A ruling against slander

Since I spend an inordinate amount of time on gloom, doom, and despair, it should be a refreshing change for loyal readers of Skeptophilia that today I'm bringing you some good news.

You might know the name of Michael Mann, the climate scientist whose "hockey stick" graph back in 1998 sounded alarm bells amongst the scientifically literate regarding the perils of climate change.  His research used proxy records such as bubbles in ice cores to track the global average temperature over the past few thousand years, and the alarming upward trend just in the last hundred was a significant wake-up call.  Mann, who runs the Earth Systems Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, has since that time been a vocal advocate for taking steps to mitigate global warming.

Climatologist Michael E. Mann [image courtesy of photographer Greg Grieco and the Wikimedia Commons]

He has also been the target of not just criticism, but harassment.  He has been the victim of dozens of spiteful attacks despite his standing in the scientific world -- he was one of the lead authors of the "Observed Climate Variability and Change" chapter of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Third Scientific Assessment Report in 2001, was the organizing committee chair for the National Academy of Sciences' Frontiers of Science conference in 2003, was named by Scientific American as one of fifty "leading visionaries in science and technology," and has received numerous awards and honors including the Hans Oeschger Medal of the European Geosciences Union in 2012.

But such credentials, and the obvious sterling quality of his research, doesn't stop ideologues who are determined to tarnish the reputation of anyone who dares to disagree with their rhetoric.  The National Review and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, have been especially vicious in their attacks.  But they seem to have crossed a line with a series of articles that accused Mann of falsifying research -- and, along the way, compared him to Penn State football coach and convicted child molester Jerry Sandusky.

Mann fought back, and took the National Review and the Competitive Enterprise Institute to court.  And late last week, a judge in the Washington D. C. Court of Appeals ruled in favor of Mann.  The judge's decision, in part, reads:

To the extent statements in the appellants' articles take issue with the soundness of Dr. Mann's methodologies and conclusions -- i.e. with ideas in a scientific or political debate -- they are protected by the First Amendment.  But defamatory statements that are personal attacks on an individual's honesty and integrity and assert or imply as fact that Dr. Mann engaged in professional misconduct and deceit to manufacture the results he desired, if false, do not enjoy constitutional protection and may be actionable... If the statements assert or imply false facts that defame the individual, they do not find shelter under the first amendment simply because they are embedded in a larger political debate.

The case will now be remanded to a lower court for trial.

Mann was elated by the decision.  "We are particularly pleased that the court, after performing an independent review of the evidence, found that the allegations against me have been 'definitively discredited,'" he said.

Mann has for years been on the front lines of this battle.  He's received death threats over his research -- hard to imagine, but if you consider the dogmatism of the opposition, not to mention the corporate profit motive behind it, it's unsurprising.  In a December 16 op-ed piece in The Washington Post, Mann writes:

I’ve faced hostile investigations by politicians, demands for me to be fired from my job, threats against my life and even threats against my family.  Those threats have diminished in recent years, as man-made climate change has become recognized as the overwhelming scientific consensus and as climate science has received the support of the federal government.  But with the coming Trump administration, my colleagues and I are steeling ourselves for a renewed onslaught of intimidation, from inside and outside government.

So Mann's victory in the Appellate Court is good news, but the war is far from over.  We have an incoming administration that appears poised to stall any forward motion on dealing with the causes and effects of climate change, and in fact is giving indications of disbelieving that it's even occurring.  Mann writes:

We also fear an era of McCarthyist attacks on our work and our integrity. It’s easy to envision, because we’ve seen it all before.  We know we could be hauled into Congress to face hostile questioning from climate change deniers.  We know we could be publicly vilified by politicians.  We know we could be at the receiving end of federal subpoenas demanding our personal emails.  We know we could see our research grants audited or revoked. 

I faced all of those things a decade ago, the last time Republicans had full control of our government.

