For many Americans, recently elected Congressman George Santos’ lies about his academic and work history, his mother’s death, and his campaign finances are emblematic of a broken political system. Of course, lying for personal or political gain isn’t new. History is rife with stories of political machinations and lies, and we often have trouble agreeing on our versions. Certainly, today's relentless 24-hour news cycle and the social media echo chamber make it difficult to separate truth from lies, propaganda, or inadvertent mistakes.
It doesn’t help that memory itself is incredibly complicated. Knowledge of the world, facts, words, and cognitive skills we acquire, even as infants, form the semantic aspects of our memory. Our personal experiences and social interactions become the episodic portion of our memory. A child born in a wealthy family in a large city and another raised in a rural town may have very different episodic memories, even though they describe them using the same language, which is part of their semantic memory. However, in particular, episodic memories turn out to be relatively fluid. This is due, in part, to how they are created in the first place.
To remember something, we have to notice it, but most of the things we pay attention to are quickly forgotten because they are not crucial for our function. In addition, episodic memories are not saved in a fixed format like a photograph or a videotape. They are reconstructed each time we access them. During that process, we merge memories of the actual incident with things we have been told, imagined, or seen in other contexts. As a result, the memory itself changes over time, typically without our conscious awareness of that fact.
Stress and emotional states also influence episodic memory. When we are stressed our fight-or-flight response influences what we pay attention to and how memories are formed. Our cognitive state and social outlook can also impact memory formation. When we want to impress others by portraying ourselves in a good light, justifying our own actions, or shifting blame to someone else, we may shift the way we recount our past actions.
Given the plasticity of our memories, it is not surprising that even eyewitnesses struggle to give the same account of an event. Our own versions of stories change over time without our conscious awareness.
Fortunately, forgetting the name of our third-grade teacher, whether we saw a movie or what we had to eat on our last birthday, rarely makes a difference in our lives. But what about people who habitually lie, even about trivial things? A great deal of research has been devoted to this topic. Some forms of brain damage cause people to create and recount false memories inadvertently.
This behavior, called confabulation, is confusing since the person telling the lies seems unaware of the contradictions in their stories. Other psychological conditions are associated with the tendency to lie regularly for no apparent reason. While puzzling and disconcerting, such behavior is more likely to reflect underlying cognitive or emotional processes than the desire to deceive others for personal gain.
The situation changes, though, when people deliberately lie about events that can be verified. Such lies, motivated by self-interest, egotism, and organized attempts to take advantage of others, cause great harm at the individual and the social level.
The man whose name has become synonymous with financial pyramid schemes, Charles Ponzi, bilked investors out of millions of dollars in the 1920s by lying about his financial system. More recent scandals caused by deliberate lies include the collapse of the Enron corporation, Bernie Madoff’s massive fraud scheme, and the ongoing collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency exchange. The reverberations of these crises extend from decimated individual pension plans to the stability of our economic system and trust in our political processes.
While the lies George Santos told about his background may not shake the foundations of our financial and political system, his behavior is still puzzling and disturbing. We don’t know why he chose to misrepresent things that could be validated, but he is certainly not alone in assuming that in a media-saturated world, it is hard to check facts. So how do we walk the line between making allowances for normal variations in memory and dealing with people who routinely lie for either pathological or manipulative reasons?
Much depends on our willingness to think critically about situations, face hard truths, and set and maintain behavioral boundaries for ourselves and our public officials. In many ways, truth is in the eye, or the memory, of the beholder. But we must be clear that there is a difference between misremembering the details of a past event and fabricating the event itself. Pretending they are the same thing makes liars of us all.