do our politicians lie to us? What are the lies that really matter in politics? Should we be worried, or do we just like to think all politicians lie? Politicians, real estate agents and journalists seem an unlikely grouping but they do have at least one thing in common - they occupy the bottom three positions in a survey of the professions we trust most. This is according to a recent Ipsos MORI Global market and opinion research survey. Politicians are routinely at the very bottom of the heap in these surveys about trustworthiness. I've always put that down to a kind of opportunism on the part of the 'ordinary' class of the powerless, and it seems I may be right. As mere voters, when we participate in such a survey, we take the opportunity to have a free swing at the political power brokers and lawmakers. While we may indeed be responsible for handing them power by voting them in, we enjoy the chance to bring them back down to size. And this 'tall poppy' knocking behaviour isn't just a local aberration - in fact, there seems to be some kind of unspoken pact shared by the general public the world over to rate our political representatives at the bottom of the heap. Yes well, maybe we just know our history? Certainly through the ages there have been many examples of dishonest and corrupt politicians: whether they are lining their own pockets, re-writing laws retrospectively to avoid prosecution, undertaking radically different policies from those they campaigned on; not to mention the outrages against human rights, rigging of elections, or using tools of the state to squash democratic processes and dialogue. The list of misdemeanours goes on and on and on. Perhaps it's fair to say that historically, politicians have 'form' in this regard. So what's the case in New Zealand? The podcast series Pants on Fire has been about exploring lies and lying as an aspect of human behaviour and if I can take anything from my work on the series, it is pretty plain to me that, as a nation, we can tell fibs with the best of them. I've learned that as a species humans do lie frequently, and for all manner of reasons - not all of them bad. In the final analysis, our politicians are as humanly frail as the rest of us, so it wouldn't be surprising to find they are just as prone to lying as you or I. In this episode, 'The Tangled Web' we dig into lies in politics. What it reveals about political dishonesty in New Zealand is quite unexpected. Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

    29 min
  • 5 Episodes

3.6
out of 5
103 Ratings

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Lies pervade our lives. So why do we do it and why does it hurt so much?

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