The people who understand science, and who are not in the pockets of the fossil fuels industry, need to be ready to fight this when it happens.  Not "if;" I think Mann is exactly correct that we're entering another era of science denialism and corporate profits über alles.  But Mann himself is far from giving up, and neither should the rest of us.  As Mann puts it -- the future of the Earth itself hangs in the balance.

Signal out of noise

I think I share with a lot of people a difficulty in deciphering what someone is saying when holding a conversation in a noisy room.  I can often pick out a few words, but understanding entire sentences is tricky.  A related phenomenon I've noticed is that if there is a song playing while there's noise going on -- in a bar, or on earphones at the gym -- I often have no idea what the song is, can't understand a single word or pick up the beat or figure out the music, until something clues me in to what the song is.  Then, all of a sudden, I find I'm able to hear it more clearly.

Some neuroscientists at the University of California - Berkeley have just found out what's happening in the brain that causes this oddity in auditory perception.  In a paper in Nature: Communications that came out earlier this week, authors Christopher R. Holdgraf, Wendy de Heer, Brian Pasley, Jochem Rieger, Nathan Crone, Jack J. Lin, Robert T. Knight, and Frédéric E. Theunissen studied how the perception of garbled speech changes when subjects are told what's being said -- and found through a technique called spectrotemporal receptive field mapping that the brain is able to retune itself in less than a second.

The authors write:

Experience shapes our perception of the world on a moment-to-moment basis.  This robust perceptual effect of experience parallels a change in the neural representation of stimulus features, though the nature of this representation and its plasticity are not well-understood.  Spectrotemporal receptive field (STRF) mapping describes the neural response to acoustic features, and has been used to study contextual effects on auditory receptive fields in animal models.  We performed a STRF plasticity analysis on electrophysiological data from recordings obtained directly from the human auditory cortex.  Here, we report rapid, automatic plasticity of the spectrotemporal response of recorded neural ensembles, driven by previous experience with acoustic and linguistic information, and with a neurophysiological effect in the sub-second range.  This plasticity reflects increased sensitivity to spectrotemporal features, enhancing the extraction of more speech-like features from a degraded stimulus and providing the physiological basis for the observed ‘perceptual enhancement’ in understanding speech.

What astonishes me about this is how quickly the brain is able to accomplish this -- although that is certainly matched by my own experience of suddenly being able to hear lyrics of a song once I recognize what's playing.  As James Anderson put it, writing about the research in ReliaWire, "The findings... confirm hypotheses that neurons in the auditory cortex that pick out aspects of sound associated with language, the components of pitch, amplitude and timing that distinguish words or smaller sound bits called phonemes, continually tune themselves to pull meaning out of a noisy environment."

A related phenomenon is visual priming, which occurs when people are presented with a seemingly meaningless pattern of dots and blotches, such as the following:

Once you're told that the image is a cow, it's easy enough to find -- and after that, impossible to unsee.

"Something is changing in the auditory cortex to emphasize anything that might be speech-like, and increasing the gain for those features, so that I actually hear that sound in the noise," said study co-author Frédéric Theunissen.  "It’s not like I am generating those words in my head.  I really have the feeling of hearing the words in the noise with this pop-out phenomenon.  It is such a mystery."

Apparently, once the set of possibilities of what you're hearing (or seeing) is narrowed, your brain is much better at extracting meaning from noise.  "Your brain tries to get around the problem of too much information by making assumptions about the world," co-author Christopher Holdgraf said.  "It says, ‘I am going to restrict the many possible things I could pull out from an auditory stimulus so that I don’t have to do a lot of processing.’ By doing that, it is faster and expends less energy."

So there's another fascinating, and mind-boggling, piece of how our brains make sense of the world.  It's wonderful that evolution could shape such an amazingly adaptive device, although the survival advantage is obvious.  The faster you are at pulling a signal out of the noise, the more likely you are to make the right decisions about what it is that you're perceiving -- whether it's you talking to a friend in a crowded bar or a proto-hominid on the African savanna trying to figure out if that odd shape in the grass is a crouching lion.

