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.

Lies, Lies, Sports, and More Lies

The sports fanatics of the world have some kind of professional athlete that they idolize. But if the person you idolized lied would you still idolize them? Athletes lie about things that they don’t want the public to know. Lance Armstrong lied about using performance enhancing drugs, Manti Te’o lied about his girlfriend being dead, Bobby Valentine dressed in a disguise to watch the final innings of a game that he was tossed from, Michael Vick lied about dog fighting, and Alex Rodriguez lied about his use of steroids. These athletes are just a few that have lied to the public and have gotten caught. Many more athletes have lied and no one knows the truth yet. Will you still idolize your favorite athlete if he/she would be the next one caught in a lie?

This information about the lying athletes was found at the following website: http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1660198-how-athletes-lie-to-us

Why Do Politicians Lie?

Everyone lies. Children, teenagers, adults, celebrities, and politicians lie. When politicians give their speech, how much of it can someone really believe? Politicians lie because they don’t want people to know the truth. The politicians want to make it so the people hear what the people want to hear. Politicians want to gain the people’s votes so they will say anything to make them look good and get voted into office. Politicians lie a lot of the time and we, the citizens, believe them. Most people will probably argue that a politician lies only to make his/her point. It seems to be that the more ridiculous the lie the more willing people are to believe it. But my question is why do we believe the ridiculous lies?

Why do People Accept Lies?

We all have been lied to whether we know it or not. When some people get lied to and they know that they are being lied to they just accept it and move on. But why do people just accept a lie? In my opinion I think there are many different reasons that a person would accept a lie. One reason could be that the lie is not a big enough lie to get worked up about. Some people know when to pick their battles and know that some things aren’t worth fighting over. Another reason could be because we don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings. An example of this is when parents lie to their children about the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, etc. and the child knows that it is all a lie. The child continues to go along with the lies because his/her’s parents think that the child still believes and the child doesn’t want to ruin the holiday spirit for his/her’s parents. Another example of why people accept lies is because they are afraid of ruining the relationship they have with the person lying. Some people also accept lies because they want to see if the truth will eventually come out. People accept lies because some live by the motto “forgive and forget”. Being lied to will happen no matter what and some people just move on from it.

Why People Lie

Humans lie all the time. Most lie daily, some lie hourly and there are a select few that lie every time they open their mouth. But what exactly is a lie? A lie is a false statement made with deliberate intent to deceive. People lie for many reasons. People want to fit in, they are afraid of being judged, they want to change the subject, they don't want to hurt someone’s feelings, or they do it to get out of trouble. When someone lies it's not necessarily with bad intentions. Some people do it for the good of someone else. People lie more to strangers than they do coworkers, extroverts lie more than introverts, men lie more about themselves than others, and women lie to save someone's feelings. There are three types of lies and deception: the butler, the sock puppet, and the Chinese water army. The butler is used to save the relationship between two people. To preserve one’s identity the type of lie that is used is the sock puppet. And the Chinese water dragon is used by companies to give themselves good reviews and positive feedback. People lie abundantly for many reasons. Sometimes it's for good reasons sometimes for bad reasons, but the kind of lie that's told usually depends on the situation the person is in.

The website below is where I got the definition of “lie”. And my information was found in two Tedtalks “The Future of Lying” presented by Jeff Hancock and “How to Spot a Liar” presented by Pamela Meyer.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/lie?s=t