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Understanding Why People Spin Honest Lies
A blind person insists he can see. A paralyzed patient claims to be able to move, but says she chooses not to. A stroke victim describes in detail a long weekend trip to a business conference hundreds of miles away—even though he had not set foot outside the hospital. People in each example are spinning their own “honest lies,” uttering falsehoods but believing they are telling the truth—a kind of metal gymnastics known as confabulation. “It’s a sort of pathological certainty about ill-grounded utterances,” says philosophy professor William Hirstein, who has studied the phenomenon for years.
Hirstein’s latest book on the subject, Confabulation (Oxford University Press, 2009), is an edited collection of essays by researchers from around the world and was named by New Scientist magazine as one of the best science books of 2009.
The collection of essays tackles one of the strangest riddles of the mind: Why do people say, and apparently believe, things about themselves that are clearly untrue? Hirstein’s investigations have led him beyond the philosopher’s traditional terrain and into psychology, psychiatry and the cognitive sciences.
“I suppose there may be people who wonder, what is this philosopher doing here? But I’m trying to do good science and good philosophy,” Hirstein said. “I use whatever data is at hand to try to knock down hypotheses.”
Writing in New Scientist, editor Liz Else called the phenomenon Hirstein explores “so interesting I want to write a novel about it.”
Hirstein’s earlier work, Brain Fiction: Self-Deception and the Riddle of Confabulation (MIT Press, 2005), was the first full-length treatment of the phenomenon. In his investigations, Hirstein relies not only on traditional philosophy’s speculations about human nature, but also data generated by medical technology to understand the physical connections and disruptions found in the brain. His approach places him among a new category of philosophers using experimental methods associated with the sciences to fuel fresh thinking about age-old problems such as perception and consciousness.
As more and more researchers have explored the various syndromes and disorders that involve confabulation, editors at Oxford University Press asked Hirstein to edit a collection of work on the topic from various academic fields. The resulting book steps nimbly across the boundaries between traditional academic disciplines. In the process of preparing the book, Hirstein found himself revising some of his own ideas about confabulation.
“I’ve always thought that there was no motivation for people to confabulate, for example. But several of the contributions convinced me that there could be motivation at work, an effort to rationalize and protect the self from the reality of a situation,” he said.
For Hirstein, such intellectual exchange is the real value of his project. “That sort of communication and feedback across disciplines is really important. There certainly were a lot of cross-disciplinary references in the essays, which is a good sign. Maybe this is an indication that we’re breaking through.”
