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Why Experts Believe George Santos Probably Has A 'Personality Disorder'

Why Experts Believe George Santos Probably Has A 'Personality Disorder'

Rep. George Santos (R-NY) has faced a litany of accusations in his short time as a lawmaker. From financial mishandling, professional embellishments, and personal occurrences, Santos has been accused of lies across the board.

Now, a new analysis is breaking down the dynamics of compulsive lying. According to Business Insider, psychological experts have explained how compulsive lying is often a characteristic of a personality disorder.

"Many psychologists say compulsive lying is often a feature of a personality disorder, such as antisocial-personality disorder or narcissistic-personality disorder," Insider's Alia Shoaib wrote. "Compulsive lying is not, in itself, classified as a disorder in the DSM, the handbook healthcare professionals use as the guide to classifying mental-health disorders."

Speaking to Insider, Christian Hart —a psychology professor at Texas Woman's University— weighed in with a detailed explanation of pathological lying.

Hart admitted that he cannot deliver a formal diagnosis of the New York lawmaker because he doesn't have specific details about his background but he also insisted that it does appear he engages in pathological lying.

According to Hart, Santos said, "lied about being a star athlete on a volleyball team at a kind of a lower-tier college — that wouldn't carry any cachet for most people. But just because we can't see the purpose of the lie doesn't mean the purpose doesn't exist for him. Perhaps, he's always had a sense of inferiority about not being an athletic person, and so to be seen that way means a lot to him where it would mean nothing to other people."

"In the sense that most people use the term 'pathological lying,' I'd say yes, it seems like he's got this long track history preceding his entering into politics where he's cultivated this reputation of being an extremely dishonest person," Hart said.

So what is the purpose of lying? According to Hart, "people don't lie unless there is some incentive to do so — though this incentive might not always be obvious to an outsider."

He also noted that: "When people have historically defined pathological lying, many of them have said these people lie with no apparent reason. But I argue that it does serve a purpose, it's just a purpose that we are unfamiliar with."

Offering a similar perspective, Drew Curtis, a psychology professor at Angelo State University, also offered an explanation about the origin of compulsive lying. Curtis explained that "pathological lying is often due to a combination of factors involving environment and genetics, both nature and nurture, and typically begins in later childhood and adolescence."

He also pointed out that Santos' deception appears to be a conscious act.

"I think in the case of Santos, he's come out, at least from my understanding, he's come out and apologized and said, you know, this wasn't necessarily true," Curtis said. "So then if someone's claiming that what they said wasn't true, then I think it's easier to say that was a deception, not a delusion."

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Trump’s Cult Of Lies

Trump’s Cult Of Lies

“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

            –Voltaire, 1698-1774

The first thing to understand is that before it’s a presidential election, it’s a TV program. To the suits at CNN, NBC, and Fox News that means it’s about ratings and money. So of course they’re going to play it as a cliffhanger.

Do they ever say “Tune in Saturday to watch the Alabama Crimson Tide humiliate hopelessly overmatched Kent State!”

Never.

So it’s going to be with Trump vs. Clinton. Almost regardless of what political scientists and number-crunchers say, the race will be depicted as a nail-biter. The fact that Charles Manson could win Texas’ electoral votes with an “R” after his name, while Democrats could take Massachusetts with a Kardashian sister, will prolong the manufactured suspense.

It’s going to be a very long six months.

Even so, it’s hard to imagine a manifest fraud like Donald J. Trump becoming president of the United States. Surely voters have too much self-respect.

“If Trump came to power,” writes Adam Gopnik, “there is a decent chance that the American experiment would be over. This is not a hyperbolic prediction; it is not a hysterical prediction; it is simply a candid reading of what history tells us happens in countries with leaders like Trump. Countries don’t really recover from being taken over by unstable authoritarian nationalists of any political bent, left or right—not by Peróns or Castros or Putins or Francos or Lenins or fill in the blanks.”

