How President Trumps Lies Are Different from Other People's
Trump is a liar, but so are you. Here’s the more interesting way he stands out.
My passion is single life, and that’s what I most enjoy writing about, but every once in a while, my old interest in the psychology of lying sneaks back into my life. That happened recently when I saw that reporters at the Washington Post had been keeping a tally of all of Donald Trump’s falsehoods, misleading claims, and flip-flops since becoming president.
I had studied the lies of ordinary people years ago. I learned from that research how often people lied, and what kinds of lies they told. I wondered how Trump’s ways of lying would compare to what my colleagues and I (along with other researchers) had already documented. So I coded the most recent 400 of Trump’s lies using the same categories my colleagues and I used when we coded the lies in our research.
I wrote about what I found for the Washington Post. The article generated a lot of interest. It was the most popular article at the Post for a while, and it got picked up by other newspapers and websites in the U.S. and elsewhere. It also attracted 2,000 comments in the first day. That made me think that Psychology Today readers may be interested in hearing more about this, including some other observations about Trump’s lying that I did not include in my article.
The two most important categories of lies in the studies my colleagues and I conducted were self-serving lies and kind lies. Self-serving lies help the liars get what they want and avoid what they don’t want, they help the liars look better or feel better, or they spare the liars from blame or embarrassment or anything else they don’t want to experience. Kind lies are the same, only they are told for someone else’s benefit. When people lie to help you get what you want, or make you look or feel better, or protect you from something you don’t want, they are telling you a kind lie. (You can find some examples of the different kinds of lies in my article.)
More info here: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/living-single/201712/how-president-trump-s-lies-are-different-other-peoples?amp&__twitter_impression=true
From the same author
I study liars. I’ve never seen one like President Trump.
He tells far more lies, and far more cruel ones, than ordinary people do.
I spent the first two decades of my career as a social scientist studying liars and their lies. I thought I had developed a sense of what to expect from them. Then along came President Trump. His lies are both more frequent and more malicious than ordinary people’s.
In research beginning in the mid-1990s, when I was a professor at the University of Virginia, my colleagues and I asked 77 college students and 70 people from the nearby community to keep diaries of all the lies they told every day for a week. They handed them in to us with no names attached. We calculated participants’ rates of lying and categorized each lie as either self-serving (told to advantage the liar or protect the liar from embarrassment, blame or other undesired outcomes) or kind (told to advantage, flatter or protect someone else).
At The Washington Post, the Fact Checker feature has been tracking every false and misleading claim and flip-flop made by President Trump this year. The inclusion of misleading statements and flip-flops is consistent with the definition of lying my colleagues and I gave to our participants: “A lie occurs any time you intentionally try to mislead someone.” In the case of Trump’s claims, though, it is possible to ascertain only whether they were false or misleading, and not what the president’s intentions were. (And while the subjects of my research self-reported how often they lied, Trump’s falsehoods were tallied by The Post.)
I categorized the most recent 400 lies that The Post had documented through mid-November in the same way my colleagues and I had categorized the lies of the participants in our study
http://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/i-study-liars-ive-never-seen-one-like-president-trump/2017/12/07/4e529efe-da3f-11e7-a841-2066faf731ef_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-cards_hp-posteverything%3Ahomepage%2Fcard&utm_term=.78d4f756c05b
Says Trump easily outpaces the biggest liars in the research study.
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why isn't the MSM covering them - calling him out - headlining all of them - and why won't any politicians stand up and call it like is it - he's a PROFESSIONAL LIAR!!!!!!!!!!!! 
My God, how much more of this do we have to take? 
