WHY DO PATHOLOGICAL LIARS TELL FIBS?
The details from the surveys fit in with some theories in scientific literature suggesting that pathological liars tell tall tales – especially of far-fetched past achievements or suffering, or grandiose social connections – as a kind of unconscious strategy to boost their fragile sense of self or low self-esteem.
For instance, in 2007 a team of Canadian psychologists reported the case of ‘Lorraine,’ whose dramatic lies included a colleague sending her death threats, a friend developing a lesbian infatuation, a supposed death threat from a fiancé’s ex-wife, and her fiancé’s three-year-old setting fires in relatives’ homes. The team, led by Dr Cheryl Birch, said that the pattern was characteristic of pathological lying because the lies were harmful to Lorraine (she actually ended up in a secure forensic unit) and they weren’t inspired by any apparent clear motive – they seemed to be driven by a deeper psychological need to present herself as a hero or victim.
In a case reported by a team of New York psychologists in 2015, a woman told her therapists she had made several suicide attempts. She also claimed her mother had been executed in California for killing her father and stepfather, that her brother and sister had been killed and buried in the backyard by her mother, and that she had two children, including one who was the product of a rape by one of her siblings. Subsequent investigations suggested none of this was true, except that she did have one son. This team, led by Dr Panagiota Korenis at the Bronx Lebanon Hospital Center, agreed with the other experts that habitual or compulsive lying of this kind usually emerges as a “means to assert autonomy in the face of lack of self-esteem”.