All politicians fudge the truth, exaggerating their successes and minimizing their failures. Trump, however, takes it to a different level. He’s a contemporary version of Baron Von Munchausen, an 18th century literary character whose wildly exaggerated military exploits—riding on a cannonball, voyaging to the moon—made him a comic-heroic favorite for generations.

Trump tells falsehoods so brazen as to redefine political lying. To see what I mean, let’s compare a couple of Clinton classics that emailers harangue me about all the time.

“I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.”

The beauty of this Clintonian masterpiece lies in the fact that people often misquote it—changing “sexual relations” to “sex.” Because according to the evidence assiduously gathered by independent counsel Kenneth Starr, it’s literally true and therefore perjury-proof.

Cunning and deliberately deceptive, yes. But sexual relations means “intercourse,” and that supposedly didn’t happen. Cute, huh?

That’s Bill Clinton.

Readers who have never lied about sex are encouraged to vent.

Then there’s Hillary infamous Bosnian adventure: “I remember landing under sniper fire,” she told a 2008 audience. “There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles.”

Confronted with CBS News footage that showed her walking calmly across the tarmac of Tuzla airport from an Air Force C-17 in 1996, Mrs. Clinton basically blamed an overactive memory. She’d actually written about the incident in her 2003 book “Living History” without mentioning the imaginary snipers.

Her press secretary later explained the possible origin of Mrs. Clinton’s false memory: “We were issued flak jackets for the final leg because of possible sniper fire near Tuzla. As an additional precaution, the First Lady and Chelsea were moved to the armored cockpit for the descent into Tuzla.”

She won’t say so but I’m guessing Hillary got scared, and her mind played a trick on her. Confronted with the discrepancy, however, she owned it.

Suffice it to say that is not the Trump method. With a background in professional wrestling, he understands that there’s a vast audience out there only slightly more discerning than a potted geranium and willing to believe (or pretend to believe) damn near anything.

Trump doesn’t trim or embroider as much as invent huge, thunderous fictions aimed at boosting himself or hurting his enemies—evidence be damned. In Trump World, facts don’t exist. He cannot be shamed.

Trump went on Morning Joe recently to attack Hillary’s terrible judgement about Libya. See, if people had listened to Donald, the U.S. would never have helped NATO overthrow Ghaddafi.

“I would have stayed out of Libya,” he affirmed.

Except that Trump shot a video back in 2011 urging an immediate invasion: “Qaddafi in Libya is killing thousands of people,” he said then. “Nobody knows how bad it is, and we’re sitting around, we have soldiers all [around] the Middle East, and we’re not bringing them in to stop this horrible carnage… Now we should go in, we should stop this guy, which would be very easy and very quick.”

The candidate does this stuff every day, on every imaginable topic. It’s brutal, demagogic make-believe, demanding his followers blind themselves to reality and enlist in his cult of personality.

So who are you going to believe, Trump or your lying eyes?

Photo: Protesters picket outside the event site before Republican U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump begins a rally with supporters in Albuquerque, New Mexico, U.S. May 24, 2016.  REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

Caught In A Lie? Maybe Oxytocin Is To Blame

Caught In A Lie? Maybe Oxytocin Is To Blame

By Karen Kaplan, Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES — There are lies, damn lies — and the lies that we tell for the sake of others when we are under the influence of oxytocin.

Researchers found that after a squirt of the so-called love hormone, volunteers lied more readily about their results in a game in order to benefit their team. Compared with control subjects who were given a placebo, those on oxytocin told more extreme lies and told them with less hesitation, according to a study published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Oxytocin is a brain hormone that is probably best known for its role in helping mothers bond with their newborns. In recent years, scientists have been examining its role in monogamy and in strengthening trust and empathy in social groups.

Sometimes, doing what’s good for the group requires lying. (Think of parents who fake their addresses to get their kids into a better school.) A pair of researchers from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel and the University of Amsterdam figured that oxytocin would play a role in this type of behavior, so they set up a series of experiments to test their hypothesis.

