Published: February 21, 2008 10:35 pm      

STAWAR: Believe it or not?

Just the other day I was listing to a man tell a rather long personal story and somewhere in the middle of it I suddenly decided that the guy was, as my father would have said, “full of beans.” Only my father wouldn’t have said “beans.”

I’m not sure what about the story lead me to mistrust it, but it just seemed too peppered with famous names and heroics to be true. It was also a bit too “Chicken Soup for the Soul” and the people in it were far too beautiful and talented. (I guess any personal story that throws in a president of the United States, as an aside, is likely to induce some skepticism in me.)

I know in relating personal memoirs there is something called poetic license. Many consider them essentially works of fiction, since they rely on memory rather than fact. But as writer Tobias Wolfe has said “memory has its own story to tell.”

Oprah Book Club author James Frey really got in hot water a couple of years ago when he embarrassed Oprah by exaggerating his memoir about recovering from addiction — ”A Million Little Pieces.” This was nothing new, back in the 1970’s Mary McCarthy said on television that every word that fellow writer, Lillian Hellman, wrote in her memoirs was a lie, including the words “and” and “the.”

Journalists still fret about Janet Cooke’s Pulitzer Prize winning story, about Jimmy the 8-year old heroin addict, which turned out to be fraudulent. Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair, Mike Barnicle and Patricia Smith are only a few journalists in recent years who have also been fired after being charged with plagiarism or fictionalizing their stories.

I was surprised to learned that even the great Hoosier Poet, James Witcomb Riley, was once fired after he convinced the editor of the Kokomo Dispatch to publish one of his poems, “Leonainie,” claiming it was a long-lost work by Edgar Allan Poe.

When writing, I know there is often a great temptation to improve on reality and bend the facts to make the story sound better. And there are always plenty of people ready and willing to believe. As the French philosopher Blasie Pascal once wrote, “We want to be deceived.”

I think hoaxes — intentional and otherwise — stem from several sources. Some are done simply for the money and notoriety they bring, Clifford Irving’s bogus biography of Howard Hughes for example. In other frauds there may be a strong element of anger and seeking some kind of justification — like the much rejected author who submitted thinly disguised Jane Austen novels to various publishers and then reveled in all their rejection slips.

There are other emotional reasons for such deceptions such as seeking sympathy or attention, trying to boost poor self esteem, or in rare cases, people may suffer from a psychiatric syndrome called “pseudologia fantastica,” a sort of pathological lying in which the patient tells wild and fantastic stories. Some people just seem to like to lie for the heck of it. I had a friend, Dennis, back in school who would lie about anything. For example I remember once how we all got bad grades on a test and Dennis told everyone he got a 62 when he actually got a 57. When I asked him what was the point, he just looked chagrined and couldn’t answer.

But that is only half of the equation. The motives of liars and hoaxers don’t address the question as to, “Why are we so gullible? “ Writing in the “Skeptical Inquirer,” Robert Caroll says that deception maybe an essential survival tool for our species. He also describes what social scientists call the “confirmation bias.” Basically this is the tendency for people to seek out and believe those things that provide evidence for their existing worldview. So basically we believe what fits in nicely with what we already believe. Anything else would cause a lot of conflict and require us to make painful changes.

The Internet has presented a whole new venue for hoaxers, from the various e-mail scams to completely fraudulent Web sites. Many previously debunked urban legends are now being recycled as more and more people have adopted e-mail as part of their everyday routine. Many of these myths seem to have even more credibility now, since they are presented in written form.

You can even test your own gullibility at the online Museum of Hoaxes Web site (www.museumofhoaxes .com). It said I am actually overly skeptical. And I think that is probably true. I had another friend in high school who was constantly exaggerating and bragging. Once he was telling a group of us how he had taken his old car down to the local drag strip and had won his class that weekend.

It was so obviously a bunch of bologna, that I just knew he totally was making it all up. Usually I let Mike slide, but for some reason I challenged him this time. He looked hurt and embarrassed and I immediately wished I hadn’t said anything. The next day he came to school with the trophy he had won and I had to eat a lot of crow that day. It turned out that I had called him on the one time in probably a thousand that he was actually telling the truth. I have since learned to keep much of my doubting to myself. So maybe that guy’s long rambling personal story was true, but I still doubt it.



Terry L. Stawar, Ed.D., lives in Georgetown and is the CEO of LifeSpring in Jeffersonville. He can be reached at tstawar@lifespr.com or 812-206-1234.