Ridicule to the rescue

Well, if you needed any good news, a study released last week in Frontiers in Psychology found that both rational argument and ridicule can reduce people's belief in conspiracy theories.

The research, done at the Eötvös Loránt University of Sciences in Budapest, was conducted by psychologists Gábor Orosz, Benedek Paskuj, István Tóth-Király, Beáta Bőthe and Christine Roland-Lévy.  The authors write:

Conspiracy theory (CT) beliefs can be harmful.  How is it possible to reduce them effectively?  Three reduction strategies were tested in an online experiment using general and well-known CT beliefs on a comprehensive randomly assigned Hungarian sample (N = 813): exposing rational counter CT arguments, ridiculing those who hold CT beliefs, and empathizing with the targets of CT beliefs.  Several relevant individual differences were measured. Rational and ridiculing arguments were effective in reducing CT, whereas empathizing with the targets of CTs had no effect.  Individual differences played no role in CT reduction, but the perceived intelligence and competence of the individual who conveyed the CT belief-reduction information contributed to the success of the CT belief reduction.  Rational arguments targeting the link between the object of belief and its characteristics appear to be an effective tool in fighting conspiracy theory beliefs.

Well, I don't know about you, but that cheers me up immensely, especially given that here at Skeptophilia I seem to split my time evenly between arguing rationally and lobbing ridicule bombs at people who hold wacky beliefs.  Some days it feels like I'm shouting in a windstorm, and that nothing I'm doing is having the least difference.  It's heartening to find that this may not be true.

Peter Kreko, visiting professor from Indiana University and co-author of the study, was interviewed over at PsyPost and had some interesting perspectives on the study.  An important distinction, he said, is that the research supports ridiculing the conspiracy theories themselves and/or the sources of such theories, but that ridiculing the person you're talking to is not likely to work.  In fact, it can generate the backfire effect -- being attacked because of beliefs people feel strongly about can result in the True Believers doubling down on their certainty.

"Our findings go against the mainstream of the communication literature and 'common wisdom,' as well as the current affective wave of social psychology emphasizing that emotions constitute the most important factor behind shaping beliefs and attitudes," Kreko said.  "Despite the general assessment that we are in a 'post-truth' world, truth and facts do matter when it comes to refuting conspiracy theories.  Uncovering arguments regarding the logical inconsistencies of conspiracy beliefs can be an effective way to discredit them."

And working to discredit them is important, Kreko says. "Conspiracy theories can be extremely harmful, they can lead to the persecution of groups. For examples, the Protocols of Elders of Zion, a conspiracy theory fabricated in the early 20th century on the Jewish leaders’ plot to rule the World, played an important role in the ideological justification of the murders of the Holocaust.  Anti-science conspiracy theories are often similarly dangerous – the anti-vaccination movement is a good example.  Several hundreds of thousands of people are estimated to die each year as a consequence of non-vaccination.  Given all of these negative impacts of conspiracy theories, it is essential to have evidence-based studies on how to reduce the popularity of such theories."

To which I can only say, "Amen."  Also that I'm really happy this study was published when it was, because heaven knows most of the news lately has been bad.  Gives me incentive for continuing to write what I do six times a week.

Thicker than water

People on the left side of the political aisle are currently engaging in a good bit of gloom-and-doom prognostication.  I try not to make predictions -- I've found that almost always, such attempts to look ahead don't work.  The universe always seems to have surprises in store for us -- some of them far better than we'd hoped, others far worse than we'd feared.  In any case, foretelling the future is generally a losing game.

This time, though.  I dunno, folks.  2017 is looking pretty dire.  I say that not as some kind of political pundit, which heaven knows I'm not.  I'm saying this because...

... the blood of St. Januarius didn't liquefy a couple of days ago.