The researchers designed a simple computer game that asked players to predict whether a virtual coin toss would wind up heads or tails. After seeing the outcome on a computer screen, players were asked to report whether their prediction was correct or not. In some cases, making the right prediction would earn a player’s team a small payment (the equivalent of about 40 cents). In other cases, a correct prediction would cost the team the same amount, and sometimes there was no payoff or cost.

In the first round, 60 healthy men sprayed either a small dose of oxytocin or a placebo into their noses 30 minutes before playing the game. As expected, men in both groups cheated — but the men who had taken the oxytocin cheated more.

By definition, anyone’s coin-toss predictions should be correct 50 percent of the time, on average. But the players on oxytocin said they made the right prediction 79.7 percent of the time, as did 66.7 percent of the players on the placebo.

What’s more, players on the hormone reported on the accuracy of their predictions in an average of 2.22 seconds. That was significantly faster than the players on the placebo, who took 2.86 seconds to decide what to tell the researchers. Apparently, the decision to lie to benefit the group required less deliberation than the decision to tell a self-serving lie.

In cases where correct predictions led to either no gain or a loss, oxytocin didn’t seem to induce players to lie any more than they would have otherwise, the researchers found.

In the next round of the experiment, the rules of the game were basically the same except that the gains (and losses) were kept by the players, not shared with a team. In that case, there was no difference in lying, truth-telling or response time based on whether players got oxytocin or the placebo. The study authors interpreted that as evidence that oxytocin influences only group dynamics, not individual behavior.

The researchers paid special attention to cases of “extreme” lying — players who said nine of their 10 predictions were correct. In truth, people should do that well only 1 percent of the time. But in the game, 53 percent of the men who got oxytocin said they went nine for 10 when they were playing for a team. Not only was that higher than the 23 percent of men who told the same whopper after getting the placebo, it was also higher than the 33 percent of men who told that lie under the influence of oxytocin when they were playing only for themselves.

“When dishonesty serves group interests, oxytocin increased lying as well as extreme lying,” the researchers concluded. “When lying served personal self-interests only, oxytocin had no effects.”

Photo: Monash University via Flickr

AEI Does Itself A Disservice With Obvious Lies

AEI Does Itself A Disservice With Obvious Lies

How many Americans think income inequality is our greatest challenge, as President Obama asserts?

According to what, at least until now, has been one of the most respected pro-business research organizations in Washington, the number of Americans holding this view totals just 315.

The figure of 315 comes from James Pethokoukis, a “scholar” at the American Enterprise Institute. It was published Monday without irony or even a hint that it was a poor attempt at humor.

Pethokoukis is a writer with a well-established reputation for pieces that events and the passage of time showed to be wrong in premise, context and specifics.

He began his AEI blog, which National Review Onlinereprinted:

Forget about the 1 percent versus the 99 percent. It’s really more like the 0.000001 percent versus everybody else. A tiny group — mostly comprising the Obama White House, a bunch of Washington Democrats, progressive economists, and the media elite — continues to fixate on income inequality as America’s greatest challenge.

Most everybody else, the 99.999999 percent, sees things differently. Surveys continue to show Americans most worried about jobs and economic growth, not the income gap between the top and bottom.

The idea that only 315 Americans think inequality is our top economic problem will not pass muster even with Fox News.

The latest Fox News poll finds (at page 10) that 12 percent of Americans rank inequality as “the most important economic issue facing the country.”

If you count everyone, using the standard Pethokoukis did, that means 37.8 million of us, not 315. But, hey, Pethokoukis’s unsourced figure is only off by a factor of 120,000. Close enough for AEI, evidently.

And, of course, Pethokoukis cited no source because he just made it up. In that he is like too many on the right in America, who mix fact and fantasy and thus sow confusion on all sorts of issues that degrade our civic debate. (The left and center have people who do this, too, but they are not sponsored by the likes of AEI.)

Two years ago Jonathan Chait deconstructed one particularly egregious piece of nonsense on inequality by Pethokoukis. Chait’s New York magazine piece was titled “Inequality and Bullshit.”

Chait drew on the brilliant and hilarious short book by Harry Frankfurt, a retired Princeton philosophy professor, titled On Bullshit. In 7,000 words Frankfurt lays out a theory of commentary that does not rise to outright lying, but bears little connection to truth, which describes Pethokoukis’ writings quite well.

Chait noted that Pethokoukis, in a piece on a new official report on income inequality, “doesn’t directly challenge any of these facts, though he wants his audience to think he does. He cites a bunch of figures that pick away at pieces of the general picture…”

Why should progressives care about the bullshit that AEI spreads when it publishes Pethokoukis?

To improve America so it can be a shining light of what the human spirit can accomplish, our nation needs a thoughtful conservative movement, one that argues for holding on to the tried and true, not just holding on to what is, as some conservatives have always done (see slavery, arguments for its economic necessity).

America needs constructive and serious conservative thinkers because their work will promote public policy debates rooted in facts and reason, as those sons of the Enlightenment, the Founders, intended.

And this, in turn, will foster better-reasoned arguments and more effective policy solutions from those whose vision is of what America can in time become rather than what it is. That is because they will have to address serious critiques, not bull.

In previous columns about a David Brooks column on inequality and National Review’sMark Steyn on climate research, I showed how failure to do basic reporting produced nonsense in both cases and a lawsuit against Steyn and National Review that may doom that publication.

The tolerance for low-grade reporting, or none at all, by writers on the right does not help our democracy endure, but instead tears at its fabric.

Since Pethokoukisian-type bull is not just tolerated, but profitable and voter-energizing, we get politicians, pundits and primetime personalities who consistently spout provable nonsense. This continues even when as time passes and facts emerge from events, their comments are repeatedly shown to be false or misleading and, sometimes, calculated lies (see G.W. Bush, tax cuts will make everyone better off.)

It is one thing when the Fox News channel gives a home to people who either just make it up or distort facts beyond reason.

After all Glenn Beck, who used to work there, and Sean Hannity who still does, say they are not journalists but entertainers, at least when it is convenient to do so. Yet no disclaimer appears on the screen when their style of entertainment is broadcast, just the logo for the Fox News channel, which is among the reasons I mock it as Faux News.

By melding entertainment and news, Rupert Murdoch and his Fox chief, Roger Ailes, grow ever richer, a powerful incentive. Unlike Jon Stewart, they are not upfront about any of it being a joke or, in the case of many Fox broadcasts, a joke on the audience.

But Pethokoukis holds forth at a nonprofit organization that declares itself allied with truth as best as it can be discerned, not profit. He is listed as a “scholar” at the American Enterprise Institute, a nonprofit pro-business research house whose website says it is “dedicated to research and education.”

AEI is a big deal in Washington policy making. Its studies, reports and expert commentary carry weight with both Democrats and Republicans. AEI is treated respectfully and its actual experts are often featured by serious news organizations like PBS, NPR, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

It also has a reputation for the integrity of its numbers. I often find fault with AEI interpretations (and sometimes agree with them), but I always have treated its reports with respect, at least until now.

AEI annual reports disclose only a summary of its finances, which is considered poor practice for public charities, and gives some hint of how a lightweight like Pethokoukis got in at AEI.

The summary shows that AEI took in $44.4 million last year, earning a surplus of $11.2 million after expenses, a remarkable figure given how many public policy nonprofits struggle just to keep the lights on.

AEI’s tax return, available at Guidestar.org, shows revenues are growing fast. It took in $38.8 million in 2012 and $34.6 million in 2011.

Pay at AEI is very good. Resident scholar Christopher DeMuth made a base salary of $303,247 in 2012 plus other compensation that brought his total pay to just under $1.5 million – four years after he retired as AEI president.

That makes AEI somewhat like the top 1 percent of individuals, who captured 94.5 percent of the income growth between 2009 — when the Great Recession officially ended — and 2012. During those same years the bottom 90 percent had negative income growth of almost 16 percent.

Those figures show AEI has the resources to hire first-rate talent. The question, then, is why the American Enterprise Institute sullies its good name by calling Pethokoukis a “scholar” and publishing his drivel.

Photo: mSeattle via Flickr