Lying politicians: Truths about why and when our leaders lie

“People are really, really not good at it. And even when we offer training you just see small, marginal improvements. Even looking at people who are lie-detecting for a living, like police detectives, they actually perform no better than college students,” said Christian Hart, a professor of psychology at Texas Woman’s University and the co-author of Big Liars: What Psychological Science Tells Us About Lying and How You Can Avoid Being Duped.

At the best of times, people can discern liars based on visual cues about 54 per cent of the time, which is only slightly better than flipping a coin. And, remarkably, the only reason we perform better than guessing is because a small portion of the population is unbelievably bad at lying, so much so that it tangibly affects the statistics.

“There’s about 10 per cent of people who are horrible liars and easily detected,” said Hart. “When we look at the types of people whose lies can be detected from their behaviour, they tend to be people who are really inept in social situations and their ineptness is really revealing when they lie.”

The many shades of dishonesty

Although politicians have a reputation for rampant dishonesty, the barefaced lie is usually a last resort.

Politicians will generally offer lesser forms of dishonesty first. Maybe that’s a strategic decision, because getting caught in a big lie can be damaging to a political career. But the idea that people who go into politics are fundamentally more dishonest than the average person isn’t reflected in recent studies.

“The types of people that go into politics don’t appear to be any different than the average person when it comes to how often they lie,” said Hart.

That said, inside the large body of research on lying that has been compiled over the last few decades is a fairly resilient finding that lying works for career advancement, especially in politics. Politicians who are willing to bend the truth are more likely to get re-elected, meaning that even honest people will have a powerful incentive to deceive the electorate in the hopes of keeping their job.

Many politicians will lie impulsively to get out of a jam, said Mitch Heimpel, the director of campaigns and government relations at Enterprise Canada.

Subsequent reporting backed up the Globe’s story.

Former U.S. president Bill Clinton also famously told a whopper in 1998, when he ended a televised address with the line: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” Of course, journalists quickly debunked that lie and uncovered an affair between Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern.

Heimpel said it was one of the first lies that came to mind and a good example of how quickly leaders will resort to a barefaced lie if they find themselves in trouble.

The political context plays a huge role in how much benefit of the doubt a politician gets from the media and voters on deception, said Jake Enwright, the vice president of government relations and public affairs at Syntax Strategic.

“I can’t underscore how much narrative plays a role in the question of what is lying and what isn’t lying in politics,” said Enwright, who worked for several Conservative leaders, including Erin O’Toole and Rona Ambrose.

Lying comes in many forms, though, and our perspective on it depends on the context. We’ve all told white lies to loved ones to protect their feelings or to maintain secrecy about a birthday gift or a surprise party. No one gets upset about that.

In our everyday lives, we may even engage in the time-honoured political practice of “spinning,” which is putting a self-serving gloss on a situation. We may tell our boss that a complicated project, like a long article on political lying, is nearly finished when in fact it’s nowhere near complete, the same way a politician might spin bad polling data.

In Trudeau and Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, Canadians can observe two masters of the art of spin, particularly negative spin about each other’s record.

Both leaders have a particular talent for expressing their opponents’ plans in the darkest possible way.

For example, during his annual holiday chat with friend and former radio host Terry DiMonte, Trudeau took a moment to paint a dystopian picture of what Canada will look like if Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives form government after the next federal election.

“Bring us back to ‘drill, baby, drill,’ ignore climate change, bring us back to father is the head of the household, women don’t get abortions unless they have a note from their husband … It’s that kind of thinking that is really putting at threat everything we’ve been able as a country to build over the past years,” said Trudeau.

It should be noted that, although the Conservatives haven’t released a full policy platform yet, Poilievre is pro-choice and, so far, hasn’t argued that abortions should only be carried out if the husband OKs it. In fact, abortion was legal long before Trudeau took office.

Even Trudeau’s friend DiMonte chuckled at the prime minister’s portrayal of the Conservative agenda.

“There’s a little campaign in the air,” he said.

Poilievre is not to be outdone on this front, though. The Conservatives are so committed to blaming anything going wrong in Canada on “eight years of this prime minister,” that it wouldn’t be a surprise to see Poilievre blaming traffic jams, mosquito bites or a painfully stubbed toe on the machinations of the Liberal government.

Most Canadians likely see this kind of lying as part of the game of politics rather than something to be taken literally. They are used to this kind of thing, which is probably better described as hyperbole than outright lying.

Plausible deniability is another time-tested technique for dodging scandals in government.

“There’s a lot more plausible deniability that goes on than people are probably comfortable with or necessarily aware of,” said Heimpel.

“The civil service, especially the federal civil service, is legendary for being like, ‘Is this something the minister wants to be briefed on?’ And so ministers obtain a degree of deniability by being able to say legitimately, ‘I don’t have any information on that, I was never briefed.’”

Of course, no minister will ever acknowledge that not being briefed on the issue was part of the plan all along.

There is also concealment, where a politician may withhold vital information that would have been crucial to a voter trying to make a decision.

When Trudeau told voters — more than 1,800 times, according to the opposition — that he was so committed to electoral reform that the 2015 federal election would be the last one conducted under the current system, he left out some vital information.

When the government finally broke the promise in 2017, Minister of Democratic Institutions Karina Gould argued that the government’s position “had always been clear” that the change wouldn’t be made unless a “clear preference” for a specific type of proportional representation and “broad support” for it could be found. In fact, voters in 2015 had no idea that Trudeau’s bombastic electoral reform promise should have had an asterisk next to it.

The opposition response was less equivocal: “What Trudeau proved himself today was to be a liar, was to be of the most cynical variety of politician,” said former NDP MP Nathan Cullen at the time.

Another type of dishonesty is strategic ambiguity, which allows a politician to dance and weave around an issue without getting pinned down. If it’s done well, it can actually pay off, because research shows that people tend to gravitate toward ambiguous politicians, especially ones they are already predisposed to agree with. Done poorly, it can look like former Conservative leader Andrew Scheer during the 2019 election campaign, who refused to be pinned down on his personal views on abortion, but also refused to lie outright about them. The result was an agonizing multi-day stretch of an election campaign where reporters grilled him repeatedly on the issue.

When a pledge runs into changing conditions years later, this can result in another type of political promise-breaking. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith recently downgraded a promised income tax cut to be “contingent” on certain economic conditions. Albertans will have to wait for subsequent budgets to see if they get the tax relief they were pledged during the last election.

Another classic example of this is when former U.S. president George H.W. Bush looked straight into the camera during a presidential debate in 1988 and said, “Read my lips: no new taxes,” only to run headlong into a recession a couple of years later.

When taxes were inevitably raised, the New York Post wasted no time skewering Bush with a front-page tabloid headline that read, “Read my lips … I lied.”

Embedded in most of these examples is some kind of plausible deniability for the politician, even if it’s a stretch. A common assumption of our politics is that it’s bad to lie and politicians grudgingly submit to this by spinning, concealing and staying ambiguous on controversial policies.

The barefaced lie, which is brazen, disprovable, and told with the deliberate attempt to deceive, is actually relatively rare in politics. At the very least, it’s a last resort.

While the barefaced lie may be rare, used only by most politicians when they are backed into a corner by a major scandal, we may be entering a new era of politics where it is more commonplace.

Donald Trump, the out-liar

No article on political lying can be written without discussing former U.S. president Donald Trump, who likely holds the world record for sheer quantity of lies. The Washington Post counted 30,573 over his four-year term.

Perhaps the most striking thing about Trump is that he lies breezily, without any real strategic thought. Sometimes his lies are so easily disprovable that it’s hard to imagine why he told them.

When faced with a difficult controversy or policy question, even remorseless political liars will usually go to great lengths to avoid lying before actually doing it.

Trump seems to go straight to the barefaced lies …

Christian Hart, professor of psychology

On this point, Trump is in a category of his own, said Hart.

“When we look at people’s decision to lie, they almost always use the most morally permissible truth avoidance that they can. They only tend to tell those barefaced lies when they feel like there’s no other options,” said Hart. “Trump seems to go straight to the barefaced lies, probably when there’s other options available that most people would use.”

The most generous analysis of Trump’s lying is that he sees politics like sales, where everyone lies and, often, the person who’s best at it wins.

Trump even told a strange lie about the Boy Scouts, when he said that the head of the organization described his speech to the group as “the greatest speech that was ever made to them.” CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale quickly reported, from a “senior Scouts source,” that it was a pure fabrication, breaking the first tenet of Scout Law, which warns Scouts to be honest.

In his list of 15 notable Trump lies, Dale writes that the former president was often trading in “pure shtick. Trump was like a touring standup comic.”