St. Januarius is an interesting figure, largely because there's a huge and complex story about him even though modern historians are uncertain whether he ever existed.  The short version is that he was a third-century holy man who helped out Christians during the reign of the virulently anti-Christian Roman Emperor Diocletian, and for his trouble got shoved into a fiery furnace (that didn't work), thrown into a pit filled with wild bears (that didn't work either), and finally beheaded (that worked).  The earliest historical sources that mention him date to the sixth century, so right there it casts a little doubt on his life history, even if you don't count the miracles.

The Martyrdom of Saint Januarius (1631), by Artemisia Gentileschi [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Fast forward to 1389, when a relic of St. Januarius showed up in Naples, Italy (where he is known as St. Gennaro).  It was a vial of the saint's blood, obtained when he was beheaded in 305 C. E. or thereabouts.  Where it had been for a thousand-odd years is anyone's guess, but it was immediately revered as a holy relic, especially when it was found that the blood spontaneously liquefied three times a year.

Skeptics have speculated for some time about how the whole liquefaction thing happens.  Robert Todd Carroll, in The Skeptic's Dictionary, said that the "miracle" can be duplicated using a mixture of chalk, hydrated iron chloride, and salt water, and was due to a property of certain liquids called thixotropy -- they become less viscous the more they're shaken, stirred, or agitated.  (A common example is ketchup.)  So predictably, my thought is that it's a non-miracle that relies on purely natural physical properties of whatever it is that's in the vial.

But of course, the true believers don't like that idea.  Especially now that (gasp) the blood didn't liquefy on schedule.  They say that this only happens when a disaster is about to strike -- such as in 1631 (before an eruption of Mt. Vesuvius), 1939 (right before World War II), 1943 (when Italy was occupied by the Nazis) and 1980 (right before an earthquake struck).  Of course, those are hardly the only bad things that have ever happened, so one has to wonder how many times the blood liquefied and something awful followed, or didn't liquefy and there was a disaster.

This hasn't stopped people in Naples from panicking, of course.  The Catholic powers-that-be have tried to calm everyone, to little effect. Monsignor Vincenzo De Gregorio, Abbot of the Chapel of the Treasure of San Gennaro, said, "We must not think of disasters and calamities.  We are men of faith and we must pray."

Or, possibly, stop believing in medieval superstitions and look for rational explanations for stuff.  That could work, too.

Of course, apparently the saint has been giving us hints of disaster all year.  When Pope Francis visited the Chapel earlier this year and said the Lord's Prayer over the vial, the blood only "half liquefied."  Whatever that means.  Archbishop Crescenzio Sepe said of the event, "The blood has half liquefied, which shows that Saint Januarius loves our pope and Naples."

The pope wasn't quite so sanguine.  "The bishop just announced that the blood half liquefied.  We can see the saint only half loves us.  We must all spread the Word, so that he loves us more."

Righty-o.  And now the blood didn't liquefy at all, which means St. Januarius doesn't love us at all, or (according to the legend) that something really dreadful is about to happen.

I'm not going to lose any sleep over it, however.  Given the world's current state, something really dreadful is pretty likely to happen anyhow, regardless whether some obscure saint decided to warn us ahead of time.  And besides, since the saints are supposed to be pretty powerful and able to work miracles and all, don't you think that there'd be a more direct way of warning us than having his blood liquefy?  How about the saint putting big letters in the sky spelling out "WATCH OUT THERE'S GOING TO BE AN EARTHQUAKE?"  Or having celestial trumpets blare, and the saint's deep, booming voice shout out, "There's going to be a volcanic eruption in the middle of downtown Omaha, you probably should evacuate?"  Or simply having the saint tell Donald Trump to tweet about it?

In any case, I'm willing to wait and see what 2017 has in store.  My guess is it'll be a mixed bag as always, although considering the fact that the incoming Cabinet appointments have all been selected from the Daddy Warbucks Fan Club, it could be a rough ride.  So we'll have to wait until the next scheduled liquefaction, which is in May, if the Earth isn't hit with a giant asteroid or something before then.

Myths, hoaxes, and Zardulu

Unless you avoid social media entirely, you've probably seen the photograph of a raccoon hitching a ride on the back of an alligator.  It caught on because of its sheer weirdness, and was widely circulated on Facebook, Twitter, and elsewhere.

What you may not know is that it's a fake.  It's cleverly done, I'll admit, but it's an admitted hoax by a woman who calls herself "Zardulu," and who has been responsible for a number of photo and video hoaxes, one of the best known of which is "Pizza Rat:"

She's also responsible for a photoshopped image of a "three-eyed catfish" that was allegedly caught, and started a panic over toxins and/or mutagens in waterways:

"Zardulu," who refuses to give her name or show her face in public, agreed to an interview in The Washington Post a couple of days ago.  In the interview, which you can watch a clip of at the link provided, "Zardulu" appears wearing a creepy-looking bearded mask.  She is also completely unapologetic about suckering people.

These aren't hoaxes, she says, they are "myths," "pearls of merriment for the world to enjoy."  "Why wake the world from a beautiful dream," she says, "when the waking world is all so drab?"

She's even put out a manifesto, which would be an odds-on winner in the Pompous, Self-Righteous Artist's Statement contest of 2016.  Here's an excerpt:

All that once truthfully lived is now a mere effigy.  Images have displaced authentic human interaction.  Before the advent of the Internet, human life was already not about living, but about having.  Those who wished to exploit us produced images to dictate what we needed and desired.  While this continues today, social life has moved further, leaving a condition of having and moving to a state of simply appearing as the image. 

Zardulism is the art of creating and perpetuating myths.  Dramatic images and language created for the purpose of reawakening and following of genuine desires, experiencing the pleasure of life. 

In Zardulism, the imaginary streams into the actual and washes over it, floods it until it has been engrossed.  In a world where nothing is absolutely real, appearance becomes meaningless and our presumption of truth in what we were told is lost.

What I object to about all of this is not that some pretentious artist has found a way to weasel her way into the public eye with a publicity stunt.  She's hardly the first pretentious artist to do that, after all.  What bugs me is that she's blathering on about "living truthfully," when by "creating myths" what she actually means is "manufacturing hoaxes and bamboozling people."

To be fair, she's even-handed about other people's hoaxes.  You've probably heard of the Cottingley Fairies, the photograph that fooled the great Arthur Conan Doyle:

"Zardulu" thinks the Cottingley Fairies are awesome.  She says, "It was decades before anyone used the term hoax, when eventually the girls came forward and admitted what they had done.  I think that it is delightful.  Absolutely delightful to have given the world such a gift.  And it does indeed resonate with me particularly that the truth [did come out.]"

The problem, of course, is that this kind of hoax causes people to doubt everything they see, devaluing media as a whole.  I can't put it any more eloquently than Sharon Hill does, over at her outstanding site Doubtful News:

The fact is, our media system of news and information is already poisoned and rickety.  We have so much bullshit asshattery and hoaxing going on in the world today that affects peoples’ lives – their feelings towards their government, their opinions on policy and law, their choice of medical treatment, what kind of food they buy, and how they vote.  Hoaxing is not generally funny, it makes people feel foolish and angry.  They also do not necessarily learn from being conned because they often lack the foundation and skills to think critically about anything...  This artist is in no sense “brightening the world” by faking charming scenes people like or making people scared of environmental harm (the mutant catfish).  By presenting lies as not untrue, she reveals that people are dark and perverse and what may seem adorable and special is really manufactured and ugly.

To which I can only say, "Amen."  We already have enough people creating fake news to get the advertising revenue, we really don't need someone doing the same thing in the name of art.  If you want to create myths, do it the way that our great modern mythmakers and visionaries do -- people like Neil Gaiman, Alex Grey, Terry Pratchett, and Thijme Termaat -- by creating beauty, and being honest about what they're offering.  They know that the most important role of any creative endeavor is to portray the eternal truths, even in a fictional setting.

Zardulu, on the other hand, would prefer to portray banal frauds and pass them off as the truth.

Sunk cost and treason

There's this thing called the sunk-cost fallacy -- that once a person has put a lot of time, money, effort, or emotional investment into something, they are unlikely admit that it didn't live up to its expectations.

This is the only thing I can come up with to explain why Republican leaders are still sticking with Donald Trump, even after credible allegations that not only did the Russians tamper with the election results, Trump encouraged them to do so.  Giving a foreign power access to our government for malign purposes is, I thought, the definition of treason.  Imagine, for example, if there were evidence that Barack Obama had allowed a foreign government to manipulate election results.  These same people who are giving Trump a pass on this, or ignoring it completely, would be calling for reinstating crucifixion.

To be fair, some Republicans are aghast at this.  Lindsey Graham has been outspoken in his call for an independent investigation of the allegations.  John McCain went even further, saying that if the claims are true, it could "destroy democracy" in the United States.  Even Mitch McConnell, who has been one of Trump's biggest supporters, has joined in the call.  Much as I hate to admit agreeing with Joe Walsh on anything, he hit the nail on the head a few days ago with this tweet:

Which is it exactly.  I would think that anyone, regardless of party affiliation, would be appalled at the idea that the Russians may have influenced a national election, and would want it investigated.

But astonishingly, that isn't what's happening.  Other than a few outspoken conservatives who want the issue looked at -- if for no other reason, to clear Trump's name and get rid of any taint of illegitimacy -- most Republicans are shrugging their shoulders and saying, "Meh.  No biggie."

Now wait just a moment.  These were the same people who were chanting "Lock her up!" because of allegations that Hillary Clinton mishandled some emails.  Instead, what has been the overall response?

An increase in the positive ratings of Vladimir Putin.

I'm not making this up.  In a poll conducted by The Economist, favorable ratings for Putin tripled in the past two years, most of the increase being in the last month.  In fact, Representative Dana Rohrabacher of California made the following astonishing statement: "There’s a lot of negative things about [Putin] that are accurate but there are a lot of negative things about him that have been said that are inaccurate.  At least the other other side of the coin is being heard now...  Finally there’s some refutation of some of the inaccurate criticisms finally being heard."

So instead of people being outraged that Putin and his cronies may have interfered in the election, they're saying, "Well, maybe Putin's not so bad after all."

I can't think of anything but sunk cost as an explanation for this.  These people have already overlooked so much in the way of Donald Trump's unethical behavior, evasions, and outright lies, not to mention his blatant lack of qualifications for the job, that to admit that this finally drives them over the edge would require a huge shift of perspective.  I've never seen a candidate that elicits such an enormous emotional response from ordinary citizens; huge investments of time and energy have been put into seeing him in the White House.  For the pro-Trump cadre to say "Okay, we were wrong about him" is apparently a bridge too far.  Easier to say, "Trump's got to be right, so we were wrong about Putin."

Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, agrees.  He said, "The Republican base, particularly the Trump part of the Republican base, is going to regard anyone and anything that helped their great leader to win as a positive force, or at least a less negative force."

I hope that wise heads prevail and that the allegations are at least investigated.  And although I don't like Trump, I hope they turn out to be false, because the idea that the Russians (or any other country) are able to manipulate our government so boldly is profoundly terrifying.  But if they are true -- if the evidence supports the Russian hacks -- we have to act.  I'm no constitutional law scholar, but there has to be some provision for invalidating an election's results if the outcome was affected by a foreign power.

Especially if a cold, calculating villain like Vladimir Putin is responsible for it.

The risks of paltering

In Richard Feynman's brilliant autobiography Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, he tells the story of his experience as an undergraduate practical joker.  One day while his fraternity brothers were asleep, he took one of the frat house doors off its hinges and hid it behind the oil tank in the basement.  Of course, when the theft was discovered, everyone wanted to know which of them had pilfered the door.  Everyone denied it but Feynman:

I was coming down the stairs and they said, "Feynman!  Did you take the door?" 

"Oh, yeah," I said.  "I took the door.  You can see the scratches on my knuckles here, that I got when my hands scraped against the wall as I was carrying it down into the basement."

Knowing Feynman to be a wiseass, everyone rolled their eyes and assumed he was lying.

The door stayed missing, and still no one confessed.  (Well, actually, someone had, of course!)  Finally the president of the fraternity was so miffed that he called a general meeting at dinner time and asked each member to swear on his word of honor whether or not he'd taken the door:

So he goes around the table, and asks each guy, one by one: "Jack, did you take the door?" 

"No, sir, I did not take the door." 

"Tim: did you take the door?" 

"No, sir!  I did not take the door!" 

"Maurice, did you take the door?" 

"No, I did not take the door, sir." 

"Feynman, did you take the door?" 

"Yeah, I took the door." 

"Cut it out, Feynman, this is serious!  Sam: did you take the door..."  It went all the way around.  Everyone was shocked.  There must be some real rat in the fraternity who didn't respect the fraternity word of honor! 

That night I left a note with a little picture of the oil tank and the door next to it, and the next day they found the door and put it back. 

Some time later I finally admitted to taking the door, and I was accused by everybody of lying.  They couldn't remember what I had said.  All they could remember was their conclusion after the president of the fraternity had gone around the table and asked everybody, that nobody admitted taking the door.  The idea they remembered, but not the words!

I always use this story in my Critical Thinking classes to spur a discussion into the nature of lying.  Was Feynman, by deliberately telling the truth so unconvincingly that no one believed him, actually guilty of lying?

I didn't know until yesterday that this practice actually has a name: misleading by telling the truth is called paltering, and was the subject of a study released just last week in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.  Called "Artful Paltering: The Risks and Rewards of Using Truthful Statements to Mislead Others," the study (by Todd Rogers, Richard Zeckhauser, Francesca Gino, and Michael I. Norton of Harvard, and Maurice E. Schweitzer of the University of Pennsylvania) shows that paltering works -- but it comes with a cost.

Professor Richard Feynman, palterer extraordinaire [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Their experiment presented volunteers with a variety of scenarios in which people are represented as lying outright, misleading by omission, and misleading by paltering -- telling the truth in such a way as to mislead.  The scenarios included negotiations for a car purchase, negotiations over the sale of a piece of property, and negotiations over the development of a piece of property for commercial use.  The results were strikingly uniform; lying outright was considered the most unethical, but paltering was close -- especially when the palter was made in response to a direct question (as it was in Feynman's case).  The authors write:

Taken together, our studies identify paltering as a distinct and frequently employed form of deception. Paltering is a common negotiation tactic.  Negotiators who palter claim value but also increase the likelihood of impasse and, if discovered, risk harm to their reputations.  This latter finding suggests that those who might view paltering as a (deceptive) strategy for claiming more value in a negotiation must be cautious.  It may be effective in the short-term but harmful to relationships if discovered.

Which is exactly what Feynman discovered.  People are much more likely to focus on the results and the intent -- they care less about the actual words spoken.  So a palterer who says after being found out, "But I told the literal truth!  It's not my fault you interpreted it wrong!" is not likely to gain much in the way of credibility.  In fact, they are generally looked upon as only a tiny notch above someone who told a bald-faced lie.

This does open up an interesting question, though; to what extent is it incumbent upon the recipient of information to be smart enough (or do enough research) to detect when lying or paltering is occurring?  I'm not trying to blame the victim, here; but the principle of caveat emptor has been around for millennia, and I have to admit that I tend to lose sympathy with someone who got hoodwinked when a bit of quick research could have uncovered the deception.  As with everything in the realm of ethics, there are no easy, hard-and-fast answers.  But it's nice to have a word to put on lying-by-telling-the-truth,  and it gives us one more thing to be on the lookout for in car negotiations, real estate purchases -- and political discussions.