Magic

Have you ever been to a live magic show? You watch the magician do his thing and you try to find any flaw possible but you can't. Magicians perfect the art of deception. Magic is my personal favorite type of deception. It doesn't involve hurting someone's feelings. What magic does involve is getting people to believe the impossible and it brings out their inner child. The point of magic is to get you to look one way while the trick is going on the other direction. Magicians make you believe that one thing is happening when in reality it's just simple slight of hand tricks and wires. Magic has grown into a large phenomenon in today's society. The city of Las Vegas is known for its large amount of magic shows and magicians that perform there. Magic is all about illusion and deception and is widely accepted in today's society.

Real Eyes Realize Real Lies

 

Have you ever heard the quote that the former rapper Tupac once said, “Real eyes, realize, real lies” before? This quote means that one can see through other people’s bull crap. I will break down the quote to easily show what it means: real eyes = being real, honest; realize = to uncover the truth, to see through; real lies = something hidden, a diversion. This quote can be interpreted in two different ways. One way is by being interpreted in the way of an optimist. By that I mean one will look properly and will see it is all true. Nothing is a lie. Another way to look at it is the way of a pessimist. This means that one will look properly and will see it is all lie. Everything is a lie. This quote is one that I personally like because it shows that someone can see through another person’s lies. People can fall to deception all the time or they can be smart enough to know what is a lie and what is not a lie. I also like that this quote is a play on words. It’s pretty clever if you ask me.

Kindergartners Lie

I am an Early Childhood Education major and I have my classroom observation in a kindergarten class at Defiance Elementary. Every day that I’m there I work with the children on their sight words, spelling, math, etc. I will even sometimes go out for recess duty with my classroom teacher. I see so many things in that classroom and out at recess that it amazes me. One day while out at recess I had a little girl (we’ll call her girl A) come up to me and tell me that another girl (girl B) had pushed her and said some things that hurt her feelings. So I went with girl A to find the one who pushed her so we could resolve this problem. When we found girl B she was defensive. I had the two girls tell me their sides of the story. Girl B denied everything that girl A told me and girl A denied what girl B had said. So I asked if there was anyone else around that saw what happened. Sure enough there was girl C. Girl C told me her side of the story. Girl C’s story backed up girl A’s story. I then asked girl B if she was lying to me. Her face completely changed and she had a look on her face that you would have thought was caused by her puppy getting hit by a car. Girl B shook her head yes and started to cry. I asked her why she lied and she responded with “I didn’t want to get in trouble. I haven’t had a red day all week and I wanted to stay in green.” (Defiance Elementary has a green, yellow, red color system (like a stoplight) in place that is recorded daily and sent home to the parents/guardians to see how the student behaves in school.) I told girl B that she shouldn’t have lied, she needed to apologize to girl A and that we had to go tell the teacher what happened. I felt like a mean person having to rat out a kindergartner but D.E.S. has a zero tolerance policy so I knew the teacher needed to be involved.

April Fools' Day

Did you realize that there is a national holiday that is all about lying and deception? It's April Fools’ Day. April Fools’ Day began in 1700, when English pranksters began popularizing the annual tradition of April Fools’ Day by playing practical jokes on each other. In today’s world, April Fools’ Day is a light-hearted day where people will play pranks and try to get people to believe ridiculous things. In other words, people straight up lie to others and it is socially acceptable. There are even big name companies that will lie to the public as an April Fools’ joke. According to History.com, in 1985, Sports Illustrated tricked many of its readers when it ran a made-up article about a rookie pitcher named Sidd Finch who could throw a fastball over 168 miles per hour. In 1996, Taco Bell, the fast-food restaurant chain, duped people when it announced it had agreed to purchase Philadelphia’s Liberty Bell and intended to rename it the Taco Liberty Bell. In 1998, after Burger King advertised a “Left-Handed Whopper,” scores of clueless customers requested the fake sandwich. April Fools' Day is a day where everyone is okay with being lied to and pranked because this specific light-hearted holiday was meant for it.


"April Fools Tradition Popularized." History.com. A&E Television Networks, n.d. Web. 15 Feb.         2016.

Suvivor of Lies

Cooperating with lies could be shown by the TV show Survivor. Survivor is a reality game show where contestants are isolated in the wilderness. There are two (sometimes three) tribes of contestants who will perform challenges and compete against each other for cash and prizes. After the competition, the losing tribe has to vote out a member of their team. For some players, voting out another player can take some technique and strategy. A player will deceive the other players of his/her real intentions in order to get what he/she wants. When the other players give in to this person’s tricks then they are cooperating with the lie. During the game there are hidden immunity idols on the island, and clues about the location of these idols. During individual immunity challenges, the winner will sometimes get an extra clue for the immunity idol. It is then up to that player’s digression if he/she wants to share the clue. This player will sometimes give false clues to his/her tribe members. This player is lying for his/her own benefit. The game of Survivor exhibits the idea that Dan Ariely had in the TEDTalk “Our Buggy Moral Code”. Cheating is a simple cost-benefit analysis. Ariely’s research has shown that a lot of people cheat only a little bit as compared to what was expected that a little amount of people cheat a lot. As seen on Survivor there are some who cheat a little bit by giving lies about the clues, and there are some people who lie almost every time he/she speaks. Either way, a lie is a lie and in this case it is a lie that is meant for personal gain.

Ariely, Dan. "Our Buggy Moral Code." TED2009. 7 Feb. 2009. Lecture.

Response to Amie Ricksecker's Post

Amie Ricksecker’s blog post “Growing Up Dressed in Lies” has made the connection that children are taught to not lie, yet they are constantly being lied to. The childhood traditions of the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, and the Tooth Fairy are all lies. Ricksecker quoted Jeff Hancock’s “The Future of Lying” on the fact that humans lie multiple times a day. Lying has become more of a ritual rather than a mistake. Children grow up to become liars by the time they reach adulthood and can we really blame them? They have been lied to since day one. Lying has become second nature to them.

http://amiericksecker.blogspot.com/

http://blog.ted.com/5-talks-that-are-all-about-lying/

When You Catch Someone in a Lie

When you catch someone in a lie, do you call them out or just go along with it? I can think of a time that I knew my friend was lying to me but I let it go. The summer before I moved to college, I was supposed to go on a weekend camping trip just my friend and I, but my friend cancelled. It was my last weekend home. We planned that weekend trip at the beginning of the summer. She told me that she wanted to have a weekend to herself but I knew that was a lie for a couple of reasons. One reason being that a friend of ours that she was texting at the time had told me her real reason for not wanting me to go. She felt “threatened” by me because the guy she had a thing for that camps at the same campground as us liked me and not her. I also knew it was a lie because she had slipped up in her words but I pretended not to notice. I chose to brush off the lie because I knew it was something not worth getting into a huge argument about. I know when to pick my battles, and that was not one I wanted to fight. People accept lies for all kinds of reasons and sometimes it’s for the better.