In fact, some of the best insights on Trump have come from the world of comedy. Comedian Shane Gillis attributed Trump’s rapid ascent in the Republican primary in 2016 to his entertaining performances in the debates, which have historically been dull affairs. Trump’s wild insults and freewheeling dishonesty was, at the very least, a novel experience for anyone used to dry policy talk on a stage filled with a dozen candidates with similar ideas.

Comedian Dave Chappelle once described Trump as an “honest liar,” who sometimes reveals profound truths amid an avalanche of falsehoods. When rival presidential candidate Hillary Clinton accused Trump during a debate of taking advantage of tax loopholes, Trump confirmed he did it and then bragged about his intelligence in doing so.

Trump turned to Clinton and dared her to fix the tax code, saying she wouldn’t do it because all her friends and donors use the same loopholes that he did.

“No one had ever seen anything like that. Nobody had ever seen somebody coming from inside that house, outside, to tell all the commoners, ‘We are doing everything that you think we are doing’,” said Chappelle.

Trump’s eagerness to lie and his bombastic style show the limits of journalistic fact-checking. Someone at factcheck.org actually spent time looking into Trump’s argument that he was the first person to popularize the term “rigged,” and his complaints that everyone else, including leftist candidate Bernie Sanders, was stealing it from him. The fact-checkers meticulously listed other politicians who, at one time or another, described the American system as rigged.

“Trump may have a new-found affection for the word. But he didn’t introduce it into the political discourse,” the story ends, with three bylines attached to it. It’s worth wondering whether anyone at a Trump rally cared one way or another, or needed further proof that the candidate was apt to stretch the truth.

How to spot a liar

A truth in the research on deception is that humans are generally willing to give each other the benefit of the doubt. We have what researchers call a “truth bias,” meaning we are more likely to judge statements to be true than false. We’re also better at assessing true statements than false statements.

But in the world of politics, that even the most naive voter views with a certain level of cynicism, do we still have that same generosity? Are we easily duped? Or do we run political speech through a different filter than the one we use for our friends and family?

Most importantly, can we tell when politicians are lying?

The odds aren’t in our favour. A resilient finding in psychology is that humans are terrible at detecting lies. An analysis of the research on this found that we have about a 54 per cent accuracy rate when it comes to correctly identifying a lie.

Last year, researchers assembled a group of 181 people tasked with judging whether a politician was lying by watching videos of political statements. They measured 14 possible cues that we use when trying to judge if a statement is true or false, things such as shifty eyes, sweatiness and stuttering speech.

The best indicator of lies, according to the 2023 study, is the amount of detail in the speech. Liars will be deliberately vague and perfunctory, while someone telling the truth will happily tell you every detail.

The frustrating thing is that while most of us are relying on lie-detecting cues that don’t work, even the ones that do work aren’t very effective. If you hear a highly detailed statement, delivered with vocal confidence and immediacy, you can only be sure that it’s slightly less likely to be a lie. Your lie-detection rate will still only be a little better than a coin toss.

There is some good news for politicians and political parties, though.

While people will downgrade their truth bias for a male politician, they are far more likely to believe that a female politician is telling the truth, whether she is actually lying or not, and the finding holds true for both male and female voters.

There’s more good news for politicians faced with a tricky policy question — voters seem to like ambiguous language from political leaders.

“The pervasive use of ambiguity in campaigns fits with our experimental finding that ambiguity can be a winning strategy, especially in partisan elections,” the study reads.

For voters who want to get better at spotting dishonesty, there’s only one remedy. The best political lie-detector, as it has always been, is more knowledge about the topic a politician is talking about.

Lying on the world stage

It is generally assumed that the world of international diplomacy is rife with lies, as diplomats navigate a zero-sum world looking for the slightest advantage for their own country. And there is no better example of the tragic consequences of mistrust, confusion and outright lies on the world stage than the Iraq War in 2003.

At best, the George W. Bush administration massively overstated the intelligence indicating Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and, at worst, they outright lied about it.

But a more interesting, and less explored, chapter in the Iraq War is Hussein’s strange inability to convince the world that he didn’t possess these weapons.

It’s now clear that the dictator ordered the destruction of his chemical and biological weapons in the immediate aftermath of the Gulf War in 1991, writes Steve Coll, author of the new book The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq.

But Hussein continued to lie about his weapons stash to weapons inspectors and, especially, his own people. Coll examined thousands of hours of tapes, meeting minutes and government records, and came to the conclusion that Hussein was desperate to avoid humiliation and concerned about projecting strength to avoid attacks from regional neighbours and from within his own country.

Notably, Hussein continued to lie to his own generals about the weapons of mass destruction, presumably so none of them got any ideas about challenging his leadership.

In hindsight, Hussein’s decision to be ambiguous about the existence of his own weapons ultimately cost him his country and his life, but when you consider the internal pressures on a dictator it’s not a wholly irrational decision.

In fact, our leaders are far more likely to lie to us about international relations than they are to lie to other leaders, writes John J. Mearsheimer in his book Why Leaders Lie: The Truth About Lying in International Politics.

When he took up the task of writing about lying in international politics, Mearsheimer expected to find a litany of examples of states lying to each other. Instead, he found barely any, whether in the high stakes world of global security or in the more banal negotiations for a trade agreement. More commonly, countries will conceal information from each other than outright lie about it and, if they do lie, it’s much more likely to be to an enemy than an ally.

“I was especially surprised by how difficult it was to find evidence of states attempting to bluff each other in bargaining situations. In fact, it appears that leaders are more likely to lie to their own people than to rival states,” wrote Mearsheimer.

There’s a long history of U.S. presidents telling outright lies to their own people to justify military actions. Franklin D. Roosevelt lied when he told the American people in 1941 that a German U-boat had launched an unprovoked attack against an American destroyer when, in fact, the American ship had fired first. It would still take the attack on Pearl Harbor to convince Americans to take part in the Second World War.

Interestingly, people tend to be more understanding about these lies than falsehoods about domestic issues.

How to toe the line

In the world of political journalism, reporters understand the need for mild deception from politicians and their press people. No journalist, for example, expects to hear unvarnished opinions from Liberal MPs about the party’s recent byelection loss in Durham.

After a record-breaking loss to Conservative candidate Jamil Jivani, it’s unlikely that many Liberal partisans are jumping for joy behind the scenes. But publicly, they’ll say everything is fine, and if they offer criticism it will be behind a veil of anonymity. Any politician who is too honest with journalists in these situations is like the rube at the car dealership, giving the game away, rather than playing it to his advantage.

“The benefit to byelections is that they are like rabbit entrails. You can pretty much see whatever you want to see,” said Heimpel.

“That’s spin, to be sure, because you’re leaving things out. But the other side is leaving stuff out, too. I don’t know that I necessarily consider either of those cases to be lying or even all that dishonest,” said Heimpel.

While reporters expect to be spun, deflected and stonewalled, it’s surprisingly rare for politicians and their press secretaries to lie directly and shamelessly.

A cataclysmic event in Alberta politics nearly a decade ago can help illustrate why this distinction matters.

When former Edmonton Journal columnist Graham Thomson (no relation to the author of this article) heard that then-Wildrose leader Danielle Smith was about to cross the floor to the governing Progressive Conservatives, it sounded too crazy to be true. The tip came from a reliable source, but Thomson couldn’t get it pinned down. Finally, he went to a PC press person and asked him outright, “Is Danielle Smith going to cross the floor?”

Weeks later, when Smith and a large chunk of her caucus crossed the floor to the PCs, Thomson went back to his source and furiously asked him to explain himself. You asked the wrong question, the source said. You should have asked if Danielle Smith and eight of her MLAs were going to be crossing the floor, instead of just asking about Smith herself.

Needless to say, Thomson was not amused and he never forgot the deception that threw him off the trail of one of the biggest stories in Alberta political history.

“The minute that somebody’s lying, that completely undermines the trust that we have between the media and a communications person. And the thing is, I told all my colleagues in the press gallery about this and that, of course, would poison the well dealing with that person,” said Thomson.

“It’s been my experience that good professional press secretaries do not lie to the media. They can try and get us off the track. They can try and deflect things and, yeah, they can do that skilfully. But they don’t actually overtly lie,” said Thomson.

Research shows that politicians who lie will generally enjoy more successful careers, but their staffers may find this rule doesn’t apply to them.

“The best press relations people I know … are always aware that their own credibility is necessary to them accurately performing their tasks, and it’s very easy for them to torch that credibility, especially with somebody who’s got some clout among their colleagues,” said Heimpel.

“Generally speaking, I’ve found that a politician in front of a microphone is more likely to be generous with the bounds of what’s true and what isn’t than a press person in a conversation with a reporter.”