國家地理:我們?yōu)槭裁凑f謊(2)

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The history of humankind is strewn with crafty and seasoned liars like Hogue. Many are criminals who spin lies and weave deceptions to gain unjust rewards -- as the financier Bernie Madoff did for years, duping investors out of billions of dollars until his Ponzi scheme collapsed. Some are politicians who lie to come to power or cling to it, as Richard Nixon famously did when he denied any role in the Watergate scandal.

人類歷史上散布著像霍格這樣狡猾和老練的騙子。許多罪犯編織欺騙以獲得不公正的報酬，正如金融家伯尼·馬多夫在龐氏騙局倒塌之前，數(shù)十年如一日地欺騙了投資者數(shù)十億美元一樣。有些政治家則靠謊言獲取或維持權(quán)力，就像尼克松否認(rèn)自己涉足水門事件的任何環(huán)節(jié)。

Sometimes people lie to inflate their image -- a motivation that might best explain President Donald Trump's demonstrably false assertion that his Inauguration crowd was bigger than President Barack Obama's first one. People lie to cover up bad behavior, as American swimmer Ryan Lochte did during the 2016 Summer Olympics by claiming to have been robbed at gunpoint at a gas station when, in fact, he and his teammates, drunk after a party, had been confronted by armed security guards after damaging property. Even academic science -- a world largely inhabited by people devoted to the pursuit of truth -- has been shown to contain a rogues' gallery of deceivers, such as physicist Jan Hendrik Schon, whose purported breakthroughs in molecular semiconductor research proved to be fraudulent.

有時候，人們會夸大自己的形象，這種動機(jī)可能最好地解釋了唐納德·特朗普總統(tǒng)的明確錯誤斷言，即他的就職典禮參與人數(shù)大于奧巴馬總統(tǒng)的第一次就職典禮。人們用謊言來掩蓋不良行為，例如，美國游泳運(yùn)動員瑞恩·羅切特在2016年夏季奧運(yùn)期間聲稱自己曾經(jīng)在加油站被持槍搶劫，真相是他和隊(duì)友在一場聚會喝醉后破壞公共財物時遇到武裝保安。學(xué)術(shù)科學(xué)領(lǐng)域常被人們比作追求真相之人所住的世界，然而這個領(lǐng)域也已被證明是含有流氓的欺騙者畫廊，物理學(xué)家簡·亨德里克·舍恩在分子半導(dǎo)體研究的所謂突破就被證明純屬偽造。

These liars earned notoriety because of how egregious, brazen, or damaging their falsehoods were. But their deceit doesn't make them as much of an aberration as we might think. The lies that impostors, swindlers, and boasting politicians tell merely sit at the apex of a pyramid of untruths that have characterized human behavior for eons.

這些說謊者之所以臭名昭著，是因?yàn)樗麄兪侨绱藧毫印o恥地毀壞著自己的謊言。但他們的欺騙并沒有使他們像我們想象的那樣相差甚遠(yuǎn)。冒名頂替者、詐騙者以及自吹自擂的政治家的謊言，僅僅是在一金字塔的頂端，而這些謊言是人類行為的永恒特征。

Lying, it turns out, is something that most of us are very adept at. We lie with ease, in ways big and small, to strangers, co-workers, friends, and loved ones. Our capacity for dishonesty is as fundamental to us as our need to trust others, which ironically makes us terrible at detecting lies. Being deceitful is woven into our very fabric, so much so that it would be truthful to say that to lie is human.

事實(shí)證明，我們大多數(shù)人都很擅長說謊。我們以大大小小的方式，對陌生人、同事、朋友和親人說謊自如。不誠實(shí)的能力對我們來說至關(guān)重要，因?yàn)槲覀冃枰嘈艅e人，諷刺的是，這使我們發(fā)現(xiàn)謊言非常糟糕。欺騙性已經(jīng)被編織進(jìn)了我們生活的框架中，可以說人類就是謊言